#cw longpost

[minimumwagedsoul]

🎩 WELCOME… TO THE A-GAYZING RIZZITAL CIRCUS! MY GAMERTAG IS CAINE, AND IM QUEER TO SHOW YOU THE MOST OHIO-SENDING, SKIBIDI EDGING, DISCORD MEWING YOU'VE EVER PHANTOM TAX, ISNT THAT, GIGA CHAD?

🫧 'THATS RIGHT SIGMA, I CANT WAIT TO SEE WHAT YOUVE GYATT IN THE KITCHEN TODAY!'

🎩 WELL, LETS NOT GRIMACE-WASTE, LETS ISHOWSPEED RIGHT INTO THE FAMILY GUY COMPILATIONS!

🎶 banban, and goku, and big chungus too, pepe, peppino, amongus, delulu!~ 🎶 gay after gay after day we fry, as the renegade pokimane makes us cry 🎶

🐰 ''gayine, is this another goofy ahh grassy pillow again? or is this a new subscriber? cause if its a new twitch donator.. we gyatt to redo this whole mlg monologue!''

📐 ''im not doing gyatt again."

🎩 ''MY MY, IT APPEARS A SUS IMPOSTER HAS JOINED THE LOBBY!"

🤡 ''HOW DO I… LEAVE THE SIN CITY WASNT MADE FOR ME''

🐰 ''just keep edging gyatt it, that ellen degeneres for all of us''

🤡 ''what the barnacles!?!? i-i-i-i put on owlhouse and now im here? who are you baby gronks? why cant i leave floptok? how do i leave minecraft?''

🎀 ''lets all kai calm-net down, everythings gyonna be okay thugshaker, weve all been through this escape the ariana grande obby, you just need to-''

🤡 ''WHAT THE VINE BOOM IS GOING ON- what?''

🎩 ''WARNING ONE, YOU CANNOT SWEAR IN GENERAL! THE GAY-MAZING RIZZITAL CIRCUMSIED IS A PLACE TO BE CLIPPED BY ALL STREAMERS, EVERYTHING CAN HAPPEN HERE! execpt for being the biggest bird ''

🤡 ''how do i.. lightskin leave?''

🎩 ''👁️👄👁️''

🎀 ''..well.. dont make a twitlong about this but-'

🐰 ''the only way you can leave is by watching phonk nair videos''

🤡🤡 ''(TIM ALLEN SHOCK NOISE)''

📐 '':mute jax.. but hes right.. welcome to the underground, how was the fall?''

🤡 ''WHAT DO YOU MEME?"

🎀''guys… dont be straight.."

🐰 ''weve been scrolling on tiktok for years.. old finger over theres been streaming the longest''

♟️''MISTER BEEASSSSSTTTT!''

🐰 ''thats why he needs to stop it.. get some help''

🤡 ''oh.. ogay, now i gyatt it! im watching dream, i should just get in the uber!''

🐰 ''whatever you say lesbian''

🎭''..my obama prisim.." :(

🐰 ''so crane, where we dropping boys?"

🎩 ''ID LIKE TO SHOW OUR BRAND NEW MOD MY ROBLOX OBBY FIRST, OFF WE GO!''

Y2FuIGFueW9uZSBoZWFyIG1lPw

🎩 ''here we have GARTEN OF BANBAN, this is where the florida men are kept, along with the FNF mods, these mods may include- GIVE HIM BACK!!!!!!!! GIVE HIM BACK!!!!!!! HES MINEEEEEEEE!!!!!!! >:((((

🤡 '' is gyatt all there rizz?''

🎩 '' OF COURSE NOT, THIS IS.. MY SPLATOON 2 LETSPLAYS!! we dont watch my OLD videos, i w(a)(m)s racist homophobic sexist abelist terrorist watchlist slay back then.

🤡 ''(huh cat)-''

🎩 '' we stay RIGHT HERE where i can keep my 70 ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNTS!! YOULL NEVER KNOW MY MAIN."

🌙 '' IVE COME TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT- ''

🎩 ''DONT MAKE ME PISS ON YOU AGAIN''

🤡 ''wait whats th- HHRUEEGGEYYAHHAHAUHASGSGUGDS :vomits vomits vomits vomits vomits vomits: ''

🎩 '' WOAH!!!!!! SHES LITERALLY DOING THE GWIDDY!''

🫧 ''me too!! watch me boss!!!!!!!"

🎩 "Stop."

🤡 ''Was that an skibidi toilet I saw out there? Is gyatt a way get a weave?"

🐰 '' What toiwet? If there was a way to not be a noob vs pro im pretty sure we'd all be hackers by now. "

📐''Yeah, what are you waffling about?"

🎩'' I ASS(ure) YOU, THERE RIZZ NO EASTER BUNNY, THERE IS NO FEETFAIRY, AND THIS RIZZ NO QUEEN OF ENGLAND!''

🤡''YOUR MOM HITS IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD WITH A CHROMEBOOK CHARGER-''

🎩 '' THATS WHY YOU SOUND LIKE THE ROBLOX COIL SOUND BITCH BOI- how about we talk about roblox doors? Whats your gamer tag?''

🤡 ''my @ is… uh.. OH FUCK. ALL I CAN POST IS ☻/ This is bob. Copy and paste him so he can take over youtube. /▌ /\ ''

🎩 ''FORGOT PASSWORD? SIGN IN USING EMAIL ADDRESS.. OR MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT! ENTER NEW NAME AND NEW PASSWORD''

🤡 ''GOD FUCKING DAMMIT KRIS WHERE THE HELL ARE WE''

🎩''dont you worry your 0% rizz, your new tumblr url can be ANYTHING! Heweby acknowwedging that youw chosen name and ow names may nowt bweach the Digitaw Ciwcus usew wicense agreement stating that youw name may nowt incwude objectionabwe content. Objectionabwe content incwudes but is nowt wimited to: Sexuawwy expwicit matewiaws, obscene, defamato-wy, wibewous, swande-wous, vio-went, and ow un-wawfuw content ow pwofanity. ''

🤡'' erm… actually.. randomly generate it please. ''

🎩 ''lets see… Who is Pomni - for 300?'' (jeopardy)

🤡 ''(womp.)

🎩 ''you're right, marketable, lets try gyatt again! what do you think of XDDCC? ''

🤡 '' BIYTCH IS YOU BLIND-''

🎩 '' badonkers. dobonhonkeros. massive doboonkabhankoloos. big ol' tonhongerekoogers!!! we should start a sidequest with our new donator, XDDCC!!! ''

🐰 ''i said that at 3:20 in the original pilot''

🎩 ''YYYOUUUUUU! SOILDJABOY OFF IN IT, WATCH ME CRANK IT WATCH ME ROLL, WATCH ME CRANK THAT SOULJA BOY THEN SUPERMAN THAT, NOW WATCH ME YUUU-''

🫧'' (plays kevin mcloyed)''

🎩'' ########### ## ####### ### ### # # ##### ''

🤡 ''does anybody in this thread play minecraft-''

🎩 '' SINCE YOUR ACCOUNT IS 12 MINUTES OLD, were gonna make this simple for your ipad baby ass, a simple oklahomo powered adventure to warm you up to the pizza tower. ''

📐 ''NO!! I DONT WANT TO PLAY WII SPORTS… GRRR… eyes glow red''

🎩'' dont worry zooble/halfdemon/princess/rich/gamer/wolf/donttouchmytail/crush;secret!!! ill make it so you can play it on console AND pc! ''

aXRzIHNvIGNvbGQ

🎩 '' hello everybody my name is markiplier and welcome to gather the number lore! thats right! here in the rainbow friends playplace will be rizzed up with swifties, you gotta catch em- (COPYRIGHT)''

🫧 ''what are swifties?''

🎩 ''thanks for the ask, anon! theyre mid-''

🫧''can it run bad apple''

🎩 ''..they-''

🫧''..can it play megalovani----''

🎩'' Swifties are part of the number lore that vore everything and draw anything they rizz into! Why do these sans fangirls do this? How do you block them? thats for me to know and for you to find out.''

🤡''…what… did any of gyatt mean?''

🎀 ''oh, hes just ai generating mr beast videos, theyre content farm so the ipad babies dont go insane.''

📐''speak for yourself motherfucker, if anyone needs me im smoking a fat blunt- OH GOD OH FUCK- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa….''

🐰''oh no, they killed zooble.. you bastards.. anyway you lesbians wanna play touhou?''

🎀'' (pheonix wright) HOLD IT!! we should check on KSI-FMO. I'm pretty sure he'd like to challange XDDCC to a boxing match!''

♟️''THERES 104 DAYS IN SUMMER VACATION-''

🎀'' You wanna come with us to *check on boykisser kaufmonster, how should i feel?''

