#STRIKE shenanigans

[opbackgrounds]

I love the framing of this panel, with the last remaining members of the Rumbar Pirates bracketed on each side by swords, symbolizing their upcoming demise. It's gorgeous and tragic, with great use of negative space that really helps hammer home Brook's question.

The Rumbar Pirates singing as they die reminds me a lot of the musicians on the Titanic who played until the ship sank to help keep the passengers calm as they loaded the lifeboats.

[shakespeareallanpoe]

*Tim gets thrown into a wall and isn't moving*

Batman: "Robin. Check the pulse."

Damian: *completely misses all pulse points on purpose and sticks a gloved finger in Tim's ear instead*

Damian: "No pulse. He's dead."

[d8tl55c]

[anthrophobixx]

Whimsical

(click the image for higher quality yay)

[tatooineknights]

[b4kuch1n]

hahaha wheee haha

[akai-anna]

shinichi: *takes a deep breath* shinichi: i lo- anyone who has spent five seconds around shinichi ever: yes, you love ran, we know, you love mōri ran so much, she's the light of your life, you love her so much, you just love ran, we KNOW , you love ran you fucking love ran ok we know, we get it, YOU LOVE MŌRI RAN. WE GET IT.

[dazzlingqwq]

going: through it

so im scrolling through pinterest trying to get really into murder drones right, and i find this radical looking VUzi post.. and i go to check the comments and... um..

i know NUzi is cool and all but.. can we let people ship things..

[yannig]

And this right here is the first proof we have that Huaien is lying to Xiaobao.

Of course, he's lying on his background as a bodyguard, but that's different from lying to Xiaobao's face - it's a general cover that the Jin's men discovered through investigation. It's not directly relevant to their relationship.

But the rest of it? I'm expecting most if not all of the stories about his family to be truthful - as well as his disbelief in love. Sure, he's hiding a lot, but most of what he's revealed to Xiaobao was likely true.

It doesn't, however, mean that it was genuine. I was asking last week if Huaien's vulnerability was genuine or a calculated way to manipulate Xiaobao. I'm of the opinion it's going too quickly to be entirely genuine - Huaien doesn't strike me as the type to make love declarations that early.

This lie proves that it is at least part of said vulnerability is manipulative. He pretends to have sacrificed a great deal to save Xiaobao when in reality his mission was perfectly fulfilled. Of course the document he gave whoever this asshole is was a decoy; Huaien isn't stupid.

But he nods when Xiaobao asks if he gave their attacker what he wanted, lying to cement the idea that he's falling in love with Xiaobao and that he's ready to risk his father's anger for him. It's the first clear confirmation we have that he's purposefully manipulating Xiaobao.

Of course, it comes to bite him in the ass instantly when his father's next order it to kill the Jin family, which actually puts him in a situation where he has to chose between his father and Xiaobao.

Up to that point, he could tell himself that every time he was allowing Xiaobao close, it was for the good of the mission. That he was seducing him to use him to get the accounting book. That he was being vulnerable and open to manipulate Xiaobao and not because he was enjoying his attention, his care, his warmth. That he was protecting him to endear Xiaobao to him and not because he cares about him. That he was being possessive because the seduction plan will work better is Xiaobao's attention is focused solely on him.

Now though? Now he's going to have to make a choice.

Does he follow his father's orders in hope that he will actually give him his freedom, but lose Xiaobao's warmth?

Does he try to pretend he followed his orders while hiding Xiaobao somewhere?

Or worse, does he fully disobey his father and try to save the whole family, because Xiaobao has both shown and stated that he'll be sad if his family dies?

[silverskye13]

You: *casually dishing out RnS chapters that would probably change the chemical makeup of my brain if I gave in and googled any lore about the hermits* Me: *dodging with increasing desperation, sweat on my brow, knowing I absolutely cannot afford a new obsession* MERCY PLEASE I BEG YOU

Ahaha I don't ! Want to put a damper on your enthusiasm ! But unfortunately the hermits don't drop banger lines like that often [unless you're Doc or Rendog, in which case you drop lines like that all the time specifically because you know it makes people go nuts lol]. Helsknight is a very, very small character in the grand scheme of things, and Tanguish is an OC. An OC heavily inspired by one of the hermits! But still.

This is a bit of a "Writing Casting Rain using two characters who barely exist in cannon, let alone interact in canon" kind of scenario lol

One could argue I should just start writing my own goddamn books, but that would require finding a publishing company, and who has time for that?

