#also how to ask to go back

[scoriarose]

My baby girl Scoria is in blue, which means she's about to shed!

Please do not think her scary!

She's actually being incredibly brave. Right now the natural fluid that builds up between her eye and eye scale helps her shed it- but it also leaves her almost totally blind. Many snakes refuse to come out of hiding while they are shedding because it's like wandering around the forest with a blindfold on.

But my baby girl trusts me completely. So she left the safety of her moss to spend a short time snuggling with me. It's like wandering around the forest blindfolded- but with your best friend guiding you so you don't trip or walk into things or get attacked by an animal trying it's luck at an easy meal. She knows my voice, and when I talk to her she knows I'm there keeping her safe. She often came over to my chin to be as close as she could to me before wandering about.

This is not a scary snake. She's my best friend, who is in a scary situation, and putting all her trust in me to keep her safe.

I will keep you safe, dear friend, and when your sight comes back again, oh the adventures we will have!

[inkskinned]

i'm still trying to piece together the truth of it. when you left, you said: feel free to spin this narrative however you want. i have no idea if you were being cruel or if you just genuinely don't remember what you've done to me.

it's hard because i'd done so much of the work for you. i had seen the parts that flaked off, the rust underneath. i started separating you into two people - the one i loved, and the one who hurt me. i had this fantasy version of you - my partner - and then i had this stranger, a third person who would show up randomly to shatter me. i am deliriously glad i'm no longer with "the stranger". i miss the gentle (unreal?) "other" you terribly.

at first, i was so strict about my boundaries. i remember telling you to get the fuck out of my house if you were going to talk to me like that. by the end: i would justify your behavior for you, accepting even your mistreatment as "my fault" in the grand scheme. i look back on the person i was before you - smart, independent, confident - and i feel a strange sense of detachment. i don't even recognize me.

even in one of our last conversations, you said: if you want a partner that always talks warmly to you, find someone else. there was a time that a comment like that would have made me leave. and instead, somehow, i just placidly accepted that kind of thing. you were literally telling me that i wasn't allowed to have a reaction to your cruelty - and i just took it, because you'd so fully turned things around on me.

when people are faced with irrationality, a rational brain tries to make sense of it. this is the trap. they're lovely in the morning, gentle and blue-eyed and sweet. like nothing even happened, they breeze around the house and kiss you on the mouth. but at night; who is that? they snap almost randomly; flying into an impotent rage about just-about-anything. it just doesn't make sense. so the problem must be me, and my brain, and how i think.

the traumatized brain just wants peace. so maybe i'm misremembering. maybe you were just having a bad day. maybe it's actually me.

you eventually would fully turn on me and start implying that i am the bad actor in our relationship. that's what happens, right? that's literally in the playbook. you went to therapy for all of a month, told her a half-truth, co-opted therapyspeak. you figured out how to reframe your actions as "seeking peace." any time i stood my ground, i was "gaslighting." when i asked you to be more gentle, you said i was "tone policing." you said, randomly, i had emotionally manipulated you - i still have no idea what that's even specifically referring to. maybe my consistent requests for calmness and empathy?

and while i literally know better, and i'm sitting here, trained by you, thinking: wait, fuck. was i actually the person you made me out to be?

and the thing that scares me is that i literally do not know if you ever actually saw what you were doing to me. when you'd tell me how you remember arguments, you'd always summarize them in a way where you come off as gentle and easy: "i was trying to set an important boundary." what had actually happened was 15 minutes of you shouting at me i know you did something shady, just admit it already. eventually you'd say my reaction to your shouting (when i finally reacted, which usually happened around hour three) was inevitably "disappointing" and "another way i'm silencing your feelings."

how many times did i ask you - beg you - to just take accountability? looking back, i don't think i ever heard you say: you're right. the way i talked to you was wrong of me.

i am trying to tie together the two people into a full version of you in my head. yes, you made my coffee and made me laugh and spent hours on the phone with me. and yes - you would scream at me until i had to run away and hide behind something.

i wish i did have a narrative i could pull out and shape to my whim. i wish i did have some semblance of reality. instead i just stand here, strange and vibrating, wondering: what the fuck just happened?

[cantpickyourgenre]

I believe Bobby is coming back from the dead because I think we deserve to live in a world where Kenneth Choi gets to act his ass off by playing a simultaneously relieved/joyous and angry/furious Chimney, who feels like he has to thank Bobby, but also scream at him until his throat is sore because it wasn't fair to make that decision! he's going to say they should have played rock, paper, scissors and Bobby will chuckle because he thinks he's joking like silly haha Chimney, but Chimney is like "no, we should have discussed it, you died and I didn't even get to say thank you. you died and I owed you a debt I didn't even know about. you let me carry that" and he has to wrestle with the guilt of knowing that Bobby would do that for him, not just theoretically, but actual concrete proof that Bobby would die to save him. which they all know on some surface level that they'd die for one another, but it feels like such a far-off concept until it isn't. but Chimney also has to deal with the gratitude because Chimney is also so incredibly thankful that he didn't die. every step of the way he wanted Ravi, Bobby, Buck, and Athena to commit crimes, because he loves his life and he wants to keep living it. he's so overjoyed that he got to go home to his wife and kid, and that comes with its own guilt because how can he be so happy to be home when Bobby DIED. does that make him a monster? that on some level he's HAPPY that Bobby did that? and now he has to FACE Bobby. so he tries to be the Before Chimney who gets people whimsical gifts, but how do you give someone balloons about choosing your life over theirs? and he spirals because he's different now and Bobby is here and he has so so much he wants to say but all of it feels contradictory and unfair and he would normally go to Bobby for advice. so he does. he goes to Bobby and he says "what would you do, if you were in my position?" and Bobby just says "whatever you need to say or feel, I understand" and that just makes Chimney even more upset because what he needs is for none of this to have ever happened. its like they all got a re-do, but kept the memories and the feelings and now he has nowhere appropriate to put them. anyway, Bobby lives and we get Chimney angst yay <3 forever and ever.

[a-compass-without-a-needle]

This is what happened after 3.1 isn't it?

[starry-bi-sky]

no thoughts head empty de-aged blood blossom danny

if ONLY because i was at work yesterday out in the play yard and one of the babies from the one year old room walked up to me, held up her arms and went "up. up" and i caved like a wet fucken nOODLE and im inflicting that onto Bruce

so im just picturing like, roughly 18mo Danny, just absolutely teeny, walking up to Bruce in the Batman suit, grabbing his cape and pulling on it to get his attention or plastering himself to the side of his legs (<- real experience i've had) and when Bruce looks down at him Danny just goes "Bah-man, bah-man. Up."

and im teLLING YOU. Bruce would cave in a fucking heartbeat.

or if he crouches down, Danny will just crawl onto him anyways. wraps both arms around his neck and tries to raise his leg over his knee so he can wrap himself around his waist (<- ALSO A REAL EXPERIENCE I'VE HAD)

also he can't fully articulate himself yet, he doesn't have all of his teeth quite yet and phonetics are harD, so he can't say Bruce it just sounds like "boo" or "booce" like 'boost' but without the 't'.

[iceagebaby]

Despondency / Refuge

that's supposed to be Bennys lighter, the Courier is dealing with cosequences of being thrown into a mess they had nothing to do with

the halo was something that turned out on an accident but i love it

Rant below

[imclou]

can't believe fnaf brought me out of art hibernation man what a turn of events

[jadewritesficshere]

Just thinking about s4 but when Alpha!Eddie grabs Steve to shove the bottle against his neck, he doesn't realize Steve is an omega and accidentally scruffs him. And Steve is just boneless, kinda goes down. And Eddie isn't expecting deadweight and almost falls ontop of Steve but realizes what's happening (let's just say he's fought off a few bullies who scruffed members of his pack). He immediately drops the bottle and holds onto Steve, who tries to scent Eddie. Just shoves his face into Eddie's neck and nuzzles it, lets out a purr unintentionally.

[lgbtlunaverse]

So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.

Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.

Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.

If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.

But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.

Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!

This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.

Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.

So he has to live.

Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.

And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the world of heavy metals, love is denser than hate!

[shrimparts-blog888]

👩‍🍳👌🏻

[neglectedsodium]

Still find it really really funny that Suo showed the slightest reaction to not liking natto and the class immediately latched onto that and dog piled him. No hesitation, just immediate teasing.

[cubbihue]

So.... why'd Peri get assigned Dev as his first godchild?

Jorgen’s usually not the one in charge of assigning godchildren. There’s an entire department that weighs and classifies potentail Godkids to the right Fairy. Although it’s on strike at the moment.

So Jorgen has to do it by hand, until the union negotiations are resolved. Turns out trying to use paperclips is very hard. Itty bitty paperclips. Big muscular biceps. Not a good combo.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

Peri's Assignment: [Previous] > [Next]

[littlecrittereli]

Wanted to doodle some comfort bros to balance out the angst of my recent posts lol

Hey pookies! Just wanted to say I really appreciate all the love and support I've been receiving lately for Decoded! I always love your comments/asks/fanart/memes, it genuinely has been bringing me so much joy and I'm so grateful for it <3

I know I said I had a lot of art to post (and then proceeded to post none of it LOL) I'm just a little overwhelmed rn with some life stuff so sorry for the wait! I also have a lot asks that I haven't gotten to and I apologize for that as well!

Trying my best to keep up, but I haven't had a lot of time recently. Art's gonna be a little delayed, but don't worry Chapter 8 is still gonna come out this Saturday as scheduled!

[mobius-m-mobius]

Mobius, I know you’re trying to help me, but we should be dealing with the bigger problem here. He Who Remains.

[thealdersgateoffice]

The Slow Horses (and Jackson Lamb) missing Slough House’s mother hen Catherine Standish 🐌🐎