#on a symbolic level…

[nachovargas]

lalo salamanca is so fantastic as like, a symbol and not a person. he is the point where every runaway train narrative converges to meet—at a villain who is quite literally unstoppable except for his own hubris. the final head of the salamanca hydra; the physical manifestation of everyone’s pagliacci-esque violent grieving behaviour and it’s a man so terrifying and so invincible he might as well be the devil.

[uyunto]

childhood

[barbiesraven]

fucking hell

I just realized that haymitch is an alcoholic. AN ALCOHOLIC. not a morphling addict. though he probably could have ended up one.

so anyway. alcohol.

alcohol is highly flammable. so much so that it evaporates quickly and leaves vapors in the air that ignite when exposed to heat. like a spark, or a flame.

a spark. "It's almost as bad as us with the berries."

fire is catching. "Almost but not quite."

who mentored Katniss? who laid down the groundwork for her eventual acts of rebellion? who planned the extraction in the 75th games around her? who fueled her fire in order to pull of a full-on political movement?

suzanne collins I am begging you to stop making every last detail of your books symbolic in some way holy shit my brain hurts

[poirott]

David Suchet on filming the final shot of Agatha Christie's Poirot

The last episode for Agatha Christie's Poirot tv series was shot on location at Greenway, Agatha Christie's house in Devon, on June 28 2013.

David Suchet improvised his last take to give thanks to the amazing crew, by tipping his hat like Poirot would have done. With crew members cheering and crying, David, too, was moved to tears. "This is the end of something that I have lived with half of my life, the culmination of a dream that has lasted years, the pinnacle of what I had worked towards for so long," he writes in his book Poirot and Me.

↳ Documentaries: BEING POIROT (2013) TRAVELS WITH AGATHA CHRISTIE & SIR DAVID SUCHET (2025)

[tsukinoshinjiu]

Willow Bark and Chamomile Bookbind

I've handbound @ssschrodingers-cat's LU fanfic Willow Bark and Chamomile! Took me a long while since I've been really busy with work and irl stuff, but I'm proud of the final result!! I will also be making all the files public in case anyone else would like to make their own binds :D Check below the cut for everything!

I feel that my handbinding skills really improved since last time (save a few nicks i gave myself LMAOO). It's definetly not perfect but it's probably my best so far. I really love this fic and its been in my brain ever since I read it. And now it's in my hands! If anyone else wants to bind this for yourself, I have shared all files necessary below! I would love to see if anyone does it too!

I do not give permission for any of these artworks and files to be re-sold. It is for personal use only.

[castieldelamancha]

physically at work, mentally lost in the fact that what started as a "i will show you how to be a gentleman, you show me how to be a pirate" ended being a lesson on love, self-discovery, trust and forgiveness

[lilithofpenandbook]

Something about Snape, 31-38, with pure black hair, not a single sign of white, despite that being the age most people start going grey

Something about how he had the full dark hair of youth and died like that

Something about how he never truly grew up like he should have

Something about how he was always stuck there in the past, stuck as that Snape boy from Spinner's End, stuck as Snivellus the boy who the Marauders hated for just existing

Something about how he died there in the same place he nearly died as a boy

Something about how he died in that place, bloodied and wounded, raven black hair, no difference between him and his boyhood self

Something about how that black hair was perhaps a sign that he was still living in the past, that a piece of him was eternally frozen at 21, at 16, at 15, he died a man yet he wasn't one, he wasn't a boy but not quite a man

Something about how his portrait among all the other heads of Hogwarts is the only one whose hair is fully dark, whose face isn't lined with age.

Next to them, he is a boy. Perhaps he always was.

[utilitycaster]

I've been a pretty harsh critic of Dr. Friedman and Polygon's general Critical Role coverage in the past, and while I think her latest article for them critiquing Campaign 3 is a fairly good one, it does in many ways cast an even harsher light on her kid-gloves handling of D20 and WBN. However, I want to talk about these two excerpts, because I think she hits on something I've increasingly noticed in Actual Play:

"This is where Critical Role’s strength — that Exandria often feels like a real, complex world — collided with the needs of a D&D campaign (a clear adversary, clear plans of action, forward momentum)."

and

"But the confused way D&D handles religion and divinity — polytheism as imagined by midwestern American Protestants — turned the question of how to handle this particular cosmic horror into a glue trap, paralyzing the players for dozens of hours of circular existential debates. Gods once mechanized (or digestible) become just another power bloc, and for players used to a system where in the end you are “basically gods,” the line gets blurrier still. And as D&D’s messy cosmology added friction to much of the campaign, D&D’s mechanics also don’t have the necessary friction for the interpersonal beats that make Critical Role compelling."