[askthesupersisters]

SO LIKE YOU KNOW HOW I RESPONDED TO THAT ONE ASK ABOUT STUDY-LIFE BALANCE AND IT WAS ALL PEACHY RIGHT

WELL UH LATER THAT DAY I WAS BROWSING THE GS ITALIAN SITE AND I FOUND THAT THE SUPERSISTERS 2 PREVIEW CAME OUT AND

Well tl;dr is uh I jinxed it in the span of a single day-- /j

(English doc is made by me, translation was made courtesy of plugging stuff into DeepL)

Anyway THEY LOOK SO DONE LIKE C'MON EVEN IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE ARTSTYLE YOU GOTTA ADMIT THIS IS HILARIOUS

And I made my own version of it too because how could I not HAHAHAH

[incorrect-multiverse]

*at some point, probably*

Daisy: In my defence, I was left unsupervised.

May: Wasn’t Simmons with you?

Simmons: I was also left unsupervised.

[donnyanne]

Because I was terrible posting in 2023, my fav pieces that year!!!

featuring OCs from @anonymalanonyme and @madmythologist!

[aurumacadicus]

Tony strikes me as the kind of person who, upon hearing neighbors fighting, would open the window and listen.

So what I’m saying is Tony moves into a nice brownstone, keeps to himself, notices his neighbors seem very close but is too awkward to insert himself into the conversations to make friends (normally people come up to him, so he has no idea how to really... start conversations). He’ll wave and they’ll wave back, and someone left cookies on his doorstep after he moved in, but mostly, he keeps to himself and they keep to themselves.

Then one day the couple across the street starts arguing while Tony goes to get the mail. He hovers by his mailbox, keeping his ears open. It sounds like the wife is angry about school but her tipping point is her husband not putting his laundry in the hamper. Tony looks through his mail but doesn’t actually read any of it because now the husband is complaining about crock pot meals every night.

“What are you doing?” someone asks flatly, and Tony jumps, turning to find one of his scarier neighbors frowning at him, arms crossed over her chest. The blond guy next to her has a dog on a leash. The dog only has three legs and one eyeball.

“...I’m nosy,” Tony says after a moment, lifting his head to blink at her.

“Great, trade places with me so I can face my good ear at their house,” the blond guy says, and Tony obediently swivels, stunned.

“Did he say anything about the crock pot?” the lady asks seriously. “I hope she breaks it over that asshole’s head.”

And it turns out Tony’s nextdoor neighbors are just as nosy as he is. They’re Natasha and Clint. The dog’s name is Lucky. Sometimes Clint takes Lucky on walks just to hear what’s going on around the neighborhood. It’s great.

The couple divorces and put their house on the market. The ex-wife gives Tony her crock pot and all her recipes for it as thanks for putting her in touch with a good lawyer and Tony has no idea what her ex-husband is complaining about because everything is delicious. A couple of Clint and Natasha’s friends snap the house up.

They argue a lot.

“You know, it’s really obvious that you’re being nosy when you just grab a cup of coffee and open your window,” Natasha says, frowning at him judgmentally.

“If they cared they’d shut up and go back inside,” Tony replies, nonplussed, and hands her another cup of coffee.

Then one day he gets more than he bargained for when one of the guys shouts, “YOU CAN ASK HIM OUT AFTER I ASK HIM OUT THEN YOU FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE,” and starts charging across the street. The only reason he doesn’t leap directly through Tony’s open window and into his house is because the other guy tackles him at the sidewalk.

Clint comes out of his house, walks over to Tony’s, and comes inside so he can close and lock the window. “Play hard to get. They’re annoying when they’re smug,” is all he says, and then he leaves again.

Tony blinks, stunned, and takes a loud sip of his coffee.

[soopersara]

For reasons that have everything and nothing to do with the most recent chapters of I&S, I've been thinking a lot about a time travel AU that I will absolutely never write.

Specifically, I want a time travel AU where little-kid!Zuko (age 9-10) travels forward in time and meets angry-teen!Zuko (we're talking like... the Book 1 egghead version of angry-teen!Zuko here). I know that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but the way I envision this playing out is:

Teen!Zuko and kid!Zuko meet, and after a healthy amount of confusion, figure out that they're two different versions of the same person. Kid!Zuko is... not thrilled to be stuck on a rickety old ship with a much grumpier version of himself, but hey! Uncle Iroh is here, and he's got lots of board games and even more free time, so it could be worse. Teen!Zuko, meanwhile, is having a bit of a crisis as he gets slapped in the face with several realizations all at once.

