#actual light of my life

[ann-fortunate]

Bruh I really went into reading Best Friend’s Brother thinking this would be a low key nice read typa fic

BOY WAS I WRONG

Glorious trans Regulus????? the Black sibling flashbacks???? and now they mentioned Eurovision???!???!??? I might actually die from overwhelm of emotion before i finish this if you never hear from me again only you guys will know the true nature of my demise

[coddda]

I wish we could have met in some other way.

Lawlight Week Day 2: Soulmates

If you saw me repost and re-edit this several times uh No you didn't </3

Still frames/Individual gifs:

If you know what every frame is from you get a free cookie. by the way

[cerulean-tea]

happy 413!! to the webcomic that changed my life 5 years ago ⭐️

[deadpoets]

SOLDIER, POET, KING by The Oh Hellos

[killakalx]

↳ ageless/blank blogs dnf

18+ content, mirror sex (for his bday and definitely not a projection of my own fantasies), doggy style, reverse cowgirl (?), against the mirror, dick grayson is an ass man

thinking about dick grayson who has you face down, ass up in front of the mirror, pulling you back into his thick dick rather than thrusting into you. the force he uses has his balls slapping into your thighs, holding your legs closer together for that echo he wants each time your skin makes contact with his. dick’s looking at you in the reflection, mouthing off about how sexy you look. he gets caught in the moment and his hands slide away from your hips to palm your ass, and the way you have to fuck yourself onto him before your orgasm teeters away nearly pushes him over the edge. your eyes drift away from the reflection of his arms and abs flexing with each thrust, mewling into your arm as you fuck yourself back. you’re doing most of the work now, hands clinging to the sheets to add a bit more force to it.

now you’re taking his cock all on you own; ass on full display for him while you watch yourself bounce on his cock in the mirror. up and down, ass smacking against his pelvis to make a lewd clap each time and dick’s moaning at the view he has. propped up on his elbow, making you yelp a few times when he smacks your ass. at first, there’s deep crescent marks in the sides of his thighs from having to hold yourself upright, now fading once he feels your pace falter. at that point, he’d plant his feet firmly into the hardwood floor off the edge of the bed, locking your arms into his hand behind you and plowing his cock into you.

still, his poor girl gets so tired after fucking herself onto him. just to help you out, he’s standing now- bending you over nothing and forcing your palms into the mirror to hold up your upper half. he’s damn near picked you up by your hips, eyes glued to your ass and the pretty arch in your back before catching a glimpse of your fucked out face pressed into the mirror. the room’s dowsed in sex, fog settling on the glass and making it knock against the wall. there are tears swelling in your eyes, incoherent whimpers for a break that get louder each time he makes your legs buckle. ‘m almost done, doll, dick would groan for the third time, this ass was just made for me, baby. you really can’t blame me. ❧

[isjasz]

[Day 155] Sunflowers always face the sun

-

So like. If sunflowers always face the sun and the majority of the sunflowers on scar's shawl are on his back and on the side does that mean scar still trusts grian with his back or he turned his back on him rejected him moved on or sometimes they wish they are by each other's sides again or are they allies or enemies this will be the death of m <- epic shower thoughts

[strayklds]

BANG CHAN as EMOJIS → HAPPY CHAN DAY! 🖤 (231003)

[javsarts]

At some point, he made a silent oath to himself that someday, he will repay that girl’s kindness.

.

.

And he unknowingly did

Just a random HC of mine where a little Jenevelle did help a little Durge at some point, set in a time before Bhaal and Shar.

[kyouka-supremacy]

ATSUSHI NAKAJIMA | Bungo Stray Dogs Anime Novel

[enkays-den]

Some captures from yesterday's stream ✨

[tanasha-not-yet]

it's kind of a cedric version of this piece

[non-un-topo]

hot guard summer

[windfalling]

THE FALL [1/5]

"You can unlearn what was taught to you," The Stranger said, his voice almost gentle. "We will do it together." Osha discovers her strength in the Force with The Stranger to guide her.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I made a few new wax seal stamps out of clay (like the ones I did for my worldbuilding stuff forever ago), this time just of random symbols that I thought might look good done in the style of painting over the raised part of the wax or etc. :0c Some of them aren't carved deep enough to really show up that well, but overall they worked okay for being clay lol

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[cordiallyfuturedwight]

you're my light, you're my light no matter how far apart we might be it will always reach me for @jkvjimin ♡︎ insp. x, x, x; template: seaoftr; trans. doolsetbangtan, bangtansubs