#which is think is still true

[crowtits]

So sorry if everyone else got this already, but what do you MEAN stack was still in the juke joint the morning after? I figured on my first watch that he'd just run away like Mary, but there's no way he would've been able to find shelter before sunrise, not with how quick it was and how there was really nothing else out there. WHICH MEANS he was still there that morning. Which means, smoke's last stand isn't just an act of vengence and greif against the klan. He's still protecting his brother, straight through the end. Which is a wonderful piece of storytelling but it ALSO means that stack had to sit around and listen to his brother die!!! The sun was still out so he couldn't actually do anything!!! He just had to sit there and listen!!!! ryan coogler what the fuck!!!!

[uncanny-tranny]

The leftism/anticapitalism leaving people's bodies the zeptosecond you imply that disabled people who aren't "productive" still matter in society and need to be treated like intrinsic equals who have a place in this world:

[emacrow]

A lost kryptonian founded.

Superman was just taking a break out of the Fortress of solitude after a couple of training to defend himself against kryptonite in case of another fight against Lethor.

Clark watched the Icy landscape in silence. It was quiet as the sky was dark, with only the tiny sound of a dangerously slow beating of a drum or a heart right underneath the ice..

Clark immediately went into Superman mode, driving right into the very glacier of frozen ice, only to nearly crash into a body in some large tunnel hole large enough to fit an adult.

It was a boy, a preteen at most curled up in a ball hugging himself with black and white hair that had a frost covered half of a crown on his head, eyes closed as If asleep with frozen tears stuck to his face like icicles, wearing a kryptonian suit with the initials rip on his chest.

Superman didn't think much or twice as he grabbed the boy carefully, diving out the hole he made from the Icy grounds.

The boy was ice cold, much colder then space itself if it weren't for the icy breath.

He dove back to the Fortress of Solitude in a tiny bit of panic, not to think at all as the Fortress's voice of Lara spoke out with a hologram.

"DNA Recognition, distant cousin once removed, Emergency Defense security disarmed."

Her eyes flickered a bit as if a message was being played, her face look a bit worried and hopeful.

"Oh, child of my beloved brother, Jac-al, if you have survived long enough under the eccentric of my brother and found the Fortress of Solitude. I hope you that you didn't inherit my brother eccentric antic to malfunction everything he built without forgetting to check if they are faulty."

[teratomatica]

you always land on all fours

[starry-bi-sky]

mmm throwaway conversation between Dan and Danny that popped into my head that I had to write out:

"You spent ten years being a one-man mass extinction event, then went back in time and fought me, and lost." Danny snarls, arms crossed and throat tight. His mouth pulls back to bare dagger-sharp teeth, and his eyes burn with the familiar thrum of ectoplasm heating up behind his eyes. "If I didn't believe you were half of Vlad before, I do now."

His other self -- and really, can he even call him that? He's half of Vlad too. Two halves severed from each other and welded together to make a new whole, -- snaps his head over to him. Wild-eyed and furious, he looks unlike the man Danny fought before, the one unruffled and untouched, unbothered by the world around him. It's familiar, but not like the way a reflection is.

"What's that supposed to mean." The Other hisses, matching Danny's scowl one-for-one with fangs much bigger and sharper than his.

But there's a reason lions fear hyenas. Danny matches the rumble in The Other's chest with one of his own, and shoves his face close to his. "I don't lose."

[fire-on-fuel]

the most important distinction between boba fett and jango fett is that jango fett grew up on a farm and then in a traveling mandalorian merc clan and boba fett grew up in a city sized lab and then juvie and then every gutter in the galaxy from here to nar shaddaa

[peace-hunter]

tfone au where OP is created as the last of the primes but way after them, a sparkling born at what were thought to be the last days of the war against the quintessons, the beginning of a new generation of peace after eons of war. a child meant to be loved and raised knowing nothing of war nor sacrifice.

he's kept mostly out of the spotlight by his siblings, who don't wish to expose him to everyone's optics so young, and want to wait until the war is done and over to properly introduce him to their people.

except of course the primes are betrayed and murdered by sentinel, the war is lost and everyone who knows and cared for the truth is either banished or outright killed in order to suppress it.

and the high guard, the ones the primes trusted the most, the ones that were supposed to protect them, the ones who failed in their most important duty, have to make a choice. to take the last prime, their last hope, with them to the surface, a hostile environment where there's little to no supplies and where they'll be hunted down by both sentinel and the quintessons as the biggest threat to their regimen.

or hide him in plain sight. place him where sentinel won't think to look for him. one more sparkling among many. and hope it will be enough to keep him alive. pray to primus that he'll protect his last child long enough for them to come back for him when it's safer (even if most of them have already lost their faith on him when he allowed the rest of his children to be massacred like that)

they almost lose their resolve when they realize they will have to take the little one's cog away in order to make him blend in with the rest of the newborns (and oh do they burn with murderous intent when they see what sentinel has done to their people but it's not the time yet-) but in the end they decide an impaired little prime is better than a dead one.

and so in the chaos of thirteen dead primes and a sudden energon crisis, a little sparkling who very few mechs really knew about and even fewer had seen completely vanishes. and in the depths of iacon a mech in charge of a new batch of newborns scratches their helm in confusion as they realize they must have miscounted the first time.

optimus prime is quietly erased from any official records by sentinel, written off as dead when they find a sparkling's frame mangled beyond recognition after an attack on the base of those rebels that insist on being a thorn on his side. killing the sparkling hadn't been precisely in his plans, he probably could've found some use for it after all, but he's not particularly upset about it either.

and orion pax grows up with an ache on his spark that tells him he's missing something far more important than a t-cog and dreams of gentle and loving hands, cradling him against the frames of mechs he cannot recall the faces of.

[dollopole]

I was just thinking about the fact that in so many Merlin fics, Merlin keeps being an healer/doctor/medic, which makes sense, since that’s how he started his life, by helping people however he could, but now consider this:

Merlin, who has lived so long and more than probably witnessed the deaths of thousands, even of those he loved, cherished and respected. So what if a millennia of life completely flipped his view on what it means to heal and study medicine. What if after all Merlin saw, everything that happened had the opposite effect on him, which means that he stopped trying and left the job to someone else.

Merlin still helps, surely, in the end, it’s in his nature as human, but we can already see how he changed, even only after ten years of being in Camelot and witnessing death after death.

What if he despaired because disease spread and not even his magic could help it, what if his magic decided that humans had to live with their own course of actions and so his magic simply refused to help them, which got Merlin just angry at the prospect of doing this for so many years.

But now take into consideration when Arthur returns:

I believe Arthur would be the healer/doctor/medic this time around.

He would be eager to help everyone he can, because that’s also in his nature, but since he can’t do it anymore in the way he once did, he has to find another path for him, a path that would make him heal too, heal from all the times he killed, instead of helping someone in danger.

Arthur lived a life of death even before Merlin could start to think about killing someone.

Arthur had his hands smeared with blood since he was a child. Being Uther’s son was automatically, in both magical people and peasants’ perspective, who lived under Uther’s tyranny, a sin and a guilt, even before Arthur could pick up a sword.

He did not just kill sorcerers, but he was raised with a mind of a killer of justice. To defend his kingdom, his father, his counsellors, his court and his people no matter what he felt regarding it, was and had always been his main duty.

He was trapped in a murderous cycle, literally, where he couldn’t do anything but raise himself to believe that the only way to help people was to kill them.

On one side, we have a man who spent his life helping people and who got tired of death, and on the other side, we got another man who spent it killing people and still got tired of death.

But to Arthur and Merlin it happened in different ways.

Where Merlin left the responsibility to someone else, Arthur decided to take that responsibility himself, in the hope that maybe, one day, he could bring back to life all those he had condemned for the simple act of living as themselves.

[scarfonbannermanroad]

Aroace shipping discourse is such a strange phenomenon. I'm sure it happens with other sexualities too but whenever an aroace character pops up its like a senate hearing over how to treat them.

[kpchrs]

Anyway, Buffy used to be an "I'll die for you" girlie but then she became an "I'll live for you" girlie, if you care.

[ooooo-mcyt]

Scott Smajor (cc) is such a good story teller actually and the common themes he uses in his storylines captivate me. I think we should talk about how good he is at Themes more often. If I wasn't so tired I'd write essays.

[rhaenyras-alicent]

can't stop thinking abt the concept of arthur hearing about this 'emrys' throughout different occasions here and there in the beginning of s4, and at first not thinking much of it, then when the name keeps getting repeated from different villains/sorcerers he interacts with, it finally catches his attention and he becomes genuinely concerned. he makes it a bit of a personal mission to find out who he is, but it's all a very lowkey side plot that's not the main focus (think of the 'traitor' arc also in s4). of course he talks about it with merlin, but to avoid suspicion, merlin shuts him down every time and tries to make him think this mysterious sorcerer is nothing to worry about.

as more time goes on, and the more arthur learns about this powerful sorcerer always protecting him from harm, and as much as he hates to admit this to anyone, most of all himself, as he's only ever been taught to hate magic and anything to do with it- he starts realizing 'emrys' is less of this evil entity that he has to hunt down and kill, and more of a guardian angel that he has genuine interest now in getting to meet. which would also be interesting in terms of contradicting morgana's plot in the same season.

then, in the s4 finale, something that merlin does or says at the end makes him finally connect the dots. he says nothing. the season closes with him just.......... left with the unbearable conflict of it all. the feeling of absolute betrayal from his own friend- the closest person to him that he turned out to not really Know at all, the anger at being lied to and his own obliviousness, all with also the gratitude to this man who has been protecting him without asking for anything in return, the confusion of why he's doing any of it, and the question deep down whether he even deserves it. he is just. left with so many questions and contradicting feelings that he just... says nothing. and we are left with this as the cliffhanger for s4's ending.

[ohitslen]

Something other about his eyes

Bonus! Based on this quick thing I did this afternoon and the idea took a bit more shape and turned into that thing from above uEK

[artharakka]

Beautiful, But Broken

[khattikeri]

one of my favorite things about mdzs is that for how heavily its plot involves politics of classism and misogyny... even the characters most directly impacted by it can't and don't free themselves from it. literally the closest exception is mianmian.

meng yao being the "son of a whore" wasn't some sort of commie awakening for him that led him to wanting everyone to be socially equal. he played the political game, climbed the ladders, sucked up to and backstabbed and murdered people, including other prostitutes who actually had nothing to do with how he and his mother were treated at the brothel he grew up in.

he put in so much extra excessive effort for even a fraction of the same respect that members of gentry cultivation clans got. and he did deserve to be treated more humanely! but he feeds into the exact same system that created him, leading to his own undoing.

his efforts were for a fragile upward mobility that was never going to hold up. he never surpassed his origins nor did he empower others in similar stations, because the society he lives in is not one that would accept that.

the second he got caught and all those crimes exposed, he was scapegoated to hell and back, replacing wei wuxian as society's terrible one-sidedly evil boogeyman overnight.

speaking of not-quite male gentry, i think it's interesting that wei wuxian explicitly doesn't try to climb the ladders in BOTH lives, knowing full well that anything he does will be punished just for the sheer fact that he is wei wuxian.

wei wuxian is scolded for giving intelligent and correct answers in school. lan wangji does the same and is praised.

wei wuxian occasionally lounges around with fellow disciples and is punished. jiang cheng does the same and mostly escapes.

wei wuxian refuses to carry his sword around in public (after losing his golden core, which nobody knows) and is scorned as an arrogant upstart. nie huaisang has been doing the EXACT SAME THING for YEARS and nobody bats an eye.

unlike jin guangyao, wei wuxian knew subconsciously from the start that his acceptance was superficial and that he could be cast out any time. when he was 10 and recently taken in by the jiangs, he canonically would not eat or use "too much" food and water because he thought they'd find him a nuisance for "wasting their things" and kick him back out.

now away from just the classism, yu ziyuan is a proud and strong noblewoman in a society that belittles and derides women for everything they do. her strong cultivation doesn't matter. she's victim to the vicious rumors of her husband loving another woman who is strong like her but apparently had a more likeable personality.

it doesn't matter even if jiang fengmian didn't cheat or that wei wuxian is wei changze's son with cangse sanren; yu ziyuan can't bear with the humiliation of herself (and by extension her children) not being "good enough". she's ridiculed for "failing" in that one duty as a wife, mother, and woman.

she lashes out and takes out that anger on everyone present for years, giving her children lasting trauma and also being a key element in how the jiang family and yunmeng jiang sect are effectively wiped out at the hands of the wen clan.

madam jin doesn't even have a name outside of the fact that she's married to jin guangshan. i don't even remember reading anything that indicates if she's a strong or weak cultivator, or what, which in itself proves that to most people, it doesn't matter. she's "just" a woman.

of course she's angry at her husband's affairs and all the bastard children they bring in. but she also can't do anything about them, so she lashes out at the few people she can: servants. non-cultivators, probably. those very same bastard children.

shoutout to meng yao getting shoved down a flight of stairs at age fourteen, because if madam jin tried that move against her husband instead, it would make her lose even more face, which as a noblewoman she'd never do.

and that's not getting into how jiang yanli is consistently sidelined for being physically weak.

that's not getting into how mianmian was actually a good cultivator, but was mocked by everyone around her for trying to stand up for wei wuxian when everyone was turning on him. how everyone scoffed at luo qingyang's words as "just some lovesick woman" who "obviously wants to marry or bed him since he saved her".

luo qingyang is the only one of these characters who HASN'T died. she didn't play society's games like jin guangyao. she didn't dig her heels in confidence of her own abilities like wei wuxian.

she didn't bitterly lash out like yu ziyuan and madam jin. she didn't gently accept it like jiang yanli.

she just LEFT.

she married an ordinary merchant and cultivates separately from mainstream cultivation society, and therein found her own peace and happiness.

mxtx doesn't bother with particularly class conscious or feminist vocabulary to hand-hold readers into understanding these disparities, but that choice highlights them & the deeply entrenched politics of their society even more. i really love it.

[arthursfuckinghat]

Whenever Arthur talks badly about himself in the mirror I always think about this one picture