#also I have a weird complex about being used to being picked second???

[rubyintheskywithdiamonds]

apparently "being like Roy Mustang" is not a healthy way to deal with your problems. Who knew? Certainly not me, and certainly not Roy Mustang.

[initialchains]

would you? | luke castellan.

pairing: luke castellan x fem!reader

summary: luke slowly starts to lose himself but that won’t stop you from reminding him of what truly matters.

wc: 2.6k

warnings: some manipulating and gaslighting if you squint and probably spoilers for the first book but they’re not explicitly mentioned.

a/n: HAPPY HOLIDAYS !! here’s luke as a gift <33 i’ve never written for luke before but he’s my favorite pjo character bc hes such an interesting and complex character aghh. sorry if this isnt as fluffy as you would all want, i promise i’m working on some real luke fluff.

The rays of the rising sun made the lake look far more beautiful than it always does. Sure, you were used to the warm tones that always engulfed Camp Half-Blood and it’s not like the weather ever really changed, at least not unless the gods willed it to, but the colors of the sun reflecting on the lake, the low hum of the wood nymphs singing, and the distant sounds of laughter coming from campers playing volleyball were strangely comforting. 

Well, as comforting as it can be when you’re trying to find some quiet in the neverending fight that was the demigod life. It gets tiring, it always does. The fighting, the studying, the adoration of gods who didn’t even bother to give their children a sign of them caring. It was all so exhausting. 

But there was peace in this small moment. You were sat in front of the lake, your legs crossed as you closed your eyes, trying to enjoy the tranquility of it all. The calm moment didn’t dare to stop your hand from finding a home in the clay beads of your camp necklace and twirling them around, a seemingly normal act to anyone who saw you, that actually was a sign of you being aware of your surroundings, a small sign of the fear you carried around, a fear that had you always prepared to draw your sword in any given moment. Not ever fully in peace. Not unless Luke was there. 

“So you decided to start your morning without me? Ouch,” You turned your head at the sound of your boyfriend’s voice, “A knock on my cabin’s door would’ve been enough, you know?”.

“Yeah? And risk waking the million campers that sleep in there? No, thank you. I would like to stay alive for a few more years, please.” You replied with a small smile, looking up to meet Luke’s eyes, his scar being more prominent in the morning, a red color adorning the edges of it.  

He snorted a laugh and rolled his eyes before taking a seat next to you. He was silent for a moment until he muttered softly, “This is a nice view.”

“Oh, definitely. The lake always looks beautiful when the sun hits it the right way. I need to give the Apollo cabin their congratulations and some flowers for having a talented father.” You answered, your hand moving away from your necklace to hold Luke’s.

“Of course, you make my pick-up line about the gods. Can you give me a win over here? I’m trying my best.” He said with a smirk before pressing a kiss to the back of your hand. It was a strange sort of thing he always did, even before you two started dating, he’d always find an excuse to hold your hand and give it a quick kiss. 

“I wasn’t going to let you get away with using a corny pick-up line on me, Castellan. At least be original with it.” A giggle escaped your lips, “Also, everything is about the gods, I thought you’d be used to it by this point.”

His face fell for a fleeting second, but he was quick to mask it with a small smile. “Right, everything always is about the gods.” Luke’s eyes moved away from your face, nervously glancing at the lake after his statement. 

You frowned when you heard the tone he used, he sounded almost.. bitter? You couldn’t even explain it. Luke had been acting weird ever since the camp came back from their annual visit to Mount Olympus on the winter solstice. At first, you thought it had something to do with Hermes being a total dick and ignoring him the entire night, not even bothering to give his son a pat on the back or a nod. But you’ve known Luke long enough to know he was past caring about what his father did, he was indifferent to what Hermes did–to what any of the gods did. 

The two of you were silent, sitting side by side in front of the lake in deep thought. He was thinking about gods know what, and you were busy trying to understand what was going on inside his mind. You decided to break the silence first, “You okay?”.

“I’m fine, baby. Don’t worry about it.” 

He was quick to answer. It was almost as if he had rehearsed it and had it scripted beforehand. It was almost as if someone else had told him what to answer. As if he was under someone else's guidance. Under someone else's control. 

“Are you sure? Because it feels like you’re.. I don't know, keeping something from me?” 

“I’m not keeping anything from you. I’m not keeping a single thing.”

“Right. Sorry for asking.”

Luke closed his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. He ran a hand through his hair and took some deep breaths, his chest moving up and down in a nonexistent rhythm, it was urgent and angry. He took a few more breaths, trying to calm himself before finally meeting your eyes again. 

“I’ve told you countless times to never apologize to me if you haven’t done anything wrong,” He reminded you of the conversation you’ve had millions of times, “Don’t ever apologize to me if you haven’t physically hurt me or something, alright? You’re fine. We’re fine.” 

He continued, “I’d trust you with my life given the chance. I’m not keeping anything from you, angel. You have to trust me.” 

“I do.” 

You didn’t see your boyfriend at all the following days. He always brushed you off by being busy with training or helping Annabeth plan for this week’s capture the flag. You weren’t the only one to notice his slight change of temper and personality, some campers from the Hermes cabin noticed it too. 

He kept pushing harder on his siblings, always insisting on them doing better. He was more violent than usual during capture the flag, not thinking about it twice before proving why he is the most talented swordsman in the last 300 years.

There was also this one time he volunteered to spar with a new camper.. it didn’t go well. He kept doing new maneuvers and techniques most campers didn’t even recognize, refusing to go easy on the poor thirteen year old girl. When you asked him about it, confused at the way he went too hard on the newbie, he answered with a dry “Where’s the glory in that? She needs to be prepared for what’s about to come.” It sounded as if he knew some kind of danger was approaching. As if it was a matter of life and death for the camper to learn how to fight against him.

You decided it was enough when you saw him skipping his daily chat with Annabeth, deciding he would rather sit by himself on the steps of the Big House for a little while. 

The walk from your cabin to the Big House was filled with self-doubt and twirling the beads of your necklace, you were nervous to face your boyfriend, which was stupid because he was the last person you’d ever expect to feel nervous with. When you arrived to the steps of the Big House and saw him sitting there, your mind went completely blank. 

You sat next to him and asked the first thing that came to your mind, “Would you rather fight 3000 ant-sized chimeras or a chimera-sized ant?”. 

An amused laugh bubbled up from Luke’s chest before he turned his head to face you, a smile taking over his handsome face. “I’ll take the 3000 chimeras, no doubt.” 

You smiled back at him, ready to ask him the question you spent the last thirty minutes planning, but before you could open your mouth he said, “Would you rather not be able to consume ambrosia and nectar for the rest of your life or.. see Mr. D without a shirt?”

You threw your head back with laughter, your face going red thanks to the lack of air in your lungs due to the laughs coming out of you, “I’d rather bleed to death without ambrosia than see Mr. D with a shirt.”

“Ditto.”

You decided to indulge in this back-and-forth game, after all, you hadn’t been able to have a real conversation with your boyfriend in days... you’ll take what you can get, “Would you rather not be able to leave camp ever again or turn against the gods?” 

“It would be boring to spend the rest of my life capturing a flag and growing strawberries… so I guess my answer is pretty obvious.” He answered while fidgeting with his fingers.

“You’d choose to turn against the gods?”

“Yup.”

“Huh, I guess capture the flag would be pretty hard when you’re pushing 90.”

Luke was silent, running his eyes through your face before asking, “Would you?”

“Would I what?”

He took a deep breath before replying, “Turn against the gods.”

You were silent for a few seconds, biting your lip and staring into Luke’s eyes, wondering if there was a right answer to this metaphorical question. You decided to give him an answer he’d like but also an answer you meant, “I’d go wherever you go. It doesn’t matter if it is a farm in the middle of nowhere or to the pits of Tartarus. If you’re there... count me in.” 

Luke cleared his throat and a serious look took over his face, “Sure, but if the time to make a choice came… would you go against them?”.

His persistence to try and get you to answer his question was making you nervous. The more he asked you about it, the more it looked like he was genuinely considering it. 

A nervous laugh escaped your lips as you nervously played with one of the beads on your camp necklace. He took notice of it. Of course he did, he knew more about you than anyone, probably even more than you know yourself. 

Luke stayed silent at that, a somber look taking over his features, you could tell there was a turmoil happening inside his head. It was almost as if he wanted to let you in on a secret, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“I... um. Well, I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon—at least not in our lifetime. But like I said, I’d go wherever you go, to Tartarus and back.” 

That brought a smile to Luke’s face, he looked into your eyes, probably looking for signs of you lying but finding none, and took your hand away from your necklace, lacing your fingers with his and pressing a kiss to the back of your hand. “To Tartarus and back, baby.” 

He brought your hands down before leaning in to kiss you on the lips. There was a sense of necessity to feel your lips against his, he kissed you like the feeling of your lips was his only shot at salvation. He raised his hand to cup your cheek and deepen the kiss, craving the heat he only got whenever he kissed you.

You stopped him before he could take the kiss any further, “Luke, we’re in the middle of camp. There are children around us, if you want to make out at least take me to our spot behind the stables. Holy shit.”

Luke took a second to steady his breathing, “Sorry, angel. I’ll make sure to keep your suggestion in mind for later, though.”

“Shut the hell up, Castellan.”

The two of you spent the rest of your day being busy working on your own stuff. Luke was still sparring with some campers who were brave enough to go against him, and you were hanging out with the Dionysus cabin while they helped grow more strawberries. 

 You found Chris sitting in the amphitheater and asked him if he had seen your boyfriend, he replied with an annoyed, “He’s probably in bed or something, I don’t know.” You decided to not ask Chris if he was okay and walked straight to the Hermes cabin.

A knock on the wooden door was enough to wake your boyfriend up, you were aware of it when you heard a muffled, “Come in”. You found Luke sitting on his bed, his sword in hand while he sharpened it.

So he wasn’t asleep at all, you thought.

“Careful with the sharp part of the blade.” He looked up from his sword when he heard your melodic voice, your words snapping him out of the trance he was in.

“Oh, hi.” Luke put the sword down next to his bunk and moved to lie down, leaving a space next to him for you to join him. He hummed when you laid down next to him, giving a kiss to his shoulder blade and wrapping your arms around his torso. 

He turned to face you, pressing his lips to your forehead with a soft sigh. His eyes closed at the sensation while his hands traveled to your back, looking for ways to hold you closer. His features relaxing when he finally touched your skin. 

You couldn’t keep this weird tension going on between you two, so you decided to bite first, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Once again, he replied in an almost scripted and mechanical way, “Talk about what?”

“The winter solstice visit, you’ve been acting.. different ever since we came back to camp.” 

Luke stiffened next to you, it made your heart drop. You’ve been dating him for a year now, and he had never been this cold—this uncomfortable around you. 

“I just... I think things are about to change.” He replied in a low murmur, his eyes closing again when you brought your hand up to caress his face, softly tracing his scar with your thumb in a delicate and loving way. Luke let out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding when he felt your fingers on his skin.

A smirk made its way to your face, “Change? yeah, in your dreams, Castellan. Campers will keep arriving and only 5 percent of them will get claimed, and the others will get thrown into your cabin.. like things always are and always will be. That’s not changing anytime soon.” 

Luke’s hand traced up and down your back in a soothing manner, “Yeah, maybe they won’t. Forget I even said that.” 

“Just because they won’t change, it doesn’t mean we have to accept it, you know?”Luke's eyes snapped up from your hands to meet your gaze, his brows furrowed in confusion. 

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re all on the same team here. Sure, the gods will never claim most of the campers and we will all probably die before we’re old enough to have children of our own... but is that really all that matters? We have each other. We don’t need them as long as we have the people we love with us.”

Luke tilted his head to the right to press a kiss to the palm of your hand that was caressing his cheek, “I don’t need the gods as long as I have you.” 

“Good to know we’re on the same page, Castellan.”

The two of you went out for a small walk by the lake and sat together in the dining pavilion at night. Your small conversation probably made Luke feel better because he was quick to go back to being himself, he kept greeting every camper he saw and holding your hand, not forgetting to kiss the back of it whenever he had the chance. 

Maybe it was you reassuring him about the love you had for him or maybe it was him being aware of you being willing to drop the gods at any time just to be with him, but he was completely normal during the following days, weeks, and months.

You were sure of it when you saw him walking around with the new arrival five months later, Luke seemed so excited to be showing him around. You greeted the new camper with a small smile when he introduced himself with a “Hi, I’m Percy Jackson.”

[briar-rolfes-research-oubliette]

ON MONDAY, I (FINALLY) MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE NEWEST ERAGON BOOK!

MURTAGH

“A Book I Read”

It took three very patient friends of mine to encourage me to finish reading this. I took notes the whole way through, and I am now sharing those in hope of finding loving community with my fellow haters.

Important context:

I loved Eragon, which came out when I was roughly eleven

Christopher Paolini was the first author to ever disappoint me

I used to love epic fantasy, until feminism, coming out, and learning about literary criticism made me just too mean to enjoy it

Since 2015, whenever I’ve had writer’s block, I’ve found inspiration by looking at this screenshot:

Christopher has managed to create a life where his mum has never stopped doing his laundry or his editing for him. He has never worked a job in his life. He has infinite time to work on his craft, and yet, with all of those advantages, he writes the way he does. I don’t hate him, but I do want to destroy him in single combat.

LET US BEGIN.

17 November 2023

I forgot how obsessed this man is with proving he knows rare words. Picking up my phone to google the word “trenchant”.

He really just didn’t want to say the dragon had a sharp sense of humour huh? Oh, no, it’s TRENCHANT. It wasn’t even for dialogue I identified as comedy but Murtagh thought it was TRENCHANT. He and Thorn have been alone in the wilderness for too long

NOT NASUADA BEING DESCRIBED AS HAVING ALMOND EYES

Of course the protagonist has grown a beard. He’s A Man Now.

I have a theory that this book is about coming to terms with marriage. Murtagh is like “our bond… our bond that lasts until death… the oldest magic… only the two of us understand each other. But, we’re also trapped with each other,” and I’m like hm. Fascinating. Say more

Instantly Murt befriends a child, to prove he is good really.

It’s so weird to read a book by a grown man with kids who is like “how did we all start out so innocent and pure…” like have you MET five year olds

This whole fork fight scene makes me feel second hand embarrassment deep in my soul. It’s SO This Guy Is The Best And Coolest

“Fencing with effortless ease” I do not care how well trained he is: you cannot kill four men with long swords by stabbing them with a little fork in “four hard impacts.” It’s just not happening.

I’m really dwelling on the idea of magic as “imposing your will” on something. It’s very.., something. Murtagh cleans his shirt by “imposing his will on the garment” like. Okay, I suppose in a way that is how all laundry is done, but it’s. Hm.

How come he’ll clean a shirt with magic but not shave with magic? Why are these books SO obsessed with beards and shaving and how to do shave and using magic for shaving etc etc, Eragon was also majorly preoccupied with this

Paolini’s got so many complexes on the page. All the “we’re half brothers and your dad killed my dad” stuff is A LOT

The naming stuff… SMH what would Ursula Le Guin say about all this

I’m obsessed with how even as (gasp) an OUTCAST!! Murtagh can’t not be the coolest guy ever for any time at all. It’s like a disease

Giving the child the enchanted killing fork was the worst decision ever made. Murtagh gives her a murder weapon and is then moping like “what’s it like… to live without killing…” literally pages later.

I’m really startled that Murt is delighted to see a tiny flying magical grass boat come down from the sky and circle him instead of being like “wtf, I’m being Watched,” which would be the true act of a man we are told is paranoid

I just got to the bit where Murtagh offhandedly says that magic users who “are the heaviest” always have the most spell reserves.

Like……… what???? Magic eats your fat?? It burns glucose??

You could be a better mage if you just, ate a bunch of raspberry frogs before each fight??????

It’s food powered??? You really want to go there, Paolini????? Wizards in the candy shop, eating sweeties like Mistborns?

GOD, if only Galbatorix had chugged a bottle of red cordial before his last big fight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I return after losing my mind about this to my partner for forty minutes)

If it was “if you’re hungry you can’t FOCUS” I’d get it. But I always assumed it was like, you know how other fantasy does it? Some kind of pool of ADDITIONAL energy that you are accessing and that can be used up (until you go too far and start using life force or whatever). Like, it’s CHANNELLING it that makes you tired, not that it’s literal food energy.

Murtagh is always running or doing his sword forms or whatever and now I’m like “DUDE, NO!!!?!? DON’T BURN YOUR WIZARD CALORIES!!?!?”

I like when magic can’t do EVERYTHING, when it’s consistent or limited in some way, but I do hate the idea that it’s this predictable. Food energy becomes raw magical power. I GUESS.

(A little later)

Screaming at the suggestion Thorn can tell when Murtagh is horny.

I don’t like the euphemisms. It makes it worse

The fact he can’t talk to his dragon whenever they’re “too far apart” (distance never specified) is making me insane. Why did I pick up the dragon riding book if it’s mostly about leaving your dragon locked up at the bike rack

I know Thorn is basically a rescue dog with anxiety, but it bothers me how much he’s left on his own. The narrative just has no idea what to use him for other than speedy transport for the first um… 200 pages, it seems? He’s meant to be his own creature with his own intelligence. He doesn’t go anywhere without Murtagh though. So what is he doing all the time

I think Paolini WANTS his world to be big and mysterious (his introduction literally just keeps saying things in the world of the story are mysterious) but he HAS to keep explaining everything

24 November 2023

I’ve figured out something that annoys me about the world of this book, in terms of just how the worldbuilding is not actually that magical. It has the D&D problem!!! Which is to say that every regular person on earth is Level One and every important character is like, level 12. And part of what makes that even worse is that all women in this world are level zero.

I’ve been watching my friend Chris play the first Alan Wake game and we realised that all the faceless enemies that are possessed by Evil in the game are… working class men. The protagonist is this literate wealthy New York writer who is constantly killing faceless workers—farmers, loggers, coal miners, builders. And that’s not an INTENTIONAL commentary by the game, but it’s very revealing. And This book is the same in that: there is no such thing as a complicated poor person. They’re all either Dirty Evil or Dirty Good. Murtagh is going around, writing poetry in his head and inventing magical computer code, and then every child is an urchin who is like Oi Guvnah, and every dad is gruff, and every woman is worried.

The language used to describe everyone who isn’t a Fighting Man is so demeaning. And even then, we only need to respect the leaders of those men. The leaders are the only ones with depth who might need to be taken seriously.

It’s like Murtagh has a tally in his head where he is going “finally, a guy who is level 6”!

Most people in this world exist to deliver information to the protagonist.

Paolini either thinks his readers are too dumb to understand that his characters exist between scenes, or he doesn’t understand himself that we don’t need to see every time Murtagh enters a city under a new name and how he does it. Or know what he ate for dinner and how he prepared it and where he slept and what he dreamed and, and, and—

It’s weird because Paolini is being self indulgent as fuck but it is NOT fun to read. This dude really just needs to go write a survival story or something… A guy in the woods depending on nothing but his wits and his axe and his beard and his libertarian values

I don’t understand the stakes at play. All the magic scenes with Mind Penetration are so sudden and hard to actually understand as action. And the way it works is about brute force, so the dragon is not going to be at risk of being taken over except by another, even bigger dragon

It would be fun to read the Murtagh city sleuth segments if Thorn was backseat driving a little. I think that their bond should not get thinner over distance. The fact that it does just defeats the point of a magical bond.

Why does the dragon have to stay so far away? Like… it’s established that there’s a spell to conceal a dragon from sight. Dude. You could just go fucking invisible

There’s so many decisions that just are so bonkers to have made. The whole fetch quest for information pissed me off so bad. “You have to join the guard” (40 pages of emotions about uniforms ensue). This guy learned about plots from video games

Paolini had kids apparently, but you can tell he doesn’t really understand kids. “How do they all start out so innocent and pure,” says a man who has never heard a seven year old describe someone being killed by farts before.

The description of Murtagh carrying a cat that doesn’t want to be carried is very funny. I don’t know if Paolini has ever carried a cat before. If you’re carrying a cat that doesn’t want to be carried close to your chest, and you tighten your grip when it squirms… say goodbye to your nipples, my man

It’s strange how much Paolini doesn’t explore the things that seem to be the point. FOR EXAMPLE, the fantasy soul bond trope loves to say “even during sex!??! 👀” because it’s about INTIMACY, and some alien presence always being there. The dragon rider trope is popular because dragons are powerful and wise but also Beasts. Magic is fun to read about because it can do things that can’t be explained.

Paolini’s world is big, but nothing in it has any real substance. Nothing in it has any real consequence, and it makes it impossible to really invest in anything that happens. None of these poor city folks have a life once they leave the scene of delivering Murtagh information… or if they are a woman, delivering him a hot meal. There’s no sense of a world that exists outside Murtagh’s point of view!

25 November 2023

The towns so far don’t feel at all distinctive to me! I was interested in the one with the massive lake, but then it having this massive fish in it was the only point of interest. It would be fun to have been like “oh the fish has ruined our summer festival! It’s ruined the nobility pleasure cruises! It’s also eating fishermen!” Or “Why do all these fishing boats have huge spikes on the prow? Well,”

Again, these guys are all level one in peasant dirt town. They have no capacity for individual thought and no ability to adapt.

It’s like Paolini doesn’t know what makes people and places in fantasy feel distinct, or have culture. It’s so evident in how much he HASN’T thought about. For example, the bonkers amount of restrictive gender norms that he doesn’t seem AT ALL CONSCIOUS OF? Everyone who died in the war was A Man. No women died in the war. But that hasn’t resulted in any social changes. There aren’t more women doing work, for example, like being fishermen

I remember being thirteen or so and reading the bit in the second book where Arya explains to Eragon that she’s better and stronger than a human woman, because she is an elf, so Eragon doesn’t have to worry about her in battle. I was this kid there like “man, that sucks. I assume he’s coming back to that assumption later,” and… he never did. He still hasn’t. And that sucks

The dragon riders were not THAT long ago, in the world of these books. It makes me wonder—were none of them human women? I always assumed that some were human women, but… did dragons only choose elf men, elf women, and human men? If they chose human women, then even being accepted into a paramilitary dragon force didn’t change gender expectations in the rest of the world. What the fuck. He’s really never thought about this.

