for as much as I love and adore stories where the power of hope and friendship is a blinding wonderful light, full of happiness and ease and laughter, something hits different about the way hope, in ffxiv, looks like this
covered in blood and dirt and limping forward. It’s probably been said multiple times before but isn’t it a reassuring image to know that hope drags itself through the mud just as much as you do and keeps fighting when it can hardly stand. and amidst deepest despair, light everlasting
I like how Hell practically pulled a reverse Solver and (temporally) turned a killing machine into a maid bot. So I decided to draw V1 in the maid outfit from MD.
Also Butler V2 being a little shit, as a treat (wearing the butler outfit from MD)
Okay, okay. But when you get right down go it, Edmund is just one person. He's not the whole of humanity (or Narnia-anity, as the case may be) - he's just one guy who committed a crime and whose life is therefore forfeit. Aslan takes his place in a direct, one-to-one swap: guilty for innocent. In the process he atones for all sin, but Edmund's the one whose life is being directly saved. The executioner lets him go.
Teen wolf headcanon #6: Stiles is much more forgiving than people give him credit for. I know, I know, he has a spiteful streak for sure (“What you need is to be beaten. Severely. With a lead pipe wrapped in barbed wire.” “Mom would have believed me.”) And certainly, he tends to be on guard against anyone who’s manipulated the pack before (Peter, Theo, etc), although that’s more just good sense. And a needed balance to Scott’s reaching out to everyone.
However, for anyone who Stiles has moved into his ‘friend group’ section, he’s willing to give an incredible amount of leeway. I mean, he meets most members of Scott’s pack because they are out of control and trying to kill him. Scott’s tried to kill him three times! But he doesn’t just accept Scott, his oldest and best friend; he also accepts Malia, Liam, Parrish, etc. I mean, let’s call out Parrish for a second here – this guy is a dangerous, on the loose hellhound, who injured him, FLIPPED THE JEEP, and is interested in Lydia (which I know, she’s not ‘his’ at this point, but still hard for him to watch). And his only response is ‘You. I like you. I’m gonna keep you.’ I mean, I don’t think he even makes him pay for repairs to the jeep! Does Stiles even tell anyone that happened??? Once someone is on his ‘good side’, they are there to stay, and there to the death. It’s not like he just tolerates Scott knowing these people either; he actively fights for them, is willing to take bullets for them. Like, that’s some pretty real forgiveness right there. Now this partly ties into Stiles’s issues with self-esteem (which is a whole nother essay, not head canon), but aside from that concern, I applaud Stiles for this. He’s more accepting than we give him credit for. He’s protective, sure, but he’ll protect anyone who joins up.
thinking about the narrative of clones “being made for the jedi” and there has to be a nonzero number of them that take the idea of ‘okay fine who is the diametric opposite of the jedi because stuff that’ and that’s how the lost battalion become the most fervent sith-sniffer-outerers in the galaxy. just turn up at dooku’s doorstep like, hi hello we’re your army let’s smush those jedi xoxo
and otoh this is playing into his master’s plan! wonderful discord!
otoh now he has two thousand badly socialised ten year olds tromping around his house and gardens what are you— would you put that DOWN— that’s not the right fork would you— okay everybody new plan, it’s time for the fine sith art of sitting very quietly while daddy deals with his headache okay
Your only friends / Oh, be anything I want to be?
have turned on you. / Oh, is this just a dream?
I am that voice, / Oh, give away so willfully...
you need me too. / Oh, please carry me away!
Buzzardclaw's a whore you say ... My interest is peaked I love these types of gossips (In fiction)
Buzzardclaw is yet another Kit Save! WindClan is RIDICULOUSLY tiny, I had to SCRAPE this one up. Buzzardkit is mentioned in only a single page in Po3 Book 1: The Sight, where he is soothed by an unnamed queen who reveals his name. I decided that his mothers are Snapstorm and Stoneclaw, and the unnamed queen who soothed him was Snapstorm.
