#again... my own personal take

[danburys]

media is open to interpretation, obviously. i do find it a little baffling when people say that the team in general and hardison and parker specifically haven't been taking care of eliot and are only now realizing that he gets hurt for them.

yes, being a hitter is a fundamentally messed up job. yes, it's a reflection of societal patterns of violence. yes, eliot often hates that he's been reduced to this. yes, it's not all he wants to be, so cooking saved him. and yes, he takes those punches for other people, for the team, and his body pays the price.

but in my view, it's pretty clear that the team ultimately gives each other the dignity of choice. they miss each other when one has to take a break, they try to make a case for why someone should stick around, but in the end sophie goes on her journey of self-discovery with no one mad at her, hardison gets to branch out and try to widen his scope. breanna gets taken along on college tours by the wilsons. parker has trouble accepting change but she lets sophie decide for herself whether she wants to go to london.

eliot is an adult man with a lot of life experience. working with the team has shown him a hundred different ways to keep going. he knows fellow vets who've chosen paths that no longer involve physical violence. he knows other hitters that could protect the team. he's taught every single member of the team a thing or two about self-defense.

eliot could stop at any point but he doesn't and that, to me, is a very conscious choice that he makes. hardison telling eliot he doesn't like seeing him get hurt all the time isn't so much about eliot being a poor abused soul as it is a personal truth of hardison's.

eliot being a hitter, taking the punishment, is not because he thinks no one cares what happens to him. it's his reality, it's the path he's gone down and every day he gets up and he decides for himself that his road to making up a little bit of the hurt he's inflicted still involves taking those punches (hardison says that, too, btw, in the very second ep of redemption, as an ultimate example.)

i think the team has shown him that he's cared for, but he's still a person in an imperfect world and both he and the team know this. and they choose who they are andvwhat they do in the confines of that fact.

[arcanegifs]

Here are some Season 2 Arcane GIF comparisons before and after I color and sharpen them! | Season 1 Comparison GIFs

[bluerosefox]

Sibling Summoning

New DPxDC idea spawned

Twins/Siblings Danny and Tim.

Ra's is trying to get Tim as his heir again.

Only this time if he doesn't comply Ra's plans to either sacrifice him or take over his body (Like he planned for Damian)

Thing is Ra's used the Pits in the ritual.

And Ghost King/or Prince Danny senses a family member of his is deep danger and summons himself to the ritual site thinking its Dani (Ellie) in trouble.

Both Danny and Tim weren't expecting to see near identical faces staring back at each other in shock.

[iwantoceans]

My brain everyday

[navree]

i think more people need to realize that the circumstances of how jason todd died would make him deeply untrusting of not only other people, not only himself and his own instincts, but specifically other people's proclamations of what they feel about/for him and how he reacts to that in turn

[essektheylyss]

truly rip Caleb for getting absolutely stuck with the dirt wizard epithet even though the rest of the Nein were content to wash all of the blood off at the wash station in the inn and he was over here like "excuse me, this is not adequate and I have some money now, I'm going to a PROPER bathhouse"

[hightowerz]

i am truly so sick of people—both outside and inside the star wars universe—remembering anakin fondly. this man, though not wholly responsible, played a major hand in the destruction of the jedi order and the death of democracy itself. he slaughtered children, brutally executed his peers and superiors, and continued to hunt them down throughout the years. he is remembered as a good master, as a good leader, but… was he? was he a good master when he led the execution, the genocide, of ahsoka’s people? their people? yes, it would have happened with or without him. yes, he was groomed and manipulated by palpatine. but he, in the end, choose to commit those heinous crimes. he chose to forsake the galaxy, forsake his community, all for a person who genuinely did not want that. it is the very thing the jedi order so deeply tried to teach him, to not let your love blind you, and to not forsake everyone else for your love. he chose his path, and to free him of any blame while putting that blame on the very people who tried to help him (the jedi) is a disservice not only to the tragedy of his character, but the tragedy of the jedi order’s fate itself.

[secondbeatsongs]

do you cook food sometimes?

do you have cats who, lacking both ethical standards and self-preservation instincts, will just jump right on your hot stovetop and lick your spoons?

then you need: metal stove hood + magnetic parts tray!¹

yes you (like me) might one day have a relative come to you like, "hey I ordered way too many of these dish things at harbor freight do you want one", and after taking them up on this offer, you too could be living the dream!²

may not work on all metal surfaces and utensils

may not be food safe³

not that that's ever stopped me

[ogsherlockholmes]

I've been thinking about trying to form my own sort of order of the Holmes canon (yes, I've been very inspired by other current Holmesian content) since I'm trying to get back into the annotations that I used to do and I'm at a loose end as to what to do with my life at the moment, but I really find it difficult to read the stories as examples of chronology, if that makes sense.

I've obviously been proven wrong time and time again as many people have wrote their theoretical canon chronologies, but part of me seriously feels that that's impossible. If they were supposed to have an order, ACD/Watson would have wrote it that way (again, my own personal opinion, I'm not trying to impose rules in the fandom because that would make all this boring). But, since he's our favourite unreliable narrator, he mixes up dates, changes them- sometimes he tells us, sometimes he let's us figure it out for ourselves.

There's the whole idea of the game, the 'true' meaning of the Holmes books and what ACD was trying to tell us. I, of course, am inclined to think that the mysteries aren't the main story, it's Holmes and Watson's relationships that are supposed to be focused on, so dates just aren't important to me. I don't believe Watson when he feels the need to include exactly when something happened, because it looks like he's establishing an alibi. Diverting attention from something.

And, I don't know, maybe I am taking it too seriously, but half the time I read the 'cases' and I doubt they even happened (as in, within Holmes' London)- a good example is obviously The Blanched Soldier wherein two men are kept apart from each so they don't endanger their reputation... a very diluted version of events, I know, but a brief example of my feelings on this. The cases are metaphorical, symbolic- cover ups.

I'm being extremely cryptid because I'm reevaluating my reading of the canon, and finding it surprisingly easy to ignore virtually everything Watson tells us to find a deeper story running through it all (not that there's anything wrong with serial crime stories- that's why I started reading in the first place).

I plan on actually forming a little bit of work on this- I doubt it'll go any further than this blog, but it'll be entertaining nonetheless, and I hope that at least a few people will understand where I'm coming from.

[nattikay]

OC lineup! All the characters that currently exist in this "story"

[chair002]

one thing bacon and subz are alike in is i think it's very bacon-like to leave everyone & shut himself in a hidden location very far away with a bunch of mobs and call them his friends (as it is also subz-like). i mean we know he loves animals and goes to great lengths to get absurd amounts of them. he's just never done it to a hostile mob before. really not out of character for him at all

[intheconfessiondial]

Redraw of the cape post, because that entire concept deserved better than the illustration I gave it.

[fagulaa]

Something I really love about the Silt Verses is how, in a world of gods and monsters, how grounded Faulkner's trauma [and relationship with his father] is. Especially as the season moves on, and the stakes amp up [and up] its so unexpectedly piercing to be presented with this exploration of childhood abandonment/negligence, inter-generational trauma, the indignities and stress that comes with unexpected elder care/early onset Alzheimer's. You're so locked in to these grander, more abstract concepts that your defenses are down! Mine were, anyway. TSV is so good at cutting its grand, complex plotlines with simpler [but not shallower] gutpunches, and it just grounds the whole thing.

[moeblob]

The extremely niche crossover only I want to see... Kingdom Hearts x Monark.

[aq2003]

macbeth soundtrack, my beloved

(voice removal is scuffed and i am very much guessing on some of these, i tried my best)

[royalarchivist]