#you know a parallel post is coming

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

Maeve + Borrowing/Keeping Otis's Clothes

[egophiliac]

I loved your drawing(and I love your style in general) with Leia in your recent post! If/when you have time can we see more of her in your style? I get so happy whenever I actually see people mention/talk about her and she’s not just forgotten because we didn’t get to see much of her. 😭

thank you! 💙💙💙 Leia/Leah/Lea/whatever is fascinating to me. she is the ultimate unknown. what was she like? how involved (or even aware of any details of the invasion) was she? Silver's basically a physical carbon copy of his biodad, so what did he get from her? like, I understand why the two of them kind of have to stay as these super vague and mysterious figures -- the whole point of them is that their story ended 400+ years ago and they're not really relevant anymore (and. well. the more that gets explained about them, the less that can just kinda be handwaved as "oh the politics were Very Messy") (we can sit here and theorize all day but let us acknowledge that, ultimately, canon gave us almost nothing about them post-Meleanor and we'd just be making things up). I do still wonder about her though! RIP Lea, we never knew you and we probably never will.

actually you know what, as long as we're here, I think I WILL go ahead and just make some stuff up about what Silver might've inherited from her instead.

[maines]

You’re the best friends anybody ever had. And it’s funny, but I feel as if I’ve known you all the time. But I couldn’t have, could I?

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) | AGATHA ALL ALONG (2024)

[demaparbat-hp]

In your Spitfire AU, since Zuko is looking after Lu Ten II, what happened to Ursa?

Zuko is slightly older in the Spitfire AU. He was banished at fifteen, his head a little clearer and denial a little weaker than in canon. After his first look through the Air Temples, Zuko decides that if he can't find a myth, he might as well search for the next best thing.

Finding Ursa isn't easy, but in time he makes it to a secluded house in a near-forgotten part of the world. His mom is there, older and stronger and alive.

But she isn't alone.

And Zuko, as it turns out, didn't keep the best company during his search.

When Ursa is discovered and her secrets are laid bare for assassins (for Ozai) to find, she begs Zuko to take his little brother and run. She'll do anything it takes to protect her children, even if that means leaving them behind to keep a target off their back. Ursa diverts attention from them and allows Lu Ten's ancestry to be kept a secret. She orders Zuko not to follow her again, and disappears.

Zuko is left with a little three-year-old brother to raise and a mother he cannot hold onto.

[beneathsilverstars]

✨ ISAT-themed to-do list game ✨

"Because doing dishes is the real time loop"

Set-up

Make a list of 10+ things you want to get done. If your list is on the smaller side, add a repeatable (like "put away eight things").

Make a list of three fun break activities.

Find a friend or randomizer that you can play rock paper scissors against. I think this website would work well, but you can also use a d6 and say 1&2 are rock, 3&4 are paper, and 5&6 are scissors, or any RNG website. Just throw your move first, then roll the RNG.

Decide on somewhere to take notes, like the side of your to-do list or your notes app or something.

Gameplay

You're on the first floor of the house, and you've just run into a sadness! Complete a chore from your list to defeat it. You can run around on this floor for as long as you like, and for every sadness you defeat, you earn one Memory of Defeat. Tally these up in your notes.

Defeated a couple sadnesses? (Or at least one?) Now you're ready to face the floor boss! For each Memory you've earned, you can attack one time by playing rock paper scissors -- cross out a Memory tally in your notes each time you attack. If you win a round of RPS, your attack hits and the boss is defeated! If you tie or lose, you can use another Memory to attack again. The battle ends when either the boss is defeated, or you run out of Memories and the boss kills you.

If you die to the boss, you loop back to that floor, to do some grinding and earn more Memories so you can try again.

If you defeat the boss, cross out the rest of the Memories you earned on that floor. Then, it's snack break time! Do one of your fun break activities.

Repeat for floors 2 and 3. Remember, if you have any floor 1 Memories leftover after defeating the floor 1 boss, those don't roll over to the next floor.

After the floor 3 snack break, it's time to face the King. You can attack the King one time for every Memory you've earned so far, used or unused, from any floor. (This time, delete or scribble out the Memory entirely when you use it to attack.) You have to damage the King three times in order to defeat him, and if you run out of Memories he kills you.

If you die to the King, loop back to an earlier floor with doors open to do some more grinding. When you're ready to try again, touch a tear and loop forward to fight the King again. (The damage rolls over, so if you damaged him twice and then died, you only need to damage him once in your next battle to win.)

Any subsequent times you lose against the King, loop back to an earlier floor with doors closed (aka, to a snack break) so you get another break before you keep grinding.

If you finish all of your tasks, you earn Memory of Success. You can now attack the King without using up Memories of Defeat. If you run out of time/energy, loop back to Dormont. Get some rest so you can try again tomorrow if you want, by either looping ahead to where you left off or starting fresh with a new list of tasks.

When you defeat the King, you talk to Euphrasie and loop back to Dormont! You're done with chores for the day, and you can hang out and relax as you like! ... Until you're ready to face the house again. But that's tomorrow's problem.

Tips and House Rules

I recommend breaking big tasks into steps and grouping tiny tasks together, so that each sadness fight requires a similar amount of effort. Or, you could decide that bigger tasks reward you with multiple memories.

Since you don't know beforehand how many tasks you'll have to get done, if something has to get done today you should put it near the top of the list.

If you want, you could put easy tasks on floor 1, medium on floor 2, and hard on floor 3. Or split them by room in your house or whatever you'd like.

If it doesn't matter which chores you get done today as long as it's some of them, you could use RNG to decide which task to do next.

If you have bizarrely average luck and win every third round of RPS, you'd need to earn 3 memories on each floor in order to beat the floor bosses and then the king, for a total of 9 tasks completed -- but of course, it could end up being higher, or as low as 1 per floor. Keep this in mind when deciding on the size of the average task! If each task (and each break) takes about 10 minutes, then an average game would last two hours.

If your tasks are pretty small and you want to get a lot of them done, you could give each floor boss 2-3 hp instead of 1, and then give the king 5-10+ hp.

For extra challenge mode, you can decide that damage against the King doesn't roll over. Better stock up on Memories before you face him, because if you die you're back to square one!

@todogames There you go! ISAT game! Now, we better get some rest while we can. We have to be ready for tomorrow... So we can finally face against the King!

[seaside-hysteria]

What is it with fantasy high and girls dying before their lives ever began. How we can never really know who they are, or who they could’ve been. Brennan Lee Mulligan I will find you

[asvidema]

final photodiary post from my second playthrough. it was a blast and i enjoyed the game so much more than my first time, having the context of kcd1 now. what a beautiful, stunning, emotional game

[mephoj]

nickel and balloon would be so much more interesting if people explored the way nickel became everything awful that balloon used to be but so much worse ironically all in the name of "protecting" everyone from that history repeating. and not softboy tsundere yaoi or whatever is going on in those tags rn

[biblically-accurate-dca]

daycare sign in the basement you will always be famous

[wafflesrisa]

Oh wait is it a toxic family when the father refuses to take accountability and instead blames the kids for his mistakes? And as a result the kids are unwillingly shoehorned into roles where one is the golden perfectionistic never allowed to criticise the family child, and the other is the black sheep difficult selfish disobedient child?

And the golden child is about to explode because he’s never allowed to have his own opinions and so when he feels real frustration at his father, he can’t land the blame there and so he’s conditioned to blame his sibling instead?

And the black sheep child just takes the criticism and the blame and learns to become overly defensive, because he’s learned no one will watch his back but himself, not even his sibling?

Oh wait it’s not a toxic family.

It’s Scuderia Ferrari

[mymarifae]

oh yeah did you guys know that the official hsr twitter accidentally posted this cutscene art

with, uh, this guy's sword in the background

and that sword also very much appears to be the sword that killed cyrene

and it also happens to look like, uh. phainon's sword. haha

i don't know how many concrete conclusions i want to draw from all of this but man. isn't that something to think about

[silver-horse]

Astarion romance is seriously giving me Zevran romance vibes...the character has a similar psychology but the writing in BG3 is handling this with far more awareness. we get dialogue options to be supportive and whatnot

[inocennt]

in your own words, describe the story suburban legends is trying to convey

aaaa i'm so sorry it's taken me literal months to answer this 😭 this is just such a Fascinating song and i realized i did not have many pointed thoughts on it at the time, so i wanted to properly sit down and try dissecting it and put as many thoughts as i could into it

On its own, I think Suburban Legends tells a story sort of similar to imgonnagetyouback: this sort of undefined, on-again off again relationship that is sort of romanticized within the narrator's mind as being a "quest" to conquer. imgonnagetyouback feels like it has more history to its story, while Suburban Legends feels a bit newer and rawer, but ultimately, I think the gist of their arcs is similar.

I will admit, I don't particularly find this general interpretation of Suburban Legends to be all that interesting to me just on its own. However, I am extremely obsessed with how many lyrical and thematic parallels there are to other songs--especially to ones written after 1989. A few days before TTPD came out, I made a playlist chronicling a narrative that (at the time lol) I felt might be relevant to fathoming what we might hear about in TTPD. I also wrote up a breakdown of said playlist, because even though it included like 4 hours worth of songs, I made it in large part because I could not stop thinking about the sheer amount of parallels between Suburban Legends. I break them all down there, but some of my favorite ones are:

"You were so magnetic, it was almost obnoxious" vs "your magnetic field" and "it's gravity keeping you with me," in addition to this general idea of magnetism in the first verse also paralleling the themes of songs like Invisible String, Glitch, and Willow

"I didn't come here to make friends" vs "I don't want you like a best friend" and other friends-to-lovers type lyrics that tie into the magnetism theme ("I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this," "We were supposed to be just friends")

"I broke my own heart cause you were too polite to do it" vs "I broke his heart cause he was nice" and "I pushed you to the edge, but you were too polite to leave me"

The second verse using the setting of high school as a metaphor for becoming a public power couple trying vs the high school metaphors/setting of Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince and the Folklore trilogy

These parallels (among many of the others that are a bit too intertwined in the playlist to break down here lol) are a big part of what compels me about Suburban Legends in the context of her discography post-1989. It feels like it slots perfectly into the relationship breakdown that preludes TTPD, specifically in how it echoes the same sort of nature of how the relationship came together in Reputation and Lover. This sort of cat and mouse, will we or won't we undertone of behavior, coupled with an underlying sense of this inevitable, fated pull. We were born to be suburban legends. Our mismatched star signs would surprise the whole school. You were so magnetic it was almost obnoxious. Somehow, this was always destined to happen.

And that makes considering the ending of this song all the more interesting.

Because there's a sort of Cardigan-like premonition running throughout the entire song. You kiss me in a way that's gonna screw me up forever. I broke my own heart cause you were too polite to do it. You don't knock anymore, and I always knew it, that my life would be ruined. All of these feel very "I knew everything when I was young" to me. Which is definitely apt for this song; "suburban legends" as a concept in and of itself plays on the idea of an "urban legend," a form of modern folklore. They are propagated via word of mouth and the waves of popular culture, not tangible, scientific proof--which again highlights the inevitability of the central relationship. (Small additional side note about "urban legends;" though not all of them are inherently based around horror and the supernatural, those are still very common themes of many well-known urban legends. Which, taken in conjunction with how she is positing her relationship with this person as being a "suburban" legend, draws an implicit line between the gossip regarding their relationship, and the horror undertones of urban legends, indicating that there is some sort of component about the relationship which is to be feared. Which just! Food for thought next to songs like The Albatross, Blank Space, Slut, etc)

Ultimately, that Cardigan-like premonition isn't enough to deter the narrator from pursuing this relationship. Despite this story ending with her leaving, despite this only being a temporary moment in time and not something that would last forever, she still sought to pursue it. Because as depicted in the second verse, her fantasies about what could be consume her so fully, she is incapable of letting it go, even though she is well aware that she will likely be "screwed up forever." She simply cannot let any "what if?" come to pass. Which is just the quintessential theme of so much her discography, truly, and why TTPD ultimately became the powder keg that it is.

