wingedshadowfan

[wingedshadowfan]

the thing that bothers me with 7 deadly sin based characters is when they cant decide if they embody the sin by suffering from it or by drawing it out of others. ie. if your gluttony demon is a guy who loves eating then your lust demon should be a gooner sex pest. and if your lust demon is a seductive girlboss then your gluttony demon should be a 5 star chef. does this make sense.

[wingedshadowfan]

the thing that’s really cool about dungeon meshi’s representation of autism is that Laios isn’t some savant. He’s just a guy with a strong interest. And he gets things wrong because that interest leads him to uncritically consuming biased sources

[wingedshadowfan]

just finished the familiar and spoilers ahead

why is no one talking abt how meandering and insane that ending was? it's like the author stopped caring about how the book would be perceived at that point in terms of consistency (like this was a passion project of reckless abandon to her) and just wanted to play with the readers's hearts by putting us on a doomed rollercoaster of emotions and expectations

first there's luzia losing the tournament, failing to escape after, going to prison and surviving the torture but failing to escape by a hair's breadth when teoda did, going on trial, victor trying (and failing) to get her out bcuz she doesn't get what tf his deal is and doesn't want to push valentina and marius under the bus, santangel stepping forward and sacrificing himself to get her out by essentially claiming he's the devil and she was naive enough to trust him down the wrong path (genius way to free himself from victor and have luzia survive btw), except for donadei popping out of nowhere going "oh yea no she definitely is clever and a heretic who knew what she was doing, and also they fucked" leaving santangel gagged and luzia sighing like "well then... fuck jesus christ i praise the devil also resurrection isn't that hard if you try hard enough dick fuck cock", then we get some expert epilog-like retardation sequence where she and santangel proceed to get burned on the pyre together, but actually hold on they just teleported and are alive in bed at an inn the next morning, but actually nevermind he does turn to ash at the first rays of sunshine, but wait she mends him back together so it's fine, he does disintegrate every morning though- LIKE WHAT WENT ON?? DID WE ALL READ THE SAME THING AND GO "OH YEAH VALID" WITHOUT RECOGNIZING HOW INSANE OF A TWISTER GAME PLOT THAT WAS??

[wingedshadowfan]

[wingedshadowfan]

I'm sitting on a backlog of unposted artwork since last year, and only have recently scraped together some free time to catch up with tidbits in my to-do list! It's out of order, but I'm posting the artwork I provided @illumicrate as a bonus print for their edition of The Familiar by @lbardugo -- because it's very leafy, and I've been recently enjoying planting some new annuals for my neighborhood pollinators! A scene from early in the book with Luzia is reviving a withered grape vine as a demonstration with her singing. (captured in foil!) This was such a fun set of character designs, for two very fun characters. Luzia and Santángel are like a pair of spicy cats meeting for the first time before eventually seeking each other's warmth for naptime. Santángel especially, I wanted to capture in his expression the stirring curiosity pushing out through his exhaustive apathy. More art dumps to come!

[wingedshadowfan]

i think it's such a nice detail that neither caitlyn nor vi are depicted as being oblivious about their attraction -- in the sense that they're always pushing down the urge of being affectionate with each other not in fear of being rejected but because, you know, a bunch of stuff is going on and they can't afford to give in to that attraction, not when they feel responsible for everything that's happening.

i think it's cool that after spending two seasons worrying over the circumstances they end up fucking in a prison cell while war breaks out. like, what could possibly be a worse context than that? there's war going on and caitlyn has an orgasm about it. multiple orgasms, maybe. who knows. good for her, honestly.

[wingedshadowfan]

being anti ai is making me feel like in going insane. "you asked for thoughts about your characters backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas". studies have proven its making people dumber. "i asked ai to generate this meal plan". its causing water shortages where its data centers are built. "ill generate some pictures for the dnd campaign". its spreading misinformation. "meta, generate an image of this guy doing something stupid". its trained off stolen images, writing, video, audio. "i was talking with my snapchat ai-" theres no way to verify what its doing with the information it collects. "youtube is impletmenting ai based age verification". my work has an entire graphics media department and has still put ai generated motivational posters up everywhere. ai playlists. ai facial verification. google ai microsoft ai meta ai snapchat ai. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least-" "but it does-" "but you can-" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the evil machine. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?

