#yeah but she's fascinating

[aroaceleovaldez]

i have suddenly become obsessed with a theme that HoO established but never proceeded to extrapolate on, which is:

You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.

You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.

You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.

You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.

You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.

You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.

You are Frank Zhang, and you are a shapeshifter. Inhabiting your own body feels strange and clumsy when you could be literally anything at any time. You are anything and everything and live your life with the simple certainty of knowing exactly how you will die.

[starry-bi-sky]

do yall ever think about bruce/batman!clone danny standing in front of his bathroom mirror after finding out he was a clone and silently tracing his face. The slope of his jaw and point of his chin. The high angle of his cheekbones and the shape of his eyes, the curve of his brow bones and the shape of his nose. The volume of his hair and the way it curls and gets fluffy when it gets too long.

His hair is black the same way a crow's wing is black. His dad's hair is black the same way a black bear's fur is black. His dad's eyes are blue like the ocean is blue. Danny's eyes are blue the same way a glacier is blue.

His dad has a square jaw and straight flat hair, and he tans and gets a face full of freckles when he's out in the sun for too long. Danny burns like a lobster and his face remains untouched. Danny has a sharp jaw and tall cheekbones, and Sam says when he's not smiling there's almost something regal about him. You would never call Jack Fenton "regal" when he's not smiling.

Sam says when he's not smiling he looks scary the same way a stone statue is. Jack Fenton when he's not smiling looks scary the same way that german shepherd staring at you across the street is.

Do you ever think he grew up wondering if he was adopted. Because of course, he has black hair and blue eyes like his dad. But having the same color doesn't make you someone's child.

Or, worse, things he's heard from the other kids and the other parents and even some of his teachers growing up; that he was the product of an affair. And that his dad was just too stupid to notice. And Danny would defend his parents until the day he died, because Jack Fenton wasn't an idiot and Maddie Fenton wasn't a cheater.

But doubt comes in with fickle tongue. his parents swear up and down that he is their child when he asks about either. That Danny just had his grandparents' features, but he was their son and they loved him.

But Danny doesn't look like either of his parents. His mom's eyes are blue like an aquamarine and Jazz's too. And they burn like lobsters in the sun too, but Jazz gets freckles on her face and so does Maddie. And as Danny grows up he doesn't bulk up or get stocky like his dad did, and when he hits puberty he doesn't shoot up like a tree like Jack Fenton did.

He stays small, and they say he's a late bloomer (and he is), or that he just has his mom's height. But he's fast and has good stamina, and some days it feels like he's built entirely different from his family. That the things they went through growing up just didn't apply to him. Jack and Maddie Fenton both had acne and breakouts when they hit puberty, and Jazz inherits it and he's seen the amount of skincare products she keeps on her side of the bathroom.

And then he hits puberty and breaks out maybe once or twice, but his skin stays clear for the most part and the problems and changes his dad went through just don't happen to him.

And the truth is worse than all of the lies.

How horrifying.

[kagooleo]

the gangs all here!!!

[beaulesbian]

One Piece ep. 257 || "That was really something. They don't call themselves pirates for nothing."

manga ch. 367

It was cute Luffy really did the peace sign in the manga as well!

+Bonus "That was fun."

"No human could pull that off"

[cluescorner]

A Batman who kills people is a bad Batman. Except for Terry because he is my special boy. Terry can drown a man it's ok. He can literally shatter a woman it's fine.

[selfloathingextraordinaire]

Yo....I can't get over the Izutsumi reveal, and how it's in a side comic. Like, she was never human. She's a cat with part of a human soul put into her. That's probably why she acts so cat instinctively. Just.....fjdhdhdh what...wow...

[dve]

pyrrha dve in the club flirting with the dancers and having an altogether bad time. where's that fic. pyrrha at her absolute sleaziest and therefore absolute sexiest just having a nightmare of an evening

[river-of-wine]

I find Miss Grimshaw’s death to be one of the most interesting out of the characters that die in RDR2 because there is just so much going on with it. She begins chapter six shooting an innocent woman, doing what she believes is the right thing as the arbiter of justice she is described as. She shoots an innocent woman through the stomach for a perceived betrayal, and in doing so, she damns herself. Grimshaw ends the chapter being shot through the stomach by Micah, by the real traitor that she failed to recognise, for what was, in Dutch’s eyes, her own perceived betrayal. Molly confessed to ratting on the gang, something that she didn’t do but knew the consequences of, and Grimshaw, as her final action of the game, turns on Dutch, the man she has been loyal to for so many years, on the side of John and Arthur. Grimshaw’s death comes at such an interesting part in the story, such a climactic moment, and yet it is almost entirely unnoticed by everybody around her. In this huge moment, this standoff between what remains of the gang, the murder of one of its longest standing members just kind of happens, and then the standoff continues as Dutch gives a speech over the dying, agonised screams of a woman who has spent so many years loyally at his side, who has taken her first real stand against him, who has been murdered, who is now a traitor and not worth acknowledging. Grimshaw dies in pain, perhaps the most that we hear from a gang member’s death that we actually witness, though I’m sure Kieran’s torture at the hands of the O’Driscolls was even less pleasant. Grimshaw’s death is the death of what may have still remained of the gang, the security within it that she helped to provide, and her death is the justice that she failed to correctly serve returning to her, her failure to actually kill the traitor then killing her. She is shot through the stomach and dies in pain and the man she had been so loyal to simply does not care

[island-in-the-shadows]

Truly, my sympathies to people watching IWTV and are getting tired/bored of different perspectives. I'm not bored or even remotely tired.

