#The Muse Writes

[awanderingmuse-fandom]

Silly Outer Wilds headcanon. When a Hearthian winks it's still a one eyed gesture. But! There's different body language meanings to how they do it. Upper eye winks connotate a lightheartedness. Joking or perhaps blatant flirting. A lower eye wink is used when trying to be sly.

[keezree]

With each new step to healing

I feel my bones ache

They press from within straining

They rail and they rake

Is it that i am resisting

Is it that I don't want a cure

Or perhaps it's something that wants out

I'm still not really sure

Is there a moment within the cocoon

New formed butterflies stretch and strain

Wondering to give up

Or to push through all the pain

My bones will not break open

They can't tear through my flesh

Rather liquid like, through marrow mazes

Perhaps soul and body will mesh

Anger arises as I'm treated gently

Don't they know they're doing it wrong?

But you can't strangle a nightingale tightly

And still yet expect to hear its song

So slowly, so slowly, i sit patiently

Focusing on each cold breath

Like a phoenix, or butterfly, burnt in ash, wrapped cocoon

It's a transformation- Not death.

[tofixtheshadows]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how Kabru deprives himself.

Kabru as a character is intertwined with the idea that sometimes we have to sacrifice the needs of the few for the good of the many. He ultimately subverts this first by sabotaging the Canaries and then by letting Laios go, but in practice he's already been living a life of self-sacrifice.

Saving people, and learning the secrets of the dungeons to seal them, are what's important. Not his own comforts. Not his own desires. He forces them down until he doesn't know they're there, until one of them has to come spilling out during the confession in chapter 76.

Specifically, I think it's very significant, in a story about food and all that it entails, that Kabru is rarely shown eating. He's the deuteragonist of Dungeon Meshi, the cooking manga, but while meals are the anchoring points of Laios's journey, given loving focus, for Kabru, they're ... not.

I'm sure he eats during dungeon expeditions, in the routine way that adventurers must when they sit down to camp. But on the surface, you get the idea that Kabru spends most of his time doing his self-assigned dungeon-related tasks: meeting with people, studying them, putting together that evidence board, researching the dungeon, god knows what else. Feeding himself is secondary.

He's introduced during a meal, eating at a restaurant, just to set up the contrast between his party and Laios's. And it's the last normal meal we see him eating until the communal ending feast (if you consider Falin's dragon parts normal).

First, we get this:

Kabru's response here is such a non-answer, it strongly implies to me that he wasn't thinking about it until Rin brought it up. That he might not even be feeling the hunger signals that he logically knew he should.

They sit down to eat, but Kabru is never drawn reaching for food or eating it like the rest of his party. He only drinks.

It's possible this means nothing, that we can just assume he's putting food in his mouth off-panel, but again, this entire manga is about food. Cooking it, eating it, appreciating it, taking pleasure in it, grounding yourself in the necessary routine of it and affirming your right to live by consuming it. It's given such a huge focus.

We don't see him eat again until the harpy egg.

What a significant question for the protagonist to ask his foil in this story about eating! Aren't you hungry? Aren't you, Kabru?

He was revived only minutes ago after a violent encounter. And then he chokes down food that causes him further harm by triggering him, all because he's so determined to stay in Laios's good graces.

In his flashback, we see Milsiril trying to spoon-feed young Kabru cake that we know he doesn't like. He doesn't want to eat: he wants to be training.

Then with Mithrun, we see him eating the least-monstery monster food he can get his hands on, for the sake of survival- walking mushroom, barometz, an egg. The barometz is his first chance to make something like an a real meal, and he actually seems excited about it because he wants to replicate a lamb dish his mother used to make him!

...but he doesn't get to enjoy it like he wanted to.

Then, when all the Canaries are eating field rations ... Kabru still isn't shown eating. He's only shown giving food to Mithrun.

And of course the next time he eats is the bavarois, which for his sake is at least plant based ... but he still has to use a coping mechanism to get through it.

I don't think Kabru does this all on purpose. I think Kui does this all on purpose. Kabru's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be understood as informing his character just as much as Laios's autism informs his. It's another way that Kabru and Laios act as foils: where Laios takes pleasure in meals and approaches food with the excitement of discovery, Kabru's experiences with eating are tainted by his trauma. Laios indulges; Kabru denies himself. Laios is shown enjoying food, Kabru is shown struggling with it.

And I can very easily imagine a reason why Kabru might have a subconscious aversion towards eating.

Meals are the privilege of the living.

[selenekallanwriter]

Person: What's your book about?

Writers:

I'm both somehow 🙃

[theajaheira]

another cool thing is when you devour a book over the course of a handful of hours and it fucks you up and you just have to lie on the couch feeling like your brain went swimming for too long & only just came up from under the water. art is so good

[lipikkawrites]

A lot will go wrong before everything goes right.

Keep moving forward.

-@lipikkawrites

[starklyscifi]

The thing people don’t realize about writing is that time spent just staring out the window is CRITICAL

[humunanunga]

Enough of the trope where memory loss undoes the damage or the corruption or whatever. More content where removing memories just removes the context.

The tragedy of needing to grieve and not knowing what or who you lost or why. The angst of having trauma and being denied the awareness that it's trauma. The suspense of being different somehow and left to wonder how and when. The tension of knowing that something is off and you can't find where it hurts. The Adventure Zone gets it. Kingdom Hearts gets it.

There is an aching inside you and you don't know how it got there.

[buggachat]

something so fucked up about Chat Noir’s whole deal is that he is in a lot of ways Adrien playing a character. Like Adrien picked up his miraculous and was told he’d be a superhero so he was like “ok, time to act like a superhero!” and he lets himself have fun w it and play up the role and let loose and kind of just allow himself to be silly and goofy and have fun and for once in his life not care about performing Perfection™.

But. But none of the other characters KNOW THAT. So everyone just sees Chat Noir and is like “look at this guy’s ego. He’s so full of himself. Surely it’d be fair to knock him down a few pegs” without being aware of how few pegs he actually HAS. He’s like the “insecure character who overcompensates in ego” trope except he’s really not doing it unironically, he’s just having a fun LARP pretending to have self worth in his off-hours but nobody else is on the same page about it being a game and he refuses to tell them. He just dramatically pouts about it and lets them laugh and pretends like he’s not internalizing it and it is almost 3 am and my brain forced me to write this instead of sleeping I’m gonna take a melatonin

[awanderingmuse-fandom]

Give Me Hope

Rating: General

Archive Warnings: None

Characters: Hornfels, Esker, Feldspar, Slate, Gossan

Pairings: Eskfels, Side-Slatespar

Additional Tags: Major Character Injury, 5 +1 things, Pre-Canon, canon compatible, Romance, Angst, Fluff, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Idiots in Love, Outer Wilds Ventures Origin Story, Getting Together, Busy!Hornfels, Busy!Esker, Beta Read!, Hornfels POV

Summary:

How Outer Wilds Ventures came to be.

OR

Five times Hornfels and Esker were too busy to date and the one time Esker said enough.

[emeryleewho]

There's a huge difference between redemption and humanization. I feel like a lot of "redemption arcs" aren't actually redemption at all, they're just attempts to humanize the villain so that they seem multi-faceted, but people read them as "redemption arcs" and think that that is meant to justify all the evil they've done before and negate whatever made them a villain in the first place. I think true "redemption arcs" are actually kind of rare because true redemption would take making the villain acknowledge their crimes, reevaluate their actions, actively choose to do better, and then proceed to make amends and become a better person, and that would this take more time than most stories are allowed to give their characters.

I've also seen people argue that a character has to be poised for redemption from the jump for it to work because once a character does something "too bad", they can't be redeemed. I completely disagree because redemption isn't justification or forgiveness, so no matter how horrible a character's actions, they could choose to become better, but because a lot of people (including writers) think redemption means "erasing the character's flaws and making it so they did nothing wrong ever", a lot of attempted "redemption arcs" just end up erasing a character's entire history or justifying every evil thing they've ever done. And yeah, in these cases, the only way to make a character go from a villain to a perfect cinnamon roll with no flaws *is* to have been planning it from the beginning and make sure they never do anything that can't be explained away later.

TLDR: real redemption arcs require a lot of self-awareness, patience, and growth, which are things that are rarely actually allocated to villains, and that's why real redemption arcs almost never get executed. The reason people think redemption arcs are overdone is because there are so many attempts to either humanize a villain that get misconstrued as redemption or attempts to blatantly erase who a character was in the name of "redemption", which is really just poor character development.

[nothatsmi]

The impossible duo (the simpletons)

THIS SHIT is the only thing that makes me happy these days. Only volleyball players on my mind. all day long. how do you expect me to work in these conditions...

I sure hope I can draw more of these fellas, there are so many characters that I like (my favorite is Nishinoya, he's definitely the one I'll draw next).

Anyway here's some kagehina, I totally ship it.

[blistexenthusiast]

19th century hand pressed antique wax seals

[thehummingbee20]

someone who can take your breath away and yet fill your lungs with air when you feel breathless.

[minimalist-quotes]

A lot will go wrong before everything goes right. Keep moving forward

-@lipikkawrites

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Idea for an animated kid's movie/comedy.

So there's this dinosaur park that's a thinly veiled Jurassic Park knock-off (call it Cretaceous Island), and it's a bit of a toy story situation, in that the dinosaurs can talk and communicate when the humans aren't looking, mostly at night.

The dinos don't really want to break out since they like their cushy zoo lives and five-star treatment from the staff, so they're willing to get oggled by a bunch of twelve year olds to keep the food coming.

Out main characters are a T-Rex, two raptor sisters, and a wise old triceratops. The raptors are bored with their lives and long for adventure, the triceratops is a wise-old mentor figure, and the T-Rex is lonely since the park won't engineer any other T-Rex's for safety reasons.

Through magical shenanigans they get sent back to the actual Cretaceous period.

Now these pampered genetically engineered dinos have to survive in the savage dinosaur era. To underscore the differences between them, the future dinos are animated as pretty standard cartoon dinosaurs, a la Land Before Time, while the dinosaurs from the past are animated to be as scientifically accurate as possible.

The dinos go through shenanigans, amke friends in the past, evade predators, and eventually make their way home through magic portal stuff, except for the T-Rex who elects to stay behind since he's fallen for a female T-Rex he met in the past. His friends are sad to leave him behind, but go to the present anyway.

Back in the present, the dinos think nothing has really changed, but they find that the exhibit in the visitor's center, previously a single roaring T-Rex skeleton, has been replaced with two T-Rex's, famous for being found fossilized together called "The Deadly Lovers", and its their friend and the mate he found in the past. It ends on the bittersweet note.