#absolute commitment to the bit

[missroserose]

Currently taking odds on this guy showing up as Sam Reich’s evil twin in the next season of Game Changer

[egophiliac]

have you been keeping up with gozyuger? it's just... truly wild to watch

OKAY I'm finally caught up! and...wild is an understatement, huh! getting some real Donbros energy off of this one (in the best of ways though really) (just all kinds of super weird and super fun! 💍) (...also the blue ranger might have murdered a child?) (I mean probably not) (they wouldn't. but.) (what if)

I'm especially fond of Bouquet and Fire Candle, just because they encapsulate the two modes of my brain at any given moment

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

[seraphont]

Your AU's idea of SolverCyn keeping Tessa's consciousness alive inside it actually seems really in-character for the canon SolverCyn. I remember someone pointing out that between Cyn and Tessa's matching hairstyles, the way that SolverCyn has been wearing Tessa's human corpse as a skinsuit and impersonating her identity in the spacesuit ever since the Well-Timed Giggle, and the way Cyn and Tessa both share a special fondness for N among the drones, it really seems like either the Solver - or the part of the Solver that's still Cyn - has a real underlying fixation on emulating Tessa.

Yeah, I see Cyns disturbing fixation of Tessa being a once innocent admiration that got twisted by the corruption. When you like someone enough you tend to parrot them and pick up their tendencies. this is really apparent in impressionable kids, and Cyn is our resident possessed robo child. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

I think it’s a funny twist of irony that the entities that hate humans so much, are so deeply obsessed with one. In the end they just want to own every piece of Tessa.

[notsogoodangel]

I'm just saying that there's no heterosexual explanation for AJ, as the Champion, having a twink actually running Parkour Civilization.

[thekidsarentalright]

if he actually did that that’s absolutely insane . and i would expect nothing less from his cunt-serving ass

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[thesulkycroissant]

Locations of Bruce's bat caves

I am DELIGHTED by this

[sforzesco]

a scene from the comic script I junked— I’m going to re write it eventually, but I realized after I finished it that I was holding back on the vitriol and the ugly teeth marks in the rivalry, like truly what is the point of doing a comic about geta and caracalla if you’re going to soften the blows lmao

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[eggcats]

Radioapple fic, where idk Catlastor exists (or maybe it's just KeeKee or Fat Nuggets) and does something bad and so like Angel or whoever picks him up and is like "I'm putting you in Air Jail for that one mista'!"

The next time Lucifer annoys Alastor, he picks up Lucifer and goes "Air Jail."

It becomes a thing where sometimes you just see a grumpy Lucifer being held aloft by Alastor (or his shadow tentacles) as he goes about his day. Even Lucifer himself doesn't know why he lets this happen.

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

"What are we gonna do, Nate? We're not ready to close Vector yet."

Leverage S03E13 The Morning After Job.

[serpentface]

Don't get too attached

[allmightyscroll-swag]

Oop, I realized I never actually posted about this, but!

Anyone remember my separated Donnie au? Code name: Violet skies? Well I'm remaking it! Rewriting it, even !!

Here's Foot Recruit/aka Donnie!

Draxum, quite begrudgingly, ends up raising the four turtles with Splinter: whom saved him when a part of the lab's roof collapsed, while he was holding onto two of the turtles. Splinter brought the both of them to the sewers, and it all happened from there.

The turtles grew up not too different, safe for extra actual training and knowledge of both the hidden city and things mystic; until Leo and Donnie turned 14. Donnie went out one day with Raph, and didn't come back.

Two years after his disappearance, when the series events begin, they find him in the Foot Clan. Now called just Foot Recruit, with no memory of them — and a good 6 years worth of memories of living with the foot clan.

[nightphoebe]

NNNNNEEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDD

[jamietwat]

RJK fake dating fic but they’re not intentionally all fake dating or anything, they just suck at planning and communicating

Keeley has to go to some event and Jack’s going to be there so now she needs one of them there as a fake date for emotional support and to prove she’s moved on and not missing Jack

But also like Keeley is not choosing which one of them to bring so she just soft pitches it to both and thinks that they’ll sort it out amongst themselves and choose if they want to do it and who it’ll be so that it isn’t weird weighted like she chose me to fake date so obviously she really wants to date me

They in fact do not sort it out amongst themselves. They both just assume that clearly she wants them to do it because she brought it up to them and they do not communicate at all that they’ve taken it on to the other

So they both show up at the event assuming they’re Keeley’s fake boyfriend and they both separately come up to her and play the role aggressively around Jack separately and when Jamie does it second, Jack’s like wait I thought you were dating Roy and Keeley’s mind goes completely blank and all she’s got is yeah and Jamie panics and overcorrects to instead of yeah she’s dating both of us to yeah all three of us are dating partly because it’s the first thing that pops into his head and partly because it’s a way more fun role to play for the night

So then when Roy grabs them after they walk away from Jack and is like hold on you’re her fake boyfriend? I already told Jack that I’m her fake boyfriend, Jamie’s like quick update, we’re fake dating now too and then breezes away before Roy even has a chance to say anything

And then they end up all pretending to be a throuple all night and really it is a lot more fun than being there separately or just one of them pretending to date Keeley so by the end they’re like wait? Is this just the solution to our problems?

[redbelles]

brandon duhaime about to get pranked so hard MIN @ BOS | 12.19.23

+ bonus postgame kirill: