#all of these are not TECHNICALLY laws

[avalovesindie]

What people call stupid American laws:

-It’s illegal to drive a camel on a road in Nevada 🤣

-Must be 18 to play pinball in South Carolina 😳

-It’s BANNED to sleep naked in Minnesota?? 😦

Real stupid American laws:

-There are no federal days off for voting

-Corporations are allowed to charge tons of money for life saving medicine such as insulin

-Disabled people can lose their being on disability because they got married

-Some people are denied life-saving abortions

[tyxaar]

A compiled list of various severe crimes committed by one Mr Scar of the Good Times, exact counts pending. Cannibalism (Multiple counts) War profiteering Trading of Souls Grave robbing Fraud of multiple varieties Racketeering Arson (Like a lot of it) Unethical experimentation Acts of Terror Spiritual possession Contract killing Sale of human remains Ritual sacrifice Oathbreaking Violation of the real life Geneva Convention Deceptive marketing Kidnapping Desecration of a sacred place Whatever tf Area 77 had going on Insider trading Extortion Patricide Matricide Unsafe building practices Holy war Desecration of corpses Market manipulation Treason Tax evasion Murder (Lots and lots) Large-scale extreme vandalism Mass enviromental destruction Political corruption Identity fraud

[midnightemy35]

mermaid aven au from: @havanillas

i like to think that ratio had like a moment where he was mentally freaking out over the fact he literally brought back a dying half-human-half-fish that probably belonged to someone else and the fact that he now has to accommodate for that same merman.

[underkunimi]

you know what’s sick and twisted? Doflamingo

NO THE FACT THAT DOFLAMINGO JUST HAPPENED TO BE IN FRONT OF THE COLISEUM WHILE LUFFY WAS BY THE WINDOW AND DOFLAMINGO JUST HAPPENED TO MAKE SURE LUFFY SAW HIM SHOOT LAW

SO SICK AND MF TWISTED

AND THEN LATER WHEN DOFLAMINGO IS MOCKING LUFFY ABOUT LAW BEING DEAD AND TELLING LUFFY THAT HE FAILED TO SAVE HIM (super quick summarization)

SICK AND TWISTED

fucking doflamingo caught on and is using that against them 😭😭

side note: the absolute relief that is shown on Luffy’s face when he finds out that Law is in fact still alive i just ansjsjdkddjdnfxkjcjfkf

[wildflowerteas]

where's that anon who asked you for an event timeline they're about to be obsessed with me and my excruciating detail

FUCK ME THIS IS INSANE???? the fact that it's chronological and not in story-telling order too oh i am ill this is crazy i'm so impressed but also simultaneously terrified to make any timeline slip ups now. i think i might need to be sedated. just

insanely grateful and so so so impressed by this. it's a tangible thing that i can stare at and marvel at and it makes the effort i've poured into this fic feel so much more real tysm now please go to sleep and get some quality rest my head is hurting just thinking about you being up at two am.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

gratitude list time I'll go first

[epicfirestormer]

[whitmore]

i can’t stop thinking about that jacaranda tree in tallulah’s flower fields there’s so many implications there. the solid information we have is that phil logged in yesterday to “organize backpacks”, the tree and dugout appeared seemingly overnight, the waypoint is called ‘welcome back, nerd <3’. tubbo says that it’s likely someone who doesn’t know the mechanics of planting that kind of tree due to the waypoint placement in midair & the secondary dig that seemed to have occurred after the player realized the initial dig couldn’t host the tree.

our two most implicated players there are wilbur and tallulah; phil even points out that while the waypoint name is wilbur’s verbiage, the heart emoticon is not very wilbur and is more tallulah. he however pointedly makes it known that it’s built very wilbur-style, with spruce and stone walls. and logistically (to meta-talk it) it was not ccwilbur; he did not log in at an ungodly hour, dig a hole, plant a tree, and not tell anyone. plus (if we’re looking past the dialect disconnect) there’s no real reason for him to make a waystone seemingly welcoming himself back, and he isn’t narratively aware that the eggs are even missing, so it can’t be a wilbur-made-structure in preparation for tallulah’s return. so perhaps we say ‘well maybe ccwilbur asked ccphil to do it for him for some presently unknown reason and that’s why he logged in and organized backpacks!’ except why would phil lead tubbo there knowing it didn’t make much sense and was seemingly unfinished in terms of both build and story? (cc)phil could have so very easily diverted tubbo and him both from visiting but he made it a point to go out there to the field; phil saw the tree first, pointed it out first, investigated first, tubbo just followed his lead— did he know what he was walking into? was it planned; whose idea was that, the name of the waystone, the materials and contents chosen?

there’s no black concrete, which makes me hesitant to allude it to a dimensional-tallulah structure— there’s nothing that indicates she’s communicating like there has been with all the other eggs previous communications, not even a pink sign, though you could make the argument that the tree itself is her sign because it’s her favourite kind of tree, and it’s also her favourite color, but i think it’s kind of a stretch in the grand scheme of things. plus in a meta-sense, especially if we’re taking into account phil’s recent backpack organizing activities, there’s no reason to believe that 02 wouldn’t just dig and plant the tree herself, which still begs the question that even if it IS somehow tallulah’s doing, what was phil doing yesterday?

[hella1975]

i have most of my friends on different life360 circles (if u don’t know it’s an app that effectively… tracks your friends? LMAO) but my favourite one is easily the one i have with my two ‘course friends’ and one thing we always do is whenever the ‘____ has 10% battery’ notification comes up we all fucking SPAM the option to tell them to charge their phone. like it’s the STUPIDEST joke but i find it so fucking funny i literally will not notice my battery dying until these two idiots start blowing up my phone with the same damn automated message it makes me smile every time especially bc the one girl finds it SO FUCKING ANNOYING she loses her rag every time it kills me

[mantisgodsdomain]

3,4,15 for any member of team snakemouth!

...how about all three?

(for this ask game)

3. Obscure headcanon

For Kabbu, though we may have noted this before, we think that the North is quite firmly considered a patch of Deadland - and its inhabitants, as a result, tend to be very, very strange from the perspective of the rest of the world. For Kabbu, specifically, this means a variety of things, both biologically and culturally - though Northern beetles are a lot more common in Bugaria, deadlands in general come with a very high rate of mutation and a very high rate of death, and that means a high rate of superstition both in things that actively impact survival and in things that do not - as well as the simple fact that a constantly-changing set of genetics means that what a northern beetle is like is often very, very open to change.

Kabbu is an example of a burrower - a subspecies of sorts primarily identified by claws designed, very specifically, for digging. His claws grow into a sort of broad shovel shape and tend to be much sturdier than an equivalent beetle's - getting underground in moments in soft ground isn't really an exaggeration! Though he can dig through harder ground, it takes time and effort, and he can't go at it with the sheer speed of softer soil - technically, he could burrow through solid rock given enough time, but it would be both hard and extremely painful. It's a trait that's heavily prized in the North for its ability to create shelter and safety - beetles dominate the North's underground, and there's nothing that can really pose a threat to them. Tunnels are safety, and it really surprises and disorients him when things underground attack him, because back home that just kind of doesn't happen unless it's Another Beetle specifically targeting you.

In terms of more social things, he has a lot of trouble getting used to the concept of mimics. This is mostly due to the fact that mimics as a whole don't really... exist in the north, at least not in the means of gaining benefit from mimicking anything else. If you can talk to them as any other awakened bug, they're usually exactly what they say they are, and species mimicking normal geological features and plants haven't found any success, unless you're willing to get extremely generous with describing the snow-bank camouflage of a Northern Silk Moth's topcoat.

Though sand wasps or "white bees" still exist, the thing they're mimicking no longer exists in the same area. Any Hive that once was in the North is long dead, overly-large groups of bugs tend to die out quickly thanks to the handful of large predators that may decide the benefits outweigh the consequences when enough tasty beetles gather in the same place, and when the enemy you're dealing with is both too heavily armoured to be really deterred by most weaponry and capable and intelligent enough to stalk your group through the snow until the cost outweighs the benefit of eating you... well, the sort of small groups generally sent to start a new colony of social bugs really don't stand a chance.

It is, occasionally, very hard to get used to the fact that southern silk moths only grow a few heads taller than him. He's used to them presenting a lot more of a threat.

For Leif... we think he's completely, 100% blind. His eyes are frozen over due to quirk of his biology - the thing about his integration that makes him a failure, specifically. With any of the Snakemouth cordyceps, they do not naturally transfer the immunity to their own magic that any other variety of mage would have, and so need to alter their hosts in order to get the appropriate biology across. With Leif, that protection is not sufficient to protect the host, much less to preserve valuable organs - eyes, especially, are fragile, after all. The cold he naturally generates exceeds the host adaptations he provides, resulting in, even beyond the blindness, unusually brittle chitin, extremely stiff and easy-to-damage tissue, organic food processing efficiency appropriate for a bug currently freezing to death...

Well, you get the idea. Functionally, if alive, a host body would be in a state of perpetual hypothermia, prone to breaking down over time and needing persistent repair that his strain of cordyceps cannot provide, as any repair he could offer that's not within his host's natural healing capabilities requires manually breaking down and reconstructing any parts, which... is inconvenient at best. As he is, he gets around most of these issues by simply replacing his host body's soft tissue with cordyceps, but that has its own issues, mainly in making him look and move incredibly uncanny. Injuries take a very long time to repair, relatively, though the less tissue damage is done the easier it is to fix - being cleanly sliced in two, for example, might be easier to handle than any sort of crushing damage. As far as his eyes go... eyes of any sort are delicate, and the slightest damage can permanently blind someone. Any of Snakemouth Den's cordyceps tend to go blind anyways as the fungus burrows into ocular nerves - if anything, this is better for hiding, since the frost over his eyeballs conceals any mycelium in the eyes themselves. In theory, it can be repaired... in practice, it would be far too much of a pain for work that will be undone the moment he overtaxes his ice magic again.

...also, he doesn't really care. Sight is not the most important sense a moth has and his scent and ability to sense pheromones is fine, along with a general sensitivity to things like vibrations in the air. More than fine, even, since he's now kind of hybridized with both Ant and Bee and the number of pheromones he's sensitive enough to sense has shot through the roof. This on top of the "magic sense" he has means he has absolutely no trouble getting around, though reading books requires more or less sticking an antenna or fungal tendril over them and parsing out where the ink is by scent and texture. He full-on didn't notice he was blind until after the cordyceps reveal.

For Vi, while this might be one we've mentioned before, we headcanon that she's got a bit of minor mutation throwing her antenna... maybe 2% more towards a non-social relative, which gears her just slightly more towards being able to detect "foreign" scents - predators, prey, and any pollen or nectar in the area. Unfortunately, this slight shift in what scents she's made to pick up comes with a reduced sensitivity to pheromones and pheromone communication within the hive, along with loss of the general innate understanding that an average bee would have of how she's meant to "fit in" to a structure that utterly cripples her communication and social life in the hive.

It's minor enough of a mutation that she's never been flagged - she's a mutation of a social bee, not a normal variant of a solitary - but she smells weird, and she doesn't pick up on pheromones quite enough, and the variation in signals she puts off means that she both fails the communication to get across what she might need and fumbles the communication conveyed back to her about what she should do. Subtle things build up over time, and within the Hive, the negatives far outweigh the benefits - the Hive is only built with bees that fit to a standard in mind, and even minor deviations can get you dragged far, far behind.

This is getting very long so, uhh. Here's a cut. Everything else is below it. We enjoy getting very long-winded. There's a lot in here.

15. Worst thing they’ve ever done

Well, this one will depend on if it's "in general" or "by their standards". Putting any sort of objective moral judgement on just about anything is ridiculously difficult, especially with how values vary by culture or individual.

There is no such thing as objective worst, and we absolutely don't guarantee these would line up with your idea of worse, and so we'll offer two options here - what we believe they would think of first if posed with the question, and an alternative answer that would likely crop up.

For Kabbu, his own response would be easy - abandoning his teammates to The Beast. It haunts him to this day - really, what sort of beetle abandons their swarm to a fate like that? If he was a little faster, a little braver, a little less of a coward - but no. He abandoned those he was meant to care most for, and they died because of it.

For the other...

There are some things that are necessary, to survive somewhere as harsh as the Deadlands. Not everyone can be saved. Not everything can be helped. Not everyone can be taken in. Tradition and law is the heart and soul of the North - rules that everyone must comply to, if not for the sake of themselves, than for the sake of those they may interact with. To break a law, for any reason, is to be shunned by the community, most likely to your eventual death.

She broke a law. It could have been for understandable reasons, or not - it doesn't matter. She put the community at risk, and for that, she couldn't stay. She was put out in the cold, despite her pleading to the contrary. She was allowed to beg and plead and bang on the door, and yet, it meant nothing. The beast she would have lead to them caught up, eventually. He would still believe it was justified.

For Leif, his first response would be... exactly what you expect of him, really. The body he took without a care. The life he stole. He might vary on whether it's the action of stealing it or the lies he's told with that body, but the answer would be the same.

For the one he wouldn't think of... He could have spoken up. He didn't. He met their eye, slated for execution on crimes that he could parlay them on if he implicated himself, and he said nothing.

The look on their face still haunts him sometimes. It hurts more now that he's two, rather than one. It's what was needed to protect his family.

For Vi... a fault in a machine. The instructions were boring, and confusing, and hard to read. She tried to do whatever she thought might work, instead of following the manual. There was an injury. Then another one. It was her fault, really, for rigging it wrong, but she was tired and angry and she argued instead of just sucking it up and fixing it when confronted on it, and it went unfixed for days more. A minor fault can very well lead to deaths, and though this one didn't, it came close - one more inch, a slightly looser bolt, and it would have cracked a bug's shell clean open. It's a miracle it turned out as well as it did. It's a miracle that no one connected it to her enough, even when it was fixed. Someone else was punished, and she was old enough to know not to step forward - she's not stupid, after all.

The guilt still haunts her. The "what-if". The possibility of it. If someone died of her own stupid negligence, if she made someone else take the fall - she would let them, really, her sense of self-preservation isn't that bad, but she's not sure she could live with it after.

With the one she wouldn't think of personally... considering the background she's got, the journey to the Ant Kingdom, and the fact that it's already stated she took jobs before canon? We think there's a fairly good chance that Vi's off jobs got... shady. It's not like she has much in the way of morals when it comes to money, and "will do just about anything for enough cash" is a decent market. If you're willing to forsake your morals, you can get more money than your heart desires - at the cost of just a bit of risk, at that!

She doesn't think about it, really. It wasn't something she needed to think about. They were threatening her, they were a risk to her team, they were the price she had to pay to eat, the specifics of what happened don't matter much at this point. Put in the position again, would she choose their life, or hers? It doesn't matter. They're dead, anyways. She should know. She was the one to take the payment for it.

4. Favorite line?

We're copy-pasting these straight from the game! These Direct Quotes are all sourced from @aquilamage's Bug Fables Transcript project, which we highly recommend checking out! It's an excellent resource for double-checking dialogue without having to replay the game first, and a repository for just about all the dialogue in the game (provided it wasn't taken out by previous patches, of course).

We will be honest: there's a lot of dialogue in this game. This might not be our absolute favorites, as a result of a general poor memory as well as Too Much Game. Also, we have blatant favoritism towards Vi in all ways. Most of these are favorite interactions, rather than anything else, so...

For Leif:

Kabbu: Leif. If you need to take a break, let us know. Vi will carry you. Vi: That is not happening. Leif: Oh, the fatigue, it kicks in... Vi: I said it's not happening!

...and for Vi, we're fond of this dialogue, specifically because the first time we encountered it we misread "exploring" as "exploding".

Leif: Science looks like a lot of hard work. Vi: It's like uh...the thinking version of exploring!

But of course, our favorite Vi Dialogue as well as our personal favorite dialogue in the game in general would be the Bee Guard overworld spy.

Leif: Vi, you're the only Bee explorer, right? Vi: Huh? Uh, yeah! That I know of... Leif: We've been thinking it's a bit weird, to see so many Bee guards, but only one explorer... Vi: Look, they're not guards because they want to or anything, okay? Vi: They were born to be guards, so they guard. That's it. Kabbu: That's a bit somber... Vi: ...That's just how the Hive is sometimes.

"I'm allergic to bouncers" is a close second, of course. In terms of story implications, we pull on her Jaune interactions and especially the point just after getting kicked out of the studio for the first time during Jaune's request, but that's... it's less we "like" it, per se, and more that the implications are fun to toy with. In terms of the actual dialogue, it just... makes us feel sad. Sad, [], and maybe a bit angry on her behalf. We've been there more than we care to admit, after all.

We... wouldn't wish something similar on anyone. And no matter how good the good gets with Jaune, it still can't really outweigh the fact that the bad starts ticking boxes about emotional abuse in a way that makes relationships like Mothiva & Zasp that more people are willing to try and call out pale in comparison. We probably need to finish that essay some time...

Anyways, we like it when Kabbu gets mad enough to yell at people.

Kabbu: This is ridiculous! You realize you could be dooming us all!? Kabbu: What if the Termite King loses trust in the Queen!? Kabbu: What if you lose to the Wasp King without our help!? Kabbu: Have you gone completely, utterly insane!? Have you lost all intelligence! Mothiva: Yikes. You're overthinking this WAY too much. Mothiva: The Ant Kingdom's way better in our hands than with you LOSERS. Kabbu: We have SAVED YOUR LIFE BEFORE, you WITCH!

[umarthiels]

[...] Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

LAW TIME!

this is so interesting to me bc it calls back to the fact that ahab doesn't actually own the pequod! he's captaining it and he does own a share in it, but the real owners are peleg and bildad, and on shore he's accountable to them. even though on the sea he is master of the ship, he still answers to the owners, and in derailing the voyage from "hunting whales and making money" to "hunting moby-dick specifically", he is usurping authority! he doesn't (well, in the sense of ownership, which will come up later) actually have the right to do this! and if the crew were to mutiny against him (say, if a certain mate who isn't keen on the quest and prioritizes the commercial interests of the voyage over ahab's goal convinced them), legally they'd be in the right to do it, and arguably it'd be their duty to do it. (nautical law side of tumblr do correct me if i'm wrong) (the idea of whether ahab actually has ultimate authority over the pequod comes up later and it's all very interesting!)

this is extra fun since ahab knows this and is genuinely nervous that the crew might rise up against him. right now starbuck stands alone, and even he gave way to peer pressure in the end! the entire crew is enthusiastic about the quest, but if that wanes and they start to consider it, ahab will be in genuine danger! he can't actually answer to the charge of usurpation, he undeniably did it (within the framework of ownership of the whaling industry ofc) which is something that isn't really obvious in pop culture perceptions of him, he's not just some dictator, he's pragmatic about things!

[underkunimi]

what if Luffy was plagued with nightmares after Dressrosa about losing Law? like Luffy thought he died twice and both times couldn’t do anything about it. the first time, he was in the coliseum and couldn’t do anything but watch and the second time, he wasn’t even there when it happened. then on top of that, Doflamingo mocking Luffy about not being able to save Law. that’s some nightmare fuel if i ever saw any.

oh and it doesn’t help that Luffy is on an unfamiliar ship so he’s probably having trouble sleeping to begin with too. i don’t know where they slept on Barto‘s ship but im just thinking about Luffy waking up after another nightmare and going to seek out Law to make sure that he’s still there and that his dream was just a dream. and i personally think Law lets him cause Law knows what’s Luffy‘s going through and Law knows how much it sucks.

i don’t know and maybe in the morning, Zoro, Robin, Franky and Usopp find Luffy and Law curled up together somewhere and they just know that the two captains need to be together and that they should try to keep it quiet for as long as possible so Law and Luffy can finally get some rest.

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

Where is this angry-at-everything-all-the-time-Jason. Between him and Bruce he’s the only one being reasonable.

[actualbird]

cat pic dump because i love my babies so much please look at them

[lukewarmchicken]

Saw a post about the concept of Byakuya not making the cut for Togami heir by @catgirl-catboy and I got normal about it.

[missholoska]

💜 Soriel Week Year 7 @sorielweek Day 7: Free Day 💙

baby bones found a snail 🐌