#...an addendum

[torchickentacos]

I love tumblr tags so much. Like okay here’s the main post and here’s my little secret thoughts and addendums for the besties

[soapeca]

happy pride!!!!! here are my two favorite lesbian squids as a treat

[iinryer]

9-1-1 is the show of missed opportunities man. why have hen and eddie never talked about getting shot. why have ravi and buck never talked about childhood cancer. why have chimney and buck never talked about being the the unfavored son. or about literally being dead. why did eddie and henren never talk about having your kid taken away. why have buck and hen never talked about coming out. why have maddie and eddie never talked about running. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY GOOD PARALLELS THAT NEVER GET TAPPED!!!

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Sentimonsters are beings made from a single emotion and Adrien's emotion is heavily implied to be love. Sentimonsters can also have any random power the writers decide to give them and have been established to sometimes get powers their creators didn't intend (see Feast). That is the ultimate setup to use the power of love to empower Adrien and yet the show gives us nothing.

(See power of love rant for more)

[dawnssummers]

willow knows she acts strange and tries hard to act "normal"; anya knows she acts strange and refuses to act "normal"; tara knows she acts strange and is just okay with it; faith has internalised the idea that there is something wrong with her; buffy needs to believe she is the most normal girl ever

[zarovichs]

one of the funniest things in disco elysium hands down is when you learn your prime suspect for the murder fled days ago because she heard the engine of kim's car and kim's only response to that is 'well i'm so sorry that my car fucks i'm sorry that my dick is huge. anyway'

[elizabethwydevilles]

One of my favourite elements is the potential relationship between Leia and Anakin, but it seems I'm very much in the minority in the fandom as it is now. The most popular theme is undoubtedly that Leia has zero interest in her bio parents and that Leia hates Anakin and good for her.

@batrachised has talked about why Leia bitterly hating Anakin jars uncomfortably with the movies message of 'hate leads to the darkside' so I'm not going to elaborate further on that, but I will say it's definitely something that current audiences struggle with. A lot of the ideas in Star Wars about hate and forgiveness do not sit comfortably alongside the current discourse in regards to resistance, etc. I sometimes feel this dissonance with what I believe at times, but these ideas are not subtle. You can see this tension when people are making posts about Leia disliking Padmé because she believed in Anakin (Leia doesn't seem to dislike Luke for the same though!) or people writing fic where Luke explains that he didn't actually forgive Anakin, et al.

Another issue of course is that people seem to feel that Leia coming to terms with Anakin as her bio father is somehow a rejection of Bail as her father (and Breha as her mother). Frankly this one annoys me because (talking in general, not in regards to Leia in particular) an adoptive/non-bio child being interested in their bio parent/s does not mean a rejection of the parents who raised them (and while this isn't applicable to Leia, it's not unheard of for an adoptive/non-bio child to have complicated feelings re: their adoption while still loving their adoptive parents). One of the things I really enjoyed in the OWK show was that Leia was interested in her biological parents and it was totally clear that she loved Bail and Breha as her parents. It really doesn't have to be an either/or situation.

The exception in the Anakin and Leia comparisons is, of course, when talking about Leia being angry. And she is angry at times! But she's also very kind. There's a real tendency to flatten Leia down to her spikiest moments and forget everything else that she is. I really would recommend this post from husborth about Leia and her characterisation, as it sits fairly closely to my own feelings re: Leia.

In the end, I will always find the idea of Leia finding some way to come to terms with Anakin being her bio father, despite everything he has done to her and those around her, to be the more compelling story than Leia simply not being bothered by it. I don't want her to have the same relationship with Anakin as Luke has — that would be boring —, it doesn't mean that Anakin would be her 'dad', it's about exploring Leia's character and what confronting this knowledge and legacy could bring to her character.

Leia will always be Leia Organa — she's also part of the Skywalker Saga. Why is it wrong to explore her in the context of that complicated legacy that is so central to the films?

[greenbeany]

It's 2025, I'm letting y'all fill in the gaps yourself

Happy birthday to Tommyinnit, Gerard Way, Lil Nas X and Kristen Stewart. Happy death day to Prince Philip.

