#I'll think about this Later

[applepie-enthusiast]

I keep thinking of a reimagine of who fights who in the infinity castle

Douma - Obanai and Mitsuri before Shinobu arrives

Akaza - Muichirou, Inosuke and Kanao

Kokushibou - Tanjirou and Giyuu, before Gyomei and Sanemi arrives

Nakime - Zenitsu and Genya

[bixels]

Learning that fans hated Applejack and called her "boring" is crazyyy to me because I genuinely, unironically believe AJ's the most complex character in the main six.

Backstory-wise, she was born into a family of famers/blue collar workers who helped found the town she lives in. She grew up a habitual liar until she had the bad habit traumatized outta her. She lost both her parents and was orphaned at a young age, having to step up as her baby sister's mother figure. She's the only person in the main gang who's experienced this level of loss and grief (A Royal Problem reveals that AJ dreams about memories of being held by her parents as a baby). She moved to Manhattan to live with her wealthy family members, only to realize she'll never fit in or be accepted, even amongst her own family. The earlier seasons imply she and her family had money problems too (In The Ticket Master, AJ wants to go to the gala to earn money to buy new farm equipment and afford hip surgery for her grandma).

Personality-wise, she's a total people-pleaser/steamroller (with an occasional savior complex) who places her self worth on her independence and usefulness for other people, causing her to become a complete workaholic. In Applebuck Season, AJ stops taking care of herself because of her obsessive responsibilities for others and becomes completely dysfunctional. In Apple Family Reunion, AJ has a tearful breakdown because in she thinks she dishonored her family and tarnished her reputation as a potential leader –– an expectation and anxiety that's directly tied to her deceased parents, as shown in the episode's ending scene. In The Last Roundup, AJ abandons her family and friends out of shame because believes she failed them by not earning 1st place in a rodeo competition. She completely spirals emotionally when she isn't able to fulfill her duties toward others. Her need to be the best manifests in intense pride and competitiveness when others challenge her. And when her pride's broken, she cowers and physically hides herself.

Moreover, it's strongly implied that AJ has a deep-seated anger. The comics explore her ranting outbursts more. EQG also obviously has AJ yelling at and insulting Rarity in a jealous fit just to hurt her feelings (with a line that I could write a whole dissection on). And I'm certain I read in a post somewhere that in a Gameloft event, AJ's negative traits are listed as anger.

Subtextually, a lot of these flaws and anxieties can be (retroactively) linked to her parents' death, forcing her to grow up too quickly to become the adult/caregiver of the family (especially after her big brother becomes semiverbal). Notice how throughout the series, she's constantly acting as the "mom friend" of the group (despite everything, she manages to be the most emotionally mature of the bunch). Notice how AJ'll switch to a quieter, calmer tone when her friends are panicking and use soothing prompts and questions to talk them through their emotions/problems; something she'd definitely pick up while raising a child. Same with her stoicism and reluctance at crying or releasing emotions (something Pinkie explicitly points out). She also had a childhood relationship with Rara (which, if you were to give a queer reading, could easy be interpreted as her first 'aha' crush), who eventually left her life. (Interestingly enough, AJ also has an angry outburst with Rara for the same exact reasons as with EQG Rarity; jealous, upset that someone else is using and changing her). It's not hard to imagine an AJ with separation anxiety stemming from her mother and childhood friend/crush leaving. I'm also not above reading into AJ's relationship with her little sister (Y'all ever think about how AB never got to know her parents, even though she shares her father's colors and her mother's curly hair?).

AJ's stubbornness is a symptom of growing up too quickly as well. Who else to play with your baby sister when your brother goes nonverbal (not to discount Big Mac's role in raising AB)? Who else to wake up in the middle of the night to care for your crying baby sister when your grandma needs her rest? When you need to be 100% all the time for your family, you tend to become hard-stuck with a sense of moral superiority. You know what's best because you have to be your best because if you're aren't your best, then everything'll inevitably fall apart and it'll be your fault. And if you don't know what's best –– if you've been wrong the whole time –– that means you haven't been your best, which means you've failed the people who rely on you, which means you can't fulfill your role in the family/society, which makes you worthless . We've seen time and time again how this compulsive need to be right for the sake of others becomes self-destructive (Apple Family Reunion, Sound of Silence, all competitions against RD). We've seen in The Last Roundup how, when no longer at her best, AJ would rather remove herself from her community than confront them because she no longer feels of use to them.

