#<<<< those last two are just in case

[crystalsandbubbletea]

In regards to Gilded Veil Callisto...

Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof

Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow

Awooga 😻

😨

BUDDY CHIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL!

[bittasol]

smile, iruma! | hey ive been here before

[buttercupshands]

can you even call it a warm up if I'm going to bed without drawing anything big

and a sketch I made while sitting in the park today

[hightowerz]

baela and rhaena i’m so sorry. y’all deserve better than your mom dying a horrible death, your dad fucking and marrying his niece immediately after your said mom’s funeral, and being a glorified cheerleader and babysitter for your dad’s niece. respectively. like oh my god.

[turtleblogatlast]

[ cw: death mention / sibling death mention / isolation / ]

Thinking about how Leo’s portal and teleportation powers have both directly (and in one instance, indirectly) been the cause of him being separated from his brothers at least four times now.

There’s that time in Portal Jacked, where his inexperience leads to his portal being messed with and his brothers ending up in Tahiti.

There’s the Bad Timeline, where Leo’s portaling led to them losing the Key, therefore indirectly leading to the apocalypse and in turn, ending with Leo being the last of his brothers alive (though just for a few minutes.)

There’s him teleporting him and Krang into the Prison Dimension, cutting him off from his family so wholly that the only way to fix this was a literal mystic miracle.

Then there’s the comic, where Leo’s powers act up again and make him lose months of time completely isolated from everyone and everything he knows.

Just, looking at all of this, it’s like the universe gave him the powers of distance on purpose to test him (and his bros), literally seeing if they can overcome unimaginable space and still make it back together. Imagine if it doesn’t stop here, and Leo has to learn to either deal with the occasional complete isolation or deal with time travelers coming back to stop some terrible event his powers (whether directly or indirectly) have caused, events that always lead to separation in some way, shape, or form.

It’s worth noting, too, that his portals often led to accidental separation, but his teleportation was the one power of his that was used to isolate himself on purpose…and was also the one that in any other scenario would have been the most permanent.

[post-punk-revival]

Which song is your #6 or #14 or whatever isn't interesting to me; I wanna hear where in your list the first song from each of your top 5 artists shows up. Or the last one

[lady-harrowhark]

*twirls hair* how big is your book collection

Pretty big

[classic-jamie]

Your shitty roommate talks you into coming to an even shittier party. Even though you hate parties. He says it won't be as bad as last time! But who knows if that's true.

Anyways that's the starting point of Thinking Out Loud, a great comic that you all should read immidiately right now. ^_^ )/

[kameyyy]

jeans guy can see himself out

[hulloitsdani]

What do u think Kiran is

How do u think the order sees kiran

*slowly sits up in my chair*

I think Kiran is a very normal person. This is someone you and I have met before. Be that from the other side of grocery store cashier, waiting in the same elevator, or walking by on a crosswalk. Kiran is a civilian from our world trying to roll with the punches of being warped somewhere completely alien. And you can see it in how they conduct themselves.

I always have a lot of fun writing Kiran’s dialogue because their casual modern speech almost feels like a dialect in comparison to the more formal fantasy tone everyone else speaks with. An “ain’t” will never exit Alfonse’s mouth, you know? And there’s a difference in “Do you have gold?” vs “You got gold?” To me, this gives Kiran an air of unfamiliarity to anyone they interact with. Let’s use Grima as an example, because it doesn’t sound like this grammatical change would make much of difference until Kiran has the audacity to hit Grima with a bro mid sentence. But that’s just how they talk. And as sweet and friendly as they are, there’s always moments like that to remind that no one has the cultural context to fully understand Kiran. Except for the audience, who can realize that Kiran let the customer service voice drop to talk to Grima like he’s an actual person.

