#returning from the depths

[kikker-oma]

Hello! I was wondering if I could request something. (Your art is beautiful and Ilysm)

So what if there’s an instance in battle where it’s best that four splits? Let’s say…time and twilight are exhausted and terribly hurt so Four splits and each color surrounds them on every side to protect them while they try to heal each other?

Thank you! 💜

HUZZAH!

[demigods-posts]

while the stables scene is a great example of percabeth's growth as a couple, particularly regarding their switch of roles in who plans for their future. an even better example is when they first told the other they loved them. annabeth, who is a well-respected strategist due to how well she can plan for the future, tells him as quickly as possible before something or someone could take him away from her again. she seized the first opportunity she had free of plan. percy, on the other hand, who is known for his impulsiveness and reckless planning, tells her two books later. not because he wasn't head over heels the entire hoo series. but because he was planning for the right moment. he wanted to wait until he could give her permanence and stability on a silver platter because he knows how much it means to her.

[gen4grl]

these two are totally related to sycamore and lyra right????

[captainfairygodmother]

You know what I really love that should be explored in even more Merlin fanfics?

Immortal Leon. Like, you've just got Merlin over there sulking about while he waits for Arthur to return. Then there's just Leon, living his best immortal life, doing the most randomest shit known to mankind

[soopmod]

easter bunnies! 🐇🍷

[rawliverandgoronspice]

I think what chronically upsets me about TotK is that. So much of it could have been so good with so little change.

I am into Zelda as a sacrificial, wondrous and silenced creature who must literally carry the blade of the hero as a wound inside her forehead and silently wait to be humanized again --and the injustice of a kingdom built on such a premice doomed to repeat itself, especially if the kingdom was founded on such dubious grounds to begin with. I am into Ganondorf forcing the present to reckon with the past through the most violent clash, forsaking everything that made him a person while sinking down into petty vindictiveness until no connection and no humanity remains, even though independance was what he was trying to protect in the first place. I am into Link as somebody trying to hold onto his most important connection to the world he once knew being used to force him into a conflict that has ultimately nothing to do with him (sure that's SS again but, it could have been explored even further). I am into Rauru as this self-important, self-made king who used his own association to godhood to live out a power fantasy that refuses to ever be acknowledge as such, maybe compounded by the fact he is one of the last of his species and feel, himself, the crushing weight of their fading heritage?

I don't know, the Tears of the Kingdom or something????

But, it all tragically depends on one crucial thing, which is to allow hylians to be wrong sometimes.

And it's wild to me how all of this incredible potential to comment on the series' history and the characters' role in it is just. Flattened into nothing, because Good must be Good and Evil must be Evil, and Hyrule must be righteous at literally every cost --even if it means nervously rewriting their own history through convoluted logic that rejects conflict and depth and vulnerability at every turn.

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Making a public announcement that I have been a horrible little coward about one of my best friends moving away, and if I don't write her a loving card and pack up her belated Christmas present to mail tomorrow, I deserve to be dragged through the streets in a barrel of nails and y'all are on the hook to do the deed

[cake-emu]

spent the entire episode worrying that nobody would eat the shakshuka

[glacialrelict]

i know everyone is talking about the maxiel implications of that FL point but have we considered the dando implications... moreover, have we considered the crazy post-singapore maxieldo triangulations...

[spaceman-spaetzle]

yo does anyone in the hetalia fandom bookbind fics

[seasbound]

𝐑𝐄: 𝐏𝐎𝐊𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐍 𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐌

i want to preface this by making it clear that marine, despite her affiliation with team rocket and the work she does for them, loves pokemon. she first dreamt of becoming a researcher due to her love and curiosity for them, especially water type pokemon. she has never harmed any pokemon and always conducts her research respecting their well being. her own team is a reflection of that. this is not to shy away from her being a villanous character, but for my own comfort, as i draw a hard line at animal cruelty of any sorts in both real life and fiction.

all of the pokemon on marine's team have been with her since her teens, with the exception of spheal. she's seen them hatch from eggs and evolve while taking care of them throughout her journey to kanto and other regions. there's also some extra pokemon she has for research, but she does not use them in her main team for various reasons [ most of them are incredibly debilitated and cannot be released back in the wild or used in battles. ] here's the pokemon in her main team that accompany her at all times.

primarina: aqua, a female primarina, was the first pokemon marine has ever gotten as a child. it was a gift from her father and has been with her since it was a popplio. it is what sparked her curiosity about water type pokemon and her main companion on her studies. it has a docile yet tenacious temperament, being fairly protective of marine and the other pokemon in their team.

