#blame it on the wolf

[maskofnova]

Hug or headlock, she's happy either way

[reds-skull]

Soap "dog-coded" MacTavish my beloved

(This took 5 weeks help)

[lacythoughts]

its just any other day. stiles is in the middle of cooking and derek's leaning against the counter watching him. stiles is ranting about something, he's waving his arms around, he's shoving a spoon at derek for him to have a taste every 3 minutes, he has to go around derek to get to the fridge but he doesn't complain about it.

there's dirty dishes piling up and whatever's simmering in the pot smells delicious but derek hasn't been paying much attention. not when stiles' hips sway every time he moves and his eyes are so very brown, they change different shades at different angles. he looks down and they're like a dark chocolate, he looks at derek and they're like honey.

stiles' lips are wet and plump, derek knows that if he tasted them right now they'd taste like spit and spices.

absolutely everything about the other man is driving derek crazy.

'-don't you think?'

'dont i think, what?'

stiles groans, derek knows it's in exasperation but it makes his heart race anyway. makes him think of soft pleas between sheets when it's just them and their needy whispers.

'have you even been listening to me??'

'nope, not at all.' derek shrugs, its stiles' own fault really.

but after the food's all done cooking and they've sat down to eat, he'll throw the doe eye'd beauty over his shoulder and make it up to him upstairs, anyway.

[mintybagels]

ahahahah yea i got that real podcast brainrot now folks

[dearest-love2410]

No cuz if my best friend had been acting weird and lying and had a history of possessed murders, had stabbed me while possessed, and was angry all the time recently, refusing to tell me what’s wrong.

And I was going through the horrors and then someone told me * very convincingly* that my best friend had murdered someone and then upon confronting my best friend he didn’t deny or explain it and then angrily approached me with the alleged murder weapon in his hand…

Ya I would flinch too.

Scott McCall they can never make me hate you.

[ravmycupine]

Some well-deserved pats for a good boy

[sleep-deprived-luka]

for drawing requests: dealer's choice (human or anthro) l/n negitoro, or if you're interested in doing a rarepair, haruan?

I added some cats to it

[sweetlullabyebye]

silliest men ever yeah right "i'm not dying for you" meanwhile theo doing complete reckless shit to keep liam alive

are they fr

[screamlikeabanshee]

Another thing that gets overlooked about the Donavan thing is that while yes, it was self-defense, it was not nothing to Stiles. He actively did not defend himself to Scott because part of him thought he deserved it, that he was a murderer. Once everyone knew the facts, it was Stiles who was most upset by what he did. Scott easily dismisses it as self-defense and so do Malia and his dad (with the latter two also being accepting if it was more akin to murder.) Theo is using it as part of his goal of corrupting stiles, he desperately wants him on his side, but as scott said at his lowest when he thinks he has been betrayed by all his friends, Stiles would never fall to Theo's level. But none the less Stiles is haunted by this for the rest of the season. It is something that taps back into his insecurities about remembering how good it felt to kill as the nogitsune. He wanted donavan dead. He didn't murder him, but he didn't know that he wouldn't have. What hurt him the most was not Theo lying and Scott believing. It is the fear that Theo was telling the truth.

[thesophisticatedworm]

For someone who has many, many things to do and has what some people may refer to as a life, I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about Thiam and drinking tea...

[optimisticcatastrophe]

PUPPY!! 🐺

🥰

[alphinias]

#same vibes

[jessmalia]

stiles and malia playlist: my boy only breaks his favorite toys by taylor swift

there was a litany of reasons why we could've playеd for keeps this time i know i'm just repeating myself put me back on my shelf but first, pull the string and i'll tell you that he runs because he loves me (he loves me) cause you should've seen him when he first saw me

[maesonc-artistic-adventures]

Just wanted to say, your Lu art inspires me everyday!

You’re so sweet! Thank you! I saw that you’d asked for Twilight fluff and this isn’t quite that but I hope it helps carry you through the end of the semester!

^Wild thinks maybe Wolfie has been hanging out with Time too much 🤔

[naivety]

death, life, lycanthropy.

death is a central theme in teen wolf, largely because it's the most extreme form of both change and the unknown; a fitting combination for a show about shapeshifters, and teen wolf has never been afraid to explore it. death and resurrection are well-worn tools in the narrative to depict both horror of transformation and transformation itself, for the better or the worse. new kinds of living always require some kind of dying to make way, and the teen part of teen wolf is the fertile ground for the guttural uproot of this process. what's interesting to me is how autonomy plays into it.