[nocek]

The power of magic baby :B

I'm enjoying doing the very loose sketchy linearts. It really helps with not falling into perfectionism buuuuuut it actually creeps back up with deciding to color XD It's unending battle.

But sometimes you need to lose it...

[miscellaneous2848]

living in a repeating world. it goes, one, two, one, two, one again. it's a terrible world. it's a predictable world. you know what's going to happen next. you find comfort that what you know is going to happen will happen. what you see is what you get.

then tell me why is it that you see so much anguish there?

it's the same body you've been in, since the day you were born. no mechanical augments. all flesh and blood. human, human. what you see is what you get. what you see is who you are

"but I don't want to be who I am! I don't want to be me!" a dying voice, crying out to be someone else. that it wants to change! to be free from the cycle!

you crush it underfoot. you like staying in the cycle. your reflection is the same as it ever was.

Viktor only became a "main character" when she was able to remember the cycles. It's difficult to truly say any agent, over the course of the plot of Lobotomy Corporation, was a "main character" - perhaps the main character of their individual stories, yes, but taking the whole of the cycle account, there was never a day where it would be Viktor that was the "main character." A side character, a B-plot character, a funny gag about an agent that hated their captain oh-so-very much - well, she'd hate these descriptors of herself. But it was only when Viktor was aware of the cycles, running through the same thing, over, and over, and over again - that is when the spotlight came onto Viktor, the heroine of Day 49. Cycles appear a lot.

The cycle of becoming the one you hated. The black, short-cut hair, the golden irises, meant imply "this is an Apocalypse Bird," or, more simply, "this is Rook." They are differentiated only by their silhouette now, instead of by color, and even then, Viktor's coat stretches far back enough to resemble a cloak at the right angles. Behaviorally, she acts sadistic and cruel, how one would expect an Arbiter to act (Rook's never been up to snuff with what an Arbiter "should" be - but this is not about him). A penchant for violence, quick thinking, tendency to antagonize. She'd hate herself, if she was someone else.

The cycle of repeating the past. An Arbiter, brought to justice by a Color Fixer. So what, if the two repeating the cycle are weaker than their counterparts? They can learn to do it better. They have an infinite amount of time to learn, an infinite amount of life. The two elders watch, their disapproval palpable. They should have been the ones to end it, clasping each others' hands tightly and pulling away with equal force. Rook wants to escape (liar. He doesn't, finding a comfort in the regularity of his head being lopped off, being the one unable to fight back - he is the innocent one, the just one), but Viktor wants to stay. A cycle brings stability, comfort, predictability. What happens when the cards are in the air?

Viktor figures, once she becomes a Color (in a nearby reality, one watched but never touched), that the cycle will repeat for her, one day. She'll raise a protégé, mistreat them horribly. They run away, and a few years later, they encounter each other, clash, and the student wins, taking the Silver title from her mantle. It's a chilling possibility. A comforting possibility. She knows what happens next in the story.

---

The ouroboros is the symbol of infinity, looping, cycles. Snakes, known for their Silver Tongues, tempter of Eve; they eat their own tails. Always growing, always shrinking, forever in pain - and it is not immortal. A cycle does not live in a vacuum, though it acts like it might. The easiest way to bring a person out of its trance... is to cut the tail off.

[amiya-shirou]

I love how despite the Seaborn having a very minor role during Exodus from the Pale Sea their presence is still embedded so deeply in every facet of the story. I don't just mean how they're the reason the Pale Sea exists or how one of them appears in the event, but also the way they affect the themes of the story, which applies the Human Individuality vs Seaborn Collective conflict we've already explored in the Abyssal Hunter events to a tale where every part is played by humans.

There's something in the way Anastasio stands against any and all desires, almost word for word quoting Arturia as something that should be fought against at all costs. The way Arturia in turn thought of the Seaborn as boring because they lacked that desire. The way the citizens in this story are so scared of desire, how they fell so deeply on the Inquisition's teachings to survive and try to forget the horror they lived through that even now that much of the danger has passed and the conditions are better they still dare not fill their bellies even if there's food, they dare not buy something that might look fun from the caravans, they dare not wish for anything for themselves, almost every ounce of individuality they once had completely destroyed to the point that when Silver tried lifting the bans and letting them live a better life they couldn't accept it and wanted the prohibitions to come back, readily switching side to Anastasio to get back that familiar sense of comfort and stability the rules gave them even if they had long exhausted their material purpose. The very Inquisition that's so hellbent on eradicating the Seaborn from the land while making speeches about the superiority of human civilization ended up turning the people they swore to protect in something that's not so different from them, or even fully ready to join We Many as seen in other events with the way the Church of the Deep is able to pray on the discontent of the Iberians.

