#((could it have been done better? sure.))

[sotiredmostnights]

"why does awakening present the player with choices that don't even matter"

that's. that's the point. you're supposed to feel like your decisions don't make a difference. you're supposed to feel hopeless when emmeryn dies. you're supposed to feel like you have no real options when facing lucina's judgement. these moments are intended to make the player feel fate's inescapable grip on them, which makes it all the more rewarding when the final choice the player makes in the fight against grima lets fate loosen its grip at last: the choice was made, and it DID matter, and fate was truly bested, be it in the present or 1000 years from now

[scificrows]

i like to make fun of murderbot for being all "i hate everyone, i don't care about anything or anyone, fuck off" while simultaneously caring very much about the people around it and the situations it finds itself in. i love how it "accidentally" ends up caring quite a lot about the friends it makes along the way. but i think something that i tend to forget is that murderbot actively decides to care - at least at some point in its story.

idk, as a person that struggles with depression, this paragraph from artificial condition really resonates with me. prior to all systems red, murderbot had contracts. it had routine and it had protocols. it knew what it had to do to just get by, how to perform so no one would notice it had disabled its governor module. it was deeply depressed, yes, but it was functioning (for lack of a better word). in artificial condition, murderbot's routine is gone. it cannot go on in that state of numbly going-from-contract-to-contract, putting in as little effort as possible, consuming media to cope. that option is gone because it escaped (and note that escaping the company was not an active choice, it kinda happened to it). murderbot has two options now: it can either gather all its energy; actively do something new and difficult and distressing; change something in its life and try. or it can let the numbness and the emptiness take over and stop trying. if murderbot wants to survive as a rogue secunit, it has to try. no matter how difficult that is. the wording in that paragraph really hits home for me. the way the non-caring sees an opportunity to slip in and to take over. does murderbot even care? does anything really matter? is anything really worth the hassle? wouldn't it be so much easier to just let your mind slip away a little, to go numb, to be passive, to watch media and wait for things to happen to you? wouldn't it be nice to stop thinking and struggling and feeling complicated things? to stop making an effort? you've been dealing with a lot lately and maybe it's time to just shut down. maybe you'll just take a little break. just slip deeper into this chair and start the show. time flies when you're not paying attention. trying is exhausting. who cares if you don't do the things you wanted to do, you were supposed to do. it'll be fine. let's just ignore those things for now. just let the non-caring take over. just stop thinking. you can deal with the aftermath later. just watch your shows. who cares. but murderbot cares. it decides to care. it decides to fight with all it has and i think that is so brave. and i think in the later books caring is less of an active decision for murderbot. once you start caring, it's easier to keep going than to stop; and murderbot, for all its "i'm a grumpy rogue secunit, leave me alone" behavior, knows just how important caring is. so it's not that it doesn't know what's happening; rather, it lets itself care. tl;dr: caring is not the default for murderbot, it's just the more difficult of two options. and it decides not to take the soft option. it decides to struggle. it decides to care. and so it does.

[kimbapisnotsushi]

okay no see the thing that made me really, really sad about hinata and the thing that made me really, really root for him and love him and want to see him win it all was how, like, people kept DENYING him. and i'm not talking about spectators in the stands going "omg he's so short haha, can he really do anything?" i'm talking about how his own team and how everyone who knew them in some way - as much as i love them - could never really separate him from kageyama. they were the freak quick duo, karasuno's number nine and number ten. they were amazing! so brilliant, the two of them. and hinata thought it was a way out, at first. he thought it was a way over the summit. he thought it was the key to being someone better.

but a key goes both ways, you know. it can lock you up just as much as it can set you free.

and hinata had to be so, so frustrated. everyone was finding ways to move forward except him. everyone expected him to stay stuck. and you could argue that that's not entirely true, sure, that he was always training, always trying to catch up, and they encouraged that. but nobody ever expected him to be more. nobody ever expected him to go beyond what he had with kageyama - they all thought that was enough for hinata. they thought he was fine like that because it worked for the rest of them. they underestimated how much he wanted to be capable. they didn't get how much he wanted to stand on his own two feet.

and that wasn't fair to hinata! it wasn't fair that hinata, who loved to play and loved the game and loved volleyball so so much, was the only one being left behind! he wanted to change that but nobody was trying with him!!! so of course he got impatient!! of course he was reckless!!! of course he was carving his own opportunities!!! there was no way forward otherwise!!! because if we take a minute to think about how training would have gone while kageyama was at tokyo, let's be honest — it probably wouldn't have gone well. nobody else can do with hinata what kageyama could do with him. hinata would have been held back. he would have felt useless. practicing serves and receives was stuff he was already doing constantly before that, and it wasn't teaching him anything. yeah hinata was a little bit selfish and a little bit shameless but being so finally got him somewhere!!

all hinata ever wanted to do was fly, even if it meant straying from the flock to do so

[omaano]

I wish I had pushed the angle on this one a little more to match what I'd imagined for this scene from the end of chapter 14 of Mand'alor Cabur by @nautilicious but at this point stubborness has kicked in and I've dug in my heals so this is what I'm working with! In other news I've picked my birthday project for this year, and in my post-vacation optimism I see a chance to get this at least to a lines-and-flats (and maybe even some lighting???) stage by the end of next week, which would be very great for me! That is if the green background doesn't completely sabotage me in the process...

