#the metaphor

[mad-jesters]

"she said even now there is hope to be found but i cannot see it" boromir x "i'm named estel which means hope" aragorn standing in front of devastated boromir..... make it make sense

[obsessed-w-bubble-gum-and-girls]

Child of flames

Oh child, when will you learn? The people from the sun, Radiant and bright, Weren’t born luminous It’s a shame, now I fear to yearn.

When will you see? The light you spread isn’t cruelty.

You’re human after all, Your shadows are real. They hollow the crevices, Of your grieving heart. Face them and heal.

Rage in your eyes, Don’t let them near, You are the sunshine, Brighten others’ lives Born to please For that you must bleed.

The planets, Look up to you. You cannot outrun, What’s meant to be. Hide your shadows, Be their warmth.

Child of flames, Humans were never meant, To light the path.

Yet you fight to live, A life you don’t deserve You aren’t as good as the rest, For you cast shadows, An all consuming void.

You can't go back To being the saviour again Save yourself It’s already too late.

[carrotcakecrumble]

Not the opening shot being Hawk shaving his literal beard

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Sebille: "We'll see how bloodied you're willing to get to pluck the one rose lost in a forest of daggers."

Sebille just casually dropping one of the most beautiful lines I've ever heard.

[selfishpresley]

A lot of you have checo as a literary character and a kind of tragic prophet, but if that comes to bite us in the ass and he becomes a victim to political machinations and the spoils of war so help me—

[twilightstarr-zinnia]

“Why are you being so nice to me?” 

“Well, like I said, you aren't in any trouble, so why shouldn't I be nice?” 

“Being here is supposed to be a punishment, isn't it? In the fortress, I mean.” 

“My goal isn't to make people suffer for their mistakes. It's to give them the opportunity to change for the better.”

“Does that work?” 

“Not always, but often enough that I think my efforts have been worthwhile.” 

“So my appearance doesn't have anything to do with it?” 

Achille did have a generically pretty face and figure, and he wore a quite well made royal purple tailcoat, with a matching bowtie and amethyst earring. Maybe it was a sign of wealth, or maybe it was the fanciest outfit he had to impress with. Many would probably say he was attractive. To Wriothesley, Achille looked like crumbling wood with a layer of polish. 

“No,” Wriothesley sighed. “Don’t get any ideas about seducing your way into special treatment. It's never worked.” 

Achille didn’t look disappointed by this; In fact, he relaxed a little more. 

Oh.

[teenidleadultgirl]

oh my god something about the original back cover covering her mouth and this back cover having her screaming loudly in the photo with her hands cupped is giving me much to ponder

[hellspawnmotel]

the me that did and said those things

[snekky-arts]

Look Up

~~~

I don't usually dabble in realism - but this was a gift for someone very meaningful in my life. And some things just deserve to be painted as they are.

[tawnysoup]

Finally now that the comic is fully public on comicfury, I get to share it with all of you here, too <3

If you enjoyed, please consider supporting by buying a PDF of the comic on itch.io: https://tawnysoup.itch.io/home-in-the-woods

[comradesummers]

the problem with watching buffy the vampire slayer for the first time when you're 13 is that it will fundamentally reshape your brain chemistry to the point where literally all fiction becomes buffy the vampire slayer in different fonts. "watch another show!" you might say, and believe me i have! i promise i've watched many other shows since i was 13. but the problem is that all those other shows as well as films, books, podcasts etc. are simply deviations of buffy the vampire slayer to me. it's the holy text, the primary source. everything else is just commentary.

[aphel1on]

nothinggg better than torturing an emotionally repressed character until every single trauma they've ever refused to process starts spilling uncontrollably out of the cracks. like a matryoshka doll situation of repressed trauma and baby you better believe i'm going in there with a hammer

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[justgivemeabookplease]

Shrek 2, while a cinematic masterpiece, is also an interesting look at queerness and comp het.

Fiona is married so it's time to reunite with her parents. But instead of marrying a prince, she's married to an ogre. Not just that, but she's also an ogre. (Yes everyone knew she would sometimes be an ogre but that was when she was a child, she didn't know she would be an ogre for the rest of her life, and besides once she met the right prince she would stop being an ogre. She was supposed to stop being an ogre.)

But okay they're both ogres. We can still ask about when they'll have children because even if they're ogres they can still have kids, right? That's what married princes and princesses do so naturally that's what everyone does. Even if ogres might not be great parents (I've heard that ogres eat their young, is that something you people do?) it's still something that should be discussed.

And okay you can stay in Fiona's childhood bedroom filled with all the reminders that hey, everyone thought she was just a princess and princesses marry princes. Her toys left out from the last time she played with them. The prince slays the ogre. The princess offers a token of gratitude for slaying the ogre. Fiona wrote Mrs. Fiona Charming a million times in her diary because what else was she supposed to grow up to be?

And Harold, the Fairy Godmother says, you have to fix this, your kingdom can't be ruled by ogres. You were unfit to rule, to be loved, when you were a frog but I changed you, I made you better, I made you a prince. You know how this works. Think of your daughter's safety.

Shrek goes to the Fairy Godmother and oh honey, ogres don't live happily ever after. It's just not done. It hasn't happened in all of fairy tale history. You have to change the both of you to be happy. You have to present as a prince and a princess. It will be better. You'll fit in better that way. You'll be accepted that way.

[atissi]

i don't really like when people say dungeon meshi is accidentally good autistic representation, because while i understand not wanting to make conclusions without explicit confirmation from the author, there's always the weird assumption that non-western authors somehow don't know about things like neurodivergency/queerness/etc. (on top of the assumptions that east asian authors are somehow more naive or oblivious to "western" social issues).

given that dungeon meshi started being published in 2014, it's not really a "work belonging to its times"—it's as contemporary as any other media we discuss on this site, which means it should be fair to assume it engages with contemporary topics (and at the very least, you shouldn't say that the representation is accidental with so much confidence)

but anyways, the chapter "perfect communication" in ryoko kui's "terrarium in a drawer" is some of the most straightforward autistic representation I've seen, and from now on I'm going to assume that laios's character writing is absolutely intentional in that regard: