#Secrets of the Atlas

[belghast]

Birbsieged - Getting Besieged by Birbs in my Backyard, and farming strongboxes for fun and profit in Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets/Mercs League.

[demaparbat-hp]

Hey, Spitfire! Try not to kill your brother ahead of time!

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Looking for Ursa right after being banished had some...wildly unexpected results. One: Zuko actually found her. Two: she wasn't alone. Three: leaving her children behind in order to protect them was, apparently, just something she did.

Looking at the bright side, Zuko now had a three-year-old younger brother to look after. Looking at the dark side, Zuko now had a three-year-old kid he needed to parent while also keeping him a secret from his father because—may Agni help him—the Fire Lord would have to go through Zuko first if he dared to even look at Lu Ten II.

(AKA an AU in which Zuko is a good big brother and doesn't want another kid to grow up like he did.)

[ranilla-bean]

✨ The Mercy of Magpies 《喜鵲之恩》 ✨

3...2...1... takeoff! 🚀 @ashcremated & @ranilla-bean here to launch our project for @zukkabigbang2024 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛

Rating: M Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender Pairing: Sokka/Zuko Chapters: 8/15 Beta: @faux-fires

Tags: Alternate Universe - Space, Space Opera, Depictions of Violence, Minor Character Death, Dilf Zukka, War, Han solarpunk, loosely inspired by Red Cliff (dir. John Woo), Decolonisation, Ghosts, the narrative is haunted, Getting Together, Slow Burn, eventual sexual content (i prommy), BBL Ozzy, thematically relevant magpies, interplanetary old man yaoi saves the galaxy

Summary:

In the XXXth span of the galactic war against the Phoenix King, the Avatar, Master of the Four Elements, summoned his trusted advisor to his side… Avatar Aang, prosecutor of the long war against the Fire Nation, tasks General Sokka with the recruitment of a secret friend hidden on his old home planet Emptiness II, razed a century ago. There, Sokka finds an impossible community, where peoples from all quadrants of the galaxy have taken root—headed by the Phoenix King’s own son Zuko. As he comes to trust them, Sokka becomes invested in the community. But war is barrelling towards them, and he must harness the spark between himself and Zuko to save Emptiness II… and the rest of the galaxy.

check out the rest of the chapter 1 art here!

[mryddinwyllt]

[yvainart]

kissing in secret behind royal palace’s walls

[cyrankaa]

[clickityquacks]

Alignment chart of dark academia books, emphasis on the academia. I have read them all and this is my take on it all.

Is the novel a dark academia because it takes place in a school and there are a lot of "dark" themes or is it a dark academia because the atmosphere is grim and the characters are pursuing knowledge.

Also book recommendations, I think people would like the books that fall in the same quadrant.

Books under the read more.

Top Left: My favourite corner where I just want the author to flex their niche knowledge.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

If We Were Villains - M. L. Rio

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies - Heather Fawcett

Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo

The Raven Boys - Maggie Steifvater

The Secret History - Donna Tarte

Babel - R. F. Kuang

Bottom right: The intersection between lots of deaths and some niche knowledge. This one is a bit more hand wavey so here are some explanations.

Blood Over Bright Haven - M. L. Wang: Often compared to Babel but has way less niche knowledge and more transactional deaths.

Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir: This one is a sequel but the convoluted plot lives in my head rent free and it’s Dark (Goth) Academia.

Bunny - Mona Awad: Lots of allusion to literature and mythology. Also lots of dark, bunnies and swans.

Bottom Left: Takes place in a school that people are trying to survive.

The Magicians - Lev Grossman

Vicious - V. E. Schwab

Legendborn - Tracy Deonn

Ace of Spades - Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Atlas Six - Olivie Blake

Deadly Education - Naomi Naovik

Top Left: Happens in a school and pretty light on death but has “dark” themes.

The River King - Alice Hoffman

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson

The Initial Insult - Mindy McGinnis

A Study in Drowning - Ava Reid

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath - Moniquill Blackgoose

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs - Janina Matthewson and Jeffrey Cranor

[chaoticmiserablelover]

I love reading about friendships that border the platonic and romantic feeling, the greatness of all of it. The feelings that are so intense they can't exist without their ugly counterparts.

Just plain good odi et amo idea.

[timeofdeathnote]

oh they Ba Sing Slayed 💅🏼

[rvieskie]

girls just wanna have fun an academic year with a ridiculously small class that might be considered essentially a cult in a field that’s tragically pretentious and consists of only the best of the best - the elite in their particular field where everyone is hot, evil and gay, everyone fucks everyone but they all hate eachother and hurt eachother yet are bound together with this inexplicable need and entanglement up in eachother, someone prophecized to die, power and knowledge driving each of them to a state of madness, found family in a sense but the family is fucked up and the chemistry and connection between all of them is so bright that it might burn all of them alive and they’d be happy to burn because this was the precipice they were reaching for anyways, so much power and so much obsession and so much passion and mania with the academia and even more so eachother and they fuck eachother up and fix eachother all at once and ohmygod GIVE ME IT

[flutesolo]

the really fun thing about making suki zuko’s personal guard is that she absolutely would figure out he’s the blue spirit. it’s literally her job to be on top of him, she would figure it out in under a month. and she would know that asking zuko to stop is a lost cause so she would follow him out. i need you to stop and picture the look on zuko’s face when he finds out suki knows he’s the blue spirit.

[belghast]

Gearing My Mercenary - After a week long break from blogging, I talk about how I have geared my Mercenary in Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas expansion.

[demaparbat-hp]

Here I am, pushing the Jian Li (Akai Kotou! Zuko) = Jinshi (The Apothecary Diaries) agenda.

[riverofthought]

[fanfic-gremlin-ft-trauma]

Sometimes a smooch cures all of lifes problems

[nightmare-grass]

@eclecticjace @portal-secret-santa

Merry Portal-mas! Thought I’d make a couple scenes to do with Oracle Turret, and because it’s Christmas, I wanted to try and include everybody.