#a thing that is both normal and possible to achieve

[littlenoodlesoup]

I've been holding my breath for a week and a half, but so help me, my little guy took a f/t mouse like a champ this morning (after about eight strikes and then grabbing it sideways, but he finally got it in there) and dear lord it's been a while since I've been so relieved about a pet.

And now... we wait for poop.

[claitea]

ok actually. does anyone have any good kingdom hearts playthroughs or video essays to recommend. i do wanna refresh my memory of the series bc i miss it a lot

[streets-in-paradise]

omg i had no idea patroclus showed the moves he learned from achilles to the girls..THATS SO CUTE AAAAAA (srry i didn’t really understand if this is something canon coming from troy or just one of your thoughts but this is so good anywayyyy)

Tecnically, it is implied in a deleted line on the script:

I understand why they deleted it, the internet is already an insufferable place attacking the version of the movie we got just because Achilles and Patroclus are relatives. It would have been like feeding gasoline to the flames of hate from Patrochilles shippers, so I am glad this stayed as a little in script bonus.

We can enjoy it, add it to our cute movie headcanons. It stays with us: I don't have to see a million edits of the line being mocked over and over by people who didn't even watched the movie in the first place, or did it in bad faith.

Everybody wins.

[squishedmellow]

I have this headcanon that when Tim realized he was dicks brother he decided to do Research so he watched a lot of shitty family sitcoms so the next time he saw Dick he walks up to him and goes "Hey big bro!" And Dick thinks he's been possessed

[pa-pa-plasma]

growing up ace/aro is so funny because you spend all your time thinking that just being able to acknowledge someone is conventionally attractive or "hot" is sexual or romantic attraction & then one day someone hits you with the "I would actually date/have sex with this person & would change my behaviour/life to do so" & you're like whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatt???

[sp1resong]

why does the concept of determinism trigger my ocd. that's so fucking stupid

[fantasmadelaciudad]

seeing pete wentz 2morrow. i think im going to spontaneously combust.

[philomelas-tongue-says]

on the other hand today I had like. the anti-Thursday. kicked the ass of my mini-teaching presentation, kicked the ass of my survey quiz, got all my silly admin stuff done while on campus, and went to an interesting lecture and asked (what I thought was) a thoughtful question. the epic highs and lows of being in a classics PhD program

[finelyageddragons]

Currently in love with the relationship between the Grey Wardens and being doomed by the narrative, especially with how the HOF subverts that relationship so here's a 3am rant about it. Enjoy! The wardens are ghosts. They are born by letting go of everything you had before and drinking poison to bind your fate to the darkspawn and promise that your life and perhaps more importantly, your death belongs to them. The whole joining is a terrifying experience, you're drinking the blood of monsters and seeing a corrupt god in your mind and waking up to see those who died around you and being told you'll meet the same fate soon enough you've just been given more time to get there because to sacrifice, to die is a warden's purpose. Even if you survive becoming a warden, your best case scenario is sacrificing yourself to end the blight but it's far more likely you'll die fighting darkspawn or even more likely lose your mind and have to go to the deep roads to be lost and have your death be your last act of defiance in the face of this overwhelming wave of evil waiting to rise again. The best thing that can happen to a warden is to die in a meaningful way because you gave away your life the moment you drank that blood. All you are now is a soldier waiting to die in war and hopefully take the enemy down with you. It is tragic and haunting and noble and so full of grief. Grief for the live you gave behind and for the one you'll never have. Every warden spends every day of their life hoping not for a future or any life for themselves but simply to make their death mean something which is an incredibly interesting mental state and I could go on about how that effects individuals and messes with their values so that corruption is rife but what started this whole thing is Fereldan.

A wonderful post by @sapphim (which I don't know how to cite but I wanna give credit so if there's a way please tell me) discussed how beneficial it was for the wardens that the fifth blight occured in Fereldan and how much they lost by it being solved so soon. To put it simply, they wanted to sacrifice Fereldan as a lost cause and use it as an example of why they wardens shouldn't be neglected. They wanted it to be known of how much of a sacrifice they make an how important their duty by letting the country of Fereldan be an example of what happens when no one is there to do it and that the narrative has doomed everyone, that the world's crimes will be paid for unless someone is willing to be selfless and bear the burden to give the world another chance. Andraste would have been a great warden I'm sure. In the eyes of the warden, Fereldan is tainted just like their blood, it is promised to the darkspawn just like they are, willingly or not it bears the duty that all wardens do and must make the sacrifice they do too. For the greater good. To stop the darkspawn. It's better you having a death that matters than a life that lasts. This is the psychology of the wardens and they are applying those same beliefs to all of Fereldan. Why must they be the only ones doomed by the narrative? There is no surviving this story and there is saving the world there is only killing the darkspawn before it kills you. Thedas is at war with the archdemons and until they're all dead, there is no peace, there is only preparing for the next battle. There is no building a life, no building a country, there is nothing to protect because it is all doomed.

The way duty and sacrifice and the promise of the Grey Wardens must alter their values and perspective on life is fascinating and there is so much to explore here but what's important for this post is that the foundation of their entire order is that they are already dead.

This then brings us to the HOF and cheating death. Duncan is like the grim reaper in Origins the way he comes and snatches your soul at the end of each origin which I honestly love and it ties in so well to the idea that wardens are ghosts given you die in every other version of the story without him but that's the story of all wardens. They all die a symbolic death at the joining so that's okay but then Ostogar happens. Flemeth happens. You should have died. Fereldan should have been lost. Remember, the duty of the wardens is dying not surviving but you did survive, snatched away by a god. Every other warden has died thinking their paying the price for an absent god yet this goddess not only favours you, she changed fate for you. Every other warden throughout history has paid the price but not you. Not Fereldan. You get to cheat the fate while it dooms everyone else. Can you imagine how that must have felt for the other wardens? How much they must hate the hero for stealing the martyr Fereldan was set to be and making all their losses naught but a tragedy when it could have been so much more? Not only did you escape your own death but you stole the value of theirs. You survived which goes against everything the wardens are made for.

Going even further than that, you have the dark ritual where you can actively choose to cheat death again. When every other warden has had to give their life, had to sacrifice and lose and grieve and poison their humanity as they did their bodies, you get to escape it all. Wardens have struggled for decades to have a foothold in Fereldan but you'll go so far as to choose their ruler for them without any consultation. You have been a warden less than a year, ended a battle that they prepared for over hundreds of years and sacrificed more hundreds of years fighting in the past and not only have you defied everything they defined themselves by, you have made them look like fools and decided their fate for them. You have stolen the meaning of the death of every warden, you have stolen their martyrs and the justifications for their actions and by keeping your own life and humanity, by resisting their poison you have made them all look like monsters.

The hero was doomed by the narrative as all wardens are but they rewrote fate, they stole their life back so many times and by surviving, they created a whole new narrative that ruined everything the wardens were built upon. The wardens were made to be ghosts, not heroes. They're meant to die and be remembered nobly so they can be redeemed for they had to do to get there but not you hero. You get to shame us all, don't you?

[nightingalesails]

Julian inventing clicker training specifically for Avra

Avra would be more upset about it if he didn't get treats out of it

[rainbowpopeworld]

I love my therapist 😂🥰 Yesterday I unintentionally made her laugh until she cried and she said “You won therapy today!” And I, of course, responded “Something which is both possible to achieve and normal to want.”

(the meme in case you are part of the 10,000 today)

[glitterrosesnzz]

because you're fantastic and we love your writing!

asdhsdjkfsldkfjsdf thank you?!?

[seaofreverie]

I must say that lately I've been too addicted to animal crossing to really have time to do anything else but one good piece of news is that I finally made some real progress on my book documenting my experience of seeing TMBG show recap post because I finished describing the pre-show stuff and the first set yesterday so I might finish it this week. I hope. The only problem is that it's already 9 pages long so in a way I'm not joking about how I could turn this into a book instead. And it's not my fault that the stage banter was so good that I'm probably going to end up transcribing like half of it at least.

[ai-the-broccoli]

anyway if there's anything I'd particularly say about Luka's portion the recent free patreon info, it's that hey, we get more information that suggests that I was correct in clocking autism in him too after all. see I wasn't just projecting y'all (<- was absolutely projecting)

(it's funny though, because I actually previously had a brief draft about my opinion on that lol. I kept in my drafts not because I wanted to add more to it, but because it had so little stuff aside from my opinion that I wasn't sure if I needed to post it)

[amelikos]

Actually a bit surprised that Cap's allergy to the word "cute" has been brought up a few times after it was first revealed.. And that it was brought up once when Spinel was in the vicinity in HZ054..

I wonder if it'll be brought up again in the future.

[caffeinatedopossum]

I had to get a drug test, as one does when getting adhd meds, and even knowing I haven't done any drugs, I was still worried I would fail the drug test (I didn't of course)