But I guess it is kinda weird that AJ has "masculine" traits and isn't interested in men at all. It's totally justified that an aggressively straight, misogynistic male fandom would characterize her as a "boring background character." /s

At the time of writing this, it's 4:46AM.

[chipper-smol]

star abducted :3

[paintedcrows]

Every day is harder, sanity seems farther

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The dog days are over.

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[harasharaved]

The fact that Judaism is trending because of both the wave of bomb threats on synagogues and Bradley Cooper's Antisemitism Adventure (his huge fake prosthetic nose, and him basically stealing the story from a Jewish man) is so infuriating and so exhaustingly typical.

The fact that I see Judaism trending on Tumblr and immediately think "oh no. Something Bad is happening to us." We're never trending cause it's fucking good. I never get to be excited, it's just cold dread.

The fact that Antisemitism is getting worse everyday and the only ones who ever talk about it are other Jews. The fact that no one else fucking cares. The only ones who support us are other Jews. Even when gentiles talk about Nazis or white supremacists they don't want to help us. We're just their prop, the canary in the coal mine and the perfect victim.

The fact that everyone's uncomfortable with Jews still being here. Reminding them of things they'd rather forget.

The fact that it'd be easier for them if we were all dead. Then they could tell stories about our people, dressed in offensive caricatures, without us making a fuss.

[aroaceleovaldez]

I was reading a post about CoTG and I realized: Rick has seemingly started to write every character pairing with the exact same dynamic, and he's not good at writing that dynamic and it doesn't make sense for 90% of the characters he writes it for.

It's that very specific dynamic of one half of the pair who is almost aggressive to the other party - "teasing" them constantly/insulting them, affectionately punching/judo flipping/maiming/etc, seemingly almost always exasperated with the other - and said other party usually just accepts this treatment or blanketly views it fondly, and may generally be framed as more incompetent than their partner and a little bit of a doormat (particularly relating to being insulted/teased/etc by their partner).

We start seeing this dynamic in HoO with Percy and Annabeth, as a sort of semi-inconsistent twist on their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic from the first series. Then the dynamic pattern develops further with Leo and Calypso. Then Magnus and Alex. Then Nico and Will, particularly in TSATS. And now in CoTG, it's Percy and Annabeth again but even more in this direction.

I know people have talked about Nico and Will's relationship over the series rapidly being shoehorned into Percabeth Two™, and it's extremely apparent in TSATS that Rick's doing it on purpose (including directly quoting Percabeth scenes but minorly tweaking them to be Solangelo). But recognizing it as an overarching trend in Rick's later books honestly reminds me a lot of how Rick started trying to apply the "Percy Formula" so-to-speak to nearly every protagonist in HoO (and then try to replicate similar character archetypes with Magnus and Apollo's narrations - moreso Magnus in being jaded and sarcastic, very much trying to be first series Percy. He only sounds unique because Rick failed at making him Percy 2. Apollo is more akin to later-series Percy characterization of being goofy and incompetent. Apollo [and Zeus] even got retconned to give Apollo a more similar backstory to Percy's). Rick seems to have decided that he thinks the audience wants this specific dynamic but 10 times over, except he's not good at writing it the first time because it's a bastardization of the time he did a different thing okay.

And Rick also seems aware of that too! Because he retconned Calypso and Leo at the end of TOA, probably because he realized how absolutely awful it was reading when they were written with that dynamic of Calypso just functionally hating Leo and constantly being aggressive towards him! The only time Rick's actually made the dynamic even semi-successful was with Magnus and Alex, because it actually fits within their characters, their dynamics with each other, and their environment. Alex beheading Magnus on the regular works out fine because there are no repercussions to that in Valhalla, Magnus will be fine, so it does genuinely come off as humorous. And Alex has been effectively established to be abrasive at times but have her genuine feelings shine through regularly, and that meshes well with Magnus' jaded-and-aloof-but-quietly-very-empathetic character. And Magnus has been established to, yes, not be great at combat, particularly compared to Alex. They are the only time that flavor of dynamic in that form was effective and cohesive.