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

what bothers me about horde prime, more than his lazy characterization or his lack of impact on the narrative, is the fact that he is such a bad representation of a cult leader. like,, this is not how cults work. they don’t just insert a chip into you and make you follow their every directive like a robot. real life cults are a lot more terrifying because they use manipulation as a tactic to convince people to join them. it’s not a digital chip that you can remove from your system and suddenly you’re in complete control of yourself. cult survivors have talked about how hard it is to actually unlearn that mindset and start thinking for themselves, how many years it takes to stop feeling guilty for leaving their cult or seeing the toxicity in the leaders they so religiously followed.

sure, hordak and catra have some trauma tied to their experience with horde prime, but most of that is because of the physical torture they went through, rather than their experience of being brainwashed. and it’s fine if horde prime was just some villain and not a genocidal cult leader. but it’s clear that he was written to be a religious authority figure, the execution is just so off.

i know he’s a character in a fantasy world, so he had to use his powers for something. but instead of turning people into robots, he could have shown them a “better world” through his tech, talked them into joining him and forgetting about all their current worries, and then used them as weapons against etheria.

it would have been a lot more impactful and angsty if catra had willingly joined horde prime’s cult so that she could repress her guilt. in fact, it would have been really interesting if horde prime had convinced catra that he would help her repend for all that she did, if she joined his cult. this would have been a lot more comparable to religious guilt and trauma in real life, and it would show that catra actually felt bad for what she did, instead of just looking sad for a while and then continuing to be a shitty person anyway.

[oyeixcher]

San ¦ by 5racha

[hecoxthirst]

he ian on my cox until i smosh. is that anything?*taps my mic* can anybody hear me? hello?

[nyxofdemons]

this was going to be like a mile long essay but i just realized the most concise way to say it is that "it feels like a retcon that blitz has been so resentful and hostile towards fizz all this time since he was supposed to feel guilty" is simply not a good criticism when we have been shown, time and time again, that blitz's number one defense mechanism when he feels guilty or judged or attacked is to lash out, to deflect and ignore all his responsibility, and to shift the blame to someone else. that's like. his defining character flaw

[bonefall]

inch resting... a heather destroyed tunneling and a heather brought it back...

Man like... in Clanmew, I've made it so they have two different names. Common-heather-star, and Bell-heather-star.

If I was in charge of this ship and Better Bones wasn't a rewrite/au to rework canon, I would have given them the same suffix in Clanmew, and then conflict-rename Heathertail on purpose into Bellstar

As if she got a new name on becoming a leader, breaking out of Heatherstar's legacy, and became the softer, pollinator-friendly heather. Surrounded by friends and lovers, bringing back that which was once destroyed.

[finexbright]

.

[manny-jacinto]

i was reading kiefer sutherland’s wikipedia and he passed one of the lead roles from my own private idaho to go skiing instead 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

[reineyday]

finished watching netflix atla! i think the hate is unjustified lol like all that hate seems a little too intense for what i think the show missed. it didn't hit all the same notes as the original show, yeah, so i'm not sure it quite succeeds as an adaptation, but as a standalone show it's pretty good. and i might have some gripes with the characterization, but there was love in the casting and in the costumes and the world, and that goes a long way for me.

[puppyeared]

for like 3 weeks i was wondering why i was sleeping so much and felt listless. and just now I managed to email 3 people and responded to a month old message in the span of an hour because I got back to TAKING MY FUCKIN MEDS..........

[kindheartedgummybears]

guess who got bored and decided to color-swatch most of the lh characters

now obviously take all of this with a grain of salt since we all know color-picking from screenshots and models isn't the best way to get their skin tone due to color theory and color-picking being pixel but pixel but its the general kind of skin tone they have so <3

all images sourced from HariboStixx on DeviantArt.

[zombie-vodka]

'and know for the love of god you need to suffer, because there is a god who demands to be bled for.'

a redraw of alexandre cabanel's 'the fallen angel'

[tymbalzine]

my personal take on liu kang's decisions regarding shang tsung:

i do think shang tsung is an incredibly unreliable narrator about his own past (if geras telling him not to lie about 'enduring squalor as a child' attests to anything). i also know he's entirely responsible for being such a slimy prick.

in my humble opinionnnn, liu kang had a personal pitfall with shang tsung, and i think some of his decisions for both sorcerers was simply because he never wanted to see or hear of either of them again. is that their fault, no, but i find it still fair.

i like the idea better that the characters being out of his hands after his placement of them goes deeper than mk1. shang tsung references sindel's imperialism a few times. intros mention she is not welcome where he was raised, and further he seems to know an extent of cruelty that either others are unaware of or simply aren't on the receiving end of.

and like... let's be honest, any target of hers or general shao's through extention must have gone through a lot. if it isn't direct, it's generational — something that liu kang has less and less control of over time, as is evident with the lin kuei.

maybe shang tsung is hiding something deeper than obscurity or poverty, but can't be damned to say it, because it means admitting others have impacted him and his environment in ways that make him uncomfortable. maybe his community being on the "losing side" of the wars carries more than he (or mk1 in general) lets on.