milotic: coral, a female milotic, was rescued by marine as a young feebas during one of her field trips to brooklet hill. its tail was caught between two rocks and, after marine helped it free, it'd show up at the lake whenever the girl stopped by, eventually being 'captured' by her. it's calm behavior always puts marine's mind at ease whenever she's feeling stressed or overwhelmed.

vaporeon: wave, a male vaporeon, was the first pokemon marine ever had seen hatch from an egg. she received it as a parting gift from her father, before she returned to alola from kanto during high school, and can be usually seen resting atop her shoulders or in her lap. it has almost a cat like behavior, being very affectionate towards marine but distrustful of other trainers.

ninetales: lumi, a female alolan ninetales, was found by marine as a young vulpix badly injured in mount lanakila. she bandaged its wound before leaving the mountain but would return regularly to check on it. after it made a full recovery, it started to follow marine out of the mountain, deciding to stay with her instead of its pack. because it was its own decision, the usually hostile ninetales pack didn't attack marine. it has a calm and sweet personality, prefering to stay out of its pokeball and keep marine company while she pulls all nighters doing her research.

kingdra: rain, a male kingdra, was rescued by marine from one of team rocket's illegal pokemon smugling sites in johto. it was one of the first moments she experienced first hand the extent of team rocket's work and she could barely sleep that night. during a walk to clear her mind, she saw it in a storage room, contained in a small tank that had barely any room for it to swim around. it was the first time she decided to retaliate against the organization, intending on setting it free in the wild, but having to hide it in a pokeball after she was caught by one of the guards. though initially hostile towards her, it slowly grew to trust marine and is now very protective of her.

spheal: frost, a female spheal, is the youngest and latest addition to marine's team. she found it while exploring a cave in hoenn, seemingly lost and unwilling to let go of her despite her efforts to push it away. she had no intention of catching it, but it's insistence won her over at the end, plus it's cute appearance was hard to resist. it became marine's stress ball of sorts, basking in her attention whenever she feels frustrated with her work or the progress of her personal quest to take her father back to alola.

[necrotic-nephilim]

Tell me why Kara Zor-L is one of my your favs! I'm been meaning to make the jump from the CW show to the comics. Any recommendations?

- @cicero-in-gotham

@cicero-in-gotham oh i would LOVE to!! Kara Zor-L is my darling beloved.

firstly for suggestions, i'll be honest Kara can be... a hard character to read for. you have to slog through a lot of really shitty "male gaze" content to get scraps of interesting stuff. the top comics i'd recommend are

Power Girl: Power Trip

Power Girl Returns

Power Girl (2023)

some people like Harley Quinn & Power Girl. i'll be honest... i did not. and Power Girl (2009) has... ups and downs, is the nicest way i'll say it. but it's also solid for what it is. certainly better than her New-52 content so i can't really complain.

anyhow, i always am enamoured by characters who are disconnected from their "family", especially due to trauma. bc no one really counts Power Girl as part of the Superfamily. and even within the Superfamily if people are talking about the "outcast" of the family, they always say Kon. (which, eh? maybe New-52!Kon but i wouldn't say the main Kon is an outcast, his issues are internal) but to me, Kara far better suites that role. it's one thing to be one of the last survivors of Krypton. it's another thing to be one of the last survivors of your entire *universe* as well. she lost everyone, *twice*.

i adore characters who feel like imposters and Kara is *peak* imposter syndrome. everything about her identity is constructed around not feeling like a "real" Super, or a "real" Zor-L. she has to live with knowing she's on an earth that has Supergirl, meaning they don't need her. she didn't wear the S crest for so long even on her own earth, because she felt like she didn't server it.the only thing she feels like she has going for her is her sexual appeal and so it's so amped up she lacks a personality outside of it. she has been isolated again and again by her trauma and she struggles to face her grief, masking with humor and oversexual appearances. i find that to be so interesting. she lost *everything*, twice. and now she's an imposter who will always hold herself at a distance from the Supers because she doesn't want to make them uncomfortable with her existence. she has to live on an Earth and know everyone is... slightly off. she has Clark, but it's not *her* Clark. she has the Justice Society of America, but it's not *her* JSA. and she doesn't have her best friend, Helena Wayne at *all*, because this earth has Helena Bertinelli as Huntress. (unless you count New Golden Age stuff but that's future timeline nonsense)

i find Kara's lack of identity interesting, and the way she just sort of drifts. she has done a lot of things, but lacks a sense of self importance bc she will never view herself as a "real" Kryptonian of this universe. she's just so neat to me. i also love the JSA personally, they're one of my favorite superhero teams, so i love any character connected to the JSA, they're always so underrated.

the Power Girl Special (which is collected in Power Girl Returns) is like, genuinely one of my favorite single issues ever. that comic just lives in my bones. it also has one of the *best* internal monologues i've ever read. something something comics are art. this is cutting some stuff out but just to show you have beautiful the writing is, this is an excerpt from that comic

people tend to think of hatred as love's opposite. but i disagree- i think hatred is just love's sharpened edge. it's the same passion. the same potency, the same intensity. just a different flavor. so no, hatred isn't love's opposite. grief is. grief is the void left behind after something you once loved was violently ripped away. grief is what happens in love's sudden absence. love is when your cup runneth over. but grief is hollow. a chasm. there is no negotiating with grief. it does what it wants to you, when it wants. you will never outgrow or outrun it. but... you can find ways to grow around it. i never got to say goodbye. i was loved, once. i was once loved so much that my life was prioritized above all else. i will never feel worthy of that love or sacrifice. but i'm realizing now that to freeze or falter in the shadow of that love is the only way to fail their sacrifice. i have to live in the light. i can step out into the sunlight, and still carry them with me.

like that is??? so Character to me. she is Everything. i'm just. so unwell over her internal struggles and how she faces the world, i cannot recommend her enough. she means the world to me and that comic has stuck with me since i read it for it's conversation about handling grief. i am begging everyone to be a Power Girl fan i know she's confusing but once you get the hang of her backstory she's so cool i swear-

[exhaustedwriterartist]

Guys. I have a new au cooking. I prommy I'm still working on Our Other Halves as well! But just know... something fun is coming. I'm not going to post anything about it until I post the next update for OOH, which will be soon.

Stay tuned my friends! <3

[bonesofapoet]

ares crowned by persephone [simon 'ghost' riley x you] requested by @gonnaneedabiggerfloat from this kisses prompt list. apologies for the super long wait, but i hope you enjoy it authors note : the one where simon asks you to leave him to die. language, blood, injury, yearning word count : 1888

Your nightmare started like this.

The sunrise reflected in the eyes of Simon Riley, and you knew this would be the last time you ever saw him. Brilliant pinks and bright cerulean blue looked back at you, instead of his unmistakable deep, warm brown. The colors streaked together adding plums and violets to the painting that would leave Claude Monet breathless with envy.

There was a pull of something strong, something sad coiling within the depths of your heart, yet you found it hard to care, hard to notice when beauty such as this, rose tall above him to envelope you in the arms of a nightmare staged to be a dream. Golden clouds shone ethereal in the midst of the colors staining his irises, the sole collector of a piece so priceless he would only have to pay with his life. That didn’t matter yet, when the sparkle in Simon’s eyes was his and his alone - the very ones, in fact, that enamored you so shamelessly every time you looked into them, no matter the color they were wearing.

Eventually, you woke up from that dream, unsure why it read like a nightmare, when the blood was staining your hands, and not the ones cradling your jaw under the rising sun.

And yet this time, there was no dream. This was slowly becoming a waking nightmare, and no one ever had a chance with those. That distant, punch-drunk love was now accompanied by something else. Something other.

Something so incredibly familiar you had to press pause on the subconscious chaos swirling too fucking fast as it roared loud enough in your ears; it even rivaled the soft thundering of the ocean rising into view.

You and Ghost crashed through the treeline and onto rocky soil, rocky sand, high tide just beginning to creep up the shore. It hit you then, when you stopped halfway down the beach. The uneven terrain had forced you both to slow down so you didn’t go down. It was a textbook lightbulb experience, in the moments that uneasy pace gifted your mind a chance to catch the fuck up. You knew what it was, now. What had been gnawing at your nerves for the last half mile and why it seemed familiar, unsettlingly so.

It was the feeling from that dream months ago. That same pulling, that same coil of sadness wrapping itself a new home inside your heart, your stomach, flowing through your veins. Except it was accompanied by dread, now. The very same kind of quiet dread telling you this was truly a nightmare, when you swore it was a dream.

“Go.”

That couldn't have been right. The water was so loud now, it was a strain to hear your own breathing. “What?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me. Fuckin’ go.”

The arm slung around your shoulders pulled away, and Ghost leaned his weight on the leg without a tourniquet failing to do it’s fucking job.

He speaks with steel, because he’s Ghost now. The urgency of your lieutenant was dominating the pale shadow of tenderness lurking in the shadows, if you knew how to listen for it.

