#<<if you squint

[zedif-y]

judgement day.

Eight days until the end of the world.

You look down at your watch, and think, that’s plenty of time.

I.

There is laughter and there is blood on that first day, the beginning where nobody is really all that afraid. The news looms over the horizon, but doesn’t seep in, doesn’t soak into your bones. Oil and water.

II.

There’s fire. It’s red-hot as it scorches, burns off your fingerprints. There’s soot in your friend’s hair. Hell-forged, you call yourselves, sweaty and singed and running from danger. We’re hell-forged, you and I.

You and me. Me and you.

Slowly, you start to build.

III.

Howling wolves echo in your skull, clawing for release. You blink, and there is fear in your friend’s eyes, a knife in your hand. Blink again, he is against a wall. Blink, the knife is gone. There’s a piercing scream. 

But not yours. Not his.

Never his.

You remember it in parts: a knowing look from a friend, another watching your back. Moonlight shining down. The glint of a blade, long hair in the wind.

Five days before the end of the world, you killed someone who trusted you.

IV.

They’re chasing you.

They’re chasing you, hunters after prey. Sharks to blood. Old allies blur into enemies blur into ghosts, and your legs ache and there’s no escaping it but you know damn well that you will try. Copper-tang crimson sits between your teeth, dripping past your lips.

Come and get me, you laugh, the sound grating against your throat. You hear the gnashing of teeth, nails scraping against stone. Come and get me, asshole.

You survive. Through all odds, by the skin of your teeth. You survive.

Red cakes under your fingernails.

V.

The thing about the past is it will not go away. It haunts you, battered and bruised and grinning with missing teeth. He smiles at you and he looks like a lover, beautiful as a night terror. He waves at you, and you beckon him closer, and the words I trust you tumble from beaten lips.

Swallow back the acid. Grit your teeth.

He follows you and it feels almost familiar. Hand in hand, past enemy and past love. You talk nonsense, watch as he giggles and nods. If you still loved him, you would tell him to run.

You grin, and you beckon him closer.

The thing about the past is it will not go away. So you blow up the body, burn what remains.

Bury the hatchet. Dig a grave.

VI.

On the sixth day, it sinks in.

VII.

On the day before the end of the world, you watch your best friend die.

On the day before the end of the world, you wonder when you will follow.

VIII.

Eight days you’ve waited. Eight days you’ve survived.

You’ve buried more bodies than you can count, your grief heavy as an axe, deadly as a blade. 

Part of you hopes to be the last one standing. The last face on a ruined world. It doesn’t matter, but it does. You’ve come so far. You’ve lost so much.

The sun beats down on a scorching field. You think of friendship, forged in hell. You think of fire.

You think of love.

But this story ends one way, and it isn’t soft nor sweet. There is no glory, no sun-burning triumph. As your blood seeps into the grass, you do not face the sky, the heavens above.

Faces and memories rush behind your eyes. People you love, people you don’t. As the light begins to dim, you wonder, distantly, if people are cheering.

The world ends, but not with you.

—

Eight days until the end of the world.

Impulse looks down at his corpse, and thinks, that wasn’t nearly enough time.

[1prodigy1]

Section 31 Bashir: No.

Beta canon is tripping if we’re expected to believe that Julian joined Section 31 after the Dominion War.

Hello?

His fascination with being a James Bond-esque hero was a staple since the beginning,

BUT IT WAS DECONSTRUCTED OVER AND OVER!

In the first few episodes, Julian excitedly talks about practicing medicine ‘in the frontier.’ And Kira immediately set him (and us) straight by reminding him that that ‘frontier’ was her home. It’s not a black-and-white issue of bringing new ideas to the natives, it’s approaching a culture that doesn’t want/need Julian’s savior complex.

Addendum: The savior complex is rooted in Julian’s desire to be extraordinary in a normal way. There are multiple ways to read him wanting to be the suave spy and hero. He could be neurodivergent, he could be trans, and/or he could be wrestling with sexuality.

All of these things deviate from the norm, which is something Julian wants to do… as long as it earns him positive attention. Of course he wants to be strong and brave, but not at risk of being seen as completely invincible and inhumanly capable. His spy worship comes from the idea of people being extraordinary in socially acceptable ways and situations.

(I want to state that this trait completely disappears when Julian has the opportunity to help people. I would argue that in a medical crisis, Julian is at his best and bravest. Another reason why I refuse to believe he would become an agent for Section 31.)

Back to the main point of deconstruction. One of Julian’s most prominent relationships is with Garak. His initial interest in Garak is because he believes Garak to be a spy. They spend many an episode with Julian implying/outright asking Garak who he is.

It’s a very fun game for him and Garak both.

And then we have ‘The Wire’ where we, and Julian, learn that Garak isn’t full of glamour and mystique. He’s a deeply flawed individual traumatized by his years of assassinations and espionage.

Instead of being excited by the ‘spy intrigue’ of it all, Julian makes it very clear that he Doesn’t Care. He has the opportunity to press for more from Garak, and he doesn’t. He even has the opportunity to ask Enabran Tain (who would have gleefully told Julian if it meant he could twist the knife that much deeper into Garak), and he doesn’t.

The whole episode goes so completely against Julian’s spy worship that we’re meant to understand that he will always, always choose real lives over his pretend one.

Honestly, everything about Garak is a critique and commentary about Julian’s spy fantasy.

Think of ‘Our Man Bashir.’

Garak made it very clear that Julian’s pretend world was nothing like a real exercise in subterfuge. He continued to poke holes in the holo-program until Julian had to make an actual tough call.

If we put aside the writers’ reasons for separating Julian and Garak from that episode on and look at it from a narrative-lense, Julian distanced himself from Garak because he didn’t like what he saw in himself.

Was he really someone who could sacrifice a life to save the collective?

He doesn’t want to be the one making those choices. Julian has already showed how deeply he values the lives of others. He’s a doctor; he saves lives, not takes them.

I could go on. The entire sub-plot with Section 31 and Sloan was meant to show Julian’s disillusionment with spy games.

He made his choice not to play.

Beta canon expects me to believe he went through all that character-growth for nothing?

Of course he went to Cardassia Prime to alleviate the human (human-adjacent) suffering there!!!

[twd-draws]

Started making my designs for the hermits! I'm hoping to get motivation to work on other designs 😭😭

[trashy-greyjoy]

really love dynamics that are like 'it honestly doesn't matter if you view them as romantic or platonic, the point is that they love each other. the type of love is inconsequential, all that matters is that it's there'. gotta be one of my favorite genders.

[theo-files]

is this anything

[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:

[qiqilasblog]

The eye opened and I wasnt prepared.

[blorbosinmyheadcentral]

Supervised Machine Learning

[void-dude]

I serve you: What if therapy worked a little tiny bit on BILL?

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

I said a little

[eternal-moss]

I forgot to post this, which I made while binging the manga

[infernumequinomin]

Have we considered what it means that Laois is so good at killing monsters, the one thing he loves, and so bad at fighting humans, the thing he feels most distance from. And inverse Kabru is terrible at killing monsters, the one thing he wants to destroy, but so good at killing humans he would have killed Falin 6 different times when he tried to kill her if her anatomy had been more human, despite his love for and drive to protect humanity? Have we considered what it means to be able to kill that which you love but not that you hate? Has anyone fucking considered the imposter syndrome that has to come from only being good at killing that which you love most??? The fear of not being able to protect yourself from the thing you most think is a threat simply because you cannot find a way to understand it enough to take it's life?

[lxboratorii]

and they say wine is romantic

[bamsara]

Local chaos god gets humbled, creates chaos over it. His aim still needs some work though

I really need to stop drawing Drunken Gods chapter stuff and actually finish the damn chapter lmao

[aveloka-draws]

The bishops of death

And some doodles

[skyberia]

missing pieces

[aria-greenhoodie]

He’s a paragon of mental health, guys.

Click for Quality!