#I truly think it's the best yet

[fahye]

A Power Unbound

Secrets! Magic! Enemies to… something more? Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, would love a nice, safe, comfortable life. After the death of his twin sister, he thought he was done with magic for good. But with the threat of a dangerous ritual hanging over every magician in Britain, he’s drawn reluctantly back into that world. Now Jack is living in a bizarre puzzle-box of a magical London townhouse, helping an unlikely group of friends track down the final piece of the Last Contract before their enemies can do the same. And to make matters worse, they need the help of writer and thief Alan Ross. Cagey and argumentative, Alan is only in this for the money. The aristocratic Lord Hawthorn, with all his unearned power, is everything that Alan hates. And unfortunately, Alan happens to be everything that Jack wants in one gorgeous, infuriating package. When a plot to seize unimaginable power comes to a head at Cheetham Hall—Jack’s ancestral family estate, a land so old and bound in oaths that it’s grown a personality as prickly as its owner—Jack, Alan and their allies will become entangled in a night of champagne, secrets, and bloody sacrifice… and the foundations of magic in Britain will be torn up by the roots before the end.

Coming November 2023

PRE-ORDER: US

PRE-ORDER: UK

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[nero-neptune]

“Roy was the engineer, and anything related to engineering, in any specialism, would have to pass through his hands. This included assembling the plane’s radio, just like he’d fixed the small battery-operated Spika radio and made it work.

“Adolfo sat down beside him. He explained to Roy that it was not a matter of expertise in electronics but one of ignorance, and pointed out that Roy was the least ignorant of everybody in that department. Roy argued that he had never seen an airplane radio in his life, not even in a book. Adolfo put his hand over Roy’s. ‘I know that, Roy. We all know that. I only wanted to tell you that you were the best one at handling the wires and the terminals, that’s all. But right now that’s a lot, it makes a huge difference … you are the engineer.’

“Roy, almost breathless, added something that his older friend already knew: ‘I am barely in my first year in Engineering, I’m only twenty years old, and the only time I’ve ever been remotely close to anything like this was when I helped instal a damn audio system for my cousins.’

“‘And you fixed the Spika radio,’ Adolfo responded, as if it were a thermonuclear station and not a basic portable radio the size of a pack of cigarettes. Before Adolfo even said the next sentence he knew clearly that it was as painful for him to say as it was for his friend to hear it. ‘Roy, the group needs your abilities. All we’re asking is that you try.’ ”

– “Is Anybody Listening?” from Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story by Pablo Vierci

LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE | SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (2023) dir. J. A. Bayona

[canisalbus]

you say machete has to be closeted then why's he always wearing them little heels

Maybe he thinks he's a tiny bit nicer looking in them.

[flambo19]

Stellaron Hunter Game Night 🎮

[mishapen-dear]

OH. okay so normally i dont touch discourse with a 20 ft pole, but this has been niggling at my brain tonight and i finally realized why

the people who are mad at qbbh for the memory loss and “dodging consequences” dont understand that he doesnt want to dodge consequences. Like they cant know that, they werent focused on him when he was literally feeding himself to the soul vultures and planning his eventual imprisonment and also. The Many Many Many hints he made towards suicide/sacrifice/Just Fucking Dying.

ccbbh is a subtle roleplayer, he’s been building this shit up for two whole months- it was day FIVE of the eggs going missing that he resolved to do whatever it took (hurting his friends) to get the eggs back. It was day three that he followed in dapper’s footsteps and started feeding himself to the soul vultures (and gaining a Massive headwound beneath his hood in the process- you can only see it if you go on namemc and remove the layers). He’s got impaired judgement. Even the memory issues arent a new thing- i cant remember exactly when they started, but one of the first big moments i remmeber was september 30th where he spent an hour falling into a delusional frenzy searching his base for cameras that he forgot he asked aypierre to plant.

The super murder of purgatory and the memory loss afterwards probably all feels very sudden for people who havent been following his story, but as someone who has been- all of this has been true to character. The only cheap swings he’s made have been combat-based in purgatory, and even the motive for those was built up in rp.

People are calling for consequences, but he has alrwady been experiencing self-inflicted consequences for months. The blue on his usual outfit is blood. This recent memory loss isnt a restart to get away with the atrocities - it is yet another consequence of his egg-protecting complexes and the ways he punishes himself for failing them.

he is NOT a moral character. he’s a demon hiding in plain site. he has eaten people. he has killed people. he understands the cruelty of his actions, and the consequences of them for the loved ones of his victims. but it matters when that harm is being done to his loved ones. he’ll still do it, because he will do anything for the eggs, but it matters, and that means that he has already started the process of self-inflicting those much-demanded consequences

[itsafternoonpast5]

thinking about their friendship so hard

[why-the-heck-not]

no those aren’t weird sex noises coming from ur neighbour’s apartment; it’s ur local insomniac slap & folding bread dough in the wee hours of the morning

[yourlocaldisneyvillain]

hope y'all are ready for the dark shit i'm about to drop after i'm done with particular lol

[burnorgetburned]

recent image reminded me again of something I noticed from Rebellion: how isolated Homura is.

This is her own fantasy world. It’s what she, in her deepest heart and dying moment, wants the most. Here she can make herself into the version that she wants to be: she can be Madoka’s best friend! The senior magical girl! The wise mentor figure that everyone finally listens to!

Homura can’t imagine herself being that, though.

Instead, she makes herself the transfer student - again. An outsider. The girls are already an experienced, established team by the time she even “arrives” in Mitakihara. They kindly invite this new magical girl into it. And she’s not the centerpiece of the team. She’s an extra power, useful to the other girls, but easily excluded if they feel like it.

That’s not the only time she secludes herself from them too. In the opening I can recall her doing this three times: once in that scene where it starts with Madoka and then adds the other girls, and they run around each other in dresses. She’s there standing at the end, waiting for all of them. The screen cuts away before any of them reach her in a way it doesn’t for the other girls, even though they do start to try and greet her. And then again while they’re all dancing and she’s kneeling on the ground.

Finally, there’s that long shot starting with the water and the drowned buildings, presumably from Walpurgisnacht. Mami and Sayaka are in a boat, and they smile at the “camera”. The camera rushes through them, and Kyoko turns around and smiles at the camera too. And, of course, it ends at Madoka, who reaches her hand towards the camera with a kind expression on her face.

We immediately cut to Madoka and Homura standing in an empty space, and it becomes apparent that Homura is the “camera”, not pausing to look at her friends smiling at her, but stopping to try and take Madoka’s hand. Only for Madoka to turn into dust. Because the person who is most kind to her, who again and again chooses to trust and care about her as we see in the series no matter how she acts - she’s not there anymore. She’s as good as dead. The other girls are kind, but they don’t reach out to her the same way Madoka does.

This is of course not their fault, because god knows their lives get harsh, but it doesn’t change the fact that Homura is just. Too traumatized and socially maladjusted to reach out first. Madoka gets through to her so easily because Madoka tries to see the best in her, so she gets past Homura’s awkward hairflips of anxiety that look really freaking arrogant to people who can’t read her and don’t have the motivation to try. She gets past Homura trying to use intimidation and Homura going quiet because she doesn’t know what to say, which, again, makes her look inscrutable and. just bad.

In the end of Rebellion, we see her going full throttle on the exclude herself part again. This time, consciously and intentionally. We see Mami walking to school, and Homura shattering a teacup. We see Kyoko try to share an apple with her Clara Dolls, and the apple dropping into the water, wasted. What do Mami and Kyoko use to befriend people in the series? Tea parties and sharing food. Homura has surely befriended/been befriended by those two plenty of times, since we see her achieve it with Kyoko and know immediately that she should eat the pocky given to her. So this is her, consciously, rejecting their friendship.

What hurts even more is the part with Kyoko. Why does Kyoko drop the apple? She sees the Clara Dolls waving at her, asking for one. Parts of Homura’s subconscious, asking for resources. She smiles and gives one over. Even before this, Kyoko was feeding some of Homura’s bird Familiars. When she drops the apple, though, we cut to a clear shot of Homura shaking her head while the apple floats.

The apple drops - into the water. The Clara Dolls are gone. Kyoko looks shocked. She couldn’t even keep feeding Homura’s birds. All of them fly away.

Homura’s subconscious asks for help. Homura sees help and shakes her head, rejecting it. Homura doesn’t let herself ask for help even when she desperately wants it (wanting it so desperately that her Familiars act it out even when she consciously tries to stop them). She’s already learned that asking for help doesn’t result in receiving help. After all, what has trying gotten her in other timelines? Disbelief. Anger. Confusion and hurt. Sometimes she gains allies (like in Kyoko), but most of the time even allies become unreliable. So she’s learned that she doesn’t know how to properly ask for help, and if she gets it, people will turn on her.

In the end, she finally has the power to address the root cause of their distrust. The Incubator, who primed other people to dislike her (something something “maybe she doesn’t want Madoka to contract because she’d be too powerful as a magical girl and she wants this territory :3”) and their resource shortage of the limited Grief Seeds, which made people fight by its own nature and eventually introduced the truth of Witches. But when others try to help her, she can’t accept it because she’s so primed to be afraid of it.

It’s part of the tragedy of Homura Akemi. She didn’t have the tools. She didn’t have the background to make connections without Madoka first reaching out to her in the 1st timeline. She didn’t have the social skills for convincing the other girls of hard truths of magical girl life. She could never make a support system strong enough to stop Mami from killing people in her despair (and I’d argue that even great social skills wouldn’t solve their resource shortage, so the best she could ever do is stop Mami from killing people. We see in other materials that Mami would often kill herself). She relied on Madoka for help with forging connections with other people, and when she got that help, she’d get so attached to everyone that it hurt her badly whenever they died. Whenever they learned the truth and it broke their hearts (she says explicitly that it hurt when Mami learned too much). It also must have hurt whenever she had to reset and then the other girls stopped caring about her.

The really awful part about the magical girl system is that grief - mundane, everyday emotional pain - starts to darken their Soul Gems. So when Homura makes friends and loses them, either to death or the loops, it darkens the Gem. Whenever she may try to learn social skills and inevitably fumbles, and the other girls interpret this as intentional, it also darkens the Gem. When she makes them her enemy. When she tries to drive Madoka away. When she’s isolated by the truth of everything. When Madoka Wishes to help other people - especially her. I would say that she can’t treat any loop as a practice ground because she’s too invested in Madoka, meaning that treating any one loop as disposable means treating that Madoka as disposable too, something that she obviously can’t accept. So she invests her all into every loop and loses, and it damages her even further.

On top of that, there’s a malicious immortal unending alien chucking everyone into deadly situations. There’s other magical girls who occasionally butt in (Oriko…). There’s timeline variance. There’s Walpurgisnacht. It becomes an unending tide of resource management except the resources are souls, friends, and her own emotional wellbeing. The failure state is a fate worse than death. The holding pattern is the endless loops, which does chip damage to her Soul Gem and already abysmal social skills by way of trauma anyway. She learns to keep this at bay by distancing herself. But in doing so, she does long-term damage and makes the other girls distrust her even more.

I honestly think there was no way in hell she was ever going to survive. Either she lost in the loops or she would lose afterwards. There was so, so much stacked against her. She learned all the reasonable ways to survive her loops which are absolutely the wrong things for her long-term health, but how could she think of the long term when the danger is right now? She learns to never rely on people (who by the way are fucking primed to oppose her… another post on that later) and all the wrong lessons for continuing on after the loops. When her crutches for surviving are knocked from under her, she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t freaking ask for a therapist, she’s a magical girl! She can’t rely on Kyoko and Mami when she has no evidence of what she went through! She seemed actually suicidal by the time of Rebellion, and I don’t think that it was her Witch talking. Or the needles puncturing her Soul Gem(?!?! Which more people should talk about? Holy shit).

This is why I genuinely think that both the anime ending and Rebellion’s ending are necessary for Homura’s story. A lot of people seem to think that Rebellion makes the anime ending useless, but I don’t think that at all. First, Witches are gone. This is a big one. Witches are genuinely the most isolating thing in the Incubator’s system, because the girls who know have to step on eggshells around girls who don’t know. Homura keeps this “Witches are gone” thing and only switches the Grief-collection system to using Incubators, which remove two of the many obstacles preventing the Quintet from wanting to help Homura. I doubt that Homura has the omnipresence to respond to every magical girl ever as they turn into a Witch because she is said to use her Familiars for gathering information, and her Familiars can’t be literally everywhere. That’s what Madoka’s Law of Cycles is for, and it’s something that Homura keeps. We also see that it’s possible for people (Madoka and Sayaka) to fully remember all of the timelines, and those shared experiences lead to understanding. Sympathy. Most importantly, less isolation.

If everyone regains all of their memories, could they see what Homura suffered through? Could they convince her that they can help? The resource shortage is gone. Witches are mostly gone. The Rebellion’s system is a system that allows all of them to grow. They stop being so utterly isolated. They can stop hurting each other. They can help.

[cheekblush]

i'd rather be friendless than to constantly have my boundaries disrespected

[fae-morrigan]

I think the thing that bothers me the absolute most about the 2019 Legion run is that conceptually its pretty brilliant.

Like, lets think about it. For a huge part of the Legion's history, part of their narrative function is to take a young Super, usually Clark or Kara, and to basically teach them how to be a hero. Its what they do, and its why the Superfam in particular is very tied up in the lore of the Legion.

Then, you have Jon Kent. Jon, who, at this point in the Superman & Action Comics run, just came back from THE single most traumatic event of his entire life. He's already feeling displaced from time, he's feeling lost, he's lost his sense of identity, and his connection to heroism is tenuous at best.

