#Re/Born

[scaredy-draws]

Jealousy

[aroaceleovaldez]

reminder that the only reason the "ADHD is actually demigod BATTLE STRATEGIES" and "dyslexia is DEMIGOD BRAINS HARDWIRED FOR ANCIENT GREEK" things exist in the PJO universe is because it's a very direct reference to early 2000s teaching/parenting techniques for neurodiverse and disabled children, which aimed to frame childrens' disabilities and hardships as a "superpower" or strength so that the children would feel more positively about their disabilities or situations. This technique has fallen out of favor since then for the most part since more often than not it just results in kids feeling as though their struggles are not being seen or taken seriously.

Yes, demigods are adhd/dyslexic (and sometimes autistic-coded) in the series. This is extremely important and trying to remove it or not acknowledge it makes the entire series fall apart because it is such a core concept. Yes, canon claims that their adhd/dyslexia is tied to some innate abilities, which is based on an outdated methodology. It's important to acknowledge that and understand where it comes from! But please stop trying to apply it to other pantheons in the series like "oh, the romans have dyscalculia because of roman numerals!" or "the norse demigods have dysgraphia for reasons!" - it's distasteful at best.

A better option is to acknowledge the meta inspiration for why that exists in the series, such as explaining potentially that Chiron was utilizing that same teaching methodology to try and help demigods feel more comfortable with their disabilities and they aren't literal powers. In fact, especially given Frank, there's implication that being adhd/dyslexic isn't a guaranteed demigod trait, which means it's more likely to be normally inherited from their godly parent/divine ancestor as a general trait, not a power, and further supports the whole "ADHD is battle strategy" thing being non-literal. It also implies the entire greco-roman pantheon in their universe is canonically adhd/dyslexic - and that actually fits very well with the themes of the first series. The entire central conflict of the first series fits perfectly as an allegory about neurodiverse/disabled children and their relationships with their undiagnosed neurodiverse/disabled parents and trying to find solutions together with their shared disability/disabilities that the kid inherited instead of becoming distant from each other (and this makes claiming equivalent to getting a diagnosis which is a fascinating allegory! not to mention the symbolism of demigods inheriting legacies and legends and powers from their parents and everything that comes with that being equivalent to inheriting traits, neurodiversity, and disabilities from your parents).

anyways neurodiversity and disability and the contexts in which the series utilizes representation of those experiences particularly during the 2000s symbolically within the narrative is incredibly important to the first series and the understanding of what themes it means to represent. also if i see one more "the romans have dyscalculia instead of dyslexia" post in 2023 i'm gonna walk into the ocean.

[rehide]

the thing about hide is that he never once expressed visible hurt abt kaneki not telling him he's a ghoul. it was never a topic of discussion between them, not even in re when it's a much safer conversation to have. he never (at least openly) feels betrayed about it, and still uses his every action to get closer to kaneki and the ghoul world despite how cut off he's been from kaneki's life. and i'm sure hide was smart enough to realize that kaneki's avoidance was always about protecting him, but it's hard to imagine that he wasn't at least a little hurt at some point that kaneki wouldn't tell him. and then a couple hundred chapters later kaneki's stumbling over his words in a sewer and hide's telling him how he's always known, while offering up his own life for his.

[sapphiceloise]

Each Bridgerton sibling is like a mirror of each other...

Daphne & Anthony: Authorative, Lots of Expectations, Certainly born leaders in some way, with a soft heart. Literally the Older Siblings™. Their love matches are certainly not without vexing each other and taking the rise out of one another. There's fire in there somewhere.

Benedict & Eloise: Creative, Intelligent/Artistic pursuit, Ache for Freedom, Open-Minded. They just have the feels and they're so gay, so help them. They feel so much in the most passionate way whether it be their pursuit of knowledge or artistic expression, and when that hurts them — they become lost/unsure. (Eloise trying to fit in, Benedict stopping his art etc.).