Women keep showing up as cunning-mysterious, as humble dirtmothers, or as innocent children. Oh my god I’m just describing maiden mother crone. That’s all he’s capable of.

I just got up to where he rescues the werecat baby (innocent girl child) and settles in to hear the stories of elder werecat (cunning-mysterious)

I noticed the Arya Problem with how Nasuada is described in this book, too. Every woman has to be the best, most capable, most powerful woman ever, to be worth the attention of The Boys. Otherwise they can’t respect her. Only two literal queens can be considered worthy of just two average guys who got pet lizards. Even then, they’re not actual equals.

“She still empathised for me.” Yes, don’t worry, Murtagh, I remember that’s what women are for.

I should note that the reason Nasuada is considered so powerful and so much worthy of his love and is her strength as a person. This is proven in the Eragon books because “she still empathised” with Murtagh whilst he was medieval torturing her. He was medieval torturing her for like… most of a book and that’s how they fell in love. Because she could see in his eyes that this guy torturing her… was Complicated. He didn’t really WANT to be medieval torturing her so she actually felt worse for him than he felt about how he was (and I can’t stress this enough) medieval torturing her

I just can’t imagine that THE QUEEN OF A WHOLE CONTINENT would still prefer the guy who sadly tortured her. He’s her top preference. Out of EVERY OTHER MAN IN THE WORLD

I put the book down until the day before I was meant to have finished the book for book club:

10 March 2024: from page 274 onwards

The evil witch is called BACHEL?????!!?!??!? Fucking BACHEL. Pronounced “buh-SHELL”, the guide at the back says. You changed one letter in Rachel, don’t lie to me Paolini

I got so mad being reminded the evil king Galbatorix was defeated by “Eragon forcing empathy upon him” so that he magically exploded himself out of guilt that I had to put the book down and complain to Charlie for five straight minutes

I guess that’s why Galbatorix made Murtagh torture Nasuada for him. He knew that if he’d done it himself she would have empathised with him too hard and he would’ve exploded himself

Murtagh has never met a single person he has respected. Murtagh is the specialest boy in all the land. Eragon had to leave the country because they were both too special to share a continent

Murtagh decided on where to go and he was immediately surrounded by armed guards who took him to where the plot was

Paolini uses the fucking word “admixed” while discussing EATING A PIE. The flavours admixed in his mouth. Just because you know a word… doesn’t mean it’s a word to deploy about eating a pie

I HATE how the only people strong enough to do the strongest magic are Elves Or Human Riders. It’s fucking magic my guy! Why is it checking your goddamn DNA! Also, hey! Wasn’t it supposed to come down to the strongest wizards being the guys who ate the most for lunch?

In a world of Magic how come every wizard battle ultimately comes down to who is a better Professor X?? I came here for fireballs, not Mind Battles. I don’t care about your Mental Wards

Hahaha Murtagh!!! Get trapdoored, bitch!!!!

Dragon panic attacks: conceptually cool but a bit ?? Like ah… the plot literally comes to scoop him up and carry him away. Yet again something outside of Murtagh makes a decision for him about what to do next

Murtagh’s poetry is going to make me explode myself like Galbatorix in book 4

If there’s something I like about this book so far it’s just the bits where he and Thorn are camping. Not flying, because then Murtagh is using the time to think and that’s horrible. The bits where they make campfires or whatever feel like something is actually happening. A guy and his dragon hanging out

Man. The way this novel is plotted really reminds me that it’s not actually that hard to write a book.

Murtagh goes to the evil village (oh yeah there’s an evil village. It is where Bachel lives. She is evil because she does magic without using the magic language). The village is called:

NAL GORGOTH

But I couldn’t remember this so I kept referring to it in my head by another, more familiar, name

Murtagh is so freaked out by finding a village with architecture that he doesn’t recognise. He’s like “My god!!! Nasuada has to be warned!!!” Ok but about what??? New ways of building pillars???? The art deco movement threatens the land??

Kinda fascinated by how much this village represents a threat to CULTURE. The architecture, the people… Everything about it so far is designed to be A Foreign Threat. The inhabitants are Of All Races (except elves they are too cool too pure etc). The humans have A VARIETY OF SKIN COLOURS, which memorably never happens in Alagaesia, a continent once explicitly described in the Eragon books as only having two (2) black people on it at all (then one died) (the other is Nasuada) (the one who died was her dad)

This guy with a goatee isn’t quite human. He is maybe part urgal and he is so uncomfortable to look at! Mainly he has arms that are a bit too long!! Bachel isn’t a human and also isn’t an elf, and that’s also deeply unsettling.

Bachel also fundamentally represents a threat to THE STRUCTURING POWER OF LANGUAGE, huh??

Bachel is so far the most interesting character in the book!

Bachel has: ALMOND EYES and AMBER SKIN

Murtagh is so upset and confused when Bachel calls him “my son” like… I’m cryign. “But she’s not my mother! I know my mother!!” he thinks, in a panic.

If this was a fantasy novel written twenty to thirty years ago, then the sexual tension between Murtagh and Bachel would be absolutely insane. Alas, this is a world of abstinence, and sexuality is only ever meaningful looks between a queen and the guy who tortured her (it is weird how he keeps caressing Nasuada’s face on the gold coins)

It’s very funny that Bachel has specifically fourteen warriors. The prose keeps telling us that there’s fourteen of them. So you get Murtagh stepping forwards and then sentences like “the fourteen warriors attending Bachel shifted”

She seems like a perfectly normal cult leader to me? Why is she automatically a threat to Nasuada! How come the two of them can’t arrange a toxic political marriage that becomes… something more 😉😉😉

Nothing annoys me more in this book than Murtagh being able to identify specific vintages of wine. It keeps happening and it pisses me off

Bachel is a half elf!!! “It had never occurred to him that such a thing might be possible.” This is truly and absolutely unbelievable to me. Nobody in this world ever has sex

How did it take so long to get to such an objectively cool village!!! Like this is just a cool place!!! Sorry that Nar Nar Goon is evil but like FINALLY something has style

Three thoughts at once:

I’m so bored that Paolini’s mind can’t get more interesting than temple virgins, let alone wearing white to represent ritualistic purity. Like… nobody in this world fucks anyway, why does it matter!

Murtagh should also wear white all the time

Lesbianism doesn’t count as a violation of being temple chosen. Alín is wearing lesbianism

Paolini has never once written a woman who is Normal. He just can’t conceive of it. You can feel how he starts sweating.

Murtagh finally realised it was a cult. What sets it apart as a cult is that the followers appear to be “half-wits” to him

I’m going to detransition to break his fucking neck

Paolini has learned nothing since he had a woman deliver the exact same line in like 2008. The fact that another editor just thumbsed this up. The fact that this is in a book published in 2023. Well, now I’m REALLY embarking on an antagonistic reading: that’s right, I am reading women as capable.

Obsessed with Bachel. She is a girlboss and I’m a feminist xxx

Book is constantly weird about how much she is capable of eating and drinking at her feasts and how it makes her appear swollen and bloated etc etc. Murtagh is so weirded out by this because he feels it is unfeminine… as though she is not a witch and we weren’t told earlier that how much magic you have is directly equal to how much you eat. (Meanwhile he is only picking at his food and eating just enough of it ‘to be polite’ as though this is not making a decision to have less magic than her)

She has so much charisma compared to anyone else in the book. If my choices are her or Murtagh then sign me up boys!!!