And that’s just about how they talk! This view is only emphasized by every other thing about them! They’re a lovable goof, which is normal chill person behavior in the audience’s eyes but feels REALLY ODD to the characters of FE’s medieval fantasy war setting. There is this air of unknown about them that the more socially perceptive will pick up on and will try to come to a conclusion about. Example, I imagine Soren would interpret a lot of this as a dangerous and deeply annoying lack of intelligence from someone he has the displeasure of sharing a tactics table with. Or looping back to the Grima example, he would totally think Kiran has greedy ulterior motives behind that pleasant facade. It takes a lot of work for those types to realize that the discrepancy present isn’t really any of those things. But I also wouldn’t be too surprised if Kiran doesn’t try to directly prove any of those assumptions wrong unless they have to.

Why? Well now it’s time for the implications! Oh how we love the implications.

Because the Summoner is a different story. No one has any fucking clue what that is.

I can tell you what Kiran has pieced together so far. Summoning people from across time and space is apparently not easy. It’s not some school of magical study that some mage could pull off with enough time and research. Trust, Eitri tried. It’s a lot of complex moving parts. For example, the contracts. The contracts Kiran automatically binds their summoned to don’t even compare to the ones Veronica used in book 1. They are far more intense and infinitely harder to break. The only way out of them is if Kiran wills it so. Not even death is an option, because Kiran can come in for the revive. If they had to guess, it’s an older, more completed version of the art. Something lost to time. But no matter the case, Kiran has the ability to take full control of whoever they manage to summon. From a lowly farmer to the divine. And their power only grows.

In a similar vein, if there was any character to canonically see the hud, I think it would be Kiran. It’s genuinely part of their power set. I have previously described Kiran as the party mage until Veronica shows up to be the actual mage, but it would be way more accurate to call them a mystic/seer. They see the map, everyone’s stats, and is doing a fast amount of math to give the combat forecast. Then, upon processing all this information their enemies couldn’t dream of having at their disposal, Kiran can telepathically communicate any change in plans to anyone under contract. Kiran is not inherently some great tactician the moment they touch ground in Askr; they simply can do things no one else can. They’re learning the actual tactics part on the fly. This makes them simultaneously the largest ace up the Order’s sleeve and potentially its biggest liability. If they fall, it could cause a whole system cascade. By that same token, some of the biggest threats the Order has faced are the ones who do their research and rightfully target Kiran.

Now. Thinking critically about all that. That’s downright terrifying. A ridiculous amount of power has been dropped callously into Kiran’s lap and they have to work extremely hard to be moral with it. It’s terrifyingly easy not to be. It would actively take less effort to ‘take the reins’ as it were. But in order to be able to sleep at night ever again, they go the extra mile to not invalidate the will of their summoned. To take over like that. To make a colony of worker bees out of people. Because oh dear god they just summoned a child and the fact that they could easily force them to fight and die for them, only to be revived and do it all over again, is HAUNTING. No. No the Order has an in house orphanage now. This kid is getting adopted and cared for god damnit or Kiran might just pop a blood vessel. And sure that child is going to be a child and there will never be a world where they get along with everyone else, but that’s just going to need be a problem they address when they get there and not an excuse to use Hubris; the power set. Now replace the word child with everyone they ever summoned and you have the wider philosophy they apply to the entire Order.

They’re hyper aware of the power imbalance. They hate it with every bone in their body. They work really hard to correct it in whatever way they can.

So Kiran might not jump on the opportunity to correct those who think lesser of them. It’s… oddly comforting to know someone is keeping a critical eye on them. Holding them accountable. Especially since so much of the order just thinks of them as this quirky yet well meaning host. And, really, what can they even do about that? They have gone over the contract with every hero they summon and despite that they still choose to stay. So, what, do they try to inspire more mistrust? The problem with that they would have to actually do acts that intentionally inspire mistrust. And even if that was successful they can’t just waste the extra man power because every other month there’s some new divine asshole who wants them all dead. And if they fail that means they have to start their life from square one and god they can’t do that again so—

Just breathe Kiran.

It’s fine. You’re fine. Just breathe.

You have work to do.

[momentomori24]

For a character that has virtually said nothing (impressive feat considering Mark Berskii exists) and has been dead since the start, Cara is so SO intriguing to me. Her complete lack of humanity in the midst of a cast brimming with it stands out in such a fucked up way.

