#ASK ME TO TELL YOU ABOUT ANY OF THESE

[shamera]

top manhwa reccs this month

So this month I seem to have thrown myself into manhwa, and oh boy I sure read a lot to calm myself down through the holidays. I find that my favourite stories are always the ones that really immerse you, and make you love the characters a lot. So here's the top 3 stories I could not put down until I got to the latest update!

A Stepmother's Märchen

The story of a 16 year old girl who finds herself a widowed stepmother of four with a story spanning across two timelines. In one timeline Shuri von Neuschwanstein grows and struggles to connect with her stepchildren for a decade and ultimately thinks herself a failure when she's told her eldest son doesn't want her at his wedding, only for her to be murdered on the celebratory day. She wakes to find herself eight years in the past newly widowed, determined to this time connect with the children so they won't exclude her from their lives.

Top of the list because I genuinely could not put this down while reading. It's beautiful and emotional and really delves into how family is what you make of it. The characters are all so good and genuinely feel like kids who are struggling on their path to growing up. They are imperfect, immature, make all the wrong decisions, but so very wise at random moments and the misunderstandings (that break my heart) all feel realistic and not at all forced. Gave me Fruits Basket vibes!

2. The Player Who Can't Level Up

Kim Gigyu thought he finally had the chance to give his mother and sister a better life when he became a player with a unique ability... only to spend the next five years struggling to take down the simplest of dungeon monsters, unable to get above lvl1. He chose instead to guide other players so they can get strong, until one day he steps to take the first test of the tower and encounters an Ego for the first time: a sentient sword who will be his partner and level in his stead. With his unique ability 'partner of Egos', he sets out to find other pieces of Ego and unravel the mystery of the tower and just why it appeared in the world.

Normally for this genre I have to read over 100 chapters before they start hinting at the mystery of the world. This one started in chapter 12. It's also refreshing as it has a good balance between fighting and building character relationships as there are plenty of chapters where Gigyu spends time with his family and friends. Also there are great positive male friendships! There are lots of badass girls! The main character talks to other people about his traumas and his worries!! The growth feels plausible and I-- I have a weak spot for the Egos. They are now part of his family, I don't make the rules.

3. Dungeon Reset

Jung Daeun was thought dead after he fell into a death trap, and when others cleared the dungeon floor and moved on to the next, he was still stuck when the floor reset to respawn all the defeated monsters. He had no fighting skills, and instead decided to survive by building a shelter and figuring out a food source. He soon figures out that because players are all moved out of the dungeon when it reset, he's now a glitch in the system with partial immunity to the worst things, but also without the benefits that other players get. After accidentally affiliating with the Dragon of Life, Daeun starts running the dungeon his own way-- by building and farming and learning how to not just survive in a dungeon, but live in it.

aka the one where a Minecraft player is hacking a dungeon Death Game? So fun. It's a pinch of Dr. Stone mixed into a good food anime and dropped onto the dangerous dungeon trope. It's got characters who all end up so human and a main character who is absolutely a little shit doing what he wants aka sure he wants to pass the Dungeon Game and go home, but he's not going to live like an animal while he's doing so. He's going to make good food and have a good bed and take baths and develop hobbies while he's at it. He's going to make friends and learn new things and show that winning isn't all about fighting, but about perseverance and adaptability. Sometimes you don't have to win the fight-- you just have to survive it.

Honorary Mentions (aka I read through it! It was pretty good!):

Trash of the Count's Family

SSS-Class Suicide Hunter

Solo Farming in the Tower

The Lone Necromancer

Return of the Frozen Player

Solo Max-Level Newbie

And then there are series I've read but didn't finish as it didn't appeal to me personally:

My Daughter Is the Final Boss

Leviathan

SSS-Class Gacha Hunter

Tomb Raider King

The World After the Fall

The Beginning After the End

[hansoeii]

It's about who.

[inkskinned]

hey btw if you're in the USA at  2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 4, they're testing the emergency broadcast system. your phone is probably going to make a really loud noise, even if it's on silent. there's a backup date on the 11th if they need to postpone it.

if you're not in a safe situation and have an extra phone, you should turn that phone completely off beforehand.

additionally, if you're like me, and are easily startled; i recommend treating it like a party. have a countdown or something. be surrounded by your loved ones. take the actions you personally need to take to make yourself safe.

i have already seen mockery towards any person who feels nervous about this. for the record, it completely, completely valid to have "emergency broadcast sounds" be an anxiety trigger. do not let other people make fun of you for that. emergency sounds are legitimately engineered to make us take action; those of us with high levels of anxiety and/or neurodivergence are already pre-disposed to have a Bad Time. sometimes it is best to acknowledge that the situation will be triggering for some, and to prepare for that; rather than just saying "well that's stupid, it's just a test."

"loud scary sound time" isn't like, my favorite thing, but we can at least try to prevent some additional anxiety by preparing for it. maybe get yourself a cake? noise cancelling headphones? the new hozier album? whatever helps. love u, hope you're okay. we are gonna ride it out together.

[lorephobic]

“the class commentary in saltburn was shit” WHAT CLASS COMMENTARY???? NOT EVERY MOVIE WITH RICH PEOPLE HAS TO OR SHOULD HAVE CLASS COMMENTARY. EMERALD FENNELL KNOWS VERY WELL THAT SHE IS NOT THE RIGHT DIRECTOR FOR A MOVIE ABOUT CLASS COMMENTARY WHICH IS WHY SHE DID NOT WRITE A MOVIE ABOUT CLASS COMMENTARY.

[shepscapades]

Xisuma, why in the world were trying to fix your helmet with TAPE?? I thought the superglue idea was unhinged but THIS IS A NEW LEVEL

(I know that it's probably not holding itself ONLY on tape, but the image in my head is too funny)

What's next? You tell me he attached Doc's new arm to his body with tape and glue too??

THIS RESPONSE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE COMICAL but I let it get away from me;;

[itsdefinitely]

i see that you like hermitcraft… thoughts on the new season so far?

i liked it when this happened

[yashley]

Say something true!

[forcedhesitation]

astarion origin playthrough worth it just for all the extra moments where he does the "sad wet cat" face

[podcast-hemocytoblast]

By the time cars were invented, Jonah Magnus was already well into the body hopping game, which raises the question: has he ever actually learn to drive? Did this man sit through driver’s ed? Or has he just been getting out of legal repercussions for his shit driving by telling the cops everything he knows about their deepest darkest secrets every time he gets pulled over?

[sweetgaleria]

Help a college student graduate by answering a survey!!

Hey!! Are you over 18 and in the miraculous fandom? Then this is for you!!

Hi everyone, this is my last semester of uni, and one of my final projects to be able to graduate is to write a scientific paper. I'm writing an article about adult fans of children's animation, specifically Miraculous Ladybug. My goal is to understand what makes adults (like us) want to join fandoms centered around shows aimed primarily at children, and to do that I'd love to hear directly from the source! The survey takes around 10 minutes to answer, it's 100% anonymous and it would help me immensely!

>>Click here for the survey<<

I need at least 30 people to answer, but honestly the more the merrier! I've also made a little thank you gif at the end, so if you see it let me know! If you have any questions feel free to send me an ask, as well!

Please reblog so it can reach more people! Thank you so much!

[boyquiet]

i think that we need to get over the narrative that you can’t have gay villains because that’s a harmful stereotype because there’s a huge difference between “this character is gay and a bad person” and “this character was written specifically to equate being gay and being evil/depraved/degenerate”. it’s just such a narrow minded view of fiction that leads to people afraid to write queer characters as anything less than morally perfect and then to a bunch of palatable but bland and boring queer characters that are arguably worse representation than a gay villain because they are not allowed to do anything wrong. while it is important to write all types of gay characters a work isn’t instantly “problematic” because the villain is queer and the hero isn’t. I think this is also related to the idea of subtext vs text in gay media and how I see a lot of people get mad bc the homoerotic subtext isn’t made canon without considering the context of it at all—sometimes creators make artistic decisions for reasons other than that they didn’t want the gay people to kiss because they’re homophobic. well written queer subtext can be better than a canon gay couple with no personality or relevance and a queer villain can be a better queer character than a gay hero because the characters in-universe morality isn’t inherently tied to how much care they are written with and the quality of “queer representation” isn’t determined by the amount of times they kiss on screen.

[dayurno]

this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it

and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?

anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode

two hours later edit: you're allowed to reblog this! sorry about the confusion

[crawley-fell]

i honestly cannot believe how many impossibly thirsty Aziraphale moments we get before the final fifteen. and then he FINALLY gets what his lil puppy eyes have been begging for all season and he goes and LEAVES ffs why is self sabotage so ingrained in us queers

[mizuski-broken]

Pac stealing Fit's blood homoerotically the other day gave me an idea for a Mad scientist AU :0

I definitely don't have the skill to do anything with it so if anyone wants to adopt it feel free lmao

I might explode into brainrot about it on here occasionally tho 👍

Think combination Frankenstein+ Monster and Capitan America style scientifically created supersoldier... But reverse.

So Pac is a scientist who specializes in chemistry and biology (with a dash of mechanics... Unless Mike handles that) who recently signed up to rehabilitate, heal, and re-humanize chemically-created supersoldiers after the end of a recent war (because leaving them crippled, traumatized, and dehumanized in more ways than one is no way to honor them for their service... As long as they're no longer of good use)

Fit was a particularly powerful and infamous super soldier, one of the first actually. (So leaving him on active duty would be seen as a threat to other countries). But... Beyond that, he's also very very badly injured.

Becoming a chemical and partly mechanical monstrosity isn't exactly good for you, so it's sort of expected that even if you don't die during the transformation process, you'll either die sometime afterwards or at least much earlier than the regular human life expectancy. Going through a whole damn war definitely didn't help. (I'm thinking maybe blown up by specially designed "End" crystal explosions at least 35786543 times). So by the time the war was over, he was more or less found in an explosion-torn ditch in the middle of the wasteland, surrounded by corpses, entirely unable to move, and in constant unimaginable pain (he's still pretty much in constant pain all the time btw. Everything hurts). There's little-to-no chance he'll ever fight again.

This is where Pac comes in.

[ganondoodle]

Hello 👋

Swallowing my nerves at last to send you an ask! I was just wondering, what inspires your designs? Are their inspirations in stuff like movies or games? Or just things you come up with yourself?

i .. honestly its kinda hard to tell, sometimes i just randomly think of something, like some detail, or color combination and try to incorporate that into a design somehow; it can come from anywhere, like the color scheme of a pithaya/dragonfruit is something i have been wanting to make a design with for ages but havent come up with anything good in all those years ;O;

im a very easily fascinated by color, espeically in nature, like sometimes i just stop and stare at something like i froze in time bc i just woooooooooooooah color! i probably look like a weirdo doing that though

its really hard to pinpoint anything specifically, the most is probably .. other artists? i guess? which always makes me nervous bc my memory is shit in most areas of life and i worry myself to pieces whether i unintentionally "stole" an idea and just dont remember and think it was my own, it goes further that sometimes i see something that makes me want to draw a similar concept but dont bc i dont want to 'steal' even if that couldnt be further from my intention (have been accused of that before ..)

that said for my ocs specifically .. most are rather old and have just kinda evolved out of their awkward first iterations (shargons first iteration was a hauro-howl- copy that was really just some human covered in feathers .. another oc was once a hellboy copy but in green- havent drawn nor redeisgn them in ages lol), the biggest inspirations for them is a mix of animals, bonus if you dont see them often- im a big shark, whale and sea creatures in general nerd so i tend to take from them as a priority but always trying to be less directly animal and mostly just .. features that work together

Eadrya is one of the newer OCs- i started to write but then looked at my folders and oh they are from 2017 .., i even made a design timeline for them how much they, and my art, have changed back in 2020, so thats also way outdated now lol (they apparently started as a whale .. thing? its like a pokemon evolution lol)

this is them now (i like this sketch still, though shargons design is now also outdated lmao)

this ones from early 2023 so also outdated now but you get the point

for demons i try to be a bit more wild on shapes and colors while still adhering to the rules of how they work (humanoid form, demon form, animalistic, one element each and more or less made to fit that, 4 arms is very common, look to be bost scary and wild but also something that would make you stop in tracks and stare in awe and fear if you crossed paths)

often times designs just kinda .. happen, i have maybe the idea ok i wanna make something with a white and red pattern also moose or those big horned cows are cool and kinda scary so maybe sth akin to that (though this one is technically a redesign too- its also pretty much entirely different)

for non demons but still non human i go for a much more restrained design, mainly inspired directly by an animal and giving the color scheme a good spin, plus adding unconventional body shapes, like ki'ita is also a good example, her old idea was just orca anthro pirate and just by making the white green instead in her most recent redesign already adds that little spin to it

that can have its pitfalls though, as i often fall into the big arm small head small legs scheme over and over xD

alot of it is trial and error, deciding on the colors can take me hours bc im always searching for my little rule of having one contrast color that shows up in very few places to draw attention to it (like with Eadrya its those bright yellow eyes and thingy at their tail)

and that is all about myy own ocs, when its fandom stuff it works kinda similar though, either in the connections i wanna draw or just thinking it further- like how deities in destiny work also just kinda .. happened like an ever derailing train

like for demise i was at first really just im gonna give him horns bc horns are cool and he got those on the starting mural in the game- so how his hair work? well maybe it isnt hair actually and just unbound energy, im making him a deity too and fit hylias design to his so, yeah, then so how does it work, ok he gotta have a skeleton still, but what if his entire actual body is made up of pure magical energy with its core in the ribcage? with the core in the ribcage >:3c and the scales you see are just like cooled down lava as an armor bc his thing is fire and earth !! the normal blood? is a thin layer of skin imiated from mortals to keep the scales together and flexible so if he ACTUALLY gets hurt hed bleed magic that looks more like lava and any normal blood you see is just the armor- so why does he have a skeleton still instead of being just energy? maybe its gotta be bound to something OH and what if all of the deities started as mortals like a mirror to the trio later on and the gods cannot have direct influence to the worlds so they needed a right hand that is neither god nor mortal but both by killing a mortal by whatever their element will be (demise burned, hylia drowned etc) and their skeleton and spirit is kept but put into a body of magic- OH what if their spirit core is like almost piloting their bodies like a mech in a way bc if youd look close youd see that every strand of magic is actual a hand of their spirit so it makes it more weird and other bc hed be able to reach out with thousands of burning claws of all shapes and sizes like the beheaded forest god at the end of mononoke- SO if hed lose and arm or something all those strands would untangle and rearrange his bones back together-OH MY GOD the whole armor idea works so well for ghirahims dark armor so what if demise had two swords once and lost one and since has forged an armor similar to his own for ghirahim out fo fear of losing him t---

and that all is a process that happens over several weeks and months not rarely while i am drawing something mindlessly and suddendly *have a thought* and omg that makes so much sense-

so "what" inspires my designs? an ever derailing train of thought about making cool thick monsters that arent the evil thing to get rid of for once? cool color schemes? idk it just kinda happens??

[ryllen]

alex who is good at heart & said  “good luck” when he rejected you after  “nah... I'm gonna ask someone else” on flower dance festival

and actually care about having friends,

that he has been acting friendly to u even at 0 hearts, in seek of new friend opportunity.