But as Deepcolor once noted in her operator record, it's impossible to completely eradicate your humanity, just like the Priest she talks to couldn't fully become Seaborn due to his curiosity or she couldn't become one because of her artistic passion, and in fact if you look at the conditions of both the citizens and Anastasio, they're all just guided by fear. After all the Seaborn have no concept of guilt or sinning, they're just driven by the instinct to keep the collective going and any of them would readily sacrifice itself for the others and they're shown wanting to free their kin even as they're actively being killed by them - meanwhile Silver trying to help the city by reforming the pirates and making some compromises so that everyone could live better is met by Anastasio with disdain, because his teachings don't allow for real forgiveness except for the one given by death, no matter if "the collective" has to live a life of misery because of it. He values peace of mind above the physical well being of the people in a way that's the farthest you could ever get from We Many, but the way he gets it is by violently eradicating the core difference between us and them. He seeks the embrace of death, deeply mythologizing it like a human would, while being driven by an incredibly powerful directive to live on like a Seaborn would, straight up coming back from the death three times. He's a walking contradiction, and when the event ends with him literally being shown as a mix of both, everything falls into pieces. It's a tale about how self-destructive repressing your wishes and individuality and trying to force everyone to adhere to a single doctrine - trying to live as a seaborn while being human - is.

And of course the final touch is how well all this works as a premise for Arknights to make a story about pirates, because of course even if they're not actual good guys and in fact very violent and did plenty of bad things on screen, they'll forever be a great stand-in for the concept of seeking freedom and following what your heart desires (and in fact the whole plot revolved around the Corazonix, one side wishing for what it promised, the other believing it only brings corruption). Juana and her crew are the other extreme to the Inquisition in the city, people solely guided by their desires to the point they become destructive, and while we had to fight both sides during the event, the final resolution is about accepting them as shown with Thorns's very simple wish that guides him to victory against Anastasio - he just wants to see the ocean. The story ends with the beginning of a straightforward pirate story with Isidro and his fun band of misfits going on an adventure, re-contextualized in a setting where the Profound Silence had long since suffocated any notion of dreaming about the future, any notion of the sea as something you want to admire and explore rather than a place of horror and death as it's always been presented in Arknights up until now.

It's neat.

[hadopelagian]

clearly a lot of people watching wild life think gem and joel have a good chance of winning, and i agree - they're well-geared up, have twelve lives between them, both have a reputation for being good at pvping, and most importantly have proved themselves good at adapting to the wild cards.

that being said, we all also know that when joel goes red, he goes very red - and especially if those two end up as some of the last to hit yellow and red, there'll be no way for them to kill their way back to green. a rampage is inevitable. but i think people forget that gem is just as bloodthirsty and almost as reckless as joel when red.

as much as i'm rooting for one of them to win, i think it's equally likely that they go out swinging and taking half the server with them - and while people expect this from joel, i think they should be expecting it from gem as well, instead of her just going as collateral to the inevitable smallishbeans rampage

i'm still rooting for a gem or joel win, but if this is how things go? id be just as excited lmao

[dailyhatsune]

the tiger draws close

[tonaegiri]

[deanpinterester]

it's fun how "villain gets tricked into confessing on video and now everyone hates them" is usually the resolution to a kids movie (monsters inc and coco do this for example) but i think the director from nimona is the only villain (that i've seen at least) who's wily enough to get out of being twitter cancelled

[coldhardspaghetti]

forgive me

(don't actually)

so i was watching episode 5 of The Woman Called Fujiko Mine and having fun with the budding friendship between Lupin and Jigen.

But then Jigen hit this pose;

and i realized i had to do it.

I drew him like this:

and then i put Lupin in there as well