Colin & Francesca: Sensitive (but not in a meek way), Quiet sometimes, Observant, sometimes ???? (That's mostly Colin). The Kindest Siblings™. Literally simply cute in affectionate gestures. Probably Friends to Lovers could be their signature trope. Falls in love immediately (i.e. Marina & John) but with their true loves it's a slow burn.

Gregory & Hyacinth: Perceptive, mischievious, full of life, and still young as of this writing. They are the seers of the Family, they just know things unknowingly and are definitely right with the love matches lol. They also definitely believe in love matches like their older sibling's success of love in the marriage mart.

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

seward waking up after a good 9 hours of sleep like

[turtleblogatlast]

[ cw: assumed death / assumed sibling death / assumed child death / solitude ]

Thinking about Leo being trapped in the Prison Dimension and keeping himself warm through the power of his own ninpo - this ability is shown to us as a flame, after all, so imagine if, when he lets his mystic energy run through him, it warms him up, just a little.

In this desolate place, all cold and alone, he focuses on that flame and leans into its warmth.

He relies on it, and he realizes it that he’d relied on it too much when it goes out, and he’s once again cold.

(In another dimension, the Hamatos believe they lost one of their own.)

[tavtime]

There is something skittering around in my brain tonight about the way that BG3 intends the audience to view mind flayers as individuals vs as a species, and the way that plays out in the player's relationships with Omeluum and the Emperor.

I mean, one of the primary gears upon which the story turns is that when a person becomes illithid, the soul they previously had is destroyed (but not their memories of the person they were). This is presented as an insurmountable wrong - literally socially aberrant - and it certainly is so from both the point of view of the gods concerned with mortal souls, and illithids' mortal prey concerned with keeping their brains in their heads.

The Emperor's storyline takes this to the conclusion that the condition of being soulless is, in and of itself, a complete destruction of the individual; that whatever it was before, the illithid will be invariably manipulative, inherently untrustworthy, and unable to reconcile its needs and desires into peaceful coexistence with non-illithids. It's certainly the conclusion you're intended to draw from Duke Stelmane's story, as well as numerous supporting texts, most notably from the creche.

But then... Omeluum offers the refutation to that. Here he is, leading a peaceful life because he just... wants to. Absent a soul or comprehensible mortal desires to operate as a moral compass, Omeluum still chooses to contribute to the Society of Brilliance. He voluntarily and at personal cost researches alternative food for himself so that he doesn't need to feed on sentient beings. He helps the player character multiple times, despite the fact that doing so carries variable risk with little promise of reward.

So clearly, being illithid in and of itself is not what makes someone manipulative or untrustworthy: it's not a baked-in species trait. The Emporer isn't Like That solely because he's a mind flayer; he's like that because... he's like that. That's who he is as a person. That's what he has become, in his current incarnation, and yes, some of it is certainly due to his transformation (having your soul shredded and your will broken would screw most people up pretty badly, I imagine), but not all of it! If something about his circumstances had been different, maybe he could've been different as well. Maybe his moral compass would have pointed in a similar direction as Omeluum's.

[dewedup]

it’s my birthday so please feast on Rain not watching where he’s going during watcher in the sky (ironic)

[soracities]

if we should protect children because they are vunerable, this means you would protect cruel children who bullies people who different than them then. the children who responsible to trauma for someone else's entire years

You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.

"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.

You don't protect kids so they can get a free pass for bullying or tormenting another child. You protect them because kids are impulsive, emotionally reactive, and profoundly social (which means deeply impressionable) human beings who are still learning & processing insane amounts of information every day about what it means to be alive, to be alive as yourself, to be alive as yourself with other people. Protecting them is realising that you can't isolate the responsibility of a 10 year old from the bigger responsibility of the literal grown adults around them, adults who are in charge of teaching them about the world and how to behave in it. Whether you have children of your own in the future or not is completely irrelevant to this; we all become those adults eventually--no matter what happened to us as kids.

[jerseymuppet]

[momo-shut-the-fuck-up]

Nikki enjoyers will see a game called "love nikki" and take it as a command

[scaredy-draws]

I love love love the “and Make Them Bloom” series! Could you give me a fun fact abt each group?

