thaliawritesblog

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happy pride y’all!!

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It’s so interesting to me that Kingsley Tealeaf, unlike any of the previous people in charge of that body, does actually take interest in the past and those who came before him.

Molly used to run away from any mention of the person who had his body before hand. Nothing good ever came out of it, and every interaction with that past was intimidating and unpleasant to him. A reminder of the shaky foundation and loneliness his life started in. The only thing he knows, and needs to know, about that person, is that they died, and got buried in a lonely shallow grave from which he had to crawl, empty and alone.

Lucien, when he came back, didn’t want anything to do with Molly either. He didn’t care for “the speck”, he wanted nothing to do with the full life he lived, with the person he was. That person was nothing. There is only Lucien. Even as he yearned for the things Molly left behind, the warmth and love that the Nein had for this thing he saw as insignificant (yearning enough to consume, to try and pull them into himself and devour them to maybe feel their warmth), he never bothered trying to understand why. He didn’t have to crawl out of the grave probably, he had Cree to help him out, but he was still the man buried once before, not too far from this grave.

But Kingsley? Kingsley Tealeaf was born in the open, surrounded by people he barely recognised, but immediately showed him care and love. He was covered, warmed, held. Even when he found words again (with help and meddling from these people, who had been there for his entire life), even when he tells them “I am not the person you wanted”, they love him anyway. They don’t leave him. They tell him about the past, and he listens. This isn’t him, this person they’re describing with so much love, but… it’s not a stranger. Not an adversary. A brother. Someone he shares some things with, someone he can pay homage to, who came before him and paved some of the way. Who, in death, gave him the gift of a stable foundation, of people he can come back home to, who can tell him about what the world used to be for this body he’s in, and who the person who came before him was, when he’s ready.

And maybe sometimes they get sad. Maybe sometimes they look at him weird, like they are grieving. They are! They are grieving a friend they lost, but they’re not trying to force him to be that person. They help him find out who he is instead. And with that security, the knowledge that he can forge a future without expectation to repeat the past, he can look back and find out who these people who came before him were. Because when he’s confident he’s his own full person, these other people aren’t a risk to his identity, just a facet of the past he gets to explore.

He called his ship the Mollymauk. The vessel that carries him into the future named after the brother who in death left him the foundation of one.

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guess who’s finally got a library card

and guess who’s gonna start reading the mighty nein origin comics 😏

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untitled | LAM⚡

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been playing this nonstop today 💙

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i’ve not been vocal about being a nijifan on here before, but i wanted to express my thoughts on this side of the internet as we say goodbye to the first vtuber i ever watched and my kamioshi, ike eveland 💙

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calamity | downfall | divergence

shop

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It's been interesting coming into Campaign 2 as a newcomer whose been hanging around in the fandom for a minute because it means I'd heard the criticisms of the early campaign as being "directionless", but eight episodes in it's really ringing as untrue? Like the Mighty Nein have had clear goals and motivations the entire time, even if they're as simple as "Caleb wants to visit a large city with a good bookstore" or "Jester wants to find her dad but in the absence of concrete leads (though she does have a ledger of her mother's clients, of which her dad was one) has decided to make it her mission to help Fjord reach and enter the Soltryce Academy" or "Beau thinks the Baumbauchs are dicks so she stole their mail and found herself fascinated by this one contact called 'The Gentleman'".

What I think people were clocking about these early episodes, and describing as "directionlessness" was actually the lack of a big central Plot Goal that all the characters were working towards. The Nein at this stage of their careers aren't working to stop any wars or cults or slavers or sentient cities, they're traveling together because being together is convenient and all their individual goals are pointing them in the same direction (or no direction in particular so might as well stay with the group). Whereas the early episodes of Campaign 1 had the Plot Goal of "find and rescue Lady Kima" and, once that was achieved, "help Kima recover the Horn of Orcus". The individual members of Vox Machina had their own personal motivations that intersected with this common plot goal, but it served as something the whole group was reaching towards. The early Mighty Nein episodes don't have the same sort of overarching plot framework, as Matt opened up the world after the initial run of episodes in Trostenwald and left it to the players to decide where the pursuit of their individual goals would take them.

But every character pursuing an individual goal did give the early Mighty Nein a direction; they were all pulling towards something and making choices in hopes of being brought closer to it, even if those goals varied between the group's members. The absence of a Plot Goal didn't result in the group having no direction. Indeed, as Campaign 3 would later demonstrate, the presence of a Plot Goal doesn't guarantee a group will have direction. It's the ability of the characters to turn motivations into goals and actions that creates this momentum.

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Of all the people to found the Cobalt Soul, it always had to be someone like Crokas. If you give the Orb of Avalir to someone seeking intelligence, seeking power, seeking mystery, or fame, you end up with the Cerberus Assembly at best. To be perfectly honest, I think in just about any other context it becomes a source of division rather than any kind of lasting foundation. It works because Crokas is the last person who would ever pursue it, but he's also the kind of person who is going to use it once he has it. He's not going to squirrel it away for someday because that's just not how he thinks and he doesn't see having it as something to brag about because he needs the time to understand what he has.

This whole order is built by a man who understood how to move through the world with strength alone but needed to learn how to learn, needed to discover what it meant to understand. For him, the ability to fight is innate, the ability to comprehend is earned. I would argue that for the large majority of people, this would be the other way around. In realms where knowledge is so sought after, most are taught to read and write, to think and to question before they are taught to fight because the priority of their pursuits is better served by the softer skills.

Crokas isn't like that. And so the place he builds is one where he is at home and where he is understood.

The Cobalt Soul, as we know it best, looks a little different now. It's had time to spread across nations and continents. It's grown to look a little more like you would expect at first glance. It's been built into a behemoth that obscures it's roots in a dragonborn monk with a complicated past, but there's still room for people like Crokas. Like Beauregard.

She comes to the Cobalt Soul with a complicated family background, no home to call her own, and more fire than patience. She knows how to fight, but not how to listen or understand. She needs to be taught the value of information and the possibilities that come from the vast wealth of knowledge at her fingertips. And it doesn't happen immediately because, again, behemoth, but she finds a place in this organization for a person who needs to learn how to learn. In spite of the fact that she doesn't fit naturally into an organization that prioritizes knowledge, she is afforded the time and opportunity to figure it out on her own terms. She is given a chance to find the balance.

They came to the Cobalt Soul a little bit broken, a little bit out of their element. They knew strength, they learned to listen. They became something great because they were given the space to be who they had always been, just with a little bit more. Crokas built a place for the people like him, and centuries later, Beauregard Lionett found it.

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help i've fallen in love with yaelokre's music

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happy ten years critical role!!

and to celebrate, i finally watched the final ep for exu: divergence and my god

to see kraghammer where the first stream began, and end at stilben where vox machina first met got me so emotional. but for liam to reveal and narrate the end of the ep for matt, returning the gift he had given him all those years ago - god i haven't stopped crying

what a beautiful love letter to a world that has been built with so much love and care over these years. a world that inhabits so many stories that have touched the lives of many, including my own. i'm so happy i stumbled into this world 7 odd years ago and i can't wait to see what else unfolds

"thanks for a good story."

"let's do it again."

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i can’t believe i managed to stay awake for the entirety of c3 finale but i’m glad i did

what an ending to such a wonderful story told over ten years. can’t wait to see what other stories the cast will tell next. but until then…

good night bells hells

good night mighty nein

good night vox machina

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Hey, pals! Weird Bleach mystery time!!

So, I was perusing the Bleach wiki, as is my wont, when I found this interesting tidbit on the Squad 4 page:

Members of the 4th Division are not allowed in the Human World.

which is cited as coming from Bleach manga; Volume 13, Chapter 111, end of chapter sketch. But when I looked it up, it's this:

It's Squad 4-related, obviously, but it doesn't say anything about the World of the Living. (My copy is the Viz version, and I also checked, ummmm, an online copy that I know of that has a slightly different translation and a compilation I found that someone had made of all the chapter sketches and they were all the same.)

This anecdote is mentioned in more detail under Iemura's entry:

In order to increase his handsomeness, Iemura searched Soul Society for contact lenses but was unable to find any. When he heard rumors of a renegade Shinigami selling contacts for Shinigami in the Human World, Iemura used his self-proclaimed fame and handsomeness to get around the ban on 4th Division members going to the Human World in order to find the contact lenses seller. When the rogue Shinigami instead offered him laser surgery using tiny beams of Reishi, Iemura thought it sounded too good to be true. Upon seeing the machine that performed the surgery, and noticing the dark eyeshadow on the Shinigami's face that resembled burn marks, he chickened out. Due to certain unspecified problems, he can no longer go to the Human World, leaving him wondering what would have happened if he had tried the surgery and if he would still be single.

This is sourced to the chapter sketches accompanying 109-112, which are literally all just Iemura complaining about his job and Squad 11 and Captain Kyouraku, it doesn't say anything about this shaggy dog contact lens story.

Does anyone know what gives? Is it possible that the chapter sketches got changed or moved around when the chapters were collected into a tankouban? It seems too big a difference to be blamed on translation error, but then again, the picture is just Iemura writing in his dumb journal, so maybe the text could have been changed. I feel like I have the vaguest memory of all this nonsense--maybe it got adapted into a Shinigami's Cup at some point??? I don't know!! I just wanted to know if Squad 4 was allowed to go to the WotL, like, if some shinigami got a neck injury on a mission and shouldn't be moved, but now I'm invested. I'm in too deep. someone who is good at Squad 4 trivia please help me out. my family is dying.

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omg mha hope agency has hit 200 hits!

thank you so much to everyone who is giving the story a go!

i never thought anyone would be interested in my ocs, so the fact there are some people out there who are reading my fic means a lot.

my new year resolution actually is to try and build a buffer of chapters so i can begin to upload a little more consistently. so, please be patient until then!

if you wanna check out mha hope agency, here's a link:

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happy new year guys! 🥳🥳🥳