♟️''Not rizzly. I think Kevin macleoufmos got packed by packgod. Last time I spoke with him, he was watching Lankybox for over 6 hours."

🤡''whose lankybox?''

♟️''No."

🎭''can someone save my goth genderfriend :(''

🤡 '' Well if you wont tell me, then I'll just ask him. And then I'll stop watching dream and watch tubbo instead!"

🐰 ''Heh. She still thinks dream isnt a pedo."

🎀 ''why are you looking at me like that? …. fa-"

🐰 ''im fine with doing (yourmom) as long as I get to see vanossgaming gmod prophunt funny moments- OW. okay ive had enough of these spambots. You, me, and XDDCC will go to the gastation. Sexualized ribbons and tumblr sexyman together will go block all the swifties.

🎀 ''..is shipping them a good idea?"

🐰 ''of course i do, im also a tumblr sexyman, whats gonna happen? i get shipped next? (proweler meme)''

🎭 ''…my comedy cock is broken again.''

♟️''okay. wait WHAT. ''

aW0gaHVuZ3J5

🎀''Welcome to the internet, have a look around, anything skibidi or phantum tax can be found. We gyatt maximum sigma grindset, but- WAIT XDDCC NO DONT LOOK UP YOUR OWN NAME!- '

🤡 ''I dont understand.. why go to the goofy ahh meepcity parties instead of trying to exit terraria?''

🎀''Well, we usually do, when we first make an account. But after awhile you start to realize that shiny hunting for the same pokemon or trying to get your favorite animal crossing villager to visit your island will make you become marketable and youll succumb to the pibby glitch."

🐰''Thank goodness this is all just an SMP, right XDCC?''

🤡''……………………… Why are we here again? Who am i, who am i? What are you even saying?''

🎀''We're gyetting one of the boys at 3 am." … Huh. Maybe he's off-stream mining? Hope he's not in creative.

🐰''Dont worry raggedy andy, Im gonna be so racist itll open the door."

🎀 ''JAX NO!!! YOU SHOULDNT BE RACIST TO DOOR!!!!''

🐰''Okay i wont be racist… JUST KIDDING, IM ULTRA RACIST NOW. You're not afraid of gay people, are you?"

🎀''JAXX!!!!!!!!! THATS LITERALLY MY ONLY FEAR (homophobic) WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS…!!!"

🐰''(minecraft open door) im gonna have to take my balls back from you kaufy. Papyrus.. im going to grillbys, do you want anything?"

🎀 ''..OH….. KAUFMO985 BECAME PART OF THE PIBBY GLITCH. INSERT SEINFIELD THEME."

tobecontinued.

[felassan]

Jason Schreier for Bloomberg reports: 'Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio'

The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil. The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in October, led EA to gut BioWare

[note: article is below cut after these tweets]

Jason Schreier: "NEW: What went wrong with Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Why was the writing so tonally inconsistent? Why did it feel so shallow? Why were there so few choices? Really, after ten years of turbulence, it was a miracle that anything came out at all. This is the story [link]:" [source]

Jason Schreier: "The fatal flaw for Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't just that it pivoted from single-player to multiplayer and back again. It was that after the second pivot, the team was forced to keep going rather than hit the reset button and take the time to create a new plan." [source]

Jason Schreier re: this old tweet from Casey Hudson: "Fun fact: when I first reported at Kotaku in 2018 that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted to become a live-service game, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson wrote this on Twitter. But it was not entirely truthful. In reality, the game was being designed around cooperative multiplayer, replayable missions, etc" [source] Casey Hudson's old tweet from 2018: "Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you'll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about "live" it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story."

Rest of post/article under cut due to length.

(bold in the text below is mine for emphasis)

"In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem."

"As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment."

"The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years."

"Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. “I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’” Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series."

"In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.” Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer."

"“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.” In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games."

"But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously. As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings."

"“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.” Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game. When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered."

"“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.” Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. “That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”"

Article by Jason Schreier. [source]

[dunmeshistash]

Some Ryoko Kui ladies, these artworks are from her old blog and her current blog, in the image descriptions is the file names.

More here

[mediumgayitalian]

Nico wakes up to gagging and a soft glow coming from the bathroom.

His first thought is, bizarrely, that Hazel’s home. But her bunk is still empty, and her shoes aren’t by the door, and she didn’t wake him when she came in. She always wakes him when she comes in, even if it’s four thirty in the damn morning, because nothing makes her cackle quite like Nico choking back curses and tweaking under her smothering pillow.

“Shit,” comes a small voice from the bathroom, followed by more retching. “Shitshitshit, no —”

Nico bolts for the door.

“Hi,” Will says, or tries to. His scarred knuckles clench with every gag, wrapped too tightly around the rim of porcelain to tremble like the rest of him.

Something about the wobbly smile he keeps trying to form in between gags. Something about the sweat that has drenched his t-shirt, something about the deep circles under his eyes, something about his spot in the bed completely cold, wrinkled.

Something is not adding up.

“You’re not sick,” Nico murmurs, pressing the back of his hand to Will’s forehead. Will mutters something about bliss, leaning into Nico’s hand; he smiles again, but it is strained, and at odds with the glassy look in his eyes. The sharp, rapid breaths.

“Just don’t — feel good.”

Every word is punctuated by a big, heaving gasp, like he’s trying to breathe through heavy cotton. On a hunch, Nico slides his hands down Will’s face, brushing the goosebumps on his neck, the irritated, pulsing tendons, and rest flat against his chest, over his heart.

His heart that is pounding, so quickly it is actually challenging to recognise as a beat rather than a buzz.

“You’re having a panic attack,” Nico says quietly.

Will shrugs. He gags again, but clamps his mouth shut before it goes anywhere, breathing deeply and carefully through clenched teeth, squeezing his eyes shut. His heart pounds faster, and the rapid movement of his chest grows shallow, but he manages to choke back his bile, swallow down whatever nausea is plaguing him.

“I’m — fine.” His laboured breathing is the loudest sound in the cabin. In the camp. “I’m handling it.”

Nico watches him. Watches him clench his jaw and squeeze his eyes shut and make a noise like he is being betrayed, like he is being sold for thirty silver by his own body, his own mind; watches him flex his muscles rigid and hold himself still like he can stop the nails and thorns from coming. He thinks of wide smiles and far away eyes and mental health pamphlets and cheerful slogans on infirmary walls.

“I think one of those things are true.”

“I don’t need —”

Whatever he doesn’t need is forgotten, because he is heaving again, only this time his body finds something to dredge up, even if that something is stomach acid and he cries as it burns its way up his throat, and in between heaving he wheezes, horrible whistling gasping noises, and his hair plasters to his forehead, and his body slumps into Nico’s hold and jerks away from him like rocky waves against a lakefront.

“How long have you been here?”

Will just shrugs again, and he cries, and he says “Leave, please,” and Nico wraps an arm tighter around his waist, and presses a kiss to his sweaty temple, lingering, holding, tasting salt from Will and from his tears both, and squeezing his eyes shut, and holding back the anger. Gritting his teeth and softening his hold, deliberately, resting his fingers delicately on the dip of Will’s hip, the raised pink of the stretch marks along his ribs.

“I hate it when you run from me,” he murmurs, and Will sobs again.

“I can’t breathe,” he says, and Nico squeezes and promises he can. “I’m dying. I’m dying, I’m gonna —”

“I’m here, Will.” He doesn’t say you’re not dying. He doesn’t say you’re fine, because this is the longest they’ve sat together in five days, because it is the the quiet middle of June, because yesterday Kayla spent half her shift screaming at Will to get out and ignoring him when he shouted back. Because the bandage around Will’s wrist has been worn to threads, because Lee’s hoodie has not been washed in weeks, because there is a newcomer named Michael and Will cannot even look at him. Because it has been bad. “I’m here.”

It is as much a reminder as it is a plea as it is a reprimand as it is a fruitless nothing, because when Nico struggles he gets angry, when Nico struggles he gets mean and biting and violent, but when Will struggles he wants the world to kill him. And for all that Nico is halfway to the grave he has clawed and chewed and fought his way to survival. And when Will scratches at the skin around his ears and screams into his hands and opens the chapped over scars on his lips his palms his fingers, Nico can only hold him, Nico can only gently pry his nails from his flesh and tell himself that one day they will get to the point where Nico wakes up. Where Will wakes him up, where he burrows into the place between his arms and his chest and hides in someone else for once. Where he trusts someone outside of himself enough to bare his back.

“I’m here,” he whispers again, and he presses his lips to Will’s hair and holds him as he sobs, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

[becauseplot]

Anyway for entirely justifiable reasons (<-is a glutton for angst) I need Chayanne and Tallulah to be present when the hummingbirds come around or a note about the 'wise old crow' appears in their house, causing qPhil to have one of his derealization/reality-questioning episodes. I need it. I need it to happen SO bad. Because they’ve seen Phil get roughed up in a fight, they’ve seen him angry, they’ve seen him wary and even nervous, but they have NEVER seen him doubt like that.

People have already made posts talking about how the cage-for-a-cage/child-of-the-sky stuff has been particularly rough on qPhil, who relies heavily on his constant vigilance, keen senses, and hyper-awareness of his surroundings for reassurance. He's the kind of guy who walks into a room and has already charted at minimum two escape routes by the time he takes a seat, you know? He sees and processes and stores information on everything, at all times, and he uses this to act in the best interest of his and his loved ones' collective survival.

His kids see this side of him too, most significantly in the ways that he looks after them: always keeping an eye on the back of the group, never far from Tallulah, and constantly analyzing Chayanne's fighting style to give helpful critique to optimize his attacks. Chayanne and Tallulah know that everything he's ever done was to protect them. Also, he's always there to offer them advice when they're feeling lost, and even if he doesn't have all the answers they need, he gives enough reassurances and promises to put their minds at ease. Phil is confident in what he knows. In their eyes, he is strong. He is a fortress, safe and impenetrable.

You could say that about a lot of children's perceptions of their parents/guardians/mentors. The older, guiding forces in our lives always seemed strong and infallible to us as kids. That's why it was always unnerving to see them get sick, or get stressed, or cry. Observing weakness in those people felt so, so wrong because we never considered the fact that they were capable of it; it was just impossible.

So, the situation: Phil is suffering in a way that makes him question the very same reality that he was a master of not too long ago. Whenever it happens, he goes quiet, looks around, mutters to himself, breathes shakily, fidgets. He is visibly unnerved and uncertain.

If Chayanne and Tallulah are there, they're gonna notice---they're perceptive, just like him. I'd imagine they'd try to ask him if he's okay, and he'd reassure them that he's fine, and maybe that's enough the first time. But, as more incidents arise, and as time goes on, they start to see more of this out-of-nowhere uneasiness, fear, from him, which is worrying, especially because he won't tell them why.

NOW. Phil has been upfront about a lot of things with Chayanne and Tallulah in the past. For example, during the height of the code attacks, Phil told them everything he ever learned about the codes, every single new development, to ensure that his kids were well informed and prepared. He was frank about the threat on their lives because to sugar-coat anything would be doing them a disservice. It was important they knew all of the cold, hard facts, even if it took away even more of their precious childhood innocence. He values their happiness, but safety comes first. It has always come first.

But this is different. It's not cold hard facts. Phil doesn't know what to believe anymore. When the hummingbirds come around and his reality comes into question, he doesn't know what is real, what he can trust, what is fact. His senses have been compromised. Hell, he's still trying to convince himself that he's not going crazy when all evidence seems to suggest that he's losing his goddamn mind. He doesn't know what to tell his kids, so he tells them nothing.

So now here stands Chayanne and Tallulah. There is something that is scaring their dad, and he won't tell them what is, so on top of the knowledge that their unwavering father is, in fact, capable of true, genuine fear, he's suddenly keeping things from them. Their dad is keeping things from them because he is scared. And I can't imagine a realization more terrifying than that.

[palamedespoetry]

i am a firm believer in that akasha is marius' mother figure and their relationship is intentionally meant to parallel him and his human mother

[chimerahyperfix]

Run down your list. You are currently on your way to intercept the King, before he gets to the house. Whenever he gets there, it’s a bloodbath; metaphorically and physically. How many more times do you have to see everyone get frozen? See the King smash those who stand before him? You can’t see it again, you can’t you can’t you can’t, so you sneak out to face him instead. If he can’t get to the House, no one has to die, right? Simple as that. The endless night of his approach hangs right over Dormont, so you have to catch him, NOW.

You make a pit-stop at the Favor Tree anyway. It’s tradition at this point.

You did… something, here. Before you started looping. The hypothesis is that whatever you did at the Favor Tree caused the time loop you’re trapped in. You know you wished, a ton— at least ten times, or maybe twenty? All in as many different ways you could think of. Stretching outside the realm of how you know to wish. The desperation drove you to doing random things in hopes it would save you, and— well, it kinda has? You’ve doomed yourself for everyone else’s sakes.

That’s all well and fine enough, you rationalize. One person for many. Who knows what’ll happen if he actually takes the House; you don’t want to find that answer out.

The Favor Tree is huge. It’s a nice tree, lots of leaves, lots of shade. You could probably climb into its branches and never leave, get trapped in a web of tree bark and leaves like a cage, birds and squirrels and other such animals as your jailers. Maybe that wouldn’t be too bad. You could try that, next loop, if you failed here. You know you’ll fail, because nothing has worked so far. Your mind flashes with images of blood-stained floors, of screams both by and for many, many people. Hands reaching to you, hands reaching out.

Breathe. The memory fades away. Your hands curl into fists.

You depart, to fight the King. To stop the King.

———————

The King is very tall. A couple stories high, you’d reckon. He towers over you, the trees and everything else. The clearing you’ve stopped him in is very close to the House. Too close for comfort. Shouldn’t have stopped at the tree. Everything is swamped with the scent of burnt sugar.

He looks down at you— do you look like an ant to him? One singular ant? Wouldn’t that be interesting. A single blockade to the anthill, standing its ground. One mistake and he’ll turn you into a dark stain, or an icy statue. One mistake is all it’ll take for him to rip through the House like paper.

The Craft Bomb is heavy in your pocket. The backup potions, seven or eight of them, all in little tossable vials, toxic and burning and acidic, weigh down the other pocket of your lab coat. You remember drinking at least three of them. They all killed you. Painfully. Curse your desk for not being clean before you started looping. If you’d just taken a few minutes before you wished, so many deaths would’ve been avoided…

But that’s not important now. The fire in your throat, as imagined as it is now, still hurts. Your voice has taken an odd rasp to it now, the consequences of toxicity and blind reaching for water forever etched into your very being.

“How have you done it?” The King asks. You can’t see his eyes, past his endless, wild mane of hair and his gauntlets covering his face, but he sounds both confused and enraged.

You don’t answer, instead brandishing the bomb you worked so hard on. You made it in record pace, this loop. It too reeks of caramel.

The King simply moves a hand. You know what’s coming, and you move before he does. The curse of being so, so tall, is that you’re faster. The bomb goes flying, and you toss the potions all in one go for good measure before skittering out of the way. The King lunges for you as the bomb explodes, sending waves of fire and craft energy everywhere. Blinding, deafening. Its force knocks you to the ground.

He still moves, though. Not enough. Damn. Maybe you need two bombs… do you have the materials for a second one? You hope, as he swings his giant gauntlet down onto you to mash you like a bug, that he sees the weird shade your eyes have taken lately. A pair of blaring, dangerous warning signs.

You’re not scared anymore. This has happened many times.

You still scream.

His attack hits, and through the veil of absolute agony, there’s a tug on your stomach. Back to the drawing board.

[minimumwagedsoul]

throwaway post but like 🤡 ''EYYYIIIIKKEESSS!!!'' (shocked blue emoji)

🎀 ''It might have been that Kaufmo rated the most popular restaurant in Toronto… When you mew over your freaky point?''

🤡''What.''

🎀'' I just lost my dawg… And my brother taught me how to chase the bag… the day he lost his soul, wish i could take it back.. ''

(Abstracted KSIfmo fucking body slams them out of his room with a lunchly box. Raggedy Andy is pinned to the wall while XDCC accidentally presses the wrong emote.)

🎀 ''Woah, Ksifmo! Listen! TO THE CAINE, TO THE JAX TO THE ZOOB TO THE KINGER… Wheres 👑 thats my bling 💎 always trouble when i reign 😈.. 🗣️🗣️🔥SMASH THROUGH THE CEILING COZ IM REACHING FOR THE STAAAAAAAAA- ''

(Ksifmo interrupts her with a Viperslash fight sequence)

🎀'' Hey… Skibpomnidi?.. You think you can.. lower .. /Kaufmonster… How should I feel?/'s aura..? I understand if you skip ad, though.. ''

(XDCC tris to skip ad but gets a double ad and gets stunlocked.)

🤡'' FUCK.'

🤡'' ..I should of gotten an adblocker.'' (RUNS AWAY IN FNAF AGONY)

(Abstracted Ksifmo chases XDCC but trips over a lunchables, letting her get away with the quick time event.)

(Pomknee catches her breath and runs back to press E to interact with Ragaytha.)

getting the Gloinks

(Zestble screams in the hole. Theres a favorite mug down there.)

♟️'' Quick, Gayngle, summerize what happened off screen!''

🎭 '' GEDAGEDIGEDAGEDAYO TRAPPED US IN THEIR GEGAGEDIGEDAGEDAYO PRISON IN ROBLOX! THAT'S RIGHT! WE ARE TRAPPED IN THIS GEDAGEDI ROBLOX GAME! AND HAVE TO FIND A WAY TO ESCAPE! ''

♟️ '' So let me get this straight…Zooble's somewhere that's not what I would call Earth.. I'm seeing FREAKING dragons .. and - OH YEAH - I'm talking to a creeper Yeah, okay, that is something I do now. I'll probably FLY NEXT! ''

🎭'' WE HAD A BLAST PLAYING THIS GAME AND THEN EVEN REVEALED SOME CRAZY GEDAGEDIGEDAGEDAYO SECRETS!''

(Zestble is ordering the among us potion from inside the hole.)

♟️ '' Boy (gender neutral), we're gyatt very goon at this, skibidi? ''

(Jaxass is seen running.)

🐰 '' Ugh.. Like the FNF song.. ⇨⇦⇨⇧⇩⇩⇦⇧⇨⇩⇨⇦⇨⇧⇩⇩⇦⇧⇨⇩ ''

♟️ ''JEVIN!! We dug up atlantas. ''

🐰 '' I like men.''

🎭 ''OH NO! ITS THE NUGGET, GEDAGEDIGEDAGEDAGO! AHAHAHA! OHH OHH!" AND WE SANG THE GEDAGEDI SONG OVER AND OVER IN THIS VIDEO! ''

🐰 '' Hows Ksifmo? He's doing great, In fact, I think he'S recording His new musIc video. In the sick of it, i Think. ''

♟️ '' Well, it's good to know he hasn't completely lost his ability to make music!''

(Distant 'im in the thick of it' in the distance and Jaxass reaches to covers his ears.)

🐰 '' He gyattually asked me to rizz you this.. '' (he throws the bowling ball backwards, causing all 3 of them to spin around and fll in the hole in accident)

(the scene cuts to them falling down at mach 5 speed before jax puts down a water bucket and saves them and also because im not writing all of that also Muffet undertales there)

♟️ ''An incell collection? ''

🎭 ''I JUST WANNA BE PART OF YOUR SYMPHONY 🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🌈💖🦄🐬🎀🌸🐬''

♟️'' (SCREAM.) ''

going back to ragatha later my back hurts

[felassan]

Albert Urmanov: “Long time no post. Some concepts I did for Arlathan forest in The Veilguard. Some poor travelers got turned into trees...” [source]

Art by Albert Urmanov.

[minimumwagedsoul]

hi gang

[icybreaths]

💍💍💍💍💍💍💍💍 (*holds the paste button forever*)

|| Time to talk about ships || @apocalypta-secundus ||

//Mila came in and left NO survivors, so now I'll proceed to not shut up!

Jewel and Kakos

OCxOC ship and both characters are mine. Their story is set in heavy themes of unbalanced power dynamics, PTSD, suicide ideation and attempts, domestic abuse/trauma, toxic love, murder attempts, and learning how to break free from that cycle. She dumped him in a fight where she severed his arm off. I could go for hours about them because they're rooted deep in one another and brought out the best and worst of each other, and those experiences eventually lead to the both of them getting help for their mental states. I don't forgive you but I'm grateful you were there when you were.

Jewel and Tetsuji

OCxOC ship and both characters are mine. Tetsuji was a fresh transfer from another division and he fell for Jewel right away, but she was still raw from her traumas from Kakos so she wasn't having it at first. Theirs was a slower build. They became friends first and through spending more time together and sharing things in common, Jewel softened around him enough to try a date, two, three... They got together but they didn't last. Jewel's power had increased to levels to where she was uncomfortable to touch for long or to have sex with (they're both sexual creatures so it was frustrating). Worst of all, she was repeating some of her abusive trauma related behaviors on Tetsuji and he wasn't having that. He dumped her in an argument. Jewel needed time to look at her actions and realize what she had done wrong, but when she tried to ask for forgiveness he wouldn't hear it. She knew she had lost something good. He was a genuinely good person. It was a reflective time for her. They eventually reconciled as friends. Then best friends. :')

Jewel and Grimmjow

CanonxOC ship and B O Y. I'd kill to have a partner to write this ship with. I have infinite muse for them. So many different ideas for a myriad of verses and AUs. Different dynamics. Plots. Art. Headcanons. My arsenal's overflowing with Them. I understand my open adoration of them may push some people away lmao but I just can't! Contain it! It's in my rules that none of my ideas are meant to force anything on anyone that writes him so I'm content to yell about them. I'd rather blab about them until my heart's content than hold it all in, otherwise here I'd be seven years later with no wall of blurbs on this blog or a ship pardner. At least I have one rn! I will say that I'm looking for key things with someone who portrays Grimm. Unafraid to be violent. Doesn't lean on 'cat traits' I see a lot in fanon (you do you if that fits your interpretation ofc!). Likes ladies lmaoo. And slow burn! They would take a fair bit of development to get to that shippy point (at least I feel that way. She's vibed with some Grimms in the past where they got on p quickly! So I don't rule that out.) Need a communicative partner (that doesn't mind plotting when needed.) I've yelled about them 23432t57823431 times but basically I'm super into them bonding as kindred souls that understand each other on an instinctual level, where they can 100% be themselves and not have to hold anything back. They're ride or dies while also not tying the other down. They're drawn to one another because the other's soul feels like home, maybe something else who knows. No one's eager to talk about it. Also I feel like even though they're both chaotic they bring out healthy traits in one another, even some subtle ones and that's juicy to me. I went ham on blurbing them here. Blurbs that link to more blurbs because my brain never shuts up about them. My brain's like: 'GrimmJe tho' and I'm like 'wow you're so right' single tear with feeling.

Jewel and Bazz-B

CanonxOC ship, with your Bazz ;D This one was all your fault, Mila!! Ofc after you brought it up to me it didn't take me long to see it. Fire and ice ship got me fucked up so they got their own verse. Here we are. Made me break my own shipping rules LOL. Glad I did because I adore them. Jewel finds him annoying but also endearing in some ways. He's a lil shit but not so bad that she'd toss him into a frozen lake probably. Given her past experiences (OC ships) she's unsure, but Bazz doesn't seem bad, minus them quarreling during the war ahem- but that was a different time. He's able to handle her coldness and zanpakuto, which is a huge thing to her. Skilled fighter. Difficult to defeat. A bit of a tease. Has nice hair? hello?? Gives her space but also enjoys her company. He has her interest. They're a ship that's a wip, but as of now they seem to have no problem hitting on each other. Jewel especially acts brazen at times. sorry if she comes off Strong at times tybw jewel loses fucks to give and it stays that way onward hwfweioifw There's a hesitation in Jewel here though. She wonders how he would perceive her in her most feral state, the worst rotting frostbite on her, just all the 'ugliness' of her out in the open. She has a better hold on her reiatsu and blade, but that old battle worn state of being can still resurface and make her look like a walking corpse skeleton. She's like, 'hmm that'd suck if that ran him off but this is fun for now, maybe he won't be bothered when he sees it. it is what it is.'

[minimumwagedsoul]

gojo x verbalase fanfic incoming (according to chatgpt)

The rain pattered softly against the windows of Adym’s apartment, creating a soothing backdrop to the quiet evening. Verbalase, or Adym as he preferred to be called offstage, took a deep breath and checked his reflection in the window. Inside, Adym and Gojo were sprawled on the couch, a movie playing on the TV that neither of them was really paying attention to. They had spent countless evenings like this, wrapped in each other’s company, the world outside forgotten. But tonight was different. Adym could feel the words bubbling up inside him, a confession he had been holding back for far too long. He glanced at Gojo, who was laughing at a particularly funny scene in the movie, his eyes crinkling with amusement. Adym’s heart swelled with affection, and he knew he couldn’t keep his feelings hidden any longer. “Satoru,” Adym began, his voice wavering slightly. Gojo turned to him, his laughter fading as he noticed the serious expression on Adym’s face. “Yeah, Adym? What’s up?” Adym took a deep breath, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve been wanting to say for a while now.” Gojo’s playful demeanor shifted, his eyes searching Adym’s. “What is it? You know you can tell me anything.” “I know,” Adym said, his voice growing steadier. “That’s the thing. You’ve been so incredible, so understanding and patient with me. And I… I’ve fallen for you, Satoru. I’m in love with you.” The words hung in the air, a vulnerable admission that left Adym feeling exposed. He watched Gojo’s face for a reaction, his heart pounding in his chest. For a moment, there was silence, the only sound the rain outside. Then Gojo’s expression softened, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Adym,” he said gently, reaching out to take Adym’s hand in his. “I’m in love with you too.” Adym’s breath caught, relief and joy flooding through him. “You are?” “Of course I am,” Gojo replied, his thumb brushing over Adym’s knuckles. “I’ve been trying to find the right moment to tell you, but I was afraid I might scare you off.” Adym laughed, a light, happy sound. “Scare me off? Satoru, you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. I’ve been afraid I’d never be enough for you.” Gojo’s smile widened, his eyes filled with warmth. “You’re more than enough, Adym. You make me feel like I can be myself, like I don’t have to put on a front. With you, I’m just… me. And I love you for that.” Tears sprang to Adym’s eyes, but they were tears of happiness. He leaned in, capturing Gojo’s lips in a tender kiss. It was a kiss filled with all the emotions they had been holding back, a kiss that spoke of promises and a future together. When they finally pulled apart, they stayed close, their foreheads touching. “I love you, Satoru,” Adym whispered, the words feeling right in a way they never had before. “I love you too, Adym,” Gojo replied softly. “And I’m never letting you go.” They stayed like that, wrapped in each other’s arms, the rain outside a gentle symphony to their newfound love. In that moment, everything felt perfect. They had confessed their feelings, and now, they could face whatever came next together, their hearts intertwined.