Hi hi hi!!!! So excited to see ppl liking the series omg jkdfjk

I've no idea what a fun fact is!!! So I've consulted our beloved co-author @jaywalking-rogue

Yakamoz: They're the first group that actually came to mind when making a shuffle au! Their name, yakamoz, is a Turkish word that means the reflection of the moonlight on the sea. I named them, as I happen to be the Turkish speaking one ehe.

Another fun fact about Yakamoz is that they all need a disguise when going out because they're fairly famous (as far as having appeared on TV a couple of times) but they're all completely terrible at it: Akito was Touya's entire fashion sense, if An wears "casual clothes" she gets recognised by street musicians around the town instead, Tsukasa always goes overboard with it and ends up looking So Suspicious the rest of them end up having to make him change into normal clothes, Nene and Kanade get recognised because of their hair and Mafuyu's stony expression is always a dead giveaway no matter the outfit. -Jay

Another another fact is that they have too many members and don't fit into 3dmvs to take pictures of them in :')

Re/Born: The first thing ReBorn did when they got together as a band was pick their designated colours, but Ichika and Haruka always mix up which blue is whose. Ichika also has an indigo streak in her hair in this AU for that reason.

Re/Born is such a cool name imo too,,, Jay named them.

Lulla-tale !!: They take an embarassingly long time to actually form the whole group and then an even longer time to discover their sekai, which only makes sense considering how big their group is. I wanted the theatre group to be bigger because canon WxS is simply a very small cast.

Lulla-tale !! was named by yours truly <3

希望—アイデンティティ(Kibou-Identity): They all have a protectiveness over one another, each thinking that the others are too nice for the world. Shizuku's big sister instincts and the things she's seen when in the idol industry, Honami and Mizuki's experience with bullying, and Minori having been pushed down so many times while trying to become an idol, they all think they need to protect the others from experiences like their own.

Another fun fact is that I still can't name them because Jay and I are silly and wanted to name them something in Japanese, but I don't know any so we're struggling. Their current name means Hope Identity and is sort of temporary maybe perhaps?

Backdraft: When Akito first asked Shiho to partner up with him, she was like "oh yeah sure," she liked his singing, his style etc. Only when they actually hung out in vivid street did she realise he's like. really well known there.

Featuring Shiho as main character of a new hit manga: I Accidentally Partnered Up With A Local Celebrity!? -Jay

Backdraft was named by Jay, after a certain song, kudos to anyone who can guess it!

Thank you so so much for the ask, you've no idea how much it brightened both Jay and I's time :)

[miquellah]

HUGE fan of morgott the omen king as a character. disabled son of god was thrown into the sewers to be left for dead with his twin brother, climbs out of the sewers, wants to still work hard and become god’s favorite and uphold the law, becomes king under the disguise that he’s abled, and then still upholds god’s law that all disabled undesirables just like him are thrown into the sewers. crazy

[2beebebetter]

Tomie makes me so sad. She was just a high school girl who was pretty shitty and yeah needed to work on her personality but she got groomed by her teacher and was subsequently murdered by that fucker and dismembered by her entire class who made her out to be this horrible child of evil because they valued a pedophile’s career over getting justice for the death of his victim. And now because of their actions she’s cursed to relive her death forever, what’s left of her humanity stretched thinner and thinner in every subsequent version of herself until she becomes the person she was seen as by everyone else — a nefarious, selfish, arrogant girl who will doom the lives of every man she gets involved with until she’s finally burned like the witch she is.

[lgbtlunaverse]

I think one aspect of Nie Mingjue that is critically overlooked in fandom is that he failed.

What I mean is that I think it's strongly implied that a significant part of Nie Mingjue's moral rigidity and his tendency to universally fall back on his principles instead of trying to see the unique context of a new situation is that he is strongly aware that at some point his sense of judgement will be greatly impaired due to the saber curse, and he hopes that a strong rule-based morality system that he sticks to at all times-- ignoring any specfic feelings or doubts that may arise-- will help mitigate the damage when that happens. If he's trained himself to ignore his instincts and stick to the rules, he can continue doing the right thing even after he emotionally can no longer tell what the right thing is!

