#but again. this would be hard to write

[bulbabutt]

one day ima write some long winded analysis thing about how i think 2012 has an abusive family dynamic going on and its the best part of the show and im either gonna be paraded like a hero or fucking cancelled

[teddybeartoji]

toji being all bundled up in his winter coat with a pretty green scarf around his neck (that you gifted him btw). his nose is red and his cheeks even redder as he taps his foot on the crunchy snow. he's waiting for you.

with his hands stuffed into his pockets, he hides from the cold bite while eyeing the passersby with furrowed brows, and even though the scarf hides the lower half of his face, you know he's wearing a sort of scowl. it's closer to a pout more than anything, but you won't mention it. his ears perk up at the sound of your voice calling his name and you feel warm at the sight of his face lighting up just a bit. it's cute. it's cute that he's so excited to see you.

he meets you halfway, his hands reaching for you as you close the distance between you. it's a quiet greeting, a very simple 'hi' accompanied by his scarred lips pressing against your temple as you hug him. in his arms, you feel safe. you feel at home. when he pulls away, he takes a second to look at you – the stars in your eyes, the bashful smile on your lips. toji thinks you look pretty as ever.

but his cute little daydream doesn't last.

a gasp makes its way out of the depths of his throat the second your hands cup his face, your frozen fingers sending shivers down his back.

the look on his face makes you giggle and the sound makes him furrow his brows again in return. he clicks his tongue. "you'll freeze to death."

"you'll save me."

he shakes his head with a sigh but takes your hands into his nonetheless. while keeping his, now very determined, eyes on your fingers, he brings them up to his face and gently blows warm air on them.

you hum. "my saviour."

the tips of his ears burn – his nose, his cheeks, but surely it's just because of the cold and because of his teasing lover. surely.

you see the grin he's so desperately trying to hold back and laugh at him once more. "my hero."

he grumbles. "be quiet."

he's still holding your hands, he's still warming them up. there isn't even an inkling of thought about letting you go, about letting your poor little fingers freeze. he will hold onto you for the entirety of the walk that's ahead of you. so he can keep you warm. and not because he so desperately wants to hold your fucking hand. it's not that. no way.

you lean up your toes while intertwining your fingers with his, and with no questions asked, he bends over to close the gap between you again. this is how it works. love.

a pair of cold lips meet the tip of his nose and toji lets his eyes fall shut at the sweet touch. he lets out a relieved sigh, a content one, and savours the way you smile against him. a kiss, and then another. a haste one to his lips before pulling back with that very same grin on your face that he adores so much. the kind of playful one, the one that tells him that you're going to be throw snowballs at him very soon. he loves it.

"are you going to get hot chocolate with me today, toji?"

he lets your glued together hands fall, only for you to start swinging them side to side. he doesn't tell you to stop.

"no."

"liar."

toji rolls his eyes, tonguing at his inner cheek as he does so.

"with marshmallows."

he loves you.

"with marshmallows."

[lunarmoves]

tbh as a writer im always so amazed when i see other ppls art bc im like 'wow i cant even draw a circle! how did they do that?' it very rarely occurs to me that artists are just as astonished at writers whenever they pull out stories. like oh yeah, i can write a 50k fic with a plot and overarching themes easy peasy (for the most part) - ppl are amazed at that??? crazy.

[maple-leaf-feet]

Wanderers Above The Sea Of Fog

I hope you like this because I wanted this image to exist so much that I learned to paint in order to make it happen

[egophiliac]

so on the subject of the "Crowley is secretly Revaan/Laverne/Levin/please Twst give us his name" theory, I think my feelings are best summed up as "I don't really buy it, but it's funny". like, in all seriousness, I'm not opposed to it; I have enjoyed the writing in Twst so far and I'm willing to trust that whatever happens will, you know, make sense and not be terrible. but I'm just not really convinced by the current evidence! maybe that'll change once we learn more, we'll see!

with that said, may I propose a few alternate theories about the possible Crowley/Revaan connection:

[sludgekludge]

characters in this show having emotional outbursts would be way more impactful if they weren't constantly crying and shitting and having breakdowns over every ant they see on the pavement every 12 seconds

[wild-karrde]

Y'all... I cannot stress enough how you need to interact with things in order to maintain a fandom community.

I have seen absolutely abysmal interaction with everything I've posted lately, and it is IMMENSELY disheartening. Of course, I create it for me, but I choose to share it with everyone and want to get excited about it WITH YOU. And it seems that every other artist/writer/creator I know is experiencing the same thing.

If you're one of the people that regularly interact or just have hit a bit of a speedbump lately, then please know I'm not talking to you. I'm also not talking to other creators that have to choose between engaging or creating (and sometimes just don't have the bandwidth). I'm talking to the blogs that ask for more and then never comment or share. I'm talking to the people that sign up for tag lists and then are never heard from again. I'm talking to blogs that spam like but haven't reblogged anything since 2022. Y'all, this site thrives off of interaction. That is how it works. You have to help things circulate, and it is so frustrating to see the entire place in a collective slump. I have been blocking blogs left, right, and center that do not share things, and I will continue to do so. But it is such a freakin' bummer to see the state of things at the moment.

Hell, I started a sideblog for Fandom Friday (@fandom-friday), and have only received a handful of submissions after getting asked numerous times when it would be coming back. IT'S BACK. IT'S HERE. WHERE IS EVERYONE????? I figured after a few months' break, that people would have plenty of submissions stacked up, but that has not been the case AT ALL.

Fandom communities are such incredible places, but it's felt like a ghost town around here lately with the writers and artists just screaming into the void to PLEASE INTERACT WITH OUR STUFF. Please show up for one another because it is so very soul-crushing to watch everyone I know just feel completely disheartened. I cannot tell you how depressing it is to spend hours and hours carefully crafting something, being genuinely excited about it, and get almost no interaction or response other than a few likes and comments.

PLEASE INTERACT WITH THINGS YOU LIKE OR ELSE THERE WON'T BE ANY MORE THINGS TO INTERACT WITH.

[ronanlynchusurper]

declan lynch is the type of guy to despise workplace gossip and drama but enjoys going home to retell it all to jordan while she paints. he maybe even ends up eavesdropping and subtly pressing for answers in a disinterested way just to get conclusions on certain theories him and jordan come up with.

[deoidesign]

For my birthday... read my webcomic! It's literally free! (Unless you want books. Those are not free)

It's beautiful, it's gentle, it's funny, they're canonically t4t and gay... And it's about time traveling vampires solving supernatural mysteries!

I've spent thousands of hours writing and drawing it, and it's really good! I'm not biased!

It's on hiatus right now and coming back in 2 months, so it's the perfect time to get caught up

[szrbett]

Reupload because i wanted to color it :p

Version without text under

[greenleaf4stuff]

TROP x social media text posts (screenshots via cap-that.com) (my other trop memes))

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[captainbobbin]

happy birthday, saix

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In Stars and Disco

(Disco side of the swap)

[writingfreezer]

you had been curious about his horns and tail, and dan heng was kind enough to let you touch them. what he didn’t anticipate was how intense the whole situation was about to become.

as your fingers delicately gracing his tail had slowly moved up to his base, his self-control had faltered with it. even though his tail was made out of mostly water, you somehow had found a way to squeeze around it to make dan heng shiver from the contact. you could see how he was biting his lower lip in order to keep the slutty moans that wanted to spill from his mouth to himself.

”does this feel good, babe?” you asked, voice sultry. your inner cheek was almost bleeding with how much you had bitten it in order to keep yourself from smirking at the sight in front of you. dan heng, the usually composed and quick-witted member of the astral express, had been reduced down to a pleading mess.

dan heng opened his mouth to speak but right before he was about to respond, your fingers curled and started scratching the base of his tail. the action made his back arch and he let out a high gasp that soon turned into a drawn-out moan. his eyes lulled to the back of his head and he flooped his head down on your shoulder.

panting, he tried to speak in his usual tone, ”plea- hah…. please, just, um… c-continue, please….” was all he could muster. the absolute desperation in his voice made a shiver run up your spine, and now both of you were biting your lips.

”oh? you like getting touched like this?” the answer was obvious enough that dan heng just settled for letting out a series of quiet moans. his forehead was still planted to your shoulder as he panted, and you snaked your free arm up to pull him close. he quickly pulled you into an embrace, snaking his tail around your waist, earning a soft chuckle out of you. his grip was tight, but not hurting. just perfect.

slowly, your hand left his back in favor of finding purchase at the hem of his pants. you tugged gently at it, giving him a warning, before diving your fingers under the fabric.

dan heng gasped and whimpered at what was to come. his hand moved down to hold your wrist as your fingers moved down, and more down, until you found the hem of his underwear. your scratching increased in pressure as your fingers dived under the next layer of fabric to meet his warm skin.

”please, be ge-” dan heng was cut off by a deep moan as your hand grabbed his cock and started pumping it without warning. this, combined with the scratching, made dan heng louder than he ever has been. it was a surprise no one on the express came barging in.

”i am gentle, now hush. let me take care of you…” you cooed softly into his ear as your pace on his hard appendage quickened. dan heng’s moans increased in pitch and his back arched into your chest, his grip on you tightening as much as he could. you could even feel his tail squeezing your waist, but that was irrelevant now.

as the vidyadhara in front of you continued to moan and plead, you couldn’t help but smirk. seeing dan heng so submissive kindled something inside of you, something that had never been kindled before in the span of your relationship. perhaps you should do this more often.

[marginofthought]

Thinking about Sam squirming in his seat because Dean made him cockwarm him for too long and now Sam's ass is too sore to sit still <3