[felassan]

Matt Rhodes: "Veilguard. The Silent Plains. A vast desert, location of the Necropolis. This was also where Dumat, the first Blight was killed. I liked the idea that the desert was still scarred from it." [source]

Art by Matt Rhodes.

Caption on image 3: "The wasteland is finally beginning to grow again" [source]

[saltydogsmut]

I disagree with the Love ending being the happiest, not because of morality, but because in it nothing has fundamentally changed.

Andrew still rejects the actions he's just taken as "mortifying" in the vision, and Ashley still has to push for a more honest response that validates her feelings. It's just less stressful because she has physical proof that he's lying and Andrew can push his emotional outbursts from violent impulses into something different.

Andrew's actions are... weird. You can say he's unmasking, but it's almost like he's putting on a new performance now, just in the other direction. He's too cheerful, too carefree. Now that he knows it's an option, it's almost like he's playing a part to get Ashley to agree to sleep with him. Acting out the part of a boyfriend like he's done before, never getting angry at them openly, but not necessarily listening or caring about their concerns either. Like how he was with Julia.

Ashley sees it as just another way to keep Andy around. She holds no baggage to it. It's an option, but not necessarily one she feels the want or need to pursue. Soothing Andrew's emotions has always been her job. This is just a newer aspect to it.

This makes the premonition troubling because if it's not something Ashley actually wants to pursue but it's caused such a large change in Andrew's behaviour, then he might just take over the power dynamic intentionally instead: Actively manipulating Ashley instead of only passively. He is implied to be just as much of a tarnished soul as Ashley on that route.

-

In terms of what it means about of the world, since it's already a crapshoot, it might be worth looking at the atmosphere around sexuality to begin with. The fact that both guards are 100% seemingly willing to and may have already, teamed up to have sex in bizarre locations with a random woman is probably our first indication of the kind of world we're in. And the fact Andrew can try bargaining for food with Pornography, and that same guard can be nervous about what kind of screwed up tastes Andrew might have should be an indication of what we're looking at. Most insults seem to be against women, whore, bitch, slut, etc, even when someone's trying to insult a male character, though to be fair that's mostly Ashley.

Ashley doesn't hesitate to sexualize herself, talking about her "fat tits" and "pornstar" body. She's highly sensitive to anything that might diminish her worth as a sex object, like when Andrew told her to move her fat ass out of the way, and she made him apologise for calling her fat. Even though she called her own tits fat without any anxiety. She also got angry when considering how her neighbour may have received sexual offers, but she didn't. As if she ties her whole value as a woman to being easily objectified. Her jokes reflect this, as upon seeing call girl ads, she jokes about putting her own flier up as well.

She also doesn't find anything wrong with considering every other woman man-stealing whores with no morals, no matter their age. The majority of the actions she considers having with other people tend to be sexual or antagonistic in nature, without any middle ground. Even towards Andrew.

With that in mind, her teasing also includes talking about herself as wife material. She wants to be seen as more than her sexual attributes, to be loved.

We don't know Andrew's relationship with women, but they all seem to be either sexual or familial. He doesn't seem to have female friends or even argue that it's possible. You could argue some of this is on Andrew's shoulders, as he has a large collection of pornographic books and with Ashley watched R-rated movies when they were both children. But obviously the world itself they live in is very bleak: there's massive organ harvesting schemes, sodas that cause organ damage and bleeding that run water companies, hit men, and sexual exploitation seems incredibly common.

I mean, apparently when Andrew had a summer job it was very common for the milk to be spiked with spit or jizz. (If you make coffee with Ashley in the cultist hangout before going to lure the hit man from the hotel room). So he has a reason to be nervous when it comes to men and their potential behaviour towards his sister, other reasons aside. Demon sex orgies seem like a valid thing that cultists might meet up for, even for the cultists there.

It seems like the only time a character mentions respecting another female character it's because they're married. If the world itself treats women like disposable whores unless they're married then it makes sense why Ashley has such a warped view of things. She got it from her mom.

As a teen mother Mrs graves probably wasn't treated very well, if we assume the worst out of the world then her parents may have disowned her (although she did get some jewellery as inheritance), or other people thought she was easy because of it and blamed her for them acting inappropriately. It would explain why she wasn't well liked. And if her husband tried defending her honor (and lost his job for it) it could be why he took getting fired so hard, he's to blame for making her a teen mom to begin with and making them think less of her. Without the assumption of teen parenthood she's "actually well liked" by her neighbours, meaning that it really was societal stigma that was keeping her from being liked in her old neighbourhood.

Speaking of her and her mom, Ashley seems to have no memories of her dad whatsoever. While you could say he was just an absentee dad, there might be a more /uncomfortable/ explanation. That being that her mom is where Ashley got her accusatory jealous streak from, and may have accused her own daughter of trying to sleep with her husband or steal his affection. In that sense, her dad being non-existent so as to not provoke his wife was how it was always going to be, as he had no backbone.

There's not much evidence for her actively expressing this, but it could explain some things, like that Ashley has such a strong hatred of other women and never got any attention, not even for her birthdays. She was totally neglected while Andrew wasn't. It's because as a boy, he wasn't a threat, while Ashley was just by being a girl, even if she was just a child. It might also be why we never see Ashley in any explicitly feminine clothes as a kid, or why she has such short messy hair. Her mom didn't want her to be perceived as feminine in any way. Ashley also perceived other girls to be more feminine than her in her childhood bunny drawings, putting them in dresses and flowers even though in cgs they seem to be wearing clothes similar to hers.

While screwed up, the world of the game itself seems to find incest plausible, as the hit man didn't seem to suspect anything when Ashley pretended Andrew was trying to get it on with her at the park. The guard's caution about the porn books may have also been because Andrew had a sister, or that perhaps even porn featuring supposedly underage girls was common, playing into their mom's fear about her own daughter.

As a common porn theme or otherwise, it would make sense that their mother might have missed warning signs about the siblings (and her own behaviour) if all women/girls were portrayed as hypersexual beings towards everyone around them. We have no idea, as the only media we see within the game is the news.... and splattergore two, "I'll never fuck your ugly whore of a wife again!", but it could explain why random women are so incredibly aggressive towards other people. Anything less might mean people thought they were flirting.

As Ashley vacillated between uncomfortably flirtatious and aggressive, her mom would have had no reason to suspect anything other than her daughter being a potential homewrecker, ignoring Andrew's misteps entirely. At least until Andrew no longer acts like a put upon son. It would also explain why Ashley gets so pissed when Andrew is checking his mom to see if she has any loot on her. She really does see her mom as a potentially sexual/love rival, just like her mom sees her.

...While you can't trust everything you see on the Internet, I remember watching a bit of a video irl where they played "gay or not". A game where where you had to guess what the majority of random straight men polled said was gay. Apparently, accidentally walking in on your mom and not getting a little bit turned on by her tits is gay. So uh, if tcoaal's world is an extreme parody of ours, then that's baseline incestuous belief of all members of that universe I guess.

So by the in world's and his mom's standards, Andy is beating the allegations against his character because he's a guy and his sister has fat tits. Wild.

The implications of the above being he can find his sister hot and still be a "normal" guy so long as he never acts upon it or gets obsessive. Which is a weird thing to type out.

---

So with that as our framework of the world, Andrew treating Ashley as a normal girl and not his sister may be incredibly bad, considering how the world-view of women in the world they inhabit is.

As his sister, he may have more consideration towards her than an unrelated woman. The last beautiful girl we saw alone in a room with Andrew, he murdered. though he probably didn't murder her because she turned him down for sex like Ashley claims. But she doesn't seem to have a better explanation, meaning she does think it's a possibility that Andrew might murder a girl who turns him down.

The Love route might just be a roundabout way of getting the same death possibility as Andrew in the denile endings. Just a different flavour of murder suicide from tragic fucked up sibling love/hate, to sister fucker incel. While it's happier superficially, in the long run I'd argue it's the funkier of the options, and might lead to Andrew treating Ashley like she thinks he treats all his other girlfriends. Just a hole.

