#absolutely same vibes

[fablesaesops]

is this anything?

[that1notetaker]

My mom cried during the mom movie.

[deadhaven]

Especially the lies.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

[grif-hawaiian-rolls]

You're gonna look at me and tell me that I'm wrong?

[houseswife]

what do you mean they were served court orders for malpractice? your honor, the only serving I see here is that of pure CUNT 🫶🏽

[lutheban]

Death: The Time of Your Life comic panel edits with Kirby

Original bellow:

[ahhrenata]

for @hamartia-grander ‘s fic Another Time 🧡

this scene in the epilogue got me 🙃 i love them.

[superbat-lmao]

Something that Bruce never meant to teach his kids was his methodology for a “final” contingency plan.

Over half of the time, operations that involve Batman’s plans are completed within the first ten acceptable contingencies. Sometimes people are injured, sometimes people unaccounted for are injured, and more often their estimates on property damage were low.

The other half of the time, when pushed beyond the ten most acceptable contingencies, more severe consequences are incurred. People are in comas, teammates lose a limb, anything shy of a permanent solution.

But Bruce, he has a final contingency for every scenario. His one true failsafe.

Self sacrifice.

At the absolute bottom of the barrel, after scraping clean the dregs themselves, in the space between the atoms of the wooden cask, is the final solution. Bruce sacrificing himself to save an enemy, a teammate, his city, the world, his galaxy, the universe. He is willing to take that hit. Only if he has to exhaust all other plans to reach that point.

His children don’t have the same compunction. It scares the hell out of him when one of them goes for the “final play” as though it’s one of the first ten contingencies. His kids think he’s a hypocrite, holding them to different standards than himself.

The one who takes after this particular mindset of his the most, is Jason.

Jason makes plans with brutal efficiency, but that rely on brutal methods. He discounts non-lethal plans in ways Bruce can’t fathom. Not always, but without a logic Bruce can follow.

He’s the only one of Bruce’s children that has successfully carried out a final plan. To the point that he always sees it as an option. He walks into a lion’s den guns blazing with little thought about extraction if it doesn’t go well. It terrifies Bruce.

Over the course of two separate movie nights, Bruce pieces together the issue.

The first movie night is a marathon of the Lord of the Rings extended editions. When Samwise is telling Frodo they will have to stretch their food for the journey home. The fact that Frodo hadn’t considered rationing supplies because he didn’t expect to return home sits uneasily with Bruce long after the credits have rolled.

The second was a movie chosen by Tim as part of a rotation. It was some science fiction film called Gattaca, about genetic engineering. In it, a man wants to go to space but lives in a world where everyone is genetically engineered at birth. It’s a scene with two brothers swimming in the ocean. The movie is trying to set up that people can’t exceed their own limits. The brother who was not engineered can swim farther than the brother who was, it is the real thesis of the movie. It comes to a point when the one asks how the other does it. How does he keep going, keep succeeding, doing better than others who were literally made to be better than him. It’s the scene in the ocean, each trying to swim further than the other. When the main character answers, it’s that he never saved any energy for the swim back to shore. Every single thing he accomplished in life was because he devoted himself singularly to the goal, didn’t plan for failure. If he had drowned in the ocean it would have been because he didn’t conserve enough energy to get back to shore. His mentality is that he never even considered it.

Jason is the only one who has been past the point of no return and still returned. He is both Frodo and Vincent, not planning for the return trip. It is something Bruce wishes he never taught his son.

[amazingdeadfish]

Close

Original painting below the cut

[linka-from-captain-planet]

obvi the hurdle - and the appeal - with Clea/Lune is that Clea doesn't think Lune is a person... or does she...

walk with me

(entire game spoilers)

Clea thinks that Alicia needs some looking after in the canvas, but you really think she'd just make a beeline for that meatbag wearing their brother's face? No way. Early on, she deigns to check on "Maelle" herself.

Naturally, every moment she spends lurking around "Lumiere", the cursed diorama that it is, is excruciating. But Clea is also a curious woman, and this place has... well, she shan't call it it culture. Customs, perhaps.

They make art. Play music. Craft beautiful clothing, weapons, technology. They developed folklore, even (much of it blaming Aline for things she, Clea, did, which she finds amusing). And is it not Clea's impossible dream to see all of the world's art and collect all of its fables? This place is decidedly not 'the world', but so long as Clea is shackled to this canvas, babysitting her entire family of adults, mind you, and thus cannot even savor the theatres and salons and galleries of her beloved Paris, let alone anywhere else...

Well, when she pops in once a canvas-year or so to make sure "Maelle" isn't toddling herself off the dock (she is duly unsurprised when her dear sis is deemed a dud and relegated to the lowest rung of this place's child labor strata - typical), Clea also takes a look around. Why not - she's already here.

So picture, say, Monolith year 40ish when a tall woman catches Clea's eye on her annual survey. Clea doesn't keep tabs on the menagerie, but her eyes trail carefully over a tattoo she doesn't recall seeing before. Chroma ink, clearly; a talisman of some sort, probably...

She knows what such a long and deliberate stare, one woman to another, would signal in her usual haunts in Paris - Le Hanneton, Le Souris, Le Rat Mort, places women of a certain inclination carved out for themselves in a man's world. It doesn't cross her mind that it might signal the same thing, here, until the woman stares back - at Clea's eyes, her lips, the notch of her collarbone exposed by her loose shirt collar - and smiles and approaches.

(Clea assumes that sapphism arose as a natural variation among these creatures, the byproduct of Aline's facsimile of humanity. Certainly Aline didn't do it on purpose, considering the man that her own face-wearing meatbag was involved with...)

But anyway, Clea hadn't bothered to speak with a Lumerian since those fools in the first year, and she isn't particularly interested in speaking with this woman, either. But. She'd never admit to feeling lonely, let alone pent up, but... Well.

It only takes a few minutes of conversation to realize this is a mistake. The woman is charming, intelligence and drive - and hunger - brimming behind her dark eyes. Her fingertips are blood-warm, trailing up Clea's arm as they chitchat. As if she were flesh-and-blood after all, and not chroma mimicking such.

She's a woman. Human. A person, but not real.

Clea had distanced herself from it before - the abomination Aline wrought in this place of wonder. The reasons why it's wrong - and against the Council's rules - are obvious.

But it's different - not so obvious - when the wrongness is in front of her, smiling, whispering an invitation in her ear. She thinks of her father's effigy of her, hunched over, crushed under the weight of the world. In comparison, the woman's hands are light, discreetly guiding her down the street and up into to a quaint apartment, passing her an open bottle of wine, brushing a hand up her calf to stroke her knee...

Clea reminds herself that this is her mother's sin, not hers. Aline made these people, and made them people. (And Clea knew that, all along - why else would she feel the need to check on Alicia if people weren't people? But she hadn't thought about it much, and that makes her feel like a fool, which means she profusely rejects it.) Aline gave these people free will, and this woman used it to pick her up, and that's that.

And anyway, why should she be the only one taking no temporary comfort from this canvas? Her whole family lost to her, alienated from her social group, hardly able to paint or sculpt or sing for pleasure for all her responsibilities...

Clea takes, and gives - nice to be appreciated again, to hear that's perfect panted in her ear again - , and it all blurs together and there are no gods here, aside from her and her parents, nor is she a believer, but Clea nevertheless thanks God that the kind of woman who picks up another off the streets here is just like the kind that'd do the same in the real world. The offer to have supper after washing up is sincere - but so is the relief in the woman's eyes when Clea declines, says she has somewhere else to be and other things to do.

Which she does.

She wasn't wrong, but she'll have no more of it - these people. Won't make the same mistake twice. She's already done her part; her pets are already doing what righteousness and the rules say she must. Aline may have stretched the time in this canvas to a ridiculous dilation, but it will only be several more days, real-time, maximum, before Renoir wrests control. What must never be done shall be undone well within the remediation period the Council would prescribe, if it ever discovered her family's transgression.

She considers stopping at Esquie's Nest, considers saying hello - or goodbye - to Francois. But she reconsiders. Attachment is Aline's vice, not hers, and it's cruel to taunt a living thing with its impending doom. The macabre puppet wallowing underneath her mother's glowing number is torture enough for the beings of this world.

So her pet sails and soars around until she finds it - him- , the meatbag wearing her brother's face. He's different from the last time she saw him - more tired, more inclined to listen to reason. Good - this time, he might finally make himself useful.

[scalierpepper]

Gave my pfp a bit of a glow up!!

Neat to see the one year improvement

[morrigan-sims]

🎭Rune Lovelace🎭

she/they/he/it | changeling | bard | college of dance | charlatan | former acrobat she is beauty, he is grace, they will punch you in the face!

[some extra info under the cut]

Rune is going to be my character for the new campaign my Monday group is starting!!! (RIP Kiran, who I never got to show off on this blog because he was a Tabaxi, a Dragonborn, and a Thri-Kreen. I'll miss it. Bugs and kisses.) We're playing Heckna! which is a Domain of Dread-adjacent horror-comedy campaign. The entire party is very macabre, and we should fit right in! (But hopefully not too much...)

Anyways, more about Rune. She's a changeling college of dance bard (a new subclass with the 2024 rules, kind of like a combo between a monk and a bard), and they used to be an acrobat at a circus. Since whatever world this party came from is clearly some kind of grimdark dark fantasy setting, the circus itself certainly had its eerie moments. (And of course, it was a magic circus.) When he wasn't up on the high wire, Rune also dabbled in doing tarot card readings for the circus guests, lying through her teeth about their pasts and futures. (While they used their true changeling form while performing in the big top, she used a specific guise when she did the readings, an older woman who used a different name.)

Rune carries with them a porcelain mask, largely featureless, but gilded with gold. When among people who do not know his changeling identity, she pretends that the mask is the source of her ability to change shape, putting it on every time they shift forms.

[jokijuzu]

Some little Magistrex doodles that I did in class today 👍

Tbh I’m still fixing up my personal design for him. Someday I might finalize something. Maybe. I don’t know.

[sewellsheart]

Question! Would your detective(s) still be interested in the opposite sex version of their LI?

[fortycumber]

give me an attractive man blinded by anger and revenge, with a good set of luscious grey hair and you know I'll be on board...no matter what becomes of this drama