#like i'm breathless!!

[ocheeva]

— ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴇꜰᴛ ʜᴀɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴅᴀʀᴋɴᴇꜱꜱ, ᴜʀꜱᴜʟᴀ ᴋ. ʟᴇ ɢᴜɪɴ

[wardensantoineandevka]

at the end of the day, for me, the most disappointing thing about C3 isn't the poor narrative structure, the bad pacing where everything feels dragged out and rushed at the same time, or never giving the characters the space and focus to breathe and develop their own centric subplots

it is ultimately that Marquet started off very strong as a setting and did feel like it was making strides to properly draw from its Asian and SWANA inspirations, including with good use of work by other authors and consultants, only for that to rapidly fall off as the Ruidus plot became central and for there to be just as little space for Marquet as there was for Bells Hells as characters beyond carriers of The Moon Plot, with no space to develop and explore either to potential and richness. It's disappointing for Marquet especially, given the continued dearth of Asian and SWANA inspirations in Western AP, and I felt C3 started off promising with Marquet as a grounded and rich location in those inspirations.

I think a lot about Ela Lumas, whose sons' murders is the inciting incident, and how her title Ginang is a Tagalog word and how exciting that was for me personally. The fact that we lost this even as smaller notes, and that ultimately Marquet was supplanted in favor of Vasselheim (not even Issylra as a whole) and Ruidus without any real grounding of why Marquet was the setting in the first place or what Marquet's importance was specifically to the narrative other than "it has to be set somewhere", is just so intensely disappointing to me. The biggest disappointment I have with C3.

[agir1ukn0w]

sorry but snow is such a well written iconic villain and donald sutherland performs him so fucking good it's almost hilarious how i start practically foaming at the mouth every time the man opens his mouth to say something deplorable in those movies, like he's so utterly and despicably wrong about almost every crucial thing from katniss and peeta's relationship to human nature as a whole and yet the second he starts talking about how hope is the only thing stronger than fear and how you have to allow a little hope but control it so its spark doesn't grow into revolution and how it's the things we love the most that destroy us you bet your ass i am on the floor screaming crying throwing up because that is my psychotic mustache-twirling villain RIGHT THERE

[royalarchivist]

Pac's reaction to Fit threatening Baghera for him.

[shokveyv]

you ever meet a person who is so radiant, you are struck dumb and unable to speak coherently?

[neverendingford]

Severance s2e3 Painting Scene "Inclusively Recanonicalized"

[nohriantomatoes]

Leo: healing can only begin with trust

Takumi: *breathless, with the softest fucking heart eyes you've seen on a lifeless fire emblem model* yeah

[kingdomoftyto]

Life is crazy right now but I still have time to go apeshit over my beloved marble team winning gold at the Marble League

Momo had to give up last week's bronze and they took that PERSONALLY

KEEP THE #MOMOMENTUM 🟢💨

[unopenablebox]

you guys are too good for the west wing now???

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

the thing is that i am not at all in principle opposed to things like: poetic language in prose, heavy use of simile/metaphor, going hard on description, ornate syntactical structures, writing that is capital-b Beautiful, etc. in fact some of my very favorite books in the world are my very favorite books precisely because they do this kind of thing. but what is unfortunate (mostly for me, a writer) is that i have not yet been able to discern any kind of specific concrete guidelines for why sometimes these things dazzle and delight me and why sometimes i'm like, ok we get it you can Write. i mean i can try to describe the difference here, in that i would say that what literary language needs in order to really function for me as intended is that it needs to feel like the expression of a holistic voice, as opposed to a series of parlor tricks. bu that's not an actionable guideline. sadly i'm not really sure there is an actionable guideline here because - as in the difference between the actor who becomes the character before eyes and the actor you can always se Acting, for example - i do think on some level the difference just comes down to whether a writer is really good or merely talented, smart, and skillful. stressful to contemplate!