Okay but much like how this would’ve been a VERY charged relationship 30 years ago, I’m weirdly disappointed Bachel she isn’t not described as megahot? Like the book keeps telling me about this virginal templemaiden or whatever, because Murtagh is only attracted to women he can rescue. But I’m actually just like… I think this woman is hot. Tell me more about her. It’s wild that this book is written by a guy like Paolini, who told me all about Oromis’ pubic hair in 2008, and who barely thinks women are people. Yet he doesn’t want to discuss her tiddies?

This book could, and should! have started when Murtagh landed his dragon in the evil village of Nar Nar Goon. That’s the point that stuff got actually interesting. Everything before this was literally video game fetch quest logic plotting that earned him the right to fly to Nar Nar Goon.

Boar hunt. More like BORED hunt. And then suddenly there are so many pigs, a comical number of them flying everywhere

This motherfucker using the phrase “the boar was lying athwart him” in a sentence in an action scene????

Murtagh is nearly dead and the boar is lying athwart him?

I’m going back in time and bullying the author at school

RIP Murtagh, trambled to death by 30-50 wild hogs

Oh god every time someone knocks Murtagh out he has a vision or a bad dream or a flashback or whatever and it’s so tiring

“EXISTENCE WAS A TOMB WHEREIN THE SINS OF THE PAST LAID INTERRED???” Do you ever read a sentence that sounds so much like the author is jerking it? “All had been lost, and there before him lay the instrument of their destruction” he is furiously jerking it oh my god. “Destroyer of hope, eater of light” oh, god, he’s still going

…This book is. Weird about mothers

Murtagh flies into a rage because Bachel mercy killed a guy who was dying bc of boar trampling because “I COULD HAVE HEALED HIM!!!!!” And the mercy killing is proof it is a cult. Because doing it Bachel’s way meant the guy was too relaxed and at peace when he died

Paolini’s family were in a cult, as I understand. So it’s kind of weird how much he doesn’t really understand how being in a cult works

I don’t really remember how religion works in this world, but I do remember tuning out of a long boring passage in book 2 or 3 where Eragon learned about all the gods and decided he was an atheist. It’s especially weird to be like “holy shit, an EVIL religion??!” In a book where religion has absolutely never come up before now

Oh my god, Alìn was whipped for being ‘too familiar’ with Murtagh!!! That’s because she’s so pure and a helpless victim girl in all white :’((

In my mind Bachel and Alìn COULD be in a fucked up lesbian relationship with bad BDSM etiquette. Of course Paolini can’t imagine a world where women have enough personality or agency to fall in toxic love with each other. Also even though he has people tied up and strapped down and whipped and being tortured etc in every book don’t think he knows that BDSM like. Exists. Boooooo

Murtagh: killing one guy who is dying of a punctured lung is the ultimate evil!

Also Murtagh: I know an invisibility spell, but to sneak out of my room I am going to suffocate seven men to death

Genuinely upsetting to read those men dying. He made it impossible for air to enter or exit their lungs with a word. Veins popping clawing at faces etc. God, what a way to go. So unnecessarily cruel. Yep, there goes the good guy

The main way the village is evil is that there are unsettling carvings everywhere. Paolini read some Lovecraft, but he did not understand what was up with it. Or maybe he did, because this book did get a lot more weird about Racial Purity once Murtagh arrived in Lovecraft Village

11 March 2024

There’s a bloodstain that “filled Murtagh with the apprehension of evil” and it confused me because these books are so gory. Earlier he killed four men with a fork. But like oh yeah I guess it’s because when Murtagh murders people now it’s bloodless. I guess. His murders are good you see

This chapter is called The Bad Sleep-Well you can tell Paolini thought he was a real genius for this one

Okay but why are there bats… roosting… in a cave… at night. And why is Murtagh worried that red light will risk waking them? Animals cannot see red light?? SOME FARM BOY YOU ARE, PAOLINI

Okay I have to stop nitpicking. I have to restrain myself until my Vyvanse kicks in

“Murtagh felt a sense of not just age but antiquity. Whoever had built the stairs had done so long before Alagaesia had been a settled place. What was it Bachel had said? That the cultists had lived in Nal Gorgoth since before elves were elves... He was starting to think she had told the truth.”

Sorry uhhhh, Alagaesia was settled?? When they talk about The Grey Ones, are they talking about a race PRIOR TO COLONISATION?????????

“He continued forward. Deeper into the womb of the earth. Deeper into the black unknown, seeking, seeking, always seeking a farther shore, every sense razor-sharp and razor-scraped, skin all goosefleshed, cold sweat dripping down the back of his neck and gathering around his belted waist.”

God it’s so overwrought...

He found the well!!

Oh my god. The well is a natural magic hotspot and that means it “wasn’t the sort of thing that the Draumar ought to have dominion over.” It’s a natural resource???

“Not that he would want Du Vrangr Gata to assume control over such an important location either. This was exactly what the Riders had been created for: to oversee and mediate that which could destabilize the land.”

Murtagh is going to bring democracy to the Middle East

He’s too scared to mentally contact his dragon with Bachel around. If he was a proper horse girl he would find a way

Oh Galbatorix BECAME evil because he met Bachel and she manipulated him. Haha oh dear. No, you can’t just come to the conclusion the dragon rider paramilitary force who controls the resources are bad on your own. Not just because they sent you into the mountains when they knew it was dangerous and wanted to find out if you’d be killed up there! No, a manipulation had to have happened

It’s funny to me that the evil ancient witch queen who lives in seclusion in the mountains uses the new name for the city of Uru’baen. Oh no, she knows it as Ilirea. She’s hundreds and hundreds of years old. You know what that is? Evidence of Find And Replace, to me.

Bachel’s eyes are “glowing with fevered ecstasy.” I could make her feel that way. Also. Because, I know about sex

Always with the fucking passing out at the end of the chapter for Christopher James Paolini

NOW Bachel is being described appropriately as a hottie. FINALLY. GOD! It only took Murtagh being mind controlled in his brain but I. I!!! I could see the glorious light of truth!!

“He followed, dumb and wildered.” Well, not as much as that sentence. (You can be bewildered. But can you ever just be wildered????)

The dedication to making Murtagh the most pitiful little meow meow in existence in the Galbatorix flashbacks I’m… what happened to the joys of a guy who is evil because he was convinced or was tricked, not because he was fully brain abused???

The Urgals are racially… uncomfortable. Yellow eyes and Murtagh just straight up saying “how do you speak English”

The evil guys have masks and they put them on and like channel the animals the masks are of and on one hand it’s an idea I THINK is cool but also combined with the everything it really has this “tribal stuff is threatening” vibe all over it

“What do you want, witch?”

“I want you.”

Obsessed with how he’s shackled to a table and there’s still an incredible lack of sexual energy to this scene. This is like a day at the office for both of them.

… oh, but she is wearing claws and claws DOES equal a threat of penetration. Maybe a little sexual? As a treat??

Him being tortured reminds him of torturing Nasuada. Wow, it was their first date!

It’s just like. It’s fucked up imo. She should never kiss you Murtagh!!!

Is anything more boring than a torture scene.

Also, was he not drugged right before this scene? How is he able to mentally evade her and power his wards etc?

I’m mad that when he’s brought fancy foods by Alìn he doesn’t share his food with Ubek the Urgal

Oh my god Ubek tells him a story where the moral is just him outright saying at the end, “it’s important to stay close to the people we care for, even if we don’t always fit in so easily” lmao. Subtlety of a mallet

Is anything more boring than a torture scene? How about a torture chapter!!!1!1!1!

This chapter is interminable. Oh my god.

Oh, so we did all that and he gives in I guess. I can’t believe how little agency this man has had throughout this book????

