#idk. CONFLICTED

[strangerhawke]

how it feels getting through the majority of fics i had planned for The Way We Connect

how it feels realising i need to figure out new plots and places to go with this and also resolve plot points i added in and then already forgot about

[oflgtfol]

guy told me he loves me. ahhhhh

[itswilliamleonard]

i only own 1 colouring pencil rn but it's the perfect one for drawing her :)

[demonio-fleurs]

To me, what is so fantastic about One Piece Fan Letter is the emphasis on the way the Straw Hats have created these connections in the lives of people they have never met. The ending scene, with all the hands putting together the puzzle pieces, and the way that all these connections came together in one dazzling way-- I loved that. I teared up at that. Wherever the Straw Hats go, they leave behind all of these puzzle pieces for people to put together and create bonds that would not have existed had the Straw Hats not shown up!

And it also just... Makes me so in love with the concept of the world after Luffy becomes King of The Pirates. I know that Oda has the final chapter planned in his head, and I doubt we will really see the long lasting effects of Luffy achieving the title of Pirate King + his dream, and I really do not want a sequel series ala Boruto or Yasahime, but.... I want to see a world in which children believe they can become a Brave Warrior of the Sea thanks to Usopp, I want to see more children look at Nami and realize they don't NEED to have a Devil Fruit or Haki or muscles to have adventures. I want to see the next generation of the One Piece world believe so strongly in their dreams, that they set out to accomplish them.

One Piece Fan Letter really opened the door, I think, for more and more stories about the "regular" people in the world of One Piece, the people you don't see in the arcs because they're the nondescript background characters, and how the Straw Hat Crew has changed them. And I want that. To me, that is fantastic.

[mekha-draws]

'nother DTDAY doodle? In this economy? Yeah sure 👍

Incandescent for StormIsADragon

[spkyart]

Post Chapter Black

[sainz100]

2024 Brazilian GP | x

[smallsinger5901]

yeah sorry we made your lawlight healthy. Yeah we took away their childishness and petty anger and murder so now they just have lukewarm therapy-speak discussions over their issues instead of doing problematic/homoerotic schemes about it. Sorry yeah there’s nothing we can do here maybe try adding a cannibalism tag to your ao3 search or something

[slurmpinheimer]

where my trans kinnies at I know you’re out there I can smell you

[cozymochi]

Thought Nyoka was going to slap Rook's face with his tail ngl

(context)

[dykesynthezoid]

The thing about student groups doing terrorism apologia is it’s not just scary from an antisemitism standpoint (from which it is very scary), it’s also scary from a “this school is full of immigrants that are extremely vulnerable to the federal government trying to exert their authority over the university and you’re handing them the excuse to do so on a silver platter” perspective

[eshithepetty]

So. Others have noted that 'aiming for the boss's gut" could mean 'filling the boss's gut', and "putting that dead meat in its place" could mean just like. Cooking steak or something. And that perhaps ENA is just misunderstanding this and thinking she'll have to kill the boss because of her prior history with violence, and that Froggy only worded it that way because that kind of wording is more familiar to her and he was imitating her ('as you say in that wacky language of yours')

So, from this, we can deduce that ENA Dream BBQ is possibly just a story about a woman experiencing microagressions and PTSD while trying to deliver a doordash order. And that's just insanely funny to me lol

[boyblundering]

and for the fourth year in a row, my annual timbern pride drawing 🥹

I don't know how to feel about this year's... I tried something new but now I wish I went with the theme I used to always go with .. not a speck of bisexual colours in this years, fly high to their bisexuality I guess 😭🙏

[casscainmainly]

Stephanie and Cass have such a complicated dynamic to me that I can never fully enjoy any dynamic/trope that's slapped onto them, like 'golden retriever x black cat' or 'sunshine x grumpy' or whatever. They're almost always inaccurate because Steph and Cass are both multifaceted and three-dimensional women who can't be boxed neatly into categories, and assigning one of them as the 'optimist/happy one' rings false at different stages of their relationship. What I love so much about them is that they can't be boiled down to one thing. It's refreshing to have a relationship between two women that holds space for all their flaws, nuances, shifting feelings, clashing morals, and more. Of course anyone can call them any trope, it's all good fun!! The appeal for me though is how static tropes don't really apply to them.

