#oxygenbefore1775

[theshipsong]

for his birthday (aug. 1), zeke + gifts

[marshmallow-rainbow139]

OMG you also watch My Happy Marriage? Me too! I started reading the manga about a year ago and was so happy to find out that there's gonna be anime about it

I really ike it, i needed something not focused on suffering and global misery and stuff and this piece was just wonderful. Yay for fluffy romance, although i also like how it portrayed the consequences of bad childhood in the mc's life. I also love visuals and the cast, it's packed with almost all of my favorite seyuus which is a bonus ofc <3

YES!

I started watching it after clips of it showed up on my Tiktok FYP.

I think I'm going to read the manga after the season ends.

And, boy! I need fluffy romance and I'm a sucker for the arranged marriage trope.

Some people may find Miyo's character annoying because she has no backbone, but they have to remember that people process trauma differently and throughout the first half of the show she has her guard up as defence mechanism. Miyo, who in quick succession lost her mom, her father doesn't give a shit about her, got a new stepmother who hates her guts, a walking failed abortion that is her sister (Does Kaya get a redemption arc?), she's forced to be a servant even though she's the noble and legitimate one and comes from an all-powerful bloodline that makes her a sought-after woman. And the latest episode... that's what I call character development. You go, girl! The more she's away from those toxic people the more she grows.

I also like Kudo. Get yourself a man who is willing to literally burn the world for you. I'm curious about his background and his origin story.

I'm also waiting for the live action movie as well.

[robosuta]

omg omg OMG not Pieck eating ice cream during snowfall. What an icon, what a fit of defiancy, what non-chalance worth coveting. If there is another person to do the same then it'd be Porco although he would have to suffer the consequences of a sore throat <3

LMAO I'm crying at your descriptions 😭 I love reading descriptions that you know were narrated by a writer ;P Pieck waits for winter because it's the season where the weather matches the temperature of her body. she's built different. Porco on the other hand.....

[roseofdarknessblog]

Haven't started a picrew in ages. So here we go, I found this pretty interesting one! 😁

Link here

Tagging: @wyvernslovecake @averysmolbear @oxygenbefore1775 @chaotic-on-main @humanitys-strongest-bamf @postwarlevi @bita-bita @stoned-eren @violet-fluff @marleysfinest @this-is-krikkit @youre-ackermine @nube55 @atruewarrior @dont-f-with-moogles @jayteacups and anyone else who would like to join! :)

[sharkmcchef515]

Trumpet and jazz hands: it’s Viking!reiner!!

Notes under the cut

1) @oxygenbefore1775 your au takes up so much space in my brain I have a mind to charge you rent (kidding I love this)

2) absolutely applauding you for those tattoos because holy smokes drawing that took years off my life- and it doesn’t even look that good sad face

3) I added a lot of my own touches and just.. made up stuff for this I hope that’s okay (´∀｀*)

4) I feel like reiner’s padawan braid should be mentioned- it just felt right

5) i still feel like I should be making Reiner’s back more scarred and depict the battles he been through, ya’know? But I was feeling uh- - lazy, so I didn’t

6) is it historically inaccurate for zeke to have glasses? Probably. Do I care? No.

Clearly I could keep going, but I’ll cut it here for now. This au and many of these designs (notably Reiner’s clothes and tattoo) were created by oxygenbefore1975, who you should definitely go check out if you want more. You can also find the fanfiction, bridging tongues, on ao3 (link below)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/58278790/chapters/148412407

[beatricebat]

A silly little observation from “Charge.” “Charge” is the 11th episode of Season 2 of Attack on Titan, the 36th episode overall, based on Chapter 47 of the manga (“Children”). Spoilers for this episode and beyond.

The episode opens with Ymir’s Jaw Titan swinging through the forest toward Bertholdt, Reiner and a strapped-in Eren. Bertholdt says, “Heads up: she’s back,” before Reiner transforms into the Armoured Titan (he’s the Armoured Titan) so Ymir and Bertholdt can hop on his back with Eren and escape to the beautiful freedom of the Liberio Internment Zone.

Rewind for a second:

“Heads up: she’s back.”

Bertholdt, my lanky love…she was fifty feet away from you, and Reiner was looking in the same direction.

I do get it. It’s dialogue for the audience, to remind us that Ymir is working with the Warriors. It’s a brief line to establish where everyone is at, and to line up the transition into them all escaping.

…but it’s still absurd in-universe, and I love absurdity, and so does Isayama. Bro never misses a chance to draw in something deeply silly.

And it’s Bertholdt too! The famously quiet Bertholdt, saying completely useless words! If it were anyone else, I could write it off as them psyching themselves up, but it’s him. There’s whole episodes of this thing where Bertholdt is on screen but has no lines. I’d swear they got the VAs to do filler noises for those episodes just out of embarrassment at how light their scripts were otherwise.

I don’t think it’s just a dub line either. I don’t speak Japanese, but the sub translation is “Here she comes, Reiner,” and the manga translation is, “She’s here, Reiner!” so every version of Bertholdt always says something right here. Manga version is actually especially silly, because Reiner’s already on his feet with his shiftin’ knife out when Bertl says it.

It gets better if you consider @oxygenbefore1775’s post about the Armoured Titan’s bad vision:

Imagine if Bertholdt knew about the poor vision, and thought he was being genuinely helpful to Reiner by pointing Ymir out. (I speak from experience here. I also have poor vision, and have had quite a few times where some well-meaning ignoramus assumed I couldn’t see something large and obvious just because it was in the middle distance. I can see it! I can see the colours and the movement and the general shapes! I just can’t make out fine detail.)

Anyway, that’s the post. It came about because I caught this little detail while I rewatched Charge to check something else. It made me laugh so hard I immediately abandoned the other post to write way too many words about this instead.

[chaotic-on-main]

I'M BACK.

Hi guys. I hope you're ready for this.

Welcome to the first ever cringefest hosted by literally all of us writers on tumblr.

What is cringefest, you might be asking? Well my lovely tumblr fiend, this is an event for us lovely creative writers to band together and let go of all our inhibitions. I personally find that I stress out a lot about my writing, making sure it's professional and well written (hell I'm doing it right now as I write this) and that can be very taxing to go through! It's literally so stressful. But what if we said fuck it and wrote for the sake of it?? To be dumb, to laugh at our dumb ideas.

Let's put our blorbos into some situations, yeah??

But first, some answers to some questions:

What do I do?

Write the cringiest, most stupid drabble (or a one-shot if you have more to say) you can about whatever you want.

This is open to any fandom, character, show, anime, movie, trope etc etc.

You need to put them in some real cringy situations though. And make sure your writing itself is cringy, don't hold back!!

Please tw/cw accordingly.

Smut is allowed obviously, I'm not your mom, but again mark MDNI and tw/cw accordingly.

Can I join even if I don't write normally?

ABSOLUTELY. This is open to EVERYONE. AND I MEAN EVERYONE.

How long does this last?

This will be open starting Saturday, July 8th and will close on Saturday, July 15th.

Who do I tag once I'm done, and what do I tag it as?

Tag me, @chaotic-on-main, so that I can compile everyone's stories into one masterpost as they come in.

As for the tags, please tag it as #cringelord69 (thanks @humanitys-strongest-bamf) and #23cringefest!

I don't feel good about knocking on certain things.

This isn't a question but I hear you!! I also don't want this to feel like this is a 'shitting on' contest, BECAUSE IT'S NOT. This collab is not meant to be mean, discriminatory, or judgmental. The point of this is not to make fun of characters, tropes, scenarios, ESPECIALLY WRITERS. This is literally us having fun and writing these characters in the dumbest way possible. Think of my immortal from all those years ago. YEAH. THAT MY IMMORTAL.

I'm worried about being bullied for my writing.

Again, not a question, but that's okay! So listen bud, this is the best thing about being cringy on purpose. We're out here being shitty for the sake of being shitty and anyone that makes fun of you is the dummy for not understanding the assignment.

Try not to worry about it, but if you are, please just send it to me in an anon and I will post it and link it to the masterpost. Easy peasy!

I said I'd tag those who reblogged the original post here in case you were all interested and wanted to partake!