Haha oh my god, Bachel is studying his nude and compliant body in front of her court. Telling him to turn around so she can inspect his back (no mention of his ass even though it is out, tragic). Fucking love it. Now that’s bdsm. Pledging my allegiance to her instantly.

I am BORED. I liked when he was at least doing things of his own volition!

He flies his dragon off on Bachel’s orders and we get the line “Never had air smelled so… so… delicious.” Cryign

GASP he’s killed… CHILDREN!!!!!!! I hate how it only becomes horrifying for him to have done these murders once he realises they’re HUMAN children. Urgal children? The implication is that would’ve been a bit tacky but ultimately fine

Prison brothers blood pact. I feel so little about this. Ubek is 5000x more interesting than Murtagh but he’s been slotted into what is unfortunately a sort of magical indigenous person trope but where instead of being a human being, he is an orc. Which makes the whole trope much worse

Murtagh touched Alìn’s face… gasp! She’s been corrupted by the Touch Of A Man!!!!! (I do not care about this.)

(I care a little. For example she didn’t touch HIM. He just reached out and she didn’t pull away. This is the biggest decision about this character’s life, and she isn’t even allowed to be the one who makes it. He decides on her behalf, and she must be okay with it. Because she doesn’t pull away or fight him off.)

(Also Paolini doesn’t seem to be aware that ‘a woman who has been pledged not to be touched by a man’ would um. USUALLY be understood by a reader as euphemistic. Not that her purity could be forever ruined by a man literally just touching her face)

The way Paolini fills Murtagh’s brainwashed dialogue with oops all ellipses makes me want to tear the book apart with my teeth

Worst: how Grieve the guy who is part urgal is perpetually referred to as “heavy-browed.” “the heavy-browed Grieve” I’m sorry but I missed phrenology school, is that bad??

Also if he’s maybe part Urgal but Murtagh is now given a chance to making it clear that some of his best friends are urgals... Why is Grieve so distastefully described? What’s wrong with being half urgal? My suspicion: it’s the bloodlines intermingling

I suspect I can just skip every fucking dream sequence and flashback. Nothing of any value in these

This one guy, Lyreth, who trapdoored Murtagh for 2.5 seconds ages ago in the book, is TWICE referenced as holding/ touching the waists of “village” or “cultist” women in his dialogue tags. That’s the full extent of it. It’s not that there’s a giggling tavern girl sprawled in his lap while he’s speaking. These faceless women are exclusively sketched into existence by how a named male character’s hand is on their waist. We don’t know anything about how they are responding to his touch, which is extra in-your-face considering that Murtagh just obliterated a woman’s ritual purity by touching her face without asking. And it’s only ever these women’s waist. It’s not their hips or thighs or boobs. He’s not kissing their necks. I’m sure in Paolini’s mind this guy touching women’s waists is meant to read as sexual, which is supposed to reinforce that he’s a scumbag… but it doesn’t work because it’s so impersonal. These women are just… unmoving waists that he is just touching. It serves as a good illustration of how women—and sex and sexuality and bodies—are handled in these books. Men are never ruled by their strong and muscular bodies. Men have minds, and magic, and telepathy battles. Even when Murtagh is on a torture table or when he’s naked in front of a powerful woman who is actively inspecting his body, he doesn’t feel vulnerable. He doesn’t have an ass or a dick. The wind doesn’t make him shiver. He’s just a Mind. But women, well. They only have bodies when men touch them. The course of Alin’s life is defined by Murtagh’s touch, and even Nasuada, a fucking queen, only gets physical description via the coins Murtagh has in his possession and his memory of the cuts and bruises he left on her body. And women also have no minds—unless they’re werecats or elves or half elves, the only kind of woman who are remotely threatening, the only kind of women who are “as good as” the baseline of human men. Nasuada is proven as Murtagh’s equal because she was able to overcome the torture of her body. If he hadn’t tortured her, or if she had broken down, she wouldn’t have proven herself worthy of being his romantic partner.

Eragon’s romantic interest also started out being tortured. Not by him, but “girl who is tortured but is too strong to give up her secrets” was her entire characterisation for a book and a half, until he rescued her. That’s uh. That’s how you find girlfriends who are good enough for your protagonists.

THESE FUCKING BOOKS.

Bachel has put Thorn in a special wrought iron muzzle. Yet again, this is just objectively cool

We learn about who the cult worships: evil dragon underground. He makes fumes come out of the earth and they brainwash people and give them visions. He will come out of the ground and eat the sun unless every living thing worships him.

Really Bachel is not leading a cult she is leading an environmental rescue mission. Quick we gotta get everyone to worship this evil dragon STAT, or he’s going to wipe out all life on earth.

Why does an evil dragon living under the earth with the power to eat the sun (?!??!) actually want or need to be worshipped by “every living thing”. What is his motivation?? And why would that stop him eating the sun?

“The sculptures would have horrified most any artist in Alagaesia, no matter their race.” Mark this down as one of the worst sentences he has written yet!!

I realise now I’ve been misremembering multiple main characters’ names

I like Bachel telling Thorn to stay, like he’s a dog. That’s good to me

Murtagh is learning about the power of friendship to heal himself last minute, I guess

Why is Murtagh pausing to duel fucking Lyreth, the most boring man in the world. Is it because of the waists he touched??? I have never felt this man was worth any time at all

NOT Paolini specifically pointing out that Lyreth “smelled of a cloying peach scented perfume” and that he’s physically weaker than Murtagh as Murtagh overcomes him. Lyreth was too feminine to be strong, in the end

This book is obsessed with the word “youngling.” Murtagh says to Thorn “don’t kill any younglings.” He’s fighting Lyreth but he’s not worried because he himself is “no longer a youngling”. Fucking fuck off! just say youth. Child. Kid. Teenager even!! Come on!!

Murtagh going “this is taking too long” in the duel: me at the whole book thus far

“Is wrong-think to worship Bachel or Azlagur,” says Ubek. This is real dialogue in a book published in real 2023. Oh yeah btw everything he says is written like this

Oh, the urgal’s size and brute strength makes him Murtagh’s equal. I see

Grieve is legitimately yelling “kill the non-believers!!” and calling them desecrators??? Cartoon hours

To start winning the fight, all Murtagh had to do was find his magic sword! It stores all his potency and he inherited it from his father. Freud?? Don’t worry about it

The cultists are bleeding green blood???? Does this mean they’re not human or is it the lighting or what.

Groups of dragons are always being described as a Thunder Of. They’re only ever being described in visions but it’s always being described as “a thunder of dragons”, because Paolini is very proud of inventing his very own collective noun for dragons I guess

Buncha little pasty freaks showing up.

Murtagh’s ultimate challenge: he has to fight one hundred gollums

Paolini inventing new guys for his dungeon at unprecedented rates

Murtagh is legitimately busy trying to think of new names for his sword NOW?? He is just going to stop in the middle of this urgent fight to go find where the bad woman (Bachel) took the good woman (Alìn) to go “my sword has a bad name. It could have a good name.” Did he not have time while he was mouldering in the dungeon to think about this

He’s checking his compendium, like in video games.

Books have never been worse. If Murtagh/Paolini calls this sword Scar I will legitimately never know peace

Oh the sword is called Freedom now. Get it? Like America? It’s the most important value??

“Seeing the armor, Murtagh realized that the leather garb the cultists had donned for the festival of black smoke had been made to resemble Bachel's fantastic suit.”

what a sentence

This is the worst

I hate how her spear has a name and a dramatic history. Like come on

Fucking mind battles again

Alin is just… I’m sorry to her, but she’s not a real person. She’s a cardboard cutout in distress

The final boss fight should not be taking place in the magical world of the mind

Now she’s calling him “infidel?” Okay

The ultimate battle: the structuring power of masculine language versus the primeval chaos of raw women’s emotion!!! Who will win!! Hint: Christopher Paolini wrote this!

“She seemed merely a woman again.”

‘Merely’ is how Paolini always describes women (when he thinks they’re worth describing of course)

Wait… is the only reason Bachel has been intimidating REALLY just because she’s been channelling a tough evil boy dragon? Once the mask is gone and he’s not empowering her… she’s merely…

I’m going to kick Christopher Paolini’s fucking ass

Murtagh feels so emotionally close to Bachel. As he splits her skull. Normal book

For real why were ALL the Riders so afraid of Bachel??? The gas fumes? Face masks not invented?? This seems pretty easy to solve like if they’d just. Sent more than one guy?

He passes out and the chapter ends of course. Then he wakes up in the city

Ah, Alin is blonde and blue eyed. She was a pale skinned virgin who needed rescuing from an evil and also foreign almond eyed amber skinned woman who was whipping her. You know how it goes

I hate how Alìn always calls Murtagh “my lord.” She’s like one of those medieval fighting game banners of a sexy woman. She’s a cartoon.

Isn’t it a shame that when Murtagh hastily gets out of bed to bow to Nasuada he is wearing pants. So much funnier if he wasn’t

I’m so over this book holy shit

Oh, for being the apparently only sole survivor of Murtagh’s obliteration of her cult and everything she’s ever known, Alìn is being promoted to… Nasuada’s maid. That’s not what she asked for. That’s just what she’s being told she’s going to do from now on. Fucking hell.

Nasuada is Jealous of this blonde woman and I was afraid for her because Nasuada is also famously the only black woman on the continent. But of course she has nothing to fear because only the most powerful woman in the land could ever be remotely Murtagh’s equal, which she proved by being stronger at being tortured than him

She asks him to stay and she touches his hand just lightly

The END??

They don’t even kiss?!!!?!! I had to read it twice to be sure. SEXLESS BOOK.

[shallowseeker]

Pamela is not just a complex stand-in for Dean's desires in 14x10, she sometimes speaks for him. AS HIM.

When Sam & Cas get into the Michael illusions, Dean immediately handles the, uh. IPA beer.

Ahem.

He looks strangely shy here, busying his hands, having something to do, eyes downcast. He flicks his eyes up lightning-quick towards Cas, but only for a second.

///

He's acting a little...weird. Fidgety. Looking away-ey. Keeping busy-ey.

Enter Pamela, animated, coming right up to them.

At the beginning of the episode perhaps she represented the stand-in for Dean's not!partner, but now she's a stand-in for Dean's words and his emotions:

PAMELA: "Cas! Sam!"

TO SAM: I'm glad you're back safe. S'startin' to worry. (snap) Don't tell Dean.

TURNING, more flirtatiously towards Cas and with the SAME Dean-air of weird bashfulness:

PAMELA (becoming more breathless, more bashful and strange): He'll...(odd pause, steps closer)...(shakes her head weird) use it against me (giggling, touching Cas's left shoulder).

Dean is oddly unanimated in the BG, 'cause Pamela is moving in his stead.

What's she saying though? What's the coded message?

"Don't TELL (HIM). HE'LL USE IT AGAINST ME."

This is Dean, trying desperately to keep a wall of what he loves away from Michael. Dean's mind is steely, locked down, but he's fighting hard to keep his true feelings as locked down and he can make them.

(Perhaps he's even been successful hiding some of his feelings from Michael?)

NOTE: Pamela and Dean both have dishrags. Pamela: animated, Dean: unanimated. They're one-to-one here.

Next:

DEAN: Hey, what're you guys waitin' for?

Now that Pamela's "gone more neutral," Dean's the one who's animated. (And they'll trade back and forth for the rest of the scene.)

SAM: (frustrated) None of this is real. This bar, Pamela-- PAMELA: Scuse me? You've never met someone more real than me, Sam Winchester.

Dean going silent, pointing at her like it's her cue to talk.

CAS: You're just a complex manifestation of Dan's memories designed to distract him.

Pamela turns to DEAN, not reacting to Cas, but ...almost like she's...waiting on words. And Dean almost like he's...thinking of words to say for both of them.

The whole thing is easily interpreted as Dean simply considering Cas's words. But a more fun interpretation? Pamela talking FOR Dean.

His eyebrows do the jumpy thing they do when he thinks of something flirty and "wowza" to say, he opens his mouth and--

PAMELA (looking Cas up and down): You really know how to talk to a lady, dontcha? Cas seems a little taken aback.

///

Why Pamela? There's been so much made of Pamela.

Dean picks Pamela for his illusion because she's a psychic; that's comfortable to him

She's tied up with his first meeting of Cas and angels

Also: He's literally being possessed and suffering the effects of angelic possession. He's probably feeling guilty about Castiel's part in the whole system of possession and angel kills, making his brain reassess everything he know about Castiel.

//

Communicating with Pamela:

Dean doesn't have to tell her things.

She can read his mind and talk for him. She's a lampshade; she's even visualized near lampshades.

Her dialogue is contrived and odd because they're often Dean's words and emotions and worries, cloaked in the manner and style he remembers of Pamela.

Not only is Pamela safe/psychic/all-knowing, her manner of speaking is outlandish and "free," allowing Dean to direct that energy at...Cas.

///

And there are some other oddities in the scene I really like, too.

When they kill the vampires, Pamela is shooting the "drunk one" in the heart, where Dean had just been standing.

Then Dean beheads "raincoat vampire (name per script)," splattering both Sam's and Cas's necks with blood, as if they've been beheaded, too.

There's some hidden aggression here, I think, especially when paired with Michael's taunts, because although negative feelings don't paint a full picture, they're fleeting...and often a little bit true.

And sometimes, your family do feel like they're vampires, sucking all the life out of you. Sam is a burden, as children are, and they leave you. Cas is obligation and he does make mistakes, as spouses are and do.

Dean's understandably a little bitter about it all. He takes the bad with the good, sure. We all do. But AU Michael paints in black-and-white without nuance or 3D shape.

Pamela shooting the drunk vampire in the heart is a nod to that sometimes Dean's feelings go unverbalized as he sacrifices on behalf of others.

That's partially, I think, why his happy place isn't the kitchen or a library or whatever. It's not family or home-grown labor. (He loves laboring for his family, it’s a love language of his for sure, but this isn't about that. It's about escape.)

This is a small business that he owns and runs; he's sitting at a desk with paperwork!

He's a caretaker finally getting their own thing, even if it's floundering.

///

Back behind the counter with Dean, Pamela turns flirty again: "You guys got real messy on that ghoul hunt, huh?"

And Cas tries to set the record straight. It's not from a hunt. It's from the illusory loop.

Pamela and Dean get silly and ignore Cas and Sam.

SAM: Man, we were there together when she was blinded!

(angel noises)

[legendofzoodles]

Honestly? I see the situation with the Sheikah Tech being a sort of parallel to technology IRL in that no matter how you try to safe-guard your data, there will always be ways to sneak in & exploit it & use it against someone.

In this way, I get the feeling that even if the Sheikah did manage to figure out about it, Ganon, as a Sorcerer, could likely figure out a new way to do it again, but this time, lay low until it was most advantageous much like how hackers will hide viruses behind innocuous masks.

That isn't to say that I think that the Hyruleans can't be allowed to advance. More so that, when they do, to only build things that are operated manually to a degree.

Especially weapons. Weapons shouldn't be operated by complex ai the way the Guardians or the Divine Beasts seemed to be.