He might become more chill about letting her sleep around or put herself at risk in that way because he no longer needs to act like her brother. She's just another girl.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see what happens in the next episode, but I can't help but be suspicious of Andrew being all lovey dovey. I get the feeling all his darker impulses will get bottled up without anywhere to go until he decides to execute a plan to kill Ashley, one that's been thoroughly clairvoyance proofed. Or Ashley gives up hope on Andrew because she's no longer being treated as a sister and tries to ditch him with explosive results.

Either way I agree that Julia will be playing a key part, even if it's only in flashbacks, showing how Andrew treated his girlfriends and what Ashley could expect if she became his new one.

Digging Graves for your Morals; Or, The Ethical Problem of Outlawry

Hello, yes, I am here again. This one is shorter, I swear (it’s under four thousand words, even). If this is the first post from me you’re seeing, this is a follow-up to my prior essay posted here on the game The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, although it should be able to mostly stand alone.

At the end of my last essay, I touched on both the game’s nearly uncompromising moral scepticism and relativity, but I didn’t really dig into it. I outlined that the game only textually frames actions as ‘morally bad’ in the context of a morality set by the society and the world that has treated them as no better than farm animals raised for the slaughter. Well, I have a lot to say on the topic of ethics on the topic of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, so buckle in, this one’s going to talk about the social contract, moral scepticism and everyone’s favourite topic: Mrs. Graves.

As usual, this was originally posted and formatted for on Sufficient Velocity and you can perhaps more easily read it there. Spoilers abound, and my content warning from last time still applies.

She’s not too hot on either ethics or her mother

The Meat of the Matter

Since a lot of this is optional or otherwise missable information, let’s review the premise the game gives us. If you’re already aware of all of this, I apologise, it won’t take long.

First off the bat, the quarantine at the start of the game was a hoax-driven money-making scheme of which you can pick up more-or-less all the relevant details of. This is entirely missable and by the time it’s possible to discover, our protagonists have better things to dwell on and have dialogue about, so I’ll give you a summary of what you can deduce from reading the notes and thinking about it.

The quarantine is an organ harvesting operation, as per some documents you can discover in the wardens’ office. They entrap the residents, test their blood types and starve to death those they deem surplus to requirements — alternatively the starvation itself could be their method of ‘preparing the harvest’, there’s evidence in both directions and it hardly matters — harvesting the organs of the others for sale. As our protagonists are AB-typed, the ‘universal recipient’ or ‘most selfish blood type’, they’re some of the first on the chopping block.

If you read through the newspapers and the documents in Mr. Washing Machine’s car, you can discover that ultimately ToxiSoda are responsible, and a similar thing is happening in a different city under the guise of a ‘chemical leak’.  Should you further investigate matters, you will find mentions of the ‘man behind it all’, the doctor, or the Surgeon, as the fandom have been referring to him — you may recall Mrs. Graves mentioned someone similar! Yeah, he’s the guy who runs ToxiSoda, who are themselves partners with the water company that faked the parasite outbreak in the first place.

It’s all a life insurance scam, apparently

How much the details of the operation matter is something open to interpretation — it might just be something for players to figure out and Episode 3 will not cover the Surgeon at all, or he might play a major part; it's not particularly relevant to this essay. What matters is that it happened at all — indeed, it’s fairly easy to justify Ashley and Andrew in everything they did in Episode 1 (flashbacks aside), arguing that if they’d made any other decisions they’d have died — an argument that the victims dug their own graves, even if the Graves siblings put them in them. How correct that is is a matter of debate, but that you can make the argument at all matters, and we’ll be returning to this later. In my last essay (and again in the introduction here), I made an analogy to farm animals, raised without love and for slaughter. Let’s put a pin in the ‘for slaughter’ part for now and take a look at the ‘without love’ part. 

That’s right, it’s time to meet the parents.

As Andrew notes, there are significantly more compelling reasons for you to say that

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum & Dad

They really do. 

Our charming protagonists are, as with many things depicted in this game, an exaggerated, almost farcical example of this phenomenon — one that’s just grounded enough to still feel very real, just like the siblings themselves. 

The late and lamentable Mrs. Graves is just the same: originally a teen mother, hopelessly out of depth with two difficult children — even if one was good at masking it — and an unreliable, emotionally unavailable (at least to their children) partner who can’t hold down a job, ends up foisting them off on each other and doing a Parental Negligence because she simply Cannot Cope. That’s the real part. The part where she gets paid off by an organ harvesting operation to leave them to die, that’s the borderline-farcical exaggeration that throws all the nooks and crannies of her character into sharp relief.

Mrs. Graves does not have a good relationship with either of her kids. Having self-admittedly fobbed the job of raising Ashley off on her son, to the degree that they did not even celebrate her birthday as kids, both of them hold differing degrees and types of resentment for her.

For Ashley, it’s hate — perhaps not quite so clear cut as that, as it’s her that calls for the eulogy and she shows some potential signs of discomfort while cleaning up her parents’ corpses, but by and large, it’s fairly simple and straightforward, as usual for Ashley. The sentiment is not exactly unreturned, either.

This brings Ashley’s heart great delight!

The most clear incident raising her from everyday ‘neglectful’ to ‘wow she wanted nothing to do with this kid’ is the optional ‘birthday cake’ scene, obtained by finding the present in Ashley’s first ‘transitory world’ dream, in which we see Ashley’s birthday  and the founding of a lemon cupcake tradition between Leyley and Andy. She has received nothing from her family, notes that her ‘friends’ would say they were busy before she even told them the schedule and Andy takes her out to buy cupcakes with his pocket money.

This scene gets a callback in Andrew’s dream later. Just remember to Ask Nicely, rather than Kill Her.

Parents of the year, everyone.

So with Ashley it’s as straightforward and obvious as she herself is — she hates her mother, her mother hates her. With Andrew, as with Andrew himself, it’s a fair bit more complicated. His mother is a much more nuanced figure, who is believable in her role as an unfortunate teen parent who was trying her best. He has a degree of trust in her against, seemingly, his own good judgment In her conversation with Andrew, she acknowledges her fault in raising him and seemingly sincerely tries to offer him a ‘way out’, an olive branch.

I think many people have had relationships where they might say this

This scene in particular intrigues me, because she is acknowledging fault in a way that Andrew strictly avoids doing — and well, there’s nothing Andrew likes more than a good way to avoid acknowledging any fault of his own. With her dominant relationship over their father as a model for Andrew to draw comparisons to his own relationship with Ashley with, it’s no surprise that the narrative resonates with him to the point of ‘Accept’ being many people’s first completion.

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. There is a fascinating contrast with her later conversation with Ashley, where she — despite accusing Ashley of brainwashing Andrew — refers to Leyley and Andy as ‘two psychos’ and states that she always knew they were responsible for Nina’s death and that, implicitly, they owe her for not turning them in. 

There's something about mother-daughter relationships here that I just do not have the time or reading to dig into, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, when Andrew interrogates her on her possession of their death certificates, she has… an interesting, plausible story about a life insurance scam and claims that she really did think they died in the fire, implicitly denying the claim that she sold them. It’s entirely possible that she’s describing the details of the ‘scam’ correctly — you can even buy that she genuinely does care for Andrew in some way, if not Ashley, but her claim about being an honest, grieving parent shocked at their deaths… doesn’t add up?

This is a very normal reaction to your supposedly dead children showing up in your house.

As Andrew himself notes after hearing her story, she’s full of shit. This gets into speculation, because there are a few ways to read this, but the most plausible ‘gist’ is that she and her partner were paid off in money and jobs to not raise a fuss — the surgeon she mentioned is almost certainly the founder of ToxiSoda, remember?

The overwhelming difference in presentation between how she speaks to Andrew and Ashley invites investigation — and when Andrew turns down her offer and tells her he isn’t interested in her offer in Decline, her reaction isn’t… despair, it’s shock — and well, there’s a good reason for that.

Why do you think she did it in the first place?

This is the happiest we see her

Well — it’s so she can finally fit into society. That white picket fence, that idyllic 1950s life — hell you can call it the American Dream. She wants that, or as close to it as she can get — the working-class teen mother, living in poverty, aspiring to the middle-class. It’s a very common, very real and very grounded motivation.

And to that end, she effectively sold off her children. It’s no wonder she can’t fathom why Andrew wouldn’t choose the same.

That’s the part that makes you think — just like the deaths in Episode 1, well- maybe the siblings are justified here, too. It’s a weaker argument, but it’s still one you can make under many common moral paradigms today — what goes around comes around, all that jazz. Just look at how awful she was to Ashley.

She’s finally found what she’s been striving for.