Take her appearance, for example. Outside of the fact that she's much paler than the group, her having redish hair feels so intentional. It physically ties her to two characters: Diana and Wolfgang's mum. By extension, that ties her to Wolfgang and Eva as well. I don't believe that she's directly tied to them, or anyone in our group really (which I think is the point). However, the links that can be tied-- that we as the audience are encouraged to tie-- still exist.

We are introduced to her as a murder victim, a girl who was brutally ambushed and stabbed to death by who is assumed to be a man. That serves as a parallel by what is implied to have happened to Wolfgang's mum; a woman who was murdered by her husband. Coupled with their vague resemblance, it explains why Wolfgang was so emotional during the trial. He's a lawyer, and it's both his job and moral code to have empathy for everyone, but it seems obvious that there was a lot of projection on his part related to this specific case. He doesn't just see a person, he sees a blameless woman, an innocent girl undeserving of her fate. A victim who had to have been sadistically murdered by a man, and "self-defence" was never on the table. He clearly cared about the case-- he cared THE MOST about the case. He was the only one to actually acknowledge that it's based on a real murder case, that the victim was a real person, and treat it with that same amount of appropriate care. But that care is rooted in his strong sense of justice for victims as a lawyer, in his own issues and warped view on gender due to his parents-- it's not entirely for her because he never actually KNEW her.

And we see her again in the execution. Quite literally like a puppet on strings, she mechanically reaches out towards Eva and offers her a hand. In my eyes, this is 100% a parallel to Diana. There's the obvious of a vaguely red haired girl being the only one to offer her support during her lowest moments, but the way Cara reaches to pull Eva up only for her to fall to her death is comparable to the way Diana reaches to pull Wolfgang up only for him to still get electrocuted to death. Here she is again, playing a different role, open to the interpretation of others. Here she is, twisting the knife about Eva's feelings about Diana. She looms over her, standing tall where Eva was at her lowest in every sense of the word. She's a girl offering help, but not out of the goodness of her heart, and the strings puppeteering her every movement emphasise that reality. Where Eva had rejected her advances before, in her desperation she actually reaches back for her, and the act of allowing herself to trust that kindness is what has her plummeting to her doom the way she was always of, the arm giving and tearing at the farce of it all.

Take her talent, for example. She's the Ultimate Teacher's Aide. By her very nature, she exists for the service of others. Uplifting others rather than uplifting herself. She's the Ultimate Teacher's Aide, and she fulfils that role by being Tozu's literal puppet in the killing game, her servitude entirely at his disposal and her autonomy nonexistant.

Take her motif, for example. She's the only character without an animal motif. Her motif, ironically enough, is a human. Two humans, in fact. And I think that's significant cuz we never actually learn anything about Cara herself when she appears. Her existence is always symbolically tied to someone else on appearance alone (Wolfgang's mum or Diana). Her motif is a human because it's the closest thing to what she looks like, but just like the Tree of Ignorance being a hollow imitation of the Tree of Wisdom, she's anything but. What do we know about her, really? What was she like? Was she a cheerful soul or a gloomy one? Was she aggressive or pacifistic? Was she someone who had confidence or none at all? Was she a perfect victim or a failed yet complicit perpetrator? The sad thing about that question is that it really doesn't matter. Her murder case is only proof of her existence that exists; history has taken this girl and reduced her to nothing else and it doesn't matter. In a group of individuals she's exists solely as a blank slate, a passive party, an entity they can project on. She's a girl. She's a victim. She's a doll. She's a reason. But make no mistake-- she was never meant to be a person.

(Cerise's made a great art piece on this idea go check it out!)

[yardsards]

people love an "i'll take care of you" "it's rotten work" "not to me, not if it's you" character dynamic until the character who needs to be taken care of is disabled. then it's supposedly fucked up and toxic for a person to have to take care of someone else.

[epic-the-musical-confessions]

there is so much in Epic that isn't mythologically accurate (Aeolus's island being in the sky, the sirens not being birds, Odysseus not arriving back on Ithaca and interacting with the suitors in disguise, etc.) and people don't have a problem with it. they treat Epic as its own canon and story. but the minute you start to look at how Calypso and Odysseus interact in Epic specifically, people will suddenly remember there's source material and bring up stuff we don't have concrete evidence she did in the musical

.