(You heard it plain as day. Plain as the facts laid bare before you, yet you pretended not to see them.)

“Ghost -”

The rising sun, now beginning to peek over the writhing horizon, began to light up the spray of the ocean. If only you were surprised by this sudden streak of martyrdom - yet it was never sudden, not really. And he would not dare consider himself a martyr.

Golden beams rose slowly and languid against a sky so vibrant, so haphazardly painted with the colors that mirrored your nightmare. You began to understand now, looking down at your hands. You were wearing gloves this time, but they were covered in blood all the same. All of this - it was becoming hard to look at. Your hands jammed themselves in the first pockets they found. 

Soon enough, your eyes fell down, down, down back to Earth, back to Ghost trying to keep off his injured leg.

That serpent of sorrow coiling surely around your heart constricted, something sharp and horrible when you remembered your shoddy medskills, how he would need a proper medic - and soon - unless he preferred to see the shores of England again from a body bag.

Your eyes slid to the spray quickly, all golden glitter sparkling in the sunrise, a precursor to the stars no doubt already waiting in the wings for their turn to grace the skies once again. And yet, you took none of it in. Not the tide inching closer and closer to your boots caked in muddy blades of grass and rock now stained with blood. Not the wild roar of the waves, gargantuan, almost, in the very near distance. Not even the way they reflected the sky painted above you in a palette so ethereal, Claude Monet would be breathless with envy.

All of it was lost, horribly muted among the cataloged scene of your extraction gone, no doubt, sideways. Ghost was shot. Your rendezvous had changed. Your team had been separated, all of you pursued, all of you trying to clear another day. And yet, all of this paled in comparison with the knowledge of Ghost - Simon - bleeding out way too fast and insisting that you fucking leave him.

If you were a perfect soldier, you would have done so immediately.

“Did I fuckin’ stutter? Get out of here, meet the rest of the team -” he cuts himself off, glances down at the pretty trail of blood he’d been kind enough to leave behind. Simon looks to the ocean, endless and vicious and impossibly beautiful before him. Flashes from before begin to greet him, an old friend that stopped coming by, long ago. “I’ll buy you some time.”

“Like hell -”

“That’s an order.” it was rough, his voice. Harsher than usual, and trying like hell to hide something. You suspected, though pushing at this juncture would be unwise, and you knew better than to waste such precious time. It wasn’t instinct, but you flinched anyway. All traces of training had begun to slip away seamlessly and disappear into the sea.

Perhaps Price was right. You should have listened when he advised you to reconsider accepting this assignment.

Next to you, Simon pushed away the old memories, pushed away the weekend he spent on a beach nicer than this one with his nephew back home. It was harder to push away the evening he brought you to the North Sea to watch the stars rise and share their stories, one by glittering one. He tried to forget the way your eyes reflected starlight, tried to ignore the memory of your smile shining brighter than the moon had, once it rose to bathe the world in glory.

But, Simon had never been good at pushing you away.

He was dying, he guessed. Between the worry he learned to read on your face, the set of your shoulders, the argument you tried to raise. And, then, there was the wonder about what had broken within him so quickly, so unexpectedly to entertain these memories here, in the middle of a fucking mission, of all places. Ghost had learned to shut shit that off.

Simon, it seemed, was succeeding on cracking the mask from within -

“Oh, right. You’re ordering me to leave you to die, then? Is this how you want to throw away everything we’ve grown to be?”

“If you’re still feelin’ fuckin’ generous, you can make your grand rescue with the team, yeah?”

Right. Right.

It was a waste, the cruel beauty of the world squandered on a moment such as this. As the sun’s rays broke through the last precious minutes of dawn’s fading blue hour, you held Simon’s gaze through the last rays of night. The sunrise was reflecting in the eyes of Simon Riley, and you knew this would be the last time you ever saw him. Brilliant pinks and bright cerulean blue looked back at you, instead of deep, warm brown. The colors streaked together adding plums and violets to the painting that would leave you cursing Monet’s name until the day you died.

That didn’t matter yet, when the sparkle in Simon’s eyes was his and his alone - the very ones  enamoring you so shamelessly, even now, in the midst of the hardest thing you will ever have to do.

He reaches for you, and you reach back without a thought, without a care for the precious time you were surely wasting. Simon reaches for you, grabbing hold of your arm to tug you closer, your own gloved hand wrapping around his wrist, sleeve soaking through with blood. Ghost has gone now, melted away for a moment, leaving Simon one last minute of clarity with you, untainted by the sins of his past. When he finally meets your eyes, there’s peace in them.