And if I may go on a bit of a self-indulgent diversion for a moment.... I once again must highlight how this feels like an evolution of the aftermath of the Speak Now narrative, and how the impact of those experiences affect the narrator's choices and behavior in the aftermath. Though I've been going insane about how well you can use Suburban Legends to analyze and enhance that storyline of Reputation through TTPD, I also think there's room for interpreting it in the opposite direction, and seeing how it reflects the mindset of the narrator at the time of Speak Now/Red:

"You had people who called you on unmarked numbers in my peripheral vision. I let it slide like a hose on slippery plastic summer, all was quickly forgiven" vs songs like Foolish One, Superman, Babe, Girl At Home; calling back to themes of infidelity/lack of commitment on the part of the muse, and the narrator's tendency to forgive and forget in the face of being personally hurt (you could also thematically tie Innocent into this, of course).

"You were so magnetic it was almost obnoxious, flushed with the currency of cool. I was always turning out my empty pockets." vs songs like Dear John, The Story of Us, Foolish One, Treacherous, All Too Well, I Almost Do; connecting directly to the prior themes of forgiveness and calling back to that running theme of being so completely taken in by someone that it feels like fate, or a gravitational pull. Comparing the muse to something rich and out of reach ("flush with the currency of cool") in opposition to her ("my empty pockets") in order to highlight how unaligned they are vs the age/experience/maturity gap explored in Dear John, Foolish One, and All Too Well.

The entire second verse being her living in a fantasy of being able to be a public relationship with this person, specifically in part because she gets to spite everyone who doubted her ("our mismatched star signs would surprise the whole school") vs Ours.

"You'd be more than a chapter in my old diaries with the pages ripped out" vs Foolish One and Superman, and the distance she depicts between her and the subject of those songs in contrast to the relationship she wants with them; the way the reality of the diary in Suburban Legends contrasts with the fantasy of the class reunion, and also how the association of a diary with childhood contrasts with the association of a class reunion as something attended by adults later in life. The way this yearning for a fantasy out of reach and pairing childhood with the yearning for adulthood is simultaneously depicted in Foolish One (and later, The Manuscript): "Maybe someday when we're older, this is something we'll laugh about over coffee every morning while you're watching the news."

"I know that you still remember [...] when you told me we'd get back together, and you kissed me in a way that's gonna screw me up forever" vs, once again Foolish One. And also the implications of "I know that you still remember" vs All Too Well.

This was a very broad spiel because I am completely incapable of ever doing anything succinctly, lmao. But ultimately, I think that Suburban Legends' story is generally straightforward on its surface. To me, it's a song about being consumed by the best possible fantasies presented to you by a relationship and indulging in them despite the shaky foundation of the dynamic. To me, it's shaking hands with songs like Treacherous, IKYWT, I Can Fix Him, etc. in how it depicts a scenario of someone seeing the red flags in a relationship, but choosing to pursue it anyway, because being haunted by the "what if" would hurt more than the actual pain of the relationship ending.

Because at least that's something she knows will happen. At least that's something she's in control of. This time.

[skymantle]

shall not be mourned...

[starrstruckcanuck]

Been thinking of making a tierlist of my thoughts on all the teams for a while so here it is!! As you can see, I am indifferent to or hate most of the league... 😶‍🌫️🫣 which is why I generally say I'm more of a Canucks fan than a hockey fan lol

[eliseliedl]

every day i grow more annoyed at fandoms giving so much importance to shipping to the point of ignoring everything else 🙄