@wyvernslovecake @humanitys-strongest-bamf @highgoon69 @roseofdarknessblog @sckerman @suukee @kingkonoha @honeylavendr @rae-does-stuff @oxygenbefore1775

don't forget guys, CRINGE CULTURE IS DEAD.

HAVE FUN WITH THIS!!

[theshipsong]

sole salvation: zeke jaeger, messiah claimant

this is so long it has a table of contents, and prompted by an ask from @oxygenbefore1775:

salvation and atonement

recapitulation

genealogy

the paths as wilderness

biblical fiction

all the english bible citations are from the NRSVCE, i reference the gospel of john just once because it sucks, this is barely proofread and about ~4k. two shorter posts that might be of interest:

the founder ymir eve-mary replacement theology run

krista/christa

none of this is arguing iseyama consciously made any allusions!! this is just comparative reading

1. salvation and atonement

i looked up the japanese title for snk 114, "唯一の救い," mostly for the second part. "唯一" is kind of obviously "sole" or "only" (if i know any CJK characters it's number radicals), but i wondered about the nuances of "salvation" because of the association i have for it below. this had me running to good ol' biblegateway.com, whose only japanese bible translation is the from the heavily paraphrased/colloquial Living Bible. a search of "救い" lands us in exodus, isaiah, and my second-favorite gospel, luke.

you guessed it: it's part of the word choice for "messiah." section titles in bible translations are editorialization, really, but the beginning of the nativity story in matthew is headed

約束 さ れて いた 救い主 promise (...tense stuff idk) savior

救 = rescue, aid, salvation; 主 = host, leader, lord

in the hebrew bible context of exodus, 救い most often refers to god delivering the israelites from egypt through moses, while isaiah is christians' favorite prophet for all his shit cited as prophesying the messiah. the title "christus" is latinized from the earliest greek translation of the bible from hebrew, which used "christos" for "messiah." kings good and bad were anointed with oil (chrism) at the start of their reign, so "anointed one," "messiah," and "Christ" really just meant a monarch. quoting some old testament pseudepigrapha (psalms of solomon 17:23-24), the messiah was understood in second temple judaism as a future davidic king expected to "thrust out sinners from the inheritance / to crush all their substance with a rod of iron / to destroy the lawless nations with the word of his mouth." (rod reiss, zeke as marley's spear, the scream, etc)

now for the "sole" bit. i am cursed to read the kodansha USA title "sole salvation" with the connotation of the solae of the protestant reformation, which are 2-5 doctrines articulated by various reformers but not necessarily codified (or creed-ified, as it were), uh, in protest of early modern catholicism. theological authority comes sola scriptura (not the pope), justification comes sola fide (not by following rules the best), and salvation is available to all sola gratia (through god's grace, not individual merit/how many indulgences you can afford).

how we apply all this to zeke:

what is wild about christianity and islam after it is "humanity"'s fall from grace and the promise of a messiah to remedy it were initially about just one people. AoT's dramatic irony has the paradisians refer to themselves as the whole of humanity until grisha's basement, so jaegerist ethnonationalism is, really, in keeping with the prehistoric tribalism detailed in the history books of the hebrew bible. when the israelites encounter egyptians and semitic peoples of canaan and babylon, they know them as pagans, and proselytization is not on their minds at all, nor these other peoples' relation or lack thereof to adam and original sin. with zeke, we see this idea of salvation and its scale and recipients flipped between grisha and ksaver: grisha promises the restorationists that zeke will save eldia, while ksaver and zeke swear to save the world from titans with eldia as the sacrifice.

the lack of consensus of how to "save" eldia mirrors the hairsplitting of soteriology into what modern commenters call theories of atonement. there are many, but the only ones i'll mention are

substitutionary theory: the vague but broadly understood starting point that jesus died for humanity, and most subsequent theories hammer out the details. with this you'll often see writing connecting it to the story of abraham and isaac, and a classic work is derrida's the gift of death chapter 3, but i have to say if this story echoes for anyone in AoT, it is tom ksaver and not just because of the ram.

ransom theory: humanity has been satan's hostage ever since the garden of eden, so jesus was born and raised, incarnated as human by god, to be the perfect sacrifice to buy back our freedom. this is weird because it calls into question god's omnipotence: why respect satan as a debt collector?

satisfaction theory: jesus' sacrifice is more about ethics and respect in that his death is the "minimum" price for our sins, but he goes above and beyond by walking willingly through the exact cavalcade of physical torture that was the passion, which "satisfied" god, working from a classical/medieval fixation on honor and dishonor.

penal (not penile) substitution theory: god cannot forgive sin willy nilly, so jesus bore god's punishment for us. this is lutheran, and if you read martin luther's diaries from when he was an augustinian, this man just wanted a morally perfect Dom. libs and catholics don't like this because it makes god look bad. s/o my kenny post where i put grandpas ackerman and jaeger side by side with a bit of penal substitution, but it also makes me think of grisha (below)

and my favorite, recapitulation theory, which is simply the most literary way to read the gospels: christ's life, not just death, are a do-over of adam's. he succeeds where adam failed, perfectly inverting everything about the first man: he was born of a woman (the cause of adam's fall 🙄) but chaste himself (allegedly), he's tempted directly by the devil and resists, and in death the piercing of his side by a roman centurion echoes that eve was made from adam's rib. it's the root of the idea of jesus and mary as the "new" adam and eve that i dip into in the krista post—antisemitic supercessionism is a later addition. mary "recapitulates" eve by obeying god, not satan, etc.

i didn't do that comprehensive a skim, but grisha and zeke seem to be the only ones who use "salvation" language, while karina braun uses "atone" in snk 94. "atonement" has one of the silliest etymologies of all time: at + onement, unification, when two become one. so framing the crucifixion as "atonement," and referring to mysticism as self-effacement, jesus' death is supposed to reconcile man with god, like we were divorced. its more pedestrian, legal definition is for reparations and such, but i don't think the soteriological version can describe marley and eldia at all. it's not just penal, but penitential (sacramental) semantics on kodansha USA's part. i might go pester @tsuki-no-ura for a direct translation later. but the jesus-est and adam-est thing about zeke, to me, is physical at-onement when ymir fuses his body into the founder, or as zeke says to armin in snk 137, "did ymir eat you, too?" so the death of jesus' earthly body is a horror story if you aren't trinitarian: he is subsumed into god, made indistinct.

2. recapitulation

recapitulation is a useful idea for FOUR AoT characters: zeke, historia, eren, and mikasa. i really think the figures that do the most to "recapitulate" the eldian creation myth are mikasa and historia, though:

historia: have already said my bit! she's the anti-mary, snk 65 has the juiciest theological language of all. see my second favorite gospel luke. she disobeys where ymir's daughters didn't: she says hell no, she kills her dad. she's my hero.

mikasa: eren and armin's conversation about mikasa and ymir more casts ymir as a god with mysterious motivations, so i'd say "whatever mikasa did" gives us a more medieval "satisfaction" model of pacifying her rage

eren: the whole metaphor on humanity penned in like livestock, ymir's leaving the gate open for the pigs. eren's defence of historia, even from her own self-sacrifice in volunteering to inherit the beast, also makes him an anti-daughter of ymir.

zeke: has all of the prologue and expectation to make him seem like a savior. if he recapitulates any part of "from you, 20,000 years ago," he starts out as fritz by attempting to order ymir with his royal blood, but ends up just as bound as her. there's a screencap we've all seen overlaying the storybook illustration of "ymir" and "the devil of all earth" with eren, zeke, and ymir in the paths. i have feminist tbh satanist thoughts on the nature of knowledge and forbidden fruit that i slghtly get into in that krista/christa post

this is the point where it's important for me to say this is an atheist post and blog, and jesus of nazareth was one of like half a dozen messiah claimants knocking around judaea at the time, including his own cousin john the baptist. the first coming of the messiah was a nearly as absurd a prospect to jews in the late roman empire as the second coming of jesus is to us, so "claimant" doesn't even mean they said so themselves. some were preachers whose followers got a little too hype, or just actual con artists. but! zeke does have a lot more christian echoes going for him beyond the exact function of his death.

in the original question mae asked about zeke in either marian or christian terms, so i gotta say that jesus was also human and subordinated to god's will, in a similar position to mary, as was adam. adam's rib symbolism is so erotic and penetrative and all i think about when titans in AoT are constructed spinal cord first. to me everything about titan shifters is a feminist issue of bodily autonomy regardless of gender, and the power of the founder to "rewrite" eldian biology is the most god-like, terrifying, violating thing about it. this is where a lot of more progressive christian theologians struggle, too, with the question of how is god, in all his power and goodness, still permissive of suffering? or is it that god is not in fact powerful, simply all-knowing? and is that worth jack shit? which is the issue of the royal family keeping the founder after the walls went up.

and we leave this section with the jesussy, or more specifically "the holy lance" that made jesus' side wound. but i think levi went for, idk, his appendix? good enough.

3. geneaology

the gospels of luke and matthew start with lengthy and conflicting geneaologies in support of the claim that jesus of nazareth is of the davidic line through the tribe of judah, but matthew's is patrilineal from abraham through joseph, while luke's is surgically imprecise about jesus' father and thus is often argued to be jesus's geneaology through mary backwards to adam, supported by luke being the gospel to feature women the most prominently. not knowing those intricacies or how legal adoption worked in 1st century judaea, you can say that mary is royalty and joseph is just some guy, ben david or not, because he famously did not contribute sperm. looking at zeke, grisha is just some guy, and dina's blood is the whole justification for zeke's suffering. had she not married grisha, she still would be affiliated with the restorationists, and whatever other child she had would be sacrificed much the same. this supposes that jesus of nazareth was just some guy himself, a typical second temple jewish teacher whose followers were especially rowdy; whether god is real or incarnated himself as human is inconsequential when mary is directly descended from david.

but joseph Does matter from a purely pragmatic point of view of protecting and providing for mary and jesus, from keeping his troth with a pregnant teenager he'd probably never met before to the matthew account of fleeing with them to egypt to hide from herod, and in christian ethics through shit like the Feast of the Holy Family, which replaced the much cooler Feast of the Circumcision.

point is, jesus had two dads! joseph is generally understood as a dead during the time of jesus' three-year ministry, but any time jesus refers to his father he does not mean joseph. like ever. zeke nation knows better than i how often zeke discusses grisha, but in my recollection he calls him his full name or says "your father" if talking to eren. in my subtitles for the above panel re: the second paradis mission he says something like "as the former son of the terrorist grisha jaeger."

but to be clear joseph of nazareth is comparatively a non-person. it's reasonable to think he taught jesus his trade of carpentry, though, and two of the greatest songs of all time play with that, along with that tumblrina poem that goes around here frequently.

beyond daddy issues, protestants like this binary of "high" versus "low" christology to discuss jesus as god and jesus as man, though the exact meaning of either varies and frankly i question the historical accuracy of using either to describe ancient/antique christological debates. the way the liberal protestants at the seminary i dropped out of tended to use it is basically sorting jesus's qualities and behaviors in the gospels as divine or human. divine activities = miracles, prophecy, rising from the dead; human activities = flipping tables, being rude to his mom, getting hangry. now these mostly look like venial sins, to err is human et cetera, but the fig tree story is one of the silliest little humanizing details about him, to me tantamount to zeke having a cat's tongue. zeke's whole problem is he holds himself to an extrahuman (not divine, no, since he probably would go with demonic) standard while forgetting what makes him human. ironically, zeke rejects his inhumane father to claim his very human mentor as family, but ultimately half-lives his own life holding himself to or counter their visions of salvation.

the other bit of jesus' family worth connecting to zeke is his cousin john the baptist. but he more belongs to the next section.

4. the paths as wilderness

the torah or pentateuch, the first five books of the hebrew bible, have 99 uses of "wilderness" in the NRSV, and it pops up about 150 more times throughout the prophetic books. of all AoT's hamhanded judaic imagery, i think the paths actually get at something theological as opposed to earthly/fixated on eldia as a persecuted people. the wilderness is a testing ground and a kind of punishment itself, especially in genesis and exodus, for prehistoric figures like hagar, moses, jacob, david, and of course the israelites once they left egypt, wandering for 40 years. they starve and god saves them with manna; left unattended for two seconds they turn to idolatry; and they of course conquer various tribal people of canaan, including the philistines (root of palestine). after that, "wilderness" is much more metaphorical, referring poetically to estrangement between god and his people, the israelites exiled in the babylonian captivity, the destructon of solomon's temple, etc.

but there's one literal wilderness in the gospels. jesus' cousin john the baptist is introduced by a quotation:

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" (Mt 3:1-3)

john the baptist is jesus' maternal cousin who he likely only meets once in adulthood, and i am too pedantic not to explain that baptism, or ritual bathing, is not a christian invention. he hung out around the river jordan wearing a hair shirt and preaching and dunking people in a kind of open-air mikveh. jesus visits him to get dunked as he starts his three-year ministry that ends with his death, but before they meet there are already whispers that john the baptist is the messiah. herod antipas, a roman tetrarch, had john beheaded shortly after this at the request of his stepdaughter, so when herod hears stories of jesus' ministry and miracles he dreads that he's john the baptist returned to life.

one could say the fateful meeting of john and jesus is the turning point for the birth of christianity, like the jaeger brothers in shiganshina, in part because the gospels have john insist up and down he himself is not the messiah, he's just preparing the way for him. this kind of makes him look like a bigger loser than he was; contemporary jewish historians of the time say he had a following to rival or even larger than his cousin's.

but right after his baptism, jesus fasts in the wilderness for 40 days, where the devil tempts him. it's the most detailed in luke 4 and matthew 4. jesus resists like a champ, but returning to "low" christology and questioning what actually makes "perfection:" after three years of preaching in galilee, jesus' resolve wavers, and the "willingness" of his sacrifice is 2,000-year-old point of debate. two moments in the gospels that show he fears his death are praying between the last supper but before his arrest, and just as he dies on the cross. gethsemane, or the mount of olives:

And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." (Mt 26:39)

And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want." (Mk 14:35-36)

Then he withdrew from [the disciples] about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done." (Lk 22:41-42)

and as he dies in matthew and mark, he quotes psalm 22, "eli, eli, lema sebachthani?" or "my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" he shows resolve and despair, i think so very like zeke. his line in snk 114 of "are you watching, mr. ksaver?" makes me think jesus' relationship to god was similarly distant, and three years of ministry have to have changed jesus as much as oh, 13 years of being a human weapon changed zeke. ymir "tests" both jaeger brothers in the paths, so i bet there's some heresy out there that jesus "stole" john the baptist's role and followers from him.

one thing i'm fascinated by that i haven't seen laid out is that grisha and the restorationists deify ymir, even calling themselves "the chosen children of god" (woof), while ksaver the scientist asks the more materialist question of "what was that 'something'" that ymir encountered if not "the devil of all earth"? but zeke has to split the difference between these two. or, the power of the founder and the paths are simply too "god-like" (kenny's words uwu) for anyone to remain rational.

when zeke first describes the paths after he blows himself up, the first thing i thought of was biblical wilderness. in snk 137, he tells armin he's spent "an astounding amount of time" in the paths trying to understand ymir; i'm cursed to fill in that blank with 40-something, years or centuries or millennia. zeke using the sand all around them as an example of lifeless objects that don't seek to multiply reminds me of two things in genesis:

god's covenant with abraham in genesis 15, reiterated in 22 after a ram(!!!) shows up to take isaac's place: "Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore" (Gn 22:16-17). of course ymir building titans from sand recalls genesis 2, that god molded adam from dust, but before god formalizes this covenant with abram/abraham, he also says "I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted" (Gn 13:16)

the memento mori verse that makes up the blessing for ash wednesday is "remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Gn 3:19) as he casts adam and eve from eden.

as a metaphor, i suppose wilderness in the bible evokes a time before creation, the void of possibility, and whether you find that beautiful or bleak, whether dust to dust makes you hope or dread, makes you closer to armin or zeke. my other atheist bestie from seminary was optimistic about the death of the human race because non-human life goes on, and that's okay and probably better; the earth can bounce back from the damage we dealt it, which is what trees growing in the colossals' footprints in the epilogue makes me think of. this makes me sound pro-apocalypse and well! i think this all solidifies that armin is the perfect counterweight, not just for the leaf and baseball; armin has always been curious about the planet, is a true scout, while zeke has been beyond the walls all his life, and has seen too much to be grateful. it's very mercury versus jupiter, details versus big picture.