Interviews by their very nature are perspective based. The story has this specific framing. As did the first book. They added to it with Armand now being an active participant and Daniel being more seasoned at interviewing. I understand how Armand's very edited and hyperbolic take on events that Book Lestat describes in The Vampire Lestat rubs people the wrong way. I do think that one could argue the way Lestat writes his own autobiography is the objective truth (note Armand in his book does not contradict Lestat). However, sorry to say, there is never an objective truth. The truth is always subjective.

I was raised by a whole family of lawyers and if I learned anything is that you can spin things in any way, but an objective truth will never exist. Not in crime, not in person to person storytelling, not in fictional storytelling. Hell, viewers seeing the SAME show CANNOT come to a consensus. Why? Because we all put our thoughts, experiences, and feelings to it. That's all perspective.

We see Louis give Armand a kiss in bed. Some think aw domestic and cute. Some think Louis is deliberately withholding and rewarding Armand for good behaviour. Some saw the act they put on in E2 as some version of truth and domesticity and some think it's only an act. Some think Dreamstat is actual Lestat out there somewhere and some think it's Louis' conscience.

Yes, the narrative will confirm one thought or another on some things but not all of them. They're deliberately left up to interpretation. Something btw, Lestat urges the reader to do in TVL when he does not go into details about his time with Louis and Claudia. And part of that has to do with perspective.

We could have a straightforward narrative with no corrections and no perspectives. But would that be as interesting as seeing how minds that far exceed our own twist and bend and interpret events? Would it be as interesting as seeing a vampire who tells himself a story so that he can carry on living despite being miserable? Would it be as interesting as this vampire who tells himself a story get pushback on what he's saying by someone who notices errors and inconsistencies? Would it be an interview at all? Or would it be, as Daniel put it in the very first episode, "a fever dream told to an idiot."

If you want a straightforward non-challenging version of the story, the 1994 movie exists. It's not perfect and a lot of details are missing, but there's only one, unchallenged perspective to it. And even then...how many people didn't (want to) see the queerness in it?

TL;DR I get being frustrated or tired or bored by the way the show is trying to tell the story, but at least it's doing something a little different and not word for word.

[sysig]

Ellen McLain’s commentary from my trivia playthrough

[theriverbeyond]

thinking more about John and.... at the end of HtN when he was interogating Wake, she wanted him to say her name. "i'll be dammed if i pass up the chance to hear you speak the words" and "they're dead words, a human chain reaching back ten thousand years": Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity.

and then she asks him "how did they make you feel?" and of course, John deflects.

but that's Aotearoa's national anthem in te reo Māori. and as we learn in NtN, John is Maori. that's his anthem. how must have that felt, to John? to hear his own anthem claimed by someone descended from the people who left his earth to die?

[luckiestmushroom]

The absolute irony of Robin’s beliefs being freedom, while Sunday’s are Order, and yet when she intervenes in the final battle, she’s desperately trying to get Sunday to agree with her, take her side, change his views. And it’s Sunday who’s like ‘we are on different paths, that’s how our lives have gone.’ Just really telling that even now after all this time he values Robin’s freedom and her beliefs, even as he’s preparing to enact his own plan. While Robin deep down still wants him to conform to her ideals and come back to her side. This is why they are truly diametrically opposed now because the only way Sunday is coming back to her side is if he totally conforms to what she wants as he did when they were children, and the only way Robin would join him would be to betray what she believes in completely.

[ascorian]

mafuyu brainrot

[donutcats]

lockwood took one look at lucy standing in the parlor doorway and was like “hi there, are you looking for a husband- sorry I meant job? because I’m definitely available- I mean hiring”

[devilsrecreation]

I JUST realized Makuu and Kiburi had completely different reactions to seeing Scar for the first time

First there’s Kiburi who, unsurprisingly, looked downright terrified at first. So much so, he actually showed an emotion other than annoyance lmao

And then there’s Makuu

It’s so brief cuz the creators wanted to show everyone’s reactions but he looks kinda…annoyed? He just glares at him and nothing else, almost like seeing an evil ghost is an inconvenience

Honestly, this is making me think of how Ucheshi would react to Scar. I feel like it’d also be the opposite of her brother. I kinda like to imagine Scar would want to recruit her at first upon hearing how she outsmarts the rest of his army in her hc episode, but when he meets her face-to-face he straight up regrets it lmao.

No bc she’d piss him off the minute he appears in front of her. He dramatically appears like “Welcome, Ucheshi~” AND HER FIRST RESPONSE IS

“….Oh. That’s what you guys are scared of?”

“Is there a problem?”

“Oh no, not at all! I just thought you’d be a little more…intimidating? You know, like the old king, Mufasa! Oh, I’d LOVE to meet his ghost someday! Even saying his name is kind of intimidating.”

And meanwhile, the rest of Scar’s army is like :0 while Kiburi looks like he wants to die 😭

[crows-of-buckets]

I cannot get the idea of a da2 au where Malcolm is the surviving parent instead of Leandra. Would both of the twins have made it out? I think they would. Because like. Malcolm, unlike Leandra, can actually fight. I don't think either of the twins would have felt the need to protect him. Would the deep roads expedition even have to happen? I assume they would probably be worse off in this au since I don't think Gamlen would lend his aid. Obviously ignoring the very valid reasons why Malcolm would NEVER take his children to Kirkwall, or anywhere near it, how different would it be? Idk why it's plaguing my head rn but LORD