[wingedshadowfan]

What's so insanely hot about the Caitlyn/Ambessa/Mel fight scene is precisely the fact that Caitlyn is seriously wounded and KNOWS she can't win and does proceed to get very badly smacked the fuck down repeatedly but DOESN'T stop trying and to me there's just nothing sexier than that specific brand of frenzied, rabid desperate determination.

It's a character moment too bc it's the kind of thing you'd expect from Vi who's a brawler and whose entire fighting style factors in getting hit. Caitlyn's always been long range and strategic, to see her get desperate enough to just throw herself into the grinder again and again was profound. She KNOWS she can't win bc she couldn't beat Ambessa on a good day but she JUST needs to buy time and create openings and she's paying for that in blood and viscera and eyeballs

Extremely cool scene, I love watching my faves backed into a corner and going absolutely recklessly feral over it

Also just the fact that this entire brutal, plot-pivotal fight scene was between three women fuckin absolutely ruled. Hell yeah

[wingedshadowfan]

another addition to the previous one (kind of a darlington character study)

blistering fever

Your favourite Darlington fics?

hiii, thanks for the ask!

i admit i don't read a lot of ninth house/hell bent fics but when i do, they're all darlingstern and i am quite picky w/ them! that said, here are a few of my recs:

rotten work (my absolute fav)

splash knives on marble (a short oneshot i bookmarked bcuz i liked it)

reconciliations between survivors (my personal sneak bcuz one of the darlington posts i made was related to it haha)

feel free to recommend me fics in the replies too, the fandom isn't all too big so it can be hard to find stuff <3

[wingedshadowfan]

I love arcane fans. The entire premise of the show is that people aren't a monolith and that everyone's actions are based on difficult decisions their material conditions put them in and that while we can all agree some actions are terrible, they give context so you can see how someone may be led to making them and that explanation is not justification but an understanding.

And then the dickhead fans were like "everyone in piltover should have been killed in season 2. One state solution Zaun, everyone who is rich is evil (except mel, the wealthiest most powerful of them all) and jinx actually is a freedom fighter who did nothing wrong, and im just going to apply my wafer thin politics i learned from watching 8 hrs of hasans israel palestine coverage and use this as a vessel for my online political brownie points"

The discussion of this show should have been about how season 2 ep 7 was the laziest most forced fan service shown in modern media, but everyone's still arguing about how in the same episode where jinx shot vi point blank with a rocket, Caitlyn elbowed Vi and therefore she's an evil abuser and somehow hitler.

[wingedshadowfan]

harana

[wingedshadowfan]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[wingedshadowfan]

i def agree with op on favoring an ending where lethe gets rebuilt - both for thematic reasons like its intrinsic ideological connection to darlington and just. how cool it would be. idk i love the shepherds

but i do want to say something abt the societies and the consequences of losing their magic bcuz that's such an interesting topic to me (sorry i will def go off on a tangent)

now iirc losing magic/access to a nexus is smth that alr exists (sadly only as an empty threat) in canon - it is technically possible, had lethe not been corrupt and less influential. so a stronger, rebuilt lethe, could technically use it as punishment proportionately to a society's crimes?? which i think is gonna be incredibly satisfying. it's not gonna eradicate the horrible people in the societies, but it is going to anger them, inconvenience them, and make them a little less powerful. all houses losing their magic on the other hand? even lethe?? that's a diff story. how would it work, what consequences would it have?

the way that i understood the books, having wealth predates learning abt and aquiring magic in the vast majority of cases (like op said, this is why alex is so unique and why darlington had beef with her at the start - she was simply born magical). for example, you first need to be part of yale to be part of yale's secret societies, and while not all yale students know abt magic, nearly no non-yale students do afaik. and how many ppl in yale aren't either incredibly wealthy and/or straight up legacy (both in yale and a society) like tripp, who comes from a family of bonesmen? like salome nils. think of mercy, who is incredibly bright unlike tripp but doesn't have the legacy or the wealth to even know about the houses.