5. biblical fiction

if you want to read the gospels as a total newb, start with mark because it's shortest, then i recommend matthew, then you can do luke and the acts of the apostles. but for juicy fiction that really digs into jesus as a human who struggles with the weight of expectation, you gotta get into:

the last temptation of christ (1988, dir. martin scorsese): i haven't read the book and only could stand the movie twice, yes even feat. david bowie as pontius pilate, but this was my first reaction to the the endng of AoT and the eremika cabin: jesus on the cross is tempted one last time by satan with a vision of running away and living as an ordinary man with mary magdalene. unfortunately zeke does not get a cabin vision but torment, and frankly his time in the paths is more like the three days jesus spent in hell before easter.

the liars' gospel by naomi alderman: is so crazy good, i love this writer deeply. it's more like four novellas stuck together of jesus' life and ministry and death narrated by his mother, judas iscariot, one of the sanhedrin that "tried" him prior to pilate, and barrabas, the criminal or revolutionary that pilate released to mark passover—all jewish, historical judean perspectives. to mary, jesus is kind of a deadbeat, awful eldest son (two of the gospels give him siblings; she did not die a virgin) who really should be working as a carpenter; to judas, he's an unworthy leader; etc. i think it's an excellent model for a novel-length, canon-compatible zeke fanfic.

if any sources are vague it's almost certainly out of the jewish annotated new testament (ed. levine/zvi brettler, 2017)

also tagging @pisspope 💜

[marshmallow-rainbow139]

Zeke and his beard

@oxygenbefore1775

I was thinking about taking care of Zeke's beard.

I wouldn't mind dating a man with a beard, but I don't know if that man takes care of his beards, so that makes me wary of them. Beards can hold the same amount of bacteria as your ass.

So imagine helping Zeke take care of his beard. You're sitting pretty on his lap. He's shirtless, and his glasses are stored away safely. The smell of ash, cigarrets, and sweat is transformed into the scent of apples and vanilla. You are so focused on trimming his beard, and he's focused on your facial expression. He thinks you look adorable as you frown.

When you finish, you're about to back away, but Zeke quickly pulls you to him and kisses you. You giggle.

[roseofdarknessblog]

Who wants to do a cute fall picrew with me? 🥺

🍁🍂 Link here 🍁🍂

Tagging: @wyvernslovecake @averysmolbear @oxygenbefore1775 @humanitys-strongest-bamf @chaotic-on-main @youre-ackermine @mobolanz @bita-bita @satorizz @marleysfinest @nube55 @stoned-eren and anyone who would like to join! :)

[sharkmcchef515]

I have been thinking about bridging tongues A LOT recently, and it’s led to me doing research on Vikings. And by research I mean horrible histories. I remember @oxygenbefore1775 making a post about how Vikings wrote a lot of poetry, and I’ve just learned that again from horrible histories. I am DEEPLY considering writing poetry about jean from Viking!reiner’s perspective.

[pisspope]

OUGH FIVE FAVES

thanks for the tag @sailorspica my fellow feline friend

tagging @marleysfinest again. do it. and @oxygenbefore1775 @heraldeez @lavender-songs

[heavenzscent]

Tagging Game

The first 8 photos (not taken by me ) on my camera roll :)

Tagging @mochimooon @solivagantress @kuromienthusiast @solciego @oxygenbefore1775 @ariamariastark1

[theshipsong]

reijean v-day 💝⚔️

see vee's prompt graphic for this. i tag anyone in any fandom, i want to hear about your OTP!!