[oranye766]

twisted karma and his last bow

[protoindoeuropean]

Photos of a bronze armillary sphere with three layers of rotating rings on an equatorial set up. The sphere is supported by three legs in a row, all decorated with detailed ornamentation and dragon figures. The text on the granite base is in Slovene and Mandarin Chinese (translation and originals under read more↓).

The astronomical instrument (an equatorial armillary sphere) that was unveiled on 6 February 2024 in front of the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana – facing the location of the old Jesuit college, where its conceptor first received his education – is a full-scale replica of the original, finished in 1754, still in place at the Beijing Ancient Observatory in China.

Ferdinand Avguštin Haller von Hallerstein, known also by his Chinese name Liú Sōnglíng (劉松齡; simplified: 刘松龄) was born in 1703, received Jesuit education in Ljubljana, Vienna and Graz and arrived in Beijing in 1739 as a missionary, set to work at the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (which had been run by the Jesuits since 1669). In 1746 he succeeded the office of the head of the bureau and ran it until his death in 1774 – longer than any of his predecessors. He died soon after a stroke he reportedly suffered upon hearing the news that the Pope had disbanded the Jesuit order (in 1773; that suppression was later lifted in 1814).

Beside the astronomical work (published as Observationes astronomicæ), he also worked as a cartographer (creating a map of Macao and its environs, of Manchuria and contributing to the Jesuit Atlas of China) and is noted for making the first exact estimate of the Chinese population (calculated to have been 196,837,977 in 1760 and 198,214,624 in 1761).

Astronomical instruments at the Beijing Ancient Observatory. Hallerstein's armillary sphere is in the foreground. {x} • {x}

The armillary sphere is one of a kind, combining Chinese and European astronomical knowledge as requested by the Qiánlóng Emperor (乾隆帝), who wanted to both honor the tradition of his ancestors and make the instrument as accurate as possible by the standards of the time. The instrument is 3.7 m long, 2.1 m wide and 3.3 m high. It is made of bronze and weighs more than 5 tons. Its replica is made of the same material and is of the same size, built in China using 3D-scanning technology and later transported to Slovenia, and is also fully functional. The design of the original instrument started in 1744 and when it was finished 10 years later, it was considered the pinnacle of Chinese astronomical science as well as artistic craftsmanship.

The Astronomical Instrument was conceived by Augustin Ferdinand Hallerstein (*1703 Ljubljana, †1774 Beijing), a Slovene Jesuit, astronomer, mathematician, cartographer and diplomat, during the time he lived in Qing China. The original stands at the Beijing Ancient Obsevatory. The replica of the instrument is a gift of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China as an incentive for the continuation of cultural exchange between Slovenia and China. Urban Municipality of Ljubljana, 2022

Zvezdni opazovalnik je v času dinastije Qing med svojim življenjem na Kitajskem zasnoval Auguštin Ferdinand Hallerstein (Ljubljana 1703–1774 Peking), slovenski jezuit, astronom, matematik, kartograf in diplomat. Izvirnik stoji na Starem pekinškem astronomskem observatoriju. Repliko opazovalnika je podarilo Veleposlaništvo LR Kitajske kot spodbudo za nadaljevanje kulturnih stikov med Slovenijo in Kitajsko. Mestna občina Ljubljana, 2022

玑衡抚辰仪 值此中华人民共和国同斯洛文尼亚共和国建交30周年，中国驻斯洛文尼亚大使馆和北京天文馆特赠天文观测仪器玑衡抚辰仪同比例复制品，以兹纪念。玑衡抚辰仪由斯洛文尼亚人刘松龄 (1703–1774) 在华担任清朝钦天监监正期间主持制造，原件陈列于北京古观象台。 二〇二二年

(for the latter, thanks go to this anon!!)

[positivelyapunovexponent-good]

sighhhhh Gd really gives her functionalest analysis to her least functional soldiers