Sending Jon off with the Legion is a great idea. It unifies both of these concepts, and would have allowed for a new brand of Legion tales, where rather than just retelling the same story with the same characters, they're interacting with a teenager whose probably not doing so hot mentally, something that is both out of the Legions depth and exactly their jam. Plus, it would've really solidified the fact that by SOKE, Jon is somewhat on his way to a recovery.

It could've been AMAZING.

But Bendis did literally NOTHING with it. So the execution was trash.

[keeps-ache]

which of these are better? :>

[theblogof-rassilon]

Hello Rassilon. Apologies for the deception but I rather wanted to make sure you started reading, so I thought it best not to announce myself. I'm assuming you're alone; you always did prefer to read your Asks in private. I wouldn't try too hard to stop reading, there's every likelihood you'll just hurt yourself. So just listen.

Anon ask of Omega (Your Ex) regarding Rassilon's current partners. Ask begins.

I hope you'll forgive me the self-indulgence, but I have worked so very hard for this moment, a culmination of two centuries of work. It's rare that you get the chance to monologue through another, and you can't tell me you're not curious.

Why does an ex seek to talk about their former partner's lovers?

It's a simple enough answer: for satisfying one's curiosity. Uninspired, perhaps, but my god. The discovery, not simply of the variety of partners you take interest in, but that you would quite willingly date the teacher of one of Gallifrey's most infamous children.

It's a strange thing to know about an ex, but the fascination, Rassilon, the fascination of it all. I have dedicated my afterlife to handing myself knowledge of these partners, and I feel nothing but satisfaction in this choice.

I believe there are far more people in this world that would catch your eye than you would ever guess. And I have preceeded all of them.

Of course, their desires did not manifest overnight. When Tumblr first gathered your romantic intereste – Borusa, Banthony, and the rest – to discuss and hypothesize on the nature of their love for you, I felt what I believe we all felt: jealousy, and anger.

But as attention on Tumblr increased in number and discussion on the greatest partner for you emerged, I began to develop a very specific concern. Banthony was so obsessed with his ideas on you and his marriage, even as our fellows began to flirt and confess our love to you ourselves.

I began to worry that if Banthony successfully attempted to catch your gaze, then I would be as much a victim as any, trapped in the nightmare landscape of a twisted world without your love.

At first, I attempted prevention, but the cause seemed hopeless. The only way to ensure I did not suffer the tribulations of what I believed to be an inevitable confession of love was to stop my own feelings of love. So what began as an experiment soon became a race. I would make you fall in love with Banthony before professing your love to anyone else, therefore eliminating what myself or Borusa's feelings may be.

And there, I think, we are brought just about up to date. I have enjoyed our little trip down memory lane, but past here lies only a happy future for you and Banthony.

Goodbye, Rassilon

- Omega xoxo

I- I don't know what to say.

Omega, if this is really you, if you somehow, by every twist and turn of fate imaginable, survived this long in some form... My love for you has always been the greatest of any I have felt. Never have I loved another in the way I loved you.

But that is in the past. I have to stop letting you hold me back. I made my decision that fateful day; I did what I had to do to reach the top, to shape this society- our society, our dream- in the way that it must be shaped. Gallifrey could never have had two rulers. You knew this going in. And, best of all, dearest love, you knew that I would not be able to stand a threat to my power and my control. So, as much as I loved you, Omega, my sweet Ohm, my darling Peylix, I had to let you go. For us, for our home, for our people, for our dream. For Gallifrey. We would both be dead and gone by now if I had not, but now, you live on in your beautous creations, and in our shared society. Look at our children. At what we have created. This must be enough.

Oh, but my darling, you never could be so easily satisfied.

That is why I loved you. And that is why I had to let you go.

If this really were you, I would say, dearest Ohm, that I am glad you are able to let me go. I know that must be exceedingly difficult. But, I am happy with Borusa, and I do not love Banthony. If I did not have Borusa to think of, perhaps things would be different, and I would honour your wishes. Perhaps, then, you may finally find peace.

I am truly sorry that I must leave you trapped in your death, but you will never be in a world without my love. My love for you transcends the grave- and yes, I know, it must be your grave, my darling, for you cannot have survived beyond. I know, in my hearts, that you are gone and that this cannot be from you, not really, for you are lost to all but my memory.

Goodbye, my love. For whatever isn't left of you, for whatever could have been- my love for you persists even now, across regenerations and across death and across time.

[yumeyumeappleo]

i have complicated feelings about tmnt and i dont know hwo to put it into words

[franeridan]

mihoyo really will be like here is this whole cast of characters dozens upon dozens a good bunch of which especially strong and useful you can have whichever you want as long as you roll for them and I'll really be like thanks I think I'll fixate on that one free to play dude you dropped in my hands at the very beginning of the game every single time

[mutalune]

me when people hate on aos trek: