#(just leaving the tag the same for now)

[somegrumpynerd]

Dust's nightmare

Dust has nightmares about fighting and killing here and there, but the ones that really stick with him are the ones that are just... memories. Things he can never have again.

What he can have though, is a distraction when he wakes up to help him settle and make sure he's not alone with his thoughts for too long

[lunarharp]

impromptu comic about agott and her art

[hinamie]

doodles

[runningatypufullspeed]

BRIGHT ASS COLORS GIRL WATCH OUT

Been like almost 6 months since I’ve been roosting here on this lovely website and I STILL have no clue how to use it

[silusvesuius]

nnnnnnnnnnnnno maa'am

[batsplat]

random throwback to fabio's response to casey saying he should've been black flagged for the whole open leathers situation

[firehose118]

“We’re just helping each other out on a long shift. It’s not gay,” Sal says into the air of the empty station bathroom as he wraps a hand around Tommy’s dick, and then in the same breath, “No one can ever know.”

Tommy nods, too far gone in the fantasy-come-to-life of what’s happening to dwell on the irony there. He’ll pick that apart later. For now, he has what he’s craved for so long within his grasp, he just has to reach out and take it.

He gets his hand on Sal’s dick in return and revels in the way it twitches under his touch. Tommy wants to moan with how good it feels to touch another man like this, to be touched by one. But he has to pretend this is friend stuff—normal straight guy shit, not the stuff of waking wet dreams—or else it will be taken away from him.

{finish on ao3 or continue below}

Tommy tries to match Sal’s pace: hard, fast, efficient. He thumbs through the liquid gathering at the head, twists his hand on the upstroke, but doesn’t let himself linger—even as his body is screaming for him to slow down and savor it. This might be his first and last chance to have this.

The way Sal is looking right at him is unexpected. He’d thought Sal would look away, pick a tile on the wall and stare at it, pretend this isn’t happening, but no: Sal is in it, studying Tommy’s face in that passive slack-jawed way of his. Tommy keeps his expression carefully neutral but he’s worried even that will give him away.

Sal’s mouth drops open on a silent moan when Tommy’s thumb drags along the vein on the underside just right, so Tommy does it again harder. He wants Sal to like this. He wants Sal to want to do this again.

Tommy is losing focus quickly. Sal isn’t working as hard to impress him, isn’t pulling out different moves to see what he likes, but his hand is big and warm and calloused and masculine around Tommy’s dick and it really doesn’t need to do anything else to have him panting and leaking.

He’s thought about this so many times and the reality of it is even better than he could have imagined. Every bit of energy he’s not using to give Sal the handjob of his life he’s putting into not whining and humping Sal’s hand like a dog.

He takes half a step forward before he can stop himself; needing to be closer. Sal huffs but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t step back.

They’re so close to each other now that Tommy could wrap his hand around both of their dicks and jerk them off like that. He knows it would feel good, wants it more than anything in this moment, but it would be a definitive step over the ‘not gay’ line into territory he’s not sure Sal will follow him willingly. It’s this or nothing, so Tommy chooses this.

“You close?” Tommy asks. He is. He can already feel it rising in his stomach, his balls, licking along his spine. He wants Sal to come first, to hide whatever his own orgasm is going to look like in the mists of Sal’s pleasure.

Sal nods. His face is inches away from Tommy’s and he looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t.

When it happens, Tommy feels it. He doesn’t know why he didn’t expect to—he always feels the pulsing of his own dick as he comes—but to feel another man’s dick twitch and spasm as it shoots warm into his hand has Tommy biting back a moan so quickly he chokes on it.

Sal comes with a low groan and Tommy is helpless to follow. For as long as he’s wanted this—wanted Sal—he thinks he could’ve come from that sound alone, but the way Sal’s big hand tightens on the next few strokes is the last thing he needs to send him hurtling over the edge.

Tommy’s forehead drops to Sal’s shoulder without permission and he keens high in his throat as the pleasure rips through him. It’s easily the best orgasm he’s had in years and he’s instantly terrified of what that means.

He shoves it down. Later. He’ll think about that later.

Tommy pants, coming back to himself, and he gives himself two more seconds of physical contact with Sal before he pulls back completely.

They both lean against the hard tile wall of the bathroom and catch their breaths.

“Good?” Tommy asks, giving a joking half-smile. He knows the answer but it seems like a safe enough way to start talking again.