Percabeth is no longer rivals-to-friends-to-lovers badasses on equal levels with shaky pasts who finally found some form of permanence with one another. Now it's super smart doting and affectionately aggressive girlfriend and her silly goofy 50%-of-the-time incompetent boyfriend who she judo flips/pushes off cliffs/etc - but affectionately~! Solangelo is trying to riff off of the early series "Poseidon & Athena are enemies" dynamic that Percabeth had but with Apollo & Hades being "opposites" but learning to accept each other, except it ends up with Will just coming off as a huge asshole and Nico being retconned to a complete doormat about it - when prior to that those characterizations would be completely contrary to their established characters (even just from TOA!). Calypso in HoO gets retconned from her PJO characterization to being snooty and aggressive, and Leo's false persona gets merged into his just normal personality except he just also becomes a doormat but more goofy than Nico with occasional haha-dark/depression-humor! Which Nico also got. Which was also a bastardized Percy trait that got redistributed.

It's exhausting. Rick write more than one relationship dynamic you can do it I promise

[donelywell]

sonic, has tails ever done this??

May 20 2024

Doodle Request #32!

A little out of order (okay a lot out of order) but I really wanted to do this one because it was funny!

Small fluffball really packs a good pair of lungs to scream that loud. IT FINALLY SENT!!!

[heartorbit]

happy valentines day... 2!

[sinnabee]

You do moons ass Mondays right

so do suns ass Sundays

your wish is my command, anon

everyone say hello to sun ass sunday. but of course, as the rule goes... suns out? guns out. >:3c

i will be barring the castle doors and fortifying my defenses in preparation for the uprising, but no, i am not sorry for this

[bixels]

tarpit site.

[vee-lociraptor]

please imagine kayne using the dagger to lift arthur's chin to get a better look at his face and also if you will forcing john to look him in the eye. thank you and goodnight

[revvethasmythh]

Reminded again, as I periodically am, that there's a fair number of people in the fandom that think of Nott the Brave and Veth Brenatto as two different characters, and not fundamentally the same woman. In the absolute literal sense, this is false: Nott the Brave, returned to the body of her choice and using her real name once again, is absolutely precisely the same person she was before Caleb cast Transmogrification on her. This is, incidentally, one of her main sources of angst towards the end of the campaign! A part of Nott must have both feared (and, in some ways, hoped) that when she was changed back into a halfling, she would also be a different person. That the person she became traveling with the Nein would be an easy identity to shed, which she may have hoped for because it would be easier to fit herself back into her home life with Yeza and Luc--and because it would be easier to say goodbye to the Nein if that were the case. And she feared it because she liked this person she became, no matter how transgressive society would label her for it. And she loved the Nein and didn't want those feelings to be altered.

But she didn't change. Veth Brenatto is Nott the Brave and Nott the Brave is Veth Brenatto. This was always the point. That's why it's an anagram. It's just that when she's Veth Brenatto again, she is much more focused on the why of what she's doing. Why am I still with the Nein? Why am I still adventuring? Why do I have this reticence to return home to my family? Why don't I long for that quiet, domestic life the way I once did? Her emotional journey becomes intensely personal, sometimes subtly/quietly told, and wholly about what kind of future she wants for herself and how her choice could affect those around her. Her two families become anchor points pulling her in different directions and she has to deal with that. Which is a different story than what she was telling when she was still Nott the Brave. Nott's story was much simpler--I am a goblin and I hate it and I would like to be a halfling again. I would like to be able to be with my family again. It's straightforward and it's achieved! But that's not where it ends, because she still needs to figure out a real, functional future for herself once her goal has been achieved.

All this to say, I think when people say they prefer Nott over Veth, it's important to remember that you are reacting to a certain story arc for the character, not an entirely different character. It may also pay to ask yourselves why you think they're so different. Was "Nott" funnier than "Veth" to you? Does her ability to serve as comic relief fundamentally change whether you like her or not? Did you appreciate "Nott's" themes more than "Veth's"? Or did you even notice the themes being explored in Veth's later game at all?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

You made her cry, time to die.

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[ink--theory]

wrong turn

[egophiliac]

I love ur twst pokemon au but I have exactly one complaint: Lilia doesn't have a Noivern

Mr pop rock bat without the sound bat??? Seems like a crime of some kind

(This is intended to be all lighthearted sorry if it comes off as otherwise!!!)

thanks! :> it's a boring reason, but I didn't give him one because it's not, like, a real AU or anything with full teams; it's just me drawing the guys with some pokemon according to a couple of arbitrary rules I made up! I wanted to keep it to just one or two each, and I was already pushing it by giving him three, so. 🤷 if you want him to have a Noivern, he can have a Noivern in your heart!