You feel fabric along your jawline, sliding gently to tilt your chin to face him fully. It’s hard to see him like this - if only because it’s happening anywhere other than behind your closed doors. Those beautiful eyes of yours drift shut, and the rustle of fabric on plastic drowns out the ocean, inches away now as the tide continues to rise.

It’s something you’ve memorized, the feeling of his lips brushing along yours. It’s a comfort, a plea on your part how you kiss him back with everything you feel, because words simply have no place here. For Simon’s part, the gesture is repaid with all the familiar softness and desperation he holds, in this moment - an apology in the only way he knows how. An apology for what, exactly, you weren’t sure.

Simon felt responsible for so, so many things.

A moment passes, maybe two. Time slips by, a fictional figment that slows everything down and muddles your senses. You stay like this for as long as you dare, and then only a second longer before it’s you, who pulls away from him first. Tentatively, slowly, heart now fully entwined with that coiling serpent nestled permanently among your heartache. If you don’t leave now - it becomes clear to yourself that you never could. Then, all of this would have been for nothing.

So, you let go.

Simon Riley slips through your fingertips, eyes hardening as he lets go of your jaw, the curve of your waist. You see it clear as crystal, when the sun's golden rays fall on the deep brown belonging to Ghost, now, that this moment is all you have.

He braces on his good leg, mask sliding back into place and grip tightening on the only sidearm he has left. There’s a nod forward, a playful glint warming up the cold depths of Ghost’s eyes. “Go.”

Nightmares, you realize, are something you never truly shake. They linger, always, hiding in the shadows of a subconscious, or making a home in the forefront of your mind, always haunting, always taunting you for the rest of your life.

You harden yourself like Ghost taught you, and push everything down, down, down the fucked up rabbit hole you tumbled through of your own free will. “Give 'em hell, Simon.”

Without wasting a heartbeat, you turn and run.

[redrobin-detective]

Pretty wild that Marcy loved and treasured Hambo for a thousand years because it reminded her of her beloved caretaker. She sacrificed that beloved toy as a last request to a temporarily restored Simon which resulted in Betty coming to the future. Betty's actions would go to have great impact to Ooo, including finding a way to rescue Simon from the crown.

I wonder if Marcy ever thinks about how she traded a memento of Simon for the real thing.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Idk if this is interesting but since you brought up the French versions tu/vous situation: in German ganondorf straight up uses the royal "you" for rauru where you refer to a person with the plural pronoun and calls him your majesty and such, while rauru also uses the informal you (du) and his first name for him. Which kinda had me shocked, because in fantasy media kings usually refer to each other with the royal you! It definitely felt disrespectful. But also in the German version ganondorf says, roughly translated: "we ask to be allowed to return (to our place) under the umbrella of the kingdom hyrule, if you'd allow us this grace." So here it's implied the gerudo used to be a vessel state and freed themselves, and STILL he gives them "repeated invitations "??? It's soo off-putting

Hey, thanks for the ask and the absolutely wild input!!

So I did a post a billion years ago detailing my feelings about the french translation of the Show of Fealty scene, its tl;dr being: it's wild they decided to go for the the tu/vous distinction because it just adds 26 layers of subtext to the entire exchange --and I don't know how this works in german, but using "tu" on a fellow adult during a show of power definitively has racist history if the context does apply (and here it's pretty hard not to see colonialist accents to the whole situation).

But it's absolutely buckwild that they gave the gerudos this notion of previously being a vassal state? but like when???? when did it happen, was it all... extremely recent history? like did Zelda just dropped at the end of some sort of unification war, where Ganondorf became a hero of his people for..... very concerning reasons? Like did they need a hero *in that context*?

(cue I need a hero etc my brain will now be haunted for the next day or so)

Like... I don't know I'm sorry if I go a bit insane, but I feel like the implication is either that Hyrule was founded in 10-15 years, given Sonia still looks pretty damn young, mid-thirties at most; or that Rauru/Mineru were trying to handle everything for far longer, and Sonia was a late addition to the picture? And so, in that time, they managed to convince everyone to do a kingdom about it --and that would mean the gerudos had time to either join first/be conquered first, and then revolt, and then join again? Like was Ganondorf forced to submit a first time as a younger king, and then return later with a Molduga army, zero-ing in on the Secret Stones, and then going all Demon King???

Yeah, from what I've seen from literal translations, that seems to be a german exclusive (unless I'm mistaken? let me know!) But it's pretty wild how such small changes in translation literally change the game's fabric and the story it tells.