“Jesus, kid,” Sal laughs. “Yeah. It was good. Where the fuck’d you learn how to do that?”

He grabs some paper towels to wipe his hand off, then gives them to Tommy to do the same.

“Lonely childhood,” Tommy says. It’s true but it’s not the answer. “Dad had a lot of porn mags he’d leave around. I spent a lot of time jerking off. Figured yours doesn’t work too differently from mine.”

That look is back in Sal’s eyes like he wants to say something, but he stays quiet again. He just shakes his head and laughs.

Sal walks towards the door but stops before he opens it. “Give it a few,” he says. He doesn’t look back at Tommy but he has a small smile on his lips still. Tommy takes that as a win.

Sal leaves and Tommy is left alone with the enormity of what just happened. It was good. It was hot. Sal clearly doesn’t hate him, isn’t disgusted by him. He seemed almost… intrigued.

Tommy will sort out the shame and elation he feels swirling inside of himself like oil and water later.

For now, he washes his hands, splashes some water on his face, and gets back to work.

[kanalaure]

(*i dont know what kind of dog huan is, but he sheds. a lot. caranthir just wants to have ONE (1) space thats not covered in shed fur)

assume this is in the context of a modern au, or else that everyone is miraculously back from the dead and generally getting along fine and in the interim aman has had its industrial revolution and produced a more eco-friendly equivalent to our technologies

dont take this too seriously or get upset if your blorbo isn't represented, i filled out the ballot on a whim lmao. if you have someone you are Convinced would have one that isn't on this ballot, please do mention it in the tags

[muirmarie]

Me: I joke about writing the same McCoy centric story over and over again in different ways

Me: and like. I love doing it and imma keep doing it because it makes me happy.

Me: but also. I do sometimes wonder if it's like. A little Much.

Me: like maybe I should branch out or something

Me: [reads another fundamental and extremely insulting misread of McCoy's character by someone who is clearly making a Choice to cast McCoy as the villain, because they have to get him out of the way of spirk, because they're too???? idk immature??? to realize that even when you're in a relationship with one person, other ppl can and SHOULD still be important to you]

Me: lmao I hope I AM too much actually!!!! I hope it is 100% obnoxious how much I love that doctor!!!!! Time to write more versions of the same story of McCoy being forced to realize that he is loved and cared for!!!!!!

Me: I KNOW MY NICHE AND IMMA DIE IN THAT NICHE, THANKS

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[slavhew]

fun fact the word "dirk" sounds exactly like the root of the croatian verb "drkati" which means to jack off

get the dirk brush here

[myreia]

— v. raison d'être

It was never going to last. They knew it from the beginning, all of them. Their time in the First was temporary, fleeting. For some, that would have been enough to give pause, to keep distance. For them, it made these moments all the more precious—even when it was difficult, even when it was unfair. Ryne knows they are both proud of her. That will never change, even when they live in separate worlds. It is a bittersweet thing to say goodbye, to close one chapter and begin the next. But change is necessary, a fundamental aspect of life. There is no sense in clinging to the past when the future—with all its countless possibilities—lies ahead. There is no looking back. Only forwards.

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[kariachi]

Just cannot forget that the show had a whole romantic subplot about Kevin being interested in Gwen but not up to making a move and just, never bothered with why. The issue at play was never actually addressed. Instead we just get a steady stream of Kevin not making a move despite his interest, while Gwen pushes him to make a move, and then Gwen finagles a move out of him and the show just, carries on like there was never something keeping him from making a proper move in the first place.

The closest we get is in the third season of AF, where we get a nice look at his mental health issues including some nasty self-worth issues, but even then the focus is less on 'wow Kevin is having A Time and this shows us some things about his character' and more as 'and here's how his response to his situation is affecting Gwen'.

Even in the fandom I've seen it treated more like a case of Kevin being whiny and selfish over nothing, like it didn't lead to him teaming up with Darkstar- something the heroes only ever do otherwise when in desperate need of help dealing with an actual and immediate threat to life.

Just, if you're going to base your drama around something, at least actually fucking resolve or acknowledge the cause of the issue, rather than just brushing it under the rug once you're bored with it.

[fisherrprince]

oh so alisaie’s exaggerated bully behavior is 80% fanon. saying this she casually picks up a large rock

[fireyartccoon]

Prismatic Parallel shenanigans

this is probably going to become its own little thing

this was for no particular reason, just felt like posting