[writingnotes520]

I headcanon that May's caretakers, whoever they are, were very insistent that May should always present super feminine and grow their hair out long and wear dresses and all that, and May just never realized that they could change that until they got to Verona

So I imagine that when May came out to Juliet, they were still pretty young (like maybe 9) and Juliet just went "So if you're not a girl, do you want short hair?" And May's eyes just widen and they go "WAIT I CAN DO THAT?? CAN WE CUT IT??" and they just smile super wide and ask if they can also wear something other than skirts/dresses

And like 5 minutes later, the floor in Juliet's room is covered in cut locks, May's hair is a mess because you can't usually trust two 9 year olds with scissors to do a great job but they love it, and they sneak into Tybalt's room and steal from his closet so that May can try on masc clothes and see what they prefer

[berkeley-mews]

CHESS MATCH AS A CODED DISPLACEMENT OF HARGRAVE'S SEXUAL ADVANCES TOWARDS HELEN & A "POLITE" EXTERNALISATION OF HER PRINCIPLED STAND AGAINST HIM??? anne brontë you are unmatched

[kritzenkriegen]

..okay that's excellent actually

[queerplatonicdiaries]

we talk softly in the kitchen and, in a way, it's everything I've ever wanted.

it's been a bad day. I'm reheating dinner when you walk in, not to grab anything, but just to talk to me because we haven't seen each other in a while.

you know things aren't going well but you don't immediately ask why I've been distant (i'm silently grateful for this small grace). instead we talk about this and that, and the microwave pings distantly in the background but I couldn't care less. you show me the tattoo that you got today, and I can't help but be excited at your excitement despite despite despite the raging black hole inside of me. I can't help but smile at your easy radiance.

I wasn't planning on it, but I make myself a cup of tea, just to have an excuse to stay here a little longer. to bathe in the fragile peace and bask in your presence.

I always did ache for your company.

you ask me how my day's been, eventually, and whether I want to talk about it. I laugh and say it wasn't great, and the light admission balks in comparison to the storm of the last week, but its an admission nonetheless. it's more than i thought i'd be able to give. its nothing compared to what i want to say but can't.

you see it anyway. in the way my hands shake and my smile is brittle around the edges, I meet your eyes and I know that you know.

and so we stand there, in the warm light of the kitchen nestled in a long, tight hug, and in a way, it's everything I ever wanted. there are a million battles raging in my heart and maybe nothing's okay at the moment, but you hold me close and tell me to take care of myself and for a moment I can breathe again, I can remember my own name.

there's a long way to go to get out of this mess, but when we softly say goodnight I carry the memory of your gentle smiles and warm embrace all the way to my bedroom and think maybe, just maybe, things will be okay.

in a way, it's everything I've ever wanted.

(you always were gentle with my heart.)

[bittersweetresilience]

*crawling in through the window*

WITNESS PROTECTION/BODYGUARD TROPE.

SELKIE NEVER WANTS ME TO BE LONELY AND I LOVE THEM DEARLY

you KNOOOOOOOOW i'm fucked over guard dog type characters this is a lethal injection into my veins. OKAY SO FIRST OF ALL SENTITWIN AU SENTITWIN AU SENTITWIN AU SENTITWIN AU

au where félix is recruited to be adrien's guard instead of placide... au where fame puts adrien's life in frequent danger and félix has to protect him sometimes by wearing his face... wait this is starting to sound like a certain other fic we know. I'M SATISFIED

i would ALSO write bodyguard au for modern au fenglian tgcf and elric siblings fma03 and stan twins gravity falls and rymin infinity train and kristelsa frozen and flutterdash mlp:fim and erikar homestuck and LET'S JUST SAY I ENJOY THIS TROPE ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL OKAY

[eyeballplanets]

the invincible fandom would start flinching and hissing if i started saying words like oedipus complex and emotional incest which is a shame really i think there's a lot of merit that could come with genre fiction fans abandoning the resistance to discussing sexuality and eroticism outside of straightforward intercourse and i do believe that this superhero cartoon genuinely has meaningful things to say about erotic structures and interactions through coded imagery of male violence (and possibly even maternalistic control) onto the sympathetic characters as part of its greater commentary on imperial and statist violence and its subdued mise en abyme on the failures of the comic to depict this. like this is literally the show with blood money shots. oh my god... it even has a recurring motif of medical bodily violations.

but then i'm like. waitaminute. isn't this the fandom where everyone's scared to talk about the only brown female recurring character because they're convinced that the only other racebent viltrumite is gonna go full bigelow strange days on steven yeun in that crater? oooohhhhhhh. i get it! 🫵 you all think that sexual violations are aberrant and isolate acts of violence sui generis completely divorced from hegemonic systems and generated by lone sickos on the margins rather than being an inherent means of reifying structuralized control and therefore believe a thrice marginalized character is the idealized vector for this messaging rather than, oh, i dunno, the guy who literally gestures to his name as a evocative of his breathless euphoric violations.