#ALSO THE GHOSTS MORE SCARY S5 ART

[spinjitsuburst]

why aren’t there more concepts around the overlord being absolutely terrifying. horror-movie level eldritch being. the embodiment of DARKNESS and EVIL ITSELF should be a terrifying entity not only psychologically but also physically

[steve0discusses]

S5 Ep 15 Pt 1: The Gang Gets Lost in India

Ah, back to Yugioh classic. Sort of. We’re going into the second filler arc before Bakura, which I have been told is kind of nonsense. And youknow what, from the first scene--this is the first scene by the way--yeah I can see the nonsense.

We got Yami cosplaying as the Chrysler building, we got Yugi saying WTFWTF, we got...this thing?

This thing tells us “Join my game, Yugi!” and then the demon just kinda bounces.

K, bye, I guess.

(read more under the cut)

Waking up from this nightmare, Yugi reveals that he has outgrown his good pajamas. Or maybe he just overused them like I did to my favorite pajamas during quarantine (which, not gonna lie, I hand sewed my favorite pajama pants back together 2 or 3 times like they were the Velveteen Rabbit. Quarantine pajamas and me were like best buds for a year there.)

RIP Yugi’s good pajamas.

It’s fine. I’m fine.

I can get used to Yugi in his normal ass old man pajamas without any cute stars on them. I can accept this. He’s getting older. So much older that for a second I thought he was learning Hebrew, by the looks of his books on his counter. I thought...wow, is Yugi actually attempting to learn a language spoken around the time of ancient Egyptians???

But uh...I went a searching and unfortunately that’s not Hebrew, and if that is a language, I don’t know what it is. Pretty sure it’s just random marks because this show has to be translated in so many languages. Man. For a second there that looked like really sneaky world building, but nah, Yugi is still kind of a dumbass who has yet to attend a solid year of school.

Also, I got to take in this mustard yellow as if I’ve seen it for the first time.

It has strong building blocks energy. It’s...so much yellow and it’s extremely the vibe of that one set of animal crossing decorations that I have because it’s a very common recipe, but, can’t figure out for the life of me how to fit into any room.

What am I supposed to do with these, Nintendo? Other than recreate Yugi’s Muto’s haunted game store/house?

Like I live in the Bay area and we have wild painted houses so you can see them through the fog (back when we...still had fog, RIP California) --but this is a little much. This is such strong Protagonist energy but as a house.

Also, I’ve don’t think I’ve brought this up before, but like...Yugi is loaded, right? Like he’s way too good and humble to ever say he’s loaded, and they sort of make it seem like he’s not (when compared to Seto Kaiba) but damn, this location of his real estate sure is something. That and Grandpa’s tiny shop seems to run on a constant deficit and his family just doesn’t care.

We flash back a bit to Gramps sneaking out, and Yugi is like “oh great, my only Father figure I ever talk about is getting a backpack together and just...leaving without any notice, huh? Without telling me you were going to go? Didn’t think that would maybe be a little off putting?“ and Gramps is like “Yes?”

Like Gramps nearly died going to an amusement park a few episodes back so I can see why Yugi is a little bit concerned.

Down the street at a little town lottery, Joey is getting further into gambling (I don’t know what those little street lotteries are called, it’s in a lot of anime--but kinda looks like mom lotteries for moms.)

I’m not sure why India is on Joey Wheeler’s bucket list, seems a little random, but he went to Pegasus’ country, after all and that’s barely even a country.

Joey going nuts on a lottery machine instead of going to school was pretty peak filler, so I’m not really minding this stuff so far.

And then, just to spook me, check this out:

I can’t believe they even let them back into a classroom. In my nerd school, if you missed one too many days, you were sent to the bad schools to be someone else’s problem. But in Yugi’s case...that either IS his school or...Yugi is failing International School, which is just a thing he’s allowed to do, because, as I said before, this kid has got to be loaded. Even Seto Kaiba was like “I’m not spending money on this school anymore. That outfit is like 50 bucks a jacket.”

Youknow, I have seen all the other characters knock on Tea’s choice of cute ass monsters for the last 5 seasons, and she has never once changed them out. She is holding onto this scary seraphim thing with the many wings like every child with their first Pidgey. She does not care.

Also how is this thing cute?

like the front of this orb has a face with hearts on it but like...it is kind of remarkable what Yugioh decides is cute. Magma golem: not cute. this thing? This thing that looks like it’s a chibi version of the last chapters of the bible and will sound the trumpets of the second coming? So cuuuuute.

Tristan used to be the Janitor/hall monitor/square archetype. Like hell he can walk around with that 00′s R+B soundtrack.

Joey appears in order to get us the hell out of school, and the art team retires this school background for the rest of what I assume is this entire series.

Goodbye school. Maybe you’ll come back with Bakura. Which would be weird, since rumor is that arc takes place in ancient Egypt.

On their walk home, Tea lets out in an inner monologue that no one could hear that after 5 straight seasons of his BS, she’s sick and tired of Pharaoh being the center of attention all the time and she needs a freakin break.

TBH, as she was thinking in her head like “Pharoah is just so freakin much” Yugi switched over to Pharaoh and was like “WHATS UP TEA, THINKING ABOUT ME??” and I thought for a split second maybe he read her mind with his Pharaoh powers.

And like...maybe he did? Seems like a thing he can just do but chooses not to tell anyone about. I mean would you tell anyone? I wouldn’t.

So, unlike Miho in Season Zero, who at least had the decency to try to take her Mother to Australia, Joey Wheeler has wisely decided that the 3 other ticket holders will not be the 3 other members of his immediate family. That would have been the most awkward trip between Serenity, his mother he hasn’t really spoken to in 7 years, and his absent father who was written out of the series for being a raging alcoholic. They would have not even made it to the plane.

Instead he’s gonna take the ghost in Yugi’s head and call that an adult (two tickets in one, really). It’s honestly not that bad of a plan, since his only other father figure, Grandpa, is MIA, and his only other, other father figure, Roland, charges like 300 dollars an hour and wants stock options and health insurance.

And honestly they should have taken Roland because he’s one of their best plane guys.

So they take the smallest little Amelia Earheart plane in the world, going from Japan to (checks map) India...which 2 times the distance this plane can go and it crashes...which is exactly what would happen if you took a teeny tiny plane over the Himalayan mountains without refueling that thing.

We call this a magical incident later in the episode, but this is just basic math.

So, fun fact, (and probably why I discuss planes so often on this blog) two of my Grandfathers were pilots (well, three, since my grandmother remarried another pilot), which sounds like a crazy coincidence until you recall that their generation was in WW2 and we just shoved children in planes for 20 years and called that normal.

Anyway, to save on travel costs, my engineer Grandfather built his own plane out of junkyard parts, which, as you can imagine, is a living nightmare, and it was held together by like duct tape and gasoline (which at one time used to be cheap). Tempted God every day that Howls Moving Castle touched the sky.

And while I only know it from photos since I wasn’t exactly born yet, it looked exactly like this plane. So looking at this, all I can think is...yeah...that’s what you get for flying to India in a tin can car. To this day I cannot trust any plane of this size.

So, they climb out of their wreckage virtually unscathed and into familiar Californian territory.

At least Joey thought about bringing a tent.

It’s interesting how our cast has become so accustomed to this that they’re not even all that shell shocked. It’s just another day in the life.

So next time we shall find out what India has in store for us. Or if we’re even in India...because again...feels a lot like this BG team doesn’t do any research into their landscapes and every place feels a whole lot of the same. But...at least they didn’t put any Arizonan mesas in India.

[aplaceofstone]

AO3: faceofstone 

All prompts and ideas are just suggestions, if you are the kind of person who likes to follow them. If not, cool, they are certainly not the end-all of what I love about these fandoms and characters.

If we matched on something that’s more on the surreal side of things, this blog is mostly aesthetics and could offer some visual prompts as well.

I like found families, oddball friendships, sympathy toward outcasts, characters who fully embrace being outcasts, melancholy, a sense of place, bittersweet accomplishments, and a stubborn flicker of hope in an overall bleak world. Dreamlike atmospheres that aren’t necessarily scary, some sort of reassurance that can be found in the weird and the profoundly unnatural.

All fic formats, tenses, povs and roughly canon-appropriate levels of grimdark are fine.

Myst: Anna, Atrus, Calam, Catherine, Marrim, Yeesha

Any missing moment for any of these characters, cranking up the spookiness or fluffiness factor to 11 for tricks or treats respectively. What does a Myst fic fit for Halloween look like? What does “$mystcharacter has a very nice day” look like, for that matter? The multiverse is the limit. I love D’ni as a setting and it’s full of possibilities (I got great D’ni fic last Yuletide and there’s always place for more!) but there are infinite Ages out there too! What happened one day in the desert? Did Catherine experience some major foreshadowing? Did Yeesha link to Riven at some point? Did Marrim play aunt to little Yeesha? Did Anna know Calam? What hobby do Marrim and Catherine share? Did the bahro keep an eye on Atrus? What’s the riskiest thing Atrus ever wrote (and did Yeesha jackass her way into an even stranger iteration of it years later)?

Ghost Dog: Ghost Dog, Pearline, Raymond, Samurai in Camouflage

I’m an enthusiastic new viewer and I would very much like to read more about these characters and/or the connections between them. I love character studies with a slice of life backbone and I love new interactions and anything that could be classified as a cute missing moment. A day in the life of Ghost Dog (may or may not include actual dogs or other wildlife). Grownup Pearline taking up his mantle, finally understanding his death. The Samurai in Camouflage doing whatever it is that he does – I don’t know the first thing about RZA but if you want to base some part of the character off him, it works for me, all I know is that his cameo is so striking. Raymond persistently (and adorably) at the center of it all. Any Hagakure quote that hasn’t already been used by the movie could be a great jumping-off point, especially for the samurai characters but Raymond has been dragged into this as well so he better deal with it. Art-wise, any illustration of any of them doing their thing would make my Halloween.

The Wire: Gus, Cedric, Lester, Bubbles, Omar, Brother Mouzone

These are my favorite characters. They do not interact a whole lot, if at all. I would really, really like them to. Could you make it happen, dear author? They all have such strong personalities and their arcs are driven by themes that could work well with each other, any combination looks to me like it could lead to something great. They could be looking for each other because of their jobs or interact by chance (at the pub, on the street…) or even have some hitherto unsuspected connection, like when Wilson contacts Gus in s5. I don’t have preferences for a point in the timeline, I’d love to read fic set before, during or after – of course postcanon Omar presents some complications but nothing fanfiction writers haven’t written their way out of before. But I also like canon’s framing of his death, so if you want to have other characters focus on Omar’s legend one way or another, I would love it too. Just pick your faves among this crop and run with it, I’ll love it! For fic or art of a single character, I would like to see them doing something we haven’t already seen them do – for example a hobby you headcanon them having. For art of two (or more?) characters, seeing them sitting somewhere and talking to each other – the visual counterpart of the “just make them interaaaaact” fic prompt…

Twin Peaks: Albert, Tammy, Cynthia, Hawk, Harry, Frank

For the federal side of the cast, I’d like to see what life has in store for them after that mess. Albert got a heavy emotional fallout to deal with, and the realization that Gordon lied to him in a major way that’s connected with Cooper’s disappearance, speaking of whom, he’s off again, taking what was left of Diane with him to boot. Is it enough for a person to be fractured, could he be split in two? Who is left for him? (Shipping-wise I’m very partial to Harry, platonically I like him and Denise, again Harry, Tammy, Constance, Diane should she be back. But if you think he could be good friends with any other character, for example Cynthia or Hawk, do surprise me!) Tammy is the face of Blue Rose now. What about a little spookiness in her life? What happened when she was stationed in town writing The Final Dossier? Does she team up and/or go on a date with Cynthia, what’s their dynamic, how do they play off each other? Do they sit down to talk about what they want to make of this new Blue Rose, to make it work when all the previous generations failed? What creepy event could showcase Cynthia’s position on the supernatural, the human drive to look beyond and beyond until you get burned and all the themes of TSHOTP and TFD? Or what’s her relationship with Colonel Davis like? Does Garland appear to her at some point to guide her, looking for all intents and purposes like Mufasa but having died too soon to get the reference (tragic)? Hell, does Laura?

For the Sheriff’s Station people, I’d be interested in their relationship with the mystery of the woods. They’re all Bookhouse Boys, they better act like it, that’s my basic prompt. Did Harry cross a threshold looking for Cooper? Did he get the sword mentioned in the script for the s2 finale and what deeper meaning would it have? How did Deputy “I’m a skeptic, but-” Hawk recount a weird encounter in the woods (and to whom? Margaret? Lucy?)? Did he ever climb either peak, or if not, why not? Was Frank born with that no-nonsense attitude of his or is it more of a fake it till you make it situation? What about his chevron-lined, bullet-deflecting hat? Did he go for a walk with Doris and something happened that made them realize what kind of mess their marriage has turned into and they can still live better lives (together or separately. I love them both)? Do they all carry the woods with them in some ways? If you don’t have anything plotty in mind, something strange and almost nonsensical like Becky’s last scene would be great. Or you could focus on the literature enthusiasts aspect of the Bookhouse Boys and write or draw something cute based on that. If you like, Cooper can tag along in any scenario in presence or in spirit.

It’s easy to think about spooky supernatural business when it comes to Twin Peaks but treats are the other side of the same coin – there can be a gentle angle to all this, hope for the future, nurturing woods, genuine comfort after all of canon’s hurt and I would love to read about it. Sometimes the right thing happens at the right time and they can be happy, for a while.

Please, no mentions of Dale/Audrey or Shelly/Gordon.