Here’s the thing, here’s the thing though — what, reasonably, could she have done? Andrew and Ashley briefly highlight this in conversation about Ashley’s ‘friends’ in Episode 1 — was she supposed to fight gunmen to try and break them out? Throw food to the balcony from four stories?

Moreover, as she herself says to Andrew… would anyone really have been able to do better than her in her position? She was seventeen when Ashley was born, living in poverty with a partner who couldn’t even remember Andrew’s name when he was a kid. Anyone would have had difficulty, let alone with these kids.

Her evils are — they’re not any deliberate action, but rather… prompted inaction. She didn’t have the emotional energy, resources or plain capability to properly parent her children, she didn’t have any solutions to their murder of Nina in a state so blatantly hostile to its underclass, she didn’t have a way to connect with Ashley and she took the money rather than fight a futile and likely suicidal battle against a corporation and its armed goons in a dystopian setting.

Ashley, notably, does not deny this.

Her sin is the one we’re all, I think, guilty of — that of not trying hard enough, that of inaction in the face of difficult tasks, of not standing up on principle because it’s just too much that day and you don’t have the spoons, you’ll do it tomorrow (no you won’t). It’s a petty, everyday kind of evil — that of not doing enough. 

Is that enough to condemn her? Certainly, there’s a pretty manipulative read of her that likely has some truth to it — in the locked door in Ashley’s dream in ‘Decay’ you can discover that she has a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul — but consider that lens — the game won’t make up your mind for you, so you’ll need to choose that for yourself.

The dad is interesting in terms of negative space — but he’s mostly important in that he doesn’t matter, so I decided to not fit him in here. He has art, though — just no sprite, because, well, he’s never mattered to either sibling.

The Contract We Call Society

Right, it’s time to get a little bit Theoretical in here. Not much, but a little. Social contract theory is a complex topic with a lot of nuance, much of which I will be eliding in the name of not writing a twenty thousand word paper on semiotics, law, and anthropology, but the short analogy is… the idea that as long as you play by society’s rules, as long as you are a good citizen, a good person, the state, or the community, will take care of you.

In a number of ways, the harshest penalty levied by many historical states and legal codes was not death, but rather the criminal status of outlawry, a practice that’s cropped up a number of times in history — the practice of no longer being protected by the law. This meant one could be killed or worse with impunity — you were no longer protected by mob justice and, while overexaggerated as a term of reference, certain texts from Medieval England refer to outlaws as bearing a wolfshead, ‘for the wolf is a beast hated by all folk’. Never minding that wolves are actually delightful, this was a time when wolves were actively hunted and sold by people — and the same was intended to happen to outlaws. They were ‘fair targets’ as far as society was concerned, no longer to be treated as your fellow citizens.

This was the gravest punishment on the books, for most of these legal codes — something saved for those who had broken the social contract so completely that there could be no turning back (civil outlawry is… a bit different, that’s not the topic here). Among others, a modern critique of the concept is that it offers no incentive for improvement, no incentive to change or to cease harming society — if an outlaw has none of the social contract’s protections, what reason do they have to obey… any of the social contract? If that seems familiar, well, let me ask you this:

What if the state or community fails its end first? What responsibility does the innocent outlaw have to that contract?

It’s an interesting phrasing, that the world is better off.

It’s time to talk about the incest, and part of why it’s there. The cannibalism too, but that’s less impactful here. If you’ve seen me elsewhere, you might have seen me say that the incest is a load-bearing narrative pillar — in large part due to it being a critical facet of the siblings’ relationship, but in another large part due to it being an equally critical part of how the game uses taboo.

A taboo is in this context something that is considered repulsive and to be avoided by society. It’s a more complex term than that — you can also use it for certain sacred actions or utterances that are only permitted to certain people, for example — but that’s what it is here. Swearing, premarital sex, BDSM and murder are, approximately from weak to strong, some example taboos held in modern Anglospheric society. 

Strong taboos are a staple of horror — they shock, they disgust, they draw people’s attention and it’s that last one that’s critical here. Incest is a very strong taboo — while I am absolutely not segueing into its historical context, the very well-established Westermarck effect gives it a certain timelessness and immunity to desensitisation that most other taboos don’t have — murder, to contrast, is a taboo we’re largely desensitised to in modern media and works of modern media have to put in actual work to make a murder seem horrifying — through atmosphere, cinematography, evocative prose etc.

And this is important because the use of taboo I’m covering in this essay is that the incest is used to invite judgment — it is so ingrained as a ‘wrong thing’ in people’s brains almost regardless of background that it forces the player to engage with the work morally. And that’s where the fun starts.

I’ve mentioned before, very briefly, about the juxtaposition of tone between the Burial & Decay endings, contrasting with the very monstrous difference in morality. Burial is remarkably light-hearted — they play around with the drain blockage, they joke about their mother’s personality and this is further exaggerated on the Love path, where Andrew is much more comfortable with casual contact and the two make a game out of how far they can throw their parents’ skulls, the humour is directly contrasted against their abhorrent actions.

I’ll be real Ashley is far more merciful than I, I’m shuddering at the thought of that gunk in my hair

In comparison, Decay is… bleak. I’ve seen it being referred to as being ‘emotionally sandblasted’ and, yeah I think that’s fair — it’s uncomfortable, it’s heavy and it’s just not fun. And this is the route in which, if you chose Trust into Accept, Andrew has bought into the narrative that his mother’s offered — that he can fit just fine into society if he wasn’t stuck, if not for Ashley — the route that ‘fits’ most closely to the social contract, to Andrew feeling the guilt that we think he should and hating the monsters that they’ve become, as the social contract deems them. Given the pains the game takes to attach the player to the protagonists, this normative moral ending is very easily interpreted as the bad ending.

And well, isn’t it?

Thing is, as mentioned above, the social contract has never held up its end for them. The game takes careful pains to point out to a viewer that they’ve never had the life that society promises people, so why do its moral standards apply?

The game invites you to judge the characters, and in the same motion, asks you from what principles you judge them, making a pretty good guess in that, like most people who haven’t spent a large amount of time navel-gazing and reading some very boring books by very dusty old men, they come from the society around you.

Love even has Ashley express this sentiment directly after the incestuous dream — she asks you — well, Andrew, but this is also something for the player to mull over — why this is what’s engaged your morality or sense of revulsion, rather than the desecration, cannibalism or murder.

Andrew and Ashley are both very funny and very fascinating in this scene.

And that’s the framing that it casts all of its own moral judgement in — even the ‘tar-soul’ aspect is… well, it’s unclear what it even means. Mrs. Graves was a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul, after all. Other than that, it’s society and the world being better off without them, rather than any kind of assertion of objective morality. Due to the present of ‘soul colour’, we’ll presumably see the game make some moral statements in Episode 3, but as it stands?

It’s nearly completely morally sceptical, in and of itself — it’s not interested in moral assertions or education, it’s interested in making you question your own morals. Deconstructive (not that kind), rather than dialectic, to be mildly pretentious.

It uses taboo and shock to invite moral judgement, but then uses tone, charm and our instinct to look for the happiest end for our blorbos to get you to recognise that these are principles you yourself brought into the game, rather than any it’s handed you. 

To summarise: you’ve brought these principles in from society, but what do the siblings, the protagonists, the villains to the world, owe society? Enough that they should follow them? It failed them first, after all.

Closing Thoughts

This one is a bit less energetic than the last, tragically — my sleeping schedule is the stuff of nightmares recently, I love windy weather. Wait, no the opposite. Huge thank you to everyone who commented on the last one, you are the wind beneath my wings and the main reason I managed to get this out this week.

This essay is a bit more interpretative than my last one — certainly, there are alternative readings and I’ve been toying with the idea of deliberately taking a reading I don’t like very much and writing from that perspective as a demonstrative exercise recently — mostly that you shouldn’t just take my word for things!

Otherwise, if the last bit at the end seemed murky, I apologise — I did try to write a more detailed version, but firstly, it was three thousand words and secondly, I re-read it the next day and I could not understand what the fuck I was talking about. Personally, I blame Derrida — suffice to say that I strongly recommend playing through it with an eye towards considering culpability, morality and why you think certain characters are more or less forgivable than others, and for what deeds. See what you get out of it.

I managed to keep one particular thread open to wrap up with here —  I try to keep speculation on Episode 3 content to a minimum in the main essays, but it should be fine here — you might have noticed that I refer to Episode 1 and Episode 2 being on something of a spectrum of justifiability, with the siblings’ actions being ‘more’ justifiable in Episode 1 and ‘less’ justifiable — but still justifiable if you try — in Episode 2. 

To continue the thought of the happiest ending being the one in which they step the furthest away from common morality and to further jar the viewers’ sense of morality by contrasting societal morality and blorbo-oriented morality, Episode 3: Burial could continue this trend in having a major victim be someone who, well, has done nothing wrong and isn’t even guilty of bystander syndrome.

I wonder if there’s any good candidates, someone who’s sweet, harmless and will indisputably be an innocent victim…

…I’m sure she’ll be fine

[orlopsexdungeon]

✅ 🤗🤲

from @werewolfsone :D

Ty @werewolfsone !

✅ What's something that appears in your fics over and over and over again, even if you don't mean to?

I'm incapable of writing a Hickey that doesn't have a certain degree of gender going on LOL. I actually tried doing that when I started writing the sport of ribald veterans and then a few paragraphs in I wrote this description of Hickey (who is the pov character) "beard and hair grown untamed, clothed in long leather boots and this tyrant’s greatcoat that pools around him like the furs of a lady of luxury, his own knife-cut slashes adorning the front as twenty-three elegant brooches" and thought hm. not quite hitting 'internally of a gender-conforming man' like I set out for!

In I Know You Rider I was deliberately drawing on the ways male hippies' gender presentation was regarded as deviant - he doesn't look like someone we'd today regard as gender nonconforming; he wears male clothing and conducts himself the same as in the show, but because his hair is long enough to tuck behind his ears and he's got a bead necklace and a couple rings on, that's how he's perceived by people outside his subculture - and giving Tozer a complicated and intertwined disgust/attraction reaction to this, which I had a ton of fun writing.

The Hickey in The Rebis is outright both a man and a woman in a explicit and articulated way. I wrote this fic in basically a fugue state over a couple days and it's an early exploration of the bigender Hickey concept I later developed more and wrote this longpost about. I'm not going to really talk more about the concept here because.. that's what I do in that post, lol.

I wrote Queen Jane Approximately with a certain level of (mostly unarticulated) internal feeling of gender variance in mind for both Hickey and Gibson. It's a fairly minor and ambiguous aspect of the fic, though - Gibson compares himself and is compared to women, dislikes feeling tall, dresses in the feminine end of counterculture fashion (and refers to his shirts as 'blouses'), and enjoys being courted in way that positions him as feminine. Hickey's hair length (which by today's standards is really not very long at all - around what he has at the start of the show), which marks him as counterculture and disregarding of society's rules, is noted as being androgynous, and he wears a ring with a yingyang symbol because he likes "symbols of spiritually enlightened androgyny and anything else that flattered him".

🤗 What advice would you give to new fanfic writers that are just getting started?

Oh boy, I don't feel experienced enough to answer this question! I've got two pieces of advice, though. One is to use an outline, or at least plan where your fic is going before you've written it. Which may sound obvious but I wrote my first two fics without doing so! And that made writing them much more of a headache then writing with a plan. The other is too write extremely self indulgently. My 60s au fics are the fics I'm most proud of, the only fics I've considered showing to people I know irl, and I don't think I would have written them if I wasn't committed to writing whatever I wanted. Their appeal might be somewhat niche, but having created something that does exactly what you want and is 100% tailored to your tastes and interests is extremely satisfying

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

I'm taking a break from fic writing till I rewatch the show, so this might be in my wip folder for a while - but I'll share anyway. Gibson pov walkout era hickeypreg where he was impregnated by Crozier long enough before being sentenced to death that he can get out of it by "pleading the belly" but cannot continue his plans for mutiny. Hickey and Gibson are laying together in a tent and talking. cw for the implication of impending death by childbirth or other pregnancy complication and impending death by scurvy - Gibson thinks both are guaranteed at this point and he's probably right

Billy finds his hand has drifted to Cornelius’s swollen stomach, and that, when Cornelius places his own hand on his and links their fingers, it’s not too difficult to ignore the pain that burns into his knuckles. 

“You’re thinking about something.” Cornelius tells him.

“What else would I be doing but thinking?”

“About something in particular,” he clarifies, “your breath is softer when your thinking isn’t about anything in particular.” 

They’re grown thick as thieves since Cornelius was deemed too heavy with child to trek in his irons, when they laid him down with the sick Billy limped and crawled to him and has scarcely left his side since. So now Cornelius knows how to tell his thoughts by the way his breath falls on his neck, and Billy knows his habits just as well. Cornelius’s tendency to pry, he was already well familiar with - he’s also learnt, over however long it’s been, that when bored enough his natural curiosity will latch onto anything at all. 

"If things were different,” Billy admits, “I'd have liked your child to be mine." 

He can’t imagine a life for them together in England, but perhaps on those islands, the ones Cornelius had invited him to more than a year ago at least now with promises of sanctified sin. Cornelius had spoken of shimmering jewels and cannibal courts - he finds he can't think of anything but a little cottage with a cradle he'll rock as Cornelius steps in, strong and whole and back from his day's work. It's a weightless fantasy, he knows, completely unmoored - if Cornelius' death was not as certain as his own he'd make a terrible mother, they both would.  

Cornelius laughs, the sound almost tinny in their dark tent. “God, I can't imagine - but I'd like to put one in you.”

“If that were possible you would have a hundred times by now - all straight to the jack-knife barber, if that were the case, so don't look so smug. But you’re right, I wouldn’t have it in me to play that role to completion.”

“Who do you think, then, would have had it in me, if things were different?”

“Probably no one.” A child is a burden that would never suit Cornelius - not in his arms and certainly not in his belly, sapping away that strength that had seemed endless and rounding his innards as the rest of him fades. But, if they are imagining that scene - the cottage with the cradle - and he thinks they might both be, why not indulge themselves and imagine it was a different man that got him in such a state? “I suppose I wouldn’t have minded if it was your..” he trails off, unsure.

"Solomon?" 

"Your handsome sergeant - I didn’t know if I should say, with how recently he had the rope." 

"It's been months, Billy, I'm not in mourning. Besides, I didn't love him. Shame, though." They both lay silent for a moment, remembering how he’d choked and dangled on the pulling noose, before Cornelius speaks again. "You’re not wrong, his tastes were not as singular as your own. Christ, it is a shame, I would have liked to bring him along, you would have loved him, if you got to know each other better - he was enormous. But you are wrong, because it could only have been Francis Crozier."

[aqours]

jesus christ i was gonna ignore this but god i hate people being annoying in my notes and then i was gonna just post a meme response but i'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt (even though you clearly never played it) to reply and try to say this in the most honest way: nobody cares. you can dislike it and move on with your life instead of making it a hill to die on. this is also part of a much larger issue which is the reason i made this post and others.

you can do whatever you want. you are free to like and enjoy anything you want. it is not a case of a lack of critical thinking: we get it. you don't like things with incest in it. jesus christ holy fuck we GET IT. it's a perfectly acceptable squick!!! there's certain media i won't touch with a ten foot pole because it makes me uncomfortable. it's a nuance that's really become actively fucking lost in this current internet climate. i've made an enitre post about how TCOAAL both romanticizes it's portrayal while also portraying it as an actively detrimental thing to both people involved (and it's a game without it's final chapter out). i think it's interesting. you're free to disagree. i don't give a shit about changing your opinion but you're on the hill of telling us how we can't understand shit so you can feel superior to us, and that's where i have a problem.

this game has unleashed such unspeakable fucking brainworms that even things like imperialism get glossed over when talking about it. look at this shit!!!

(for the record, i cannot stress this enough: fuck rev says desu, but even broken clocks are right twice a day)

"Call of Duty visualizes the horrors of war," is one of the most fucking outstanding things i have EVER seen said to try to prove why the incest cannibal horror game is bad. it's literally a fucking propaganda machine for the US military. we've reached a point where incest in video games > war crimes in video games that actively glamourizes actual war crimes perpetuated by a capitalist empire complicit in genocide. "GTA punishes you for committing crime! RDR2 punishes you too!!! it portrays it as BAD" is such an unspeakably weird take for anyone that's played these games for more than 20 seconds. it's fucking media illiteracy going from "just kind of silly" to "actually fucking concerning." it's fucking SCARY that people actually think this and think it's a better position than liking TCOAAL because people ship the siblings than actively funding a war machine that is fucking killing people. because it fetishized something??? then just don't play it!!! stop making it seem like a bigger issue than it is!!!

it's fine not to like it, jesus christ!!! i get it! everyone gets it! it's UNDERSTANDABLE you don't like it! but can you understand this fucking weird obsession? i'm gonna spare you shit about it being a common kink and stuff that's a different discussion. just don't play it!!! stop trying to make yourself feel like a fucking martyr and genius for not liking it, it's ok to dislike it! "i dislike it because it doesn't demonize the incest in it-" that's fine!!! it's COMPLETELY fine!!! ebenelephant is right!!! we understand what you're saying- it just doesn't fucking mean anything at all because all you have to do is pretend it doesn't exist and move on with your life.

it's not about other people lacking reading comprehension. it's just you being fucking annoying. that's it. that's all. just say your peace and move on and enjoy things you like.

we've entered a really fucking weird era of shipping discourse ngl