And it fails! Miserably! He essentially tried to destroy his ancestral curse with Facts and Logic and it didn't work! And he doesn't even realize that it's no longer working because surprise surprise: the curse that severely affects your sense of judgement also ruins your ability to gauge whether you're still standing by those rules you made up for yourself.

And the system was flawed from the get-go, because there is no such thing as a set of moral rules that are so universally applicable you'll never have to make unclear decision in edge-cases or re-evalutate the rules themselves based on new information-- a thing this system won't let him do because What If That's The Curse Talking? (nmj is basically a walking version of the slippery slope fallacy. Any small change is bad because it will lead to eventual catastrophy)-- and also because facts unfortunately do in fact care about your feelings and your attempt to be objective and unclouded by your emotions is still going to be subjective and informed by your own views, which is why Nie Mingjue's moral code has a core tentant that says self-sacrifice is not only Good but Mandatory and wanting to live is Bad, actually.

But even if the rules had somehow been perfect it would still, in the end, have failed. Right as the moment Nie Mingjue made that whole fucking system for arrives, it becomes useless. It's honestly really dark and tragic and deeply fascinating because of that.

Any fix-it that includes Nie Mingjue recovering from late stage saber poisoning should include him being absolutely horrified. Not just in the generic "oh my god I'm so sorry I hurt you" way, but in the sense that the thing he has committed to to the utmost degree since he was a child failed completely and instantly without him even noticing. Dedicated most of his life to it and it didn't matter at all. That's gonna fuck with a guy's head.

[imjustavenuxwithaboomerang]

finished the eps so here's some zombies lore and tidbits from the re-animated series:

bonzo and willa have the same shoe size (10 3/4 in men's and 12 3/4 in women's)

bucky loves cool frogs and hates all dogs (except for barky)

willa has been wearing the same boots every day because she became the alpha of their pack while wearing them (they are now destroyed)

bree runs the lost and found department and addison is her secretary

they have a drama department, a marching band, a water polo team, and a clown club

there are zed, addison, and eliza clones living in a neighboring town

there are alien-specific classes led by a computer robot in the mothership

zed has physical cards with drawings of him and eliza that act as "best friend cards"

bonzo was born on january 28th in 2007

zed and addison regularly use whiteboards to plan stuff

zed has a habit of smooth-talking his way out of and into things (including, but not limited to, getting extra food from lunch ladies, convincing eliza and addie to do things with/for him, and convincing a possessed dae to hold off on destroying the world)

there is a sentient blob that attends seabrook high

bonzo works at bree's family diner which is called grammykin's griddle

wyatt's a february pisces and eliza is an virgo

the werewolves celebrate numerous meat-themed holidays like porksgiving, beefapalooza, and vealentine's day

werewolves also have a great meat hunt that involves one werewolf being picked to hunt an unchecked apex predator in the woods and bring it back for the pack to eat

there are now zombie dogs due to another soda incident

principal lee has a sister who is pregnant (or has a very young baby)

wynter has an uncle named uncle wolfchowski

zed's favorite color is decomp green with light saturation

coach used to be best friends with the solstice slasher that haunts the woods

zombie strength can hold back a moving car

there are many pet sitting services in seabrook (some names include waggedy ann's, be on all four seasons, and harry poopins)

eliza created their universe's version of tik tok called shrimp tok

addison can't wink

moonstone necklaces were first created by a werewolf named wilhelmina lykenlolly

werewolves and sasquatches are century long enemies

eliza and wyatt are vegetarian

zed, wyatt, bree, and eliza play dungeons and dragons together and zed runs the campaign (zoey now also plays with them by the end of the episode)

aliens hatch out of spotted eggs and have a hatch-uation

a-spen is mothership's favorite alien