(THOUGH I am considering taking the unnamed queen and making her into a full character, tbh. I'm not kidding, this Clan is unacceptably small and it is ALL hands on deck. Maybe make her into a permaqueen type.)
WindClan NEEDED more sillies, because the majority of the cats in it are pretty harsh and serious, so I decided that this one was going to be sort of a hopeless romantic gossip girl type. He's really close with his Mi, Snapstorm, who's an Aftergathering regular at the Lake and likes trading. Because of her, Buzzardkit was getting acquainted with other cats from a young age and just kinda learned to play up how cute he is.
He grew up into a pretty kitty, too. Both of his parents are handsome mollies, and he managed to somehow get FOUR colors from between them. White, brown, black, and gold. It makes up for the fact he has very few scars, because he's a wuss.
He uses his charm and appearance to get people to do what he wants, but he has absolutely no ambition to follow up with this. What he wants is a nice blanket made of mole hide, or a good bit of gossip, or competitive scratchstone tips. Probably becomes a popular Honor Sire in his later years.
A Celestia Ludenberg observation from revisiting DR1
I think a lot of people have rightfully observed that Celeste's final moments in DR1, in which she's heavily heavily implied to have been forcing her smile and composure before she's dragged off to her demise, and her free time events implying that she's likely from a pretty boring, working class family in Togichi who secretly misses her hometown and its gyoza are pretty indicative of the fact that she's got hidden depths and deep-seated insecurity (not to mention her willingness to give everyone else a shot at getting out by protecting Alter Ego). She's almost on the verge of opening up to Makoto by the end of her free time if you put in the effort to get to know her, the implication being that with a bit of time and different circumstances she could have been able to ditch her overblown alter ego and be loved by her classmates for who she really was.
What I haven't seen as many people talk about, however, is the fact that this almost certainly did happen prior to The Tragedy and everyone's memory erasure/imprisonment, because when Hifumi regains his memories and wants to name his killer in his final moments, he specifically uses her birth name, indicating that a) he had known her very well personally, because God knows the Celeste we meet would have never let that information slip, and b) this is more speculative but I suspect that, having regained his memories, he might have expected everyone else to recognize who Taeko Yasuhiro was in his delirious state. Hifumi–someone Celeste is rightfully repulsed by far more so than the rest of her classmates, and refuses any actual friendship to beyond manipulating him–had known her well enough to know Taeko Yasuhiro, and she'd let her guard down enough around to tell him that information, and presumably so does the rest of the class. Evidently, when Celeste was given the brief opportunity to form real friendships with her classmates and voluntarily sealed herself into Hope's Peak to live with them rather than take her chances outside, she'd learned to open up and genuinely trust them in ways we almost see her do with Makoto, and every single bit of that development is wiped from her mind and stolen from her as she's pushed to kill former friends who might very well be the first people she'd been able to be herself around.
me, an abuse survivor, listening to laudna's conversation with delilah and finding it alarmingly relatable when laudna
1) keeps hold of her own moral codes but also relies upon the abuser as a valid source of advice (and doesn't realize why this is a weird place to go to for advice)
2) reverts to familiar coping mechanisms of the Past, when shit was real fucking bad
3) is unable to remember what made human relationships worth it
on the one hand: YES, HAHA, YES, THIS IS SO REAL, I AM BEING REPRESENTED
on the other hand: I have enough objectivity to realize this is not a great situation for laudna, and her behavior probably looks incomprehensible to someone who hasn't been subject to long-term abuse... (but this is accurate representation, the internal logic is water-tight, guys I swear it makes perfect sense)
the greatest tragedy of the 2000s-era Batfam is the lost story potential that happened because Jason's villain era and the Evil Cass arc happened at the same time instead of when Cass was Batgirl
we really could have gotten Jason and Cass being narrative foils, ripping each other to shreds over their different morals and perceptions of Bruce, and stories exploring how they're basically each other's walking nightmare scenario and instead we just got Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain!Jason and Cass being character assassinated and then shipped off to Hong Kong