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one of my sexual fantasies is to have someone notice my absence and wonder about me

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Happy birthday Usagi 🌙✨🎂

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MOVING IMAGES CMYK Embroidery | Evelin Kasikov

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STOP no more live-action remakes. We're going the other way now. Animated Casablanca. Animated The Godfather. Animated Oppenheimer. Animated Fight Club.

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let's struggle to dine with mama

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I think they’re fabulous

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Strawberries - René Tweehuysen, 2013.

Dutch, b.1957 -

Oil and tempera on panel, 22 x 25 cm.

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While I appreciate Hiroko taking into account the power dynamic at play I find ABSOLUTELY hilarious that she thinks she ever hold the power over Ayaka at any point in their story.

Ma'am that woman is a menace and you have been at her mercy since she fell for you but good try.

[icyday]

Every poll on this blog is about fictional characters only. This request was sent to us and we made a poll in response to it. Send any Blorbo-related question you want to our inbox and we���ll make a poll on which people can vote with their own Blorbos in minds

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Lynne Drexler (USA, 1928-1999)

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Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[icyday]

I want to [remembers that suicide jokes only further damage my mental health] fuck you like an animal

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literally them

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A horse.

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one thing people need to understand about leverage is that it quite literally invented competence porn.

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The last three arcs (Bid Poker, Human Auction, and Four Kingdoms) all work together as a conversation about trust. It can definitely seem repetitive, but I do think the later arcs don’t so much repeat any of the points made during Bid Poker so much as they build on those points.

The whole Bid Poker arc serves as a basic and direct conversation about trust. Harimoto’s group makes for a formidable foe because they have an outside connection of trust already in place. Akiyama and Nao are able to keep trust in each other because of the bonds they’ve built up over the various games. The unaffiliated ‘extra’ players don’t initially trust anybody, but come to trust Nao by the end because, through her actions, she has proven herself trustworthy to across several games, and that trust in Nao becomes the key to Akiyama’s final victory and the players’ salvation.

Human Auction also looks at trust, only this time instead of it being the extra players who are required to trust to attain their idea result, it’s Nao who has to put all of her faith into other people. Which, for all that Nao is said to be overly trusting, she hasn’t actually had to entirely trust someone with her ideal result since the 2nd round. But in this arc, Nao is only an active player long enough to figure out a plan, and set enough pieces in motion to make it possible to execute. After that, it’s all on Akiyama (who will be her ‘enemy’ in the next game) and Kaneko (who is basically unknown to Nao) to achieve her results.

Four Kingdoms takes that conversation two levels higher. The first level is that it’s now the two masterminds (Akiyama and Yokoya) who need to entrust their ideal results to the players from the two ‘extra’ kingdoms. Both of their plans require their two teams to fall early and leave the other two teams to battle it out. Yokoya trusts that one team will defeat the other while Akiyama trusts that a stalemate will happen.

What I think ultimately decides the final outcome is that Yokoya actually doesn’t care about which team wins, and just assumes one team will triumph over the other as a matter of course. Once Wo and Wei go down, his work is done, and he mostly just waits around and tries to gloat in the meantime—at least until the stalemate possibility comes to his attention. But even then, he doesn’t even try to do anything until the last minute.

On the other hand, Akiyama cares enough about getting a stalemate that he’s taken active steps throughout the game to encourage the final two teams to reach that point. There’s more at work here—and this is where I think Nao’s influence comes in, both on the members of Wu and Shu so that they don’t wish to betray each other and also on Akiyama who is able to trust that those ‘weak and selfish’ players will do what he needs them to do.

The second level is what happens once the stalemate does happen: When Akiyama talks about ‘entrusting to humans’ and the concept that once you get to know someone, you can entrust something to them, that also includes someone like Yokoya, who has been actively in opposition to him. That last conversation between Akiyama and Yokoya where Akiyama talks about doubt and trust and Nao’s victory and then ends it with ‘The battle isn’t over yet’ and especially in the tankobon where Akiyama makes it clear that there’s still something for Yokoya to do…all of that points to Akiyama entrusting the end of the stalemate to Yokoya, the only player motivated to actually break it.

And, in the tankobon, Yokoya after thinking about everything, actually does end the stalemate in a way that favors Akiyama and Nao’s ideal outcome. And it’s because Akiyama’s taken steps to make Yokoya’s default methods very difficult and because Nao has come to understand Yokoya’s mindset very well—and even sabotage Yokoya’s idea of perfect victory, that this is able to happen. Kind of the epitome of doubting someone to get to know them and then entrusting them with ‘something’.

Trust throughout the series is something that escalates from the easy ways of trusting in Bid Poker to trusting even the enemy by the end of Four Kingdoms. And similarly from the ‘weak’ needing to trust the ‘strong’ in Bid Poker to the ‘strong’ having to put their trust in the ‘weak’ in Four Kingdoms. And in the middle of it ‘trust’ as something that’s earned not just in the receiving of trust the way Nao does in Bid Poker, but also in the giving of trust.