I agree with both these statements, as someone who, to be clear, enjoys D&D 5e. D&D supports a range of narratives, but all are ultimately a story of gaining power and fighting off or through a series of adversaries; if your characters are not doing that, it raises the question of why you picked a system that gives you few other options. (This is also, I should note, an increasingly loud question when it comes to Worlds Beyond Number; I fell behind for personal reasons after the Coven arc, but Brennan's initial statements about D&D as scaffolding were perhaps too true; almost every interesting mechanic, in a game with minimal combat that has thus far felt primarily focused on how the three protagonists have fundamentally different adversaries, has been homebrewed, to the point where the cosmology and baggage of D&D has felt like a liability rather than an asset).

D&D also has, in part due to such programs as D20, developed a reputation for being world-agnostic, and that ultimately isn't true. D&D does struggle to make the lines between "real divinity", an archfey or similarly powerful entity, and a L20 character feel sharply defined on a mechanical level; once you give a god a stat block, it can be killed (and on a metanarrative level, revealing the gods' statblocks in Downfall serves to make them both immense, yet also more fragile. The hit points are many, but still finite.) There are a number of questions most D&D worlds simply fail to address - and to be clear, this is not a flaw provided you have buy in. A level 2 warlock in D&D is, in most societies, an one-person lethal force unless the entire town swarms them at once, knowing that many of them will lose their lives in the effort; a level 2 warlock PC, however, is almost never, in-world, treated this way, and indeed is framed as an underdog in a harsh world despite usually having the ability to destroy the entire tavern.

D&D has also developed a (not undeserved) reputation as being The Dominant TTRPG put out by a massive corporation, and has developed a (not deserved) reputation as being itself uniquely problematic as a power fantasy, particularly by people who conveniently forget where Pathfinder came from. I've previously covered that, for all people demand non-D&D actual play, the viewership drops precipitously whenever a big AP show that made its name with D&D dares to branch out, and, related to that, I've seen an uptick in people who are excited for D&D to subvert itself. They wanted Campaign 3 to subvert these norms of divinity and heroic fantasy, cheered for it...and ultimately it was unable to do so. I don't think it's accurate to say that D&D's lack of interpersonal mechanics was the problem here, given that Campaigns 1 and 2 (and again, D20) have no such issue; but rather that since D&D's lack of interpersonal/RP mechanics require more effort from the players to initiate, the debates on the nature of divinity in a world and system that could not sustain them sapped any energy for the late-night watch conversations D&D can support when you're not fighting against it.

I think one of the many lessons we can learn from Critical Role Campaign 3 is that if you go up against D&D with an attempt to destroy it from within, your story will instead find itself conforming to the shape of its container, often to its detriment.

[sthilarions]

X-Men-inspired AU where the boys are still ghosts, but they were killed (in part) for being mutants

(hate crimes are most likely to occur at the intersection of multiple oppressive axes, of course)

Edwin was killed before the Atomic Age when mutants were not yet publicly known, but his peers certainly knew he was strange, uncanny, too graceful and too flexible, too sensitive, hilariously easy to make jump with loud noises, and they knew when his ears started to grow points and his eyes turned smoldering red that it would be even more hilarious to push all their jokes about him being a demon-freak a little further.

The first time he teleported was out of the hands of the boys holding him down, but it was too late; Sa’al already owned his soul and it delayed his death by barely moments.

His body in Hell has the pointed ears and red eyes, but his ghost form, under his control, does not.

Edwin did not tell Charles that he had been killed for his sexuality, in another universe; in this universe, he tells him about neither that nor his mutation, lets Charles believe the quirks he can’t fully hide (the sensitivity to sound, the slightly-too-much-grace, the flexibility at his wrists) are just Edwin being Edwin. He doesn’t have the words for it, at first, anyway, knows only that he started becoming demonic even before going to Hell.

Charles does know the words. All of the words - mutie, genejoke, genefreak. Has heard them over and over, since he first gave his mum a delicate pink mushroom that he grew from his hand, and his dad saw and asked and Charles didn’t know yet not to tell. He learned.

He learned, very well, but when his mates started kicking that kid, and he started punching them off, the clearing filled with what he later learned was Amanita virosa, the Destroying Angel, and it was a little too late to keep his mouth shut, then.

