#you're so so so loved

[usercelestial]

the only solace i took from this episode was in watching nate be so so happy with jade like yes thats your girlfriend, she loves your smile and she thinks you're amazing

[nothorses]

there is a judge in Seattle who does the weekly name change hearings, and who says it's her favorite part of the week. she says she doesn't read out previous names, or ask about the reasons why people want to change them. she says it's a beautiful moment, and a celebration; a claiming of a new identity, or a reclamation of an old identity. she encourages the room to clap for folks. then she welcomes everyone up, one by one, by last name and with warmth; she shows them the court order where nobody else can see, asks them to double check the spelling, and then they're done! do they want a picture? do they want their friends and loved ones who came with them to be in it too? do they want the court order in the photo? she helps everyone pose, shakes hands and stands with them for as long as they need to take it, recruits the clerk for help taking photos of the folks who came alone. then she tells them where to go next, congratulates them, and claps along with the rest of the room.

probably three quarters of the people there were trans, and she centered their experience quietly, with love and joy.

I think I'll be thinking about her a lot this January, and for a long time after. it's good to know she's there.

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[ionomycin]

my favorite pieces from 2024

[itsbrucey]

Big fan of sun motifs in characters not necessarily being about positivity and happiness and how they're so " bright and warm" but instead being about fucking brutal they are.

Radiant. A FORCE of nature that will turn you to ash. That warmth that burns so hot it feels like ice. Piercing yellow and red and white. A character being a Sun because you cannot challenge a Sun without burning alive or taking everything down with them if victorious.

[birdmenmanga]

they are putting yaoi in the city art museum and censoring nsfw content with heat-responsive material so you have to put your hands on it to see dick

[fallen-goldfishcracker]

Wyll is so fucking funny and no amount of acknowledgement about this could ever be enough. He's literally walking around being so casually hilarious completely under-the-radar. He calls Halsin a "thick hunk of an elf". He once accidently implied that he was fucking an ogre instead of killing it and then proceeded to absolutely stumble his way through explaining. He gets excited by Lae'zel talking about carnal pleasures. He canonically tells his pessimistic thoughts to shut the hell up. He volunteers to babysit Shadowheart's hypothetical werewolf babies as long as she gets him gloves. He tries to give Gale a hero moniker like his own. He jokes that his father, the Grand Duke of Baldur's Gate, can't spell. He calls Astarion "Mister Fangs". He makes up storybook chapter names for his own fucking adventures. As a child he got chased by the Flaming Fist for stealing fruit, nearly drowned trying to find mermaids in the harbor, and almost successfully broke into the Counting House. He reads monster erotica, and is not ashamed to tell you about it. He ranks eating pudding among life's greatest moments. He will, without shame and completely unprompted, meow at you. He is 24 years old.

[kodasea]

Son of Gondor

[crabussy]

IM GOING TO PUNCH A HOLE IN SOMEONES CAR

[prouvaireafterdark]

listen I know it's heartbreaking that Claudia dies and it's understandable to wish she didn't, but let's please not accuse the writers of fridging her. to do so is a fundamental misunderstanding of the story and is frankly insulting to the intelligence and skill of the writers of the show.

Claudia's death, and the overwhelming grief and regret her parents experience because of it, is quite literally the point of the entire story. she dies because Anne's daughter Michele died of leukemia when she was five years old and there was nothing she or her husband could do to prevent it.

writing IWTV was how Anne coped with the unimaginable loss of a parent losing her child. she created a story about a little girl that could not die and then killed her anyway. Claudia's death is a senseless, unavoidable tragedy, just like Michele's was. the grief that haunts Louis and Lestat for the rest of their lives is the same grief that haunted Anne and her husband.

so when you're accusing people of killing Claudia off to benefit a story about two men, please remember that in real life sometimes parents lose their children. please remember Michele Rice.

she's the reason Claudia exists.

she's also the reason Claudia cannot be saved.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[stil-lindigo]

lighthearted.

if this comic resonated with you, please consider donating to this palestinian escape fund (vetted by @/nabulsi and @/el-shab-hussein) as it is less than $7,000 away from it's goal.

i turn 24 today. To celebrate, I made this comic to be a spiritual successor to lead balloon, a comic in which I talked about the darkest period of my life so far.

A lot has changed since my 23rd birthday and this one. My priorities have shifted a lot, in ways that I think are mostly good. But i think the best part about today is that suicide has gone back to being a far away notion. I'm really lucky, and I'm grateful for that.

[chimaeraonwards]

John Cusack, the voice actor for Dimitri in Anatasia (1997), shared his statement on Palestine 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 🇵🇸

P.S. He has been a Palestinian supporter for years

[cometblaster2070]

i'm making myself laugh thinking about this but I wholeheartedly believe madame morrible absolutely HATES the thought of glinda and elphaba being together like the mere mention of gelphie would probably send her into immediate cardiac arrest and it's not even because she's homophobic or anything I just fully believe she dislikes glinda so so much she's just like this is absolutely NOT happening in my house.

glinda and elphaba are having their gay ass moment and she's like "I sense a disturbance in the force; the wind is telling me those fucking lesbians are at it again."

like IK this woman hates to see glinda's fruity ass coming for several reasons but first and foremost I believe it's because she's so fucking ANNOYED by how much elphaba loves and cares for her, like this pink bitch is throwing a wrench in her plans just by EXISTING and being herself.

and she can't even really do anything to glinda because it'll make elphaba upset and she really can't have that so she just has to sit there and be like