and yes, perhaps there are other ways to get access to magic and be introduced to its world, like with darlington who was neither currently wealthy nor a yale student, but still came from money, and through it had developed the skills and knowledge to try to kick open a door that was locked to him (which almost killed him), and only really got to enter with the help of sandow nonetheless. bcuz sandow saw him as useful, malleable, exploitable. same with alex and likely even michelle.

what i mean to say is, i think world order won't collapse if the societies lose their magic because world order is not built on magic. it's built on wealth and the knowledge of magic's existence. it won't necessarily create chaos or a vacuum of power because there will still be wealthy and thus influential people. greed and evil won't disappear, because like op said, that's not the kind of story this is + they're a product of human nature, not of occult magic. majority of the rituals we've seen at yale are just related to acquiring more wealth (or other forms of success that can be converted to wealth, and wealth to power, and power to more wealth). since magic is supposed to be a confined secret, you shouldn't be able to take it with you outside of yale and use it out in the real world, just in yale's societies - but money you always can. so they use magic to get more money.

in that sense, magic is a bit like education - it's a kind of cultural capital you can inherit and/or acquire through wealth and use to acquire even more wealth/power. now if magic was suddenly made public knowledge to everyone, that would probably cause lots of chaos and danger. it distantly reminds me of the plot of misfits & magic.

Do you think Darlington and Alex will bring down the societies in NH3? I don’t tbh…

i love this question.

do i think it will actually happen? not really, even tho i hope so. it will be incredibly satisfying to see all the societies forcibly dismantled for playing with forces they don't understand, for all the damage they've caused and all the corrupt strategies they've employed to try and hide their wrongdoings or evade consequences. if there was a way for the societies to lose access to magic/their nexuses forever, or for the occult to become widely known and accessible to everyone, i think that'd be pretty rad.

what i think is more likely to happen, is either

alex and darlington not changing the order of things at all but just saving themselves by graduating and/or leaving lethe (after sending all the escaped demons back to hell ofc), which they absolutely deserve for all the shit they've been through tbh but this begs the question of the purpose of a demon man and a wheelwalker woman in the "normal" world (there's also the possibility to "cure" darlington and/or release alex from her ability to see the gray but i personally don't like those possibilities)

or they'll dismantle just lethe and rebuild it into what it was always supposed to be: a body of authority and oversight whose main priority is the safety and security of the people within and outside of the societies (and isn't just bought by the elite and made to kneel at the orders of the bigger sharks). this would mean dedicating their lives to keeping the rest of the societies in check through a newer, more influential and honest lethe

[wingedshadowfan]

girlknight slumped over the bar at the local tavern, three pints in, gripping her own scalp, "i have GOT to stop swearing oaths of fealty"

[wingedshadowfan]

an old bakery in my hometown has made it to local news multiple times because it was held by this old man whose father once had it and whose son was currently helping him out w/ it and it had the craziest workhours (12am to 8am exclusively including weekends or smth like that), so it literally saved the lives of generations of drunk club-goers, taxi drivers and patrolling police officers

I think every pizza/kebab place that stays open late on the weekends has seen somebody drunk off their tits literally weep from joy because what they're currently eating is like the best thing they've ever eaten in their life.

[wingedshadowfan]

One of my most soul softening onyx storm moments are when Lynx manifested shadow powers and Xaden instead of getting insecure or angry that someone else is stealing his thunder or scared that nature is finding its balance and has already replaced him or exhibit any of the n number of things an average, insecure, egoistic man would normally do but instead calmly guided Lynx through his first ever manifestation of signet with words of affirmation, encouragement and coaching advices. What is there to not love in Xaden ? I mean 😭, I get it. I get why the whole fourth wing fandom, including the critics, are all praises and have not one bad word to say about Xaden, despite his minor humanoid flaws.

[wingedshadowfan]

came back here to add

now we runnin' wild (same author as the third one above)

Your favourite Darlington fics?

hiii, thanks for the ask!

i admit i don't read a lot of ninth house/hell bent fics but when i do, they're all darlingstern and i am quite picky w/ them! that said, here are a few of my recs:

rotten work (my absolute fav)

splash knives on marble (a short oneshot i bookmarked bcuz i liked it)

reconciliations between survivors (my personal sneak bcuz one of the darlington posts i made was related to it haha)

feel free to recommend me fics in the replies too, the fandom isn't all too big so it can be hard to find stuff <3