After he figured out what the Destroying Angel had been, there was a pit in his stomach that never quite left at the fear that some idiot St. Hils kid had tried one at some point in the years after he left and before he went back and burned them all up. Just half of an Amanita virosa cap is plenty to kill.

Edwin was the first person he told mostly of his own will, because he was pretty sure Edwin wasn’t real anyway, and also Edwin had probably seen the amanita and definitely saw the mold that crept up the attic walls as Charles died.

Controlling fungi doesn’t come in as handy as you might think, as a ghost detective, especially since it doesn’t seem to work on magical mushrooms. (He apologized to Edwin for not being able to stop Teeth Face over and over. The one fucking time his mutation could have actually been a good fucking thing, and he was useless.)

Crystal initially assumed Edwin was being a dick to her because he was old and being bigoted about her psychic mutation. Edwin pointed out, to little effect, that bigotry about psychic mutations hadn’t even been invented yet when he died.

The Cat King forced the truth out of his mouth with a golden spell, and then looked at Edwin’s crimson eyes with his own yellow ones and called them beautiful, and it hit something, in Edwin, that he didn’t know how to process.

When Edwin was taken to Hell for the second time, his pointed ears and red eyes came back, again, as his control over his form was ripped away, and he still doesn’t understand how Charles knew it was him and not a demon badly imitating him. But Charles assumes he must have been somehow warped temporarily by Hell, and leads him out with scarcely a word about it. Edwin could have never said anything, and the silence would have been unbroken, both agreeing never to mention it again just as they haven’t for the last 34 years, but -

But Edwin confesses his love on the steps of Hell wearing his own skin for the first time in decades. And Charles’s fingertips brush against the sensitive points of his ears, and Charles looks into the ember-red of his eyes as though they don’t burn. And he finds that somehow, as much as he has always hated it, as much as he has always associated it with death and hatred and pain and Hell and damnation, he can’t bring himself to shrug his natural form off when he gets back to Earth.

Crystal’s eyes bug out, but she doesn’t say anything until after it’s all over, when she punches him quietly in the arm and mutters that he could have just said he wasn’t being a bigot. (He did, he points out, to little effect.)

Niko loves his ears and his eyes and the grace and flexibility with which he moves, when he lets himself, for the little time she gets to do so.

And after Esther…

Edwin holds his hands out to Charles and says “There’s something I’ve been practicing. Do you trust me?” And Charles, as he’d known he would, takes his hands and says “Always.” And Edwin tells him to close his eyes, and then pulls him in closer, wraps his arms around him, and pulls again, and Charles opens his eyes to their office, a continent away from where they had been moments before.

“Well,” Charles says with a grin that shines like the sun, with lips the delicate pink of Marasmius haematocephalus, the pink bonnet mushroom, the resurrection fungus. “That’ll save a lot of money on mirrors.”

[bowenoke]

no more celestial body symbolism. embrace fast and furious casting headcanons. take my hand. let's watch all 10 films together so we can accurately assign characters to previous life series winners. I believe Fast X: Part 2 (releasing 2025) can become a crane wives situation if we do our best

[da-janela-lateral]

"Mob has black eyes" "Mob has red eyes" listen What If

[galactaknightyaoi]

☀️ IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!! 🌙

This is my gift to myself :) I drew my favorite guys ever.

For a while I've been itching to draw the wedding outfits from this post again. I made them up on the fly as I was drawing, but I actually really like how they ended up turning out. They're super cute!! (though, yet again, you can't see almost any part of Dedede's outfit... 💔)

But then I couldn't get it out of my head to make a companion piece for it, with their mirror versions. And so. I did. What they have going on is a little bit messy, though...

Marriage or divorce!! Take your pick.

[celtrist]

Controversial opinion: Vox's design sucks

...

Because he should be wearing a NORMAL TIE. not a BOWTIE. It would:

Add to his businessman persona

Give a place for that wifi symbol to go that isn't awkward

Be a good opposing design to Alastor's bowtie

Potentially give the idea he's moved away (or attempting to) from Alastor. Especially if they had it that Vox USED to wear a bowtie.

Also, we joke about it but seriously, why does everyone have a bowtie when it doesn't make sense for some characters like Husk--

I rest my case your honors.

...

Rebuttle:

Vox having the bowtie could signify him latching onto his past with Alastor and not being able to move on

[c-kiddo]

thought u_u ... level 20 caduceus design with braided hair decorated with jewellery like his dad

[3am-brainrot]

I AM LA REVACHOLIÈRE.

I AM THE CITY.

[exaltior-a]

Father like daughter, Mother like son