funnily enough, i was researching the history of zombie folklore when my brain started picking up breadcrumbs. according to wyatt macgaffey, the kimbundu word "nzumbe" or "nzambi", roughly meaning "ghost" or "spirit of a dead person," is thought to be the origin of the word zombie. vodoun priests, bokors, induced this ritual with a magical powder called coup poudre containing tetrodotoxin as a key ingredient that paralyzed the victim and their respiratory system to the point of clinical lifelessness, allowing the body to be buried only to be dug back up some time later still living, though likely severely brain damaged; prime condition for outside influence. they would then supposedly remain under the bokor's power until the bokor's death. theft of not just the living body, but the will.

force of will is a familiar concept within the teen wolf narrative as well, painting the characters' abilities to complete spells, take pain, or rise to positions of power. will is a magical tool. life essence, in a way, and yet the concept of the zombie depicts a life-form that's void of this life essence. if death is life essence removed from the body, what does it mean when the body still moves? not alive, not dead, but something else. halfway between one and the other.

the lore within teen wolf puts the victim of an alpha werewolf's bite at a crossroads their body will step through with or without their consent; death or transformation. in the instance of our protagonist, this process is very much non-consensual, and a kind of death regardless of survival. his body healed of it's human ailments only to be subject to the will of the same creature that forced this transformation in the first place, and it wants him to kill people. in response, scott develops a new kind of allergy to the act of taking a life himself, regardless of where this line in the sand lands from situation to situation, and regardless of if his own life hangs in the balance as a side effect. scott dies a total of three times in the show with even more attempts on his life to number, all as the price for this transformation of self he wrestled from peter hale's force of will back within his own. were he not bit in the pilot, scott mccall likely wouldn't have turned into the kind of person willing to die so seamlessly, wouldn't have needed to, but he was put on this irreversible threshold of one change or another. die to himself to make way for peter hale's new creation, or create something of his own. change of some kind is inevitable and irreversible. in the moment of this choice, of will primed for action, you exist in-between. halfway between one choice and another. you as a concept become hypothetical, pure possibility, whether that's you as a body or you as you know yourself; your life or your will.

lycanthropy as an allegory for transgenderism has already been done before, but with teen wolf's themes of self-determination and the body, they've never been more apt, but i'm here to talk about bardo. bardo ties all these themes of life and death and change and in-between states together. as kira says herself, bardo comes from the tibetan bar, meaning ‘interval’, and do, ‘two’. between two states. it's a crossroads of death and rebirth, death and transformation. within tibetan buddism, it's a space articulated as stages of both your life and your death as they are inexplicably tied through time, and you can draw a direct parallel between each level with the stages of scott's growth throughout the text. teen wolf gives us enough to chew on throughout each season, but none more than its depiction of scott's canon bardo experience in episode 8 of season 4, time of death.

it's an episode immediately following weaponized, in which our shapeshifters are infected with a virus that kills them slowly, all while wrestling the physical manifestations of their supernatural nature from their control. their glowing eyes, their fangs, their claws, even their blood; unnatural, inhuman, even in death. weaponized, which features scott's father, rafael, killing someone in order to save a life. time of death opens with scott asking his dad about this experience in a way that directly parallels their scene together in season 3 episode 23, insatiable, when rafael recounts a moment of personal transformation that could only come about through a kind of destruction to scott's body; an injury scott couldn't recall and his loved ones purposefully denied the possibility to. father explains to son how killing isn't an easy thing, not even when you're forced to do it, and what it means to do it anyway. unbeknownst to the father, his werewolf son is already familiar with these elements of death and choice, transformation and will, the capacity to create and destroy either, however scared of them he remains.

to be a werewolf is to be on the precipice of choice every full moon for the rest of your life. the inevitable changes that come with living life now go through the visceral filter of your body that's not quite human, not quite beast, but something stuck between. in philip brophy's article horrality: the textuality of the contemporary horror film, he coins the term body-horror as a genre itself. he describes the destruction of the body as a pervasive element of horror due to its display of our physical selves severed from our control. the audience is made an audience to themselves with their sense of self extracted; on they look as a body that looks like theirs does things their bodies should not be able to do, let alone survive. die, resurrect, transform, bleed. the pain is hypothetical made visceral. the horror of lycanthropy is embodied. you're bitten and made new; still you, yet only halfway. the other half is subject to feelings unbridled; joy, jealousy, lust, love, rage, and in teen wolf's case, the will of the one who bit you. loss of autonomy is made as horrifying as loss of life. your self is now suspended between the most base parts of you and not you at all, your physical self at odds with your sense of self. whose body is it then, if not your own anymore?

by time of death, scott is firmly beyond peter's realm of control. he's anchored his wolf in others and himself, become an alpha of his own making through sheer force of will and prominence of character all before he's old enough to graduate, and as of 5 episodes earlier, he's bitten his very first beta. season 3 for scott establishes this sense of self into something solid and actualized, whether it's a tattoo burned into his skin or an alpha red into his eyes. it's poignant to me that out of the two, scott directly chooses the former while the latter once again happens to him more than he happens to it, same as when he bites liam. scott's transformation into an alpha is just as much a change he survives as his transformation into a werewolf. his will is secondary to the process of surviving the trauma forced upon him to attain these positions of inhuman power. trauma itself can be conceptualized as a fracturing of the psyche; you, as pieces. all the parts you can still identify with, and all the parts you can't.

teen wolf is riddled with an array of traumatized characters who are shaped by violence by either being able to identify with others through a shared sense of victimhood, or the adamant refusal to identify themselves as victims ever again. the self is broken apart, and you only have so much composure left after the trauma itself to pick up the pieces, however few or many you can hold without cutting yourself on the edges. dissociation is a trauma response, and its disorders are characterized by “a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior”. trauma is its own crossroad, and season 4 is the culmination of all the instances scott's transformations have intersected with his will, moreover the ways it's robbed him of it as much as he's refused to let it. the season in which scott experiences bardo so vividly is the same season he's a fully fledged alpha, the same season he turns a kid for the first time, the same season peter comes back to take both his life and his will for a second time in an episode titled smoke and mirrors.

the fifth stage of tibetan bardo, the stage after the moment of death, is chönyi bardo, the bardo of dharmata, or the luminosity of the true nature. as andrew holecek puts it in his excellent article on these stages, "in the buddhist view, the essence of mind is the same for all sentient beings. but the surface structures that cover that essence are different. hence the journey through the surface structures (bardo of dying), into the essence of mind (bardo of dharmata), and then out of it (bardo of becoming), is not the same, but the general pattern of this three-stage process is universal. any meditation that allows you to become familiar with your mind will prepare you for death. in the bardos we’re 'forced' to relate to our mind simply because there’s nothing else." despite having a force of will the world only sees once every hundred years, scott's nature as a werewolf and an alpha were transformations forced upon him. scott's coping mechanism is to step into the change with the inverted intentions of those who sought to change him in the first place. however, the moment this coping mechanism falls short, all it takes is a little wolfsbane to impair the inhibitions and scott is ready to set himself on fire over it.

to be in-between is to be the anchor of two opposites. you are the similarity between opposing forces. the same thing that makes scott able to save lives instead of kill them is the same thing that makes him able to, well, kill them-- both with greater ease than humans are able to throughout the show. bardo is only shattered glass; what you see depends on you, the sole audience. if scott's goodwill comes at the cost of his own life, the inverse of this is scott hacking into his beta's body with a tomahawk until his eyes glow redder than the blood on his face. the only thing between these two versions of him is his own will, but all three points are still him. there is no real divide, and in death, all that remains is you, so why the horror?

if scott's life has become the pervasive theft of his body, death of the body over death of the self, scott’s bardo is the theft of his human will. death of the self over death of the body. this stage of grief, of denial, that he's neither monster nor man, but something in-between. chönyi bardo is known to possess the capacity to frighten and confuse as much as it can liberate. it's death as a stage of transformation-- an inevitable transformation, but bardo is the crossroads at which a choice is made; further fracture, or integration. fear primes for action, for decision, premeditates change as much as force of will. halfway between human and wolf, the choice between the mortality of the man or the immortality of the monster is visceral; change or die. there's no space to grieve for either in a state of base survival, of trauma. until you can face yourself with enough curiosity to beget empathy, enough empathy to beget understanding to beget acceptance, there is no regression to the mean. there's no room for it in a corner. there are only two extreme choices to make; change of some kind is inevitable and irreversible. right?

that's the thing about death; everybody fears it, but nobody knows it. all we know is the time between it and our beginning, and how the world teaches us to survive it. for all scott's strength of character, he's just a kid, and he's is unable to integrate his fear as much as re-iterate his force of will over those who made him so afraid, and so he is reborn just to die young again. it's re-possession of the self so many have tried to steal, what his very next antagonist tries to steal yet again in the following season, but it's what digs his grave at the same time. will over life. change or die, and scott's forced in the same corner he's been in since his first brush with bardo underwater, since he was first faced with this non-choice: death. no funeral.

[phielows]

Kinda don't wanna be that person but like i feel like Bruce somehow dresses or has this type of vibe lowkey cuz..we all kinda know that he has that THAT type of vibe, like this dramatic kind of guy..so like..i could imagine, that in like late nights..unironically...he'd be like this..esp that long type of cigarette in his hands while peeking in the wide ass window as he heaves a sigh...(if not, atleast one of his wolves in him is lowkey like this.)