Realization #1: A warship is not a good place for a 9-10 year old boy to live, but there's literally nowhere else in the world where kid!Zuko will be safe. For as long as kid!Zuko is stuck in this timeline, teen!Zuko has to look after him.

Realization #2: Oh, shit. No one has seriously fucked up kid!Zuko yet. His life obviously hasn't been perfect, but this is pretty much the peak of kid!Zuko's sweet-and-innocent phase.

Realization #3: ... as fucked up as teen!Zuko's life has been, he desperately doesn't want to be the person who fucks up kid!Zuko's life.

Cue teen!Zuko scrambling to get his shit together so that he can be a reasonably healthy and stable guardian/big brother figure for his younger self. He starts working on his temper and trying to take Iroh's advice more seriously, and while things don't always go smoothly (kid!Zuko definitely picks up some vigilante tendencies from teen!Zuko. There may or may not be sightings of a tiny Blue Spirit causing trouble up and down the Earth Kingdom coast), teen!Zuko eventually figures out what he's doing. He puts in the work to become a decent role model, he deals with some of his own shit (and his outlook on life improves), he grows to see kid!Zuko as the little brother he never had, and he generally doesn't fuck anything up too badly.

Basically, looking after kid!Zuko teaches teen!Zuko self love (but with extra steps! I don't think grumpy-teen!Zuko could ever learn anything the simple way 😂)

All of that growth makes it harder and harder for teen!Zuko to ever envision himself returning to the Fire Nation. After all, if he wouldn't put his younger self through the pain of going back there and dealing with Ozai, why should he put his present self through that? And on a related note, kid!Zuko definitely has questions about teen!Zuko's scar and banishment. When teen!Zuko reaches a point where he's able to think about the Agni Kai, he can't imagine anything that kid!Zuko could ever do to deserve that kind of treatment, which leads teen!Zuko to question whether he deserved it. And as teen!Zuko starts to come to grips with the fact that he's probably never going back home - certainly not if it would mean putting kid!Zuko through the same pain that teen!Zuko experienced there - he has to start considering what other options he has for the future.

Kid!Zuko may or may not accelerate teen!Zuko's redemption arc even more by befriending various members of the Gaang and dragging his 'big brother' along to meet his new friends/disappearing for a few hours with his new friends only to be 'rescued' by teen!Zuko who is... very surprised and very awkward about it when he realizes who kid!Zuko is hanging out with.

There are obviously lots of time travel AUs out there already, but apparently this one is just going to live in my brain for the forseeable future 😂 As much as I love the standard "post-redemption!Zuko meets Book 1 Zuko and mentors his younger self to accelerate his own redemption/drags himself kicking and screaming toward redemption" time travel AUs that I see around the fandom, I think I'm just hungry for a time travel AU where pre-redemption!Zuko doesn't know what his future could look like. To me, there's just something really appealing about the idea of a time travel AU where his redemption gets accelerated not because he knows his life will get better if he becomes a better person, but because he wants to be someone who his younger self can be proud of.

[doublxpresso]

Sorry this is just my link click hyperfixation mixing with my feelings about graduating, but do you ever think about how many first and lasts that CXS missed/forgot/didn’t get to experience again? Like there are these sweet emotions or tragic ends that he doesn’t remember. For every sacrifice, or final day, there’s a piece of him missing and he doesn’t even know. Honestly the worst part for me would be the not knowing. The good thing with graduating was that I knew some of the friends I said goodbye to that day, it was likely that we wouldn’t speak much or at all afterwards but it was always worse to have a final conversation that you weren’t aware of. Like I’m curious what changed and how much did CXS lose or gain from LG time shenanigans

Ah, I get what you mean, and it makes me wonder about LG's pov rather than CXS's! Because CXS doesn't remember, right? He lives his firsts and lasts over and over again while being nonethewiser about it, right? I wonder, tho, if he would sense something missing, or feel some kind of deja vu, at some point...would be interesting!

But how does LG feels, watching these firsts and last over and over again? Seeing how CXS may change little by little, timeline to timeline? Even for the graduating part, or any other instance in life really, not knowing is always how it goes, isn't it? You never know that one thing you've done could be the last time ever. So how does it feels, to relive all these moments you actually know will be the last? I'm thinking, like talking to an old neighbour that you're used to greet everyday but is suddenly gone, or talking to a classmate at graduation and with who you'll inevitably lose contact... but /knowing/ it's the last time, wouldn't one want to change that last conversation? Give a final goodbye? Wouldn't LG feel nostalgic, seeing CXS say 'see you around' to this one person who he knows they'll never see again? Very interesting things to think about :'))