[sminny-wew]

This is all just my own speculation, but I think Howdy might be next on the Witnessing The Horrors train. And I don't have an explanation for it rn but based on the recurring presence of the Buggle, I strongly feel like Barnaby's going to be involved somehow since he's Howdy's best customer (something something watchdog)

(Putting this under a Read More b/c I wound up having a lot to say)

Eddie's moment in the Homewarming update was based around him not knowing what to do with himself when he's not being the mailman, the role he was made for. Poppy's moment in the first Looky-Loo mini-update strikes me as being about her not knowing how not to be a big chicken (the role she was made for), as well as the other neighbors not knowing how to include her and thinking it's better to just trap her in her own house than to compromise with her, making her nerves worse as a result. Julie's moment in the Springtime Salutations update was about her insecurities in her relationships with her family and Frank, her insecurity in her roles (make the flowers bloom, invent new games, and overall be the most joyful neighbor), and not knowing what to do when spring comes early or a flower just won't bloom no matter what she does.

Howdy's role is to be a businessman, to supply his neighbors with what they need and sell them what they don't. My guess is that Howdy's moment will have something to do with supply and demand, his job and his personal life becoming indistinguishable from each other, and the pressure that family, customers, and superiors can put on a person to meet certain expectations. I also highly suspect, based on other people's observations about the flower from Julie's hidden videos resembling the logo, that Marlo will be relevant again.

There's an old saying about employment that goes, "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life." But in-universe, Welcome Home is a product of its time (1969-1974), when America was kinda-sorta still riding the high of its post-World War 2 economic prosperity but was beginning to see a rise in income inequality. (What a funny coincidence that Welcome Home presumably aired while Nixon was president...) I don't think I need to tell you that, in 2025, it's harder than ever to find successful, long-term employment that will earn you a livable wage without working yourself to death or requiring a college degree that will plunge you into lifelong debt. Things have changed a lot since the neighborhood left the airwaves (assuming WH was ever even a real show in-universe).

But I digress. Howdy Pillar's Going Through The Horrors™ moment.

What happens to Howdy when his best customer (Barnaby) is preoccupied, either by sickness or a prior engagement? Do his nerves about financial success ever stress him out, as implied in that image of him and Anthony Rancho? What happens when Howdy cannot meet the demands of his neighbors to supply them with what they need? How would Howdy react if the neighbors suddenly decided to make their own resources, instead of buying from him?

If Howdy's not a breadwinner, appeasing his family and the businessmen at Marlo by selling enough goods to be considered a profitable business investment well off, then who is he?

He doesn't know.

[lassieposting]

Been thinkin about Astarion + vampire biology so have some headcanons and the bits of game lore they're based on

Dialogue establishes that Cazador has been successfully passing himself off as a regular noble for centuries, and Astarion confirms that while he's considered a bit reclusive, he does mingle with the upper class of Baldur's Gate and has a property specifically for hosting fancy events.

Vampires are camouflage predators, whose primary hunting strategy is to blend in with their prey until the perfect time to strike. Their ecological niche is not a particularly safe or stable one - they live hidden in plain sight, usually in sizeable cities, for easy access to prey, but they know that if they are discovered they will be rooted out and killed or driven away. They are rarely able to get away with attacking in public, where city guards might rush to the aid of a screaming victim - they have to isolate their target before killing it. The ability to blend in, to be overlooked by their target, until it is too late is essential.

Cazador is, as far as we know, the only true vampire in Baldur's Gate

This is because true vampires are aggressively territorial. Like most apex predators, they eat a lot, and need substantial territories to support them - even moreso if they have a partner or spawns. Ascendant!Astarion would need to hold onto the entire city, as Cazador did, to be able to feed himself and Tav without raising suspicion.

True vampires are relatively rare, but there are more of them than there are cities, so it's not uncommon for one to set up in an occupied city and try to oust the sitting resident. The challenger usually believes himself to be as strong or stronger than the current tenant: these territorial disputes usually end in at least one death, so they're not to be entered into lightly.

Astarion is very obviously a vampire: his fangs are visible, as are his bite scars; he's so pale multiple people comment on it; his eyes are red, etc.

Astarion is not a healthy vampire.

This is a man who has been kept on the knife's edge of starvation and tortured regularly for 200 years, and to another vampire, that would be clear from the state of him: Astarion is a camouflage predator who is so malnourished he is no longer able to blend in.

Tav will get an up-close look at his transformation over the course of the game and during the years afterwards: the more healthy and well-fed Astarion becomes, as his body catches up on its immense energy deficit and begins to recover, the better he will be able to mimic a living elf. His skin will be able to bleed, or blush, or bruise, none of which he's capable of while actively starving. Hia fangs will retract until he needs them, not invisible but less obvious - having them out all the time is a response to severe deprivation; he's so hungry his body can't risk losing prey to the split second it takes Cazador to snatch a rat back, so he's permanently in bite mode, hyperaware, ready to strike. Some body functions will come online that he didn't even know he had, the ones that are supposed to help him blend in - his eyes will start producing pigment to look darker, less scarlet and more burgundy, to be more easily mistaken for brown; his lungs will make him breathe automatically even though he doesn't need it, he'll start being able to eat normal food without getting sick again, though he still won't get any nourishment from it; he'll heal faster. He'll even be able to get drunk, though he'll burn through it very quickly. As it stands, all those extra systems have been shut down by his starving body - they're useful, but nonessential, and he needs every single bit of energy funnelled into just keeping him alive and functional.

There is probably an intentional bit of psychological warfare against the spawns on Cazador's part here - him starving them strips them of their natural defences, and every time he makes them leave the mansion to hunt, they have to do so knowing that they're poorly hidden and vulnerable. But it's established that true vampires treating their spawn poorly or outright abusing them is A Thing, so it's not the only reason - he sees them as property rather than people, he keeps them weak so they won't plot against him, he's acting out his own trauma from Vellioth on them, he just wants to - but it does feed into it.

Astarion can, at one point, identify old blood as belonging to the player character. He also gets excited at another point if an enemy character runs away, stating, "Now it's a hunt."

He says that "even stale, [he'd] recognise that bouquet anywhere." This confirms a few things for us:

He has a vastly superior sense of smell capable of identifying individuals by scent and - since he can tell who the blood belongs to even after some time has passed - following scent trails.

This confirms that although city-dwelling vampires may primarily hunt via luring a victim to a secondary location before killing it, they still have the "stalk down and chase" predator instinct. Since Astarion can't lure wildlife anywhere, this is almost certainly how he's been hunting to supplement his diet when he's not using the player as his personal caprisun.

The fact that he can scent out prey before killing it means he has this ability all the time - he can smell blood while it's still safely inside the owner's body.

So scent is probably relevant to how vampires process the world. The more time each companion spends with him, the more he gets used to their scent, starts associating it more with safety and camaraderie than with a potential meal, and so he becomes more relaxed around them. As he learns to link the player's scent with love and comfort and trust, the more likely he is to retreat to their tent over his own when he's injured or afraid or having a trauma moment. When he's fond of someone, something of theirs will go conveniently missing - he's moving their scent into his little safe space, it's comforting for him. He can tell when his lover is hurt or aroused or frightened - though not which of the three applies - from a distance, because his sense of smell can pick up the spike of adrenaline rushing into their bloodstream.

But that also means that he can never feel like he's got any distance from Cazador while he's living in the mansion - even if the man isn't in the same room, the entire place reeks of him, and it makes Astarion feel like Cazador is breathing down his neck all the same. Ascendant Astarion would have a really, really hard time sticking it out in that mansion with stale Eau de Cazador all over the place. It means that he's put instantly on edge by the faint scent of one of his siblings as he walks through the lower city - when seven vicious, territorial apex predators are confined to a single small dormitory, several hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, fights are going to be nasty and frequent, and although Cazador wouldn't allow them to kill each other, considering how many of his siblings refer to him as weak or a runt, Astarion probably didn't win them very often. So. Having a highkey advanced sense of smell is a mixed bag.