💝 favorite canon scene:

these panels in the 57th scouting expedition right here.

in the anime the only internal monologue we get is from jearmin, which is a big rewatch tell of oh shit! why are reiner's thoughts private (armored hehe). but the ONE time, ONE time we get reiner's thoughts in this arc in the manga... it's about jean. and it's not like he takes over narration like armin did when he encounters annie alone, or like jean does once these three meet up. it's just one stray 💭 of "jean really... is different."

sure, other characters note jean's maturity since joining the corps, but recognition from reiner stands out here as a vote of confidence from marcel!reiner, AND four years later: when he still describes jean as "an irresponsible jerk who only ever thought of himself," even though reiner knows first hand that jean grew so, so much after trost. and it's his fault.

💝 a song that reminds you of them:

i previously posted SASAMI's I Was a Window, but another one that screams reijean to me is Till Death by Japanese Breakfast. briefly, it's about marriage, but she wrote a whole book about the context that this song and her relationship come from, which i highly recommend.

so many images in it are so post-rumbling to me: "get these days to go by like the swaying of a ship," (the studio recording starts with ocean sounds); "sing me to sleep, soothe this insomnia"; "your embrace healing my wounds / teach me to breathe, teach me to move." the beginning of verse 2, "steering on hostile waves of panic, like fighting a wheel that pulls to the right" makes me think of a later jbrekkie song, Slide Tackle, which IS reiner.

💝 favorite official picture/graphic:

back to back on the vol. 32 alliance cover baby!!

💝 favorite fanfic:

i have to say two:

vermin by @oxygenbefore1775: delicious cadet days, delicious fucked up time in reiner POV, delicious, smart tangling with the technological/material/cultural gaps between the walls and the rest of the world. how much of RBA's deep cover is culture shock? the total lack of guile jean has while running roughshod over the land mines in reiner's head with just "bunny." god.

from shiganshina with love by @fromriches-tosin: this is really the one that lured me in. it feels like a locked room, three-hander play, when even being in the wide open air (well, not reiner) is claustrophobic because two characters are intertwined and dug into one another. and as someone who has inhaled shelves' worth of eruri fic and doujinshi, vee's levi is one of my favorites.

💝 favorite fanart:

oh, this and everything by @mikibagels. one thing about reijean that goes so hard is jean's growth spurt, cadet and post-rumbling reijean both have height difference. similar vein, @valmendy illustrating reiner's flirting from never let me go: "i feel like i missed out on my little brother growing up." hello???

💝 why i ship:

i binged the anime so late, just in time for season 4, and when the finale came out i could hardly think of anything other than "we're scouts, we don't know when to quit."

back in my day (i'm turning 27 this month), one dude beating up another in shounen launched a ship, a fleet of ships, and kept it afloat for years, but yams gave us their more obvious, huge interactions in the last... fifteen chapters. but there's so much history between them that screams to be noticed on initial reread and rewatch: the reijearmin (horrendous throuple name) date that was the female titan arc, that jean keeps his cool when the 104th hop on the armored as reibert and ymir try to flee, the whole return to shiganshina, the echo i come back to of "the jean kirchstein i know only thinks of himself."

with jean's OVA, they're the characters whose moms we see the most of besides carla jaeger??? the difference between karina and jean's mother is vast, yet their sons turned out so similar, despite it all. so caring, so haunted by that care. jean takes his leadership in the post-time skip survey corps so seriously, he agonizes over his field leadership in trost, while reiner feels like he killed marcel and bertolt and doomed annie, and in his lowest, lowest moments still manages to protect and worry for falco and gabi.

also, another big why: you people. this is such a cozy pontoon. 😘 happy valentine's day!!!

[marshmallow-rainbow139]

@oxygenbefore1775 I don't know if you pay attention to catholic news but the Pope came to my country and with him came almost the entirety of the roman catholic population and since I live near the capital I see a multitude of them.

Today in the mall I saw a priest that looked like Zeke, without the glasses and beard. I mentally said "Hello, Father Zeke!" when I saw him.

What kinda priest do you think Zeke would be?

[roseofdarknessblog]

Picrew time! Mr. and Mrs. Ackerman say hello! 🥰

Link here

Tagging: @wyvernslovecake @averysmolbear @hangeslefteye @oxygenbefore1775 @chaotic-on-main @humanitys-strongest-bamf @mobolanz @bita-bita @satorizz @this-is-krikkit @youre-ackermine @arlertwitch @postwarlevi @jayteacups and anyone who wants to join :)