Rather, the devices should be run mostly by simple operational ai. You could even classify the Purah Pad in such a way because even though it is controlled by programs, at the end of the day, it can't do anything or cause any real harm without the user's input.

If you notice, the Zonai's constructs doesn't seem to explicitly have permanent weapons. Rather, they have to pick up things like swords, shields, bows & arrows. But none of them are as innately destructive as the Guardians or Divine Beasts were & I think that might partially be from experience.

It may even be a way to purposefully limit the damage they could do should someone manage to hack their constructs. Which we actually do see happen in TotK twice. Once with Kouga & once in the Spirit Temple.

Either way, by limiting technology to being relatively manual, you also limit the amount of damage that can be done using that same technology should someone take over.

In fact, even the Secret Stones are that way as it's still the person who's ultimately in control. Without a user they can't really do anything.

So, I stand by my thoughts that the old king was right to at least bury the Guardians & Divine Beasts.

Maybe I'm weird,but that's just how I feel.

I don't think Ganon could 'lay low' without showing signs. Whatever his new ideas are, he'd have to test them to see if they would work or if they could be improved upon. The only way would be to just ponder the idea for millenia and then strike without practice, which could lead to a multitude of things going wrong or not like he planned. To be fair, it's easier to corrupt and break something than to fix it, but he ideally wants to keep the tech functional so he can puppet them.

But fair, it would be possible for him to hide those experiments in a way the Sheikah couldn't detect or take too long, or even lead them down the completely wrong path. But the hypothetical of the two sides struggling for centuries trying to outsmart the other is fun to think about.

That's a good point about weapons, but they would have to be careful about how and where they store them. Ganon, forever watching, could send a huge raid of monsters to seize the stores, or use malice to destroy them and blow everything in the area to nothing.

That's a good idea, to disarm the ai tech or have a failsafe where they shut down if in the presence of malice/gloom. Or if they were to ever be corrupted, make them as passive as possible for a reasonable chance at restoring them to normal.

I still disagree. I'm fairly sure the Guardian pillars around the castle were never discovered by the Hylians and yet Ganon shot those into action. They were going to be corrupted anyway, it's a good thing there were discovered at all just before the second calamity, or the simple act of them rising out of the ground would have completely unearthed the kingdom and done most of the damage.

Also why bury them instead of destroy them? That's so weird. He wants the tech gone, thinks it's served its purpose, doesn't want the Sheikah to have all that power...yet buries it for future generations to discover? What if only a couple decades later, smart angry members of newly formed Yiga dug up some of this tech and enacted revenge?? What a shortsighted king.

But never mind the king what about his wisdom wielding wife?! Why didn't she have any foresight or sense to ponder any of this??

[og-danny-dorito]

Can I have a short fic or headcanons of Hellboy and his elvish girlfriend?

A/N: heyo!! of course! i'm sorry for responding so late, and i wanted to warn you that this turned out to be more of me describing how the reader and hellboy got together more than as his girlfriend. i used the elves from the movie as a reference, but if you meant in the traditional fantasy sense please let me know and i can change the wording around to fix it. i also went a little haywire with this one since the creative caveman brain was just off the rails today so i apologize for that. i hope you enjoy regardless though!! sorry again for the length and also the weird second divisions, tumblr on laptop has a weird character limit rule now ^^;

[ CATEGORY ]: SFW

Hellboy With An Elvish! Girlfriend

CW: long post, feminine reader (warning for those who are uncomfortable or dysphoric with feminine descriptions or connotations)

TW: parental death, discrimination

honestly?? no hate to liz i love her dearly but i genuinely think someone who looks physically different would be the best for him

not for attractiveness' sake but because they would understand more of what its like to feel the way he does

i mean if you've grown up almost entirely with other elves in Bethmora, then you probably won't have a lot of experience with trying to blend in but for the sake of the post we'll go with the timeline where you were cast out from a young age and had to live alongside humans

your parents had told you of a distant past where humans and mythos lived alongside one another in harmony, undisturbed by things like environmental disease and pollution

but greed overtook humans, leaving the remains of the mythos' culture scattered and torn, just like your family

once your parents passed away you were cast out for wanting to live outside of Bethmora since your parents made it clear that while human beings were capable of great evil, they were equally as capable of great good. you didn't want to give up on them just yet.

but time hardened you, and so did hiding yourself from the outside world. living in underground the city amongst those who understood the struggle of not feeling like you fit in was comforting enough for you to get by without the embarrassment of going back “home”, but your specific set of expiriences made it hard for you to really connect with others once you became an adult

that was, until you met him.

when you first see him, hellboy is scary. he's tall, big, and this deep shade of red that reminds you of the feeling of rage and power. its something that makes you cower in spot when he walks up, gun firm at his hip as he... asks for directions

right. okay. directions.

you grew up here, so you know your way around pretty well, but he makes it kind of hard to think straight with all his staring. he probably thinks you look funny if you're being honest, but you try to ignore it as you bring him over to a lone vendor at the end of the street

he's kind of... brash. from what you can tell. the entire walk there was silent but he seems to have plenty of words for the vendor who honestly can't understand a word he's saying

you can tell they're both getting more aggravated by the second so, in a moment of clarity you offer to translate

the language, though complex and mostly lost to time and lack of native speakers, rolls easily off your tongue as you explain what he's looking for

living around these parts meant you picked up a lot of languages in your time, so acting as this weird strangers translator isn’t that much of a problem for you. it lessens the chance of blood being spilt, anyways

it doesn't take you long to get him the information he needs (more directions it seems, but not for any place or thing you know about)

he's quiet for a second after you translate, staring down at you with a steely but... bemused look? curious? you can't really tell in the dim lighting, but before you can open your mouth to break the uncomfortable silence, he speaks

"You ever consider working for the government?"

and the rest is history. it didn't take you long to move into your own room at the BPRD, where you met a few of Hellboy's (tall red guy, he was astronomically less scary than you thought he was once you got to know him) coworkers including Abe, a friendly blue fish guy that was more than fascinated with your life stories. you almost felt bad for him for being stuck in a tank most of his life, he would’ve been an excellent traveling buddy

but anyway Hellboy was, as previously stated, a lot less scary than you originally thought him to be. sure he was tall and imposing and could most definitley rip someones limbs off if he wanted to, but he also liked old human music bands like Motley Crue and Queen. he also, to your surprise, had a VERY strong affinity for cats

needless to say the two of you become close over a very short period of time. having your rooms be next to each other certainly made running into each other a lot easier, but if you were being honest knowing him is the first time you ever really felt like someone... got it

certain feelings, certain struggles and pains you thought you faced alone were shared by him, more deeply than a way you ever thought possible. being hated for your appearance and heritage was something he knew all too well, and never feeling like you ever truly knew where you came from was one of the many things both of you had long, drawn out talks over

it was only a matter of time before you began to feel more than just... friendly feelings for him. it was just approaching them that was the issue

but thankfully you wouldn't have to considering he accidentally told on himself while he was drunk LMAO

like obviously he tried to play it off like he totally didn't remember what he said the next morning even though he was nuzzled into your shoulder while hugging you and telling you how much of a coward he felt like for just not being able to say that he wanted you ("I feel like shit, Y/n." "Why...?" "I'm such- I'm such a fucking wimp. I can't even say I like you. Do you know how that feels, too?" "A little too well, Red.")

but after hearing from abe how upset you were about him pretending to not know about it he called you to his room once he knew you were settled down for the day to talk

you obviously assumed the worst considering you were pretty sure he was going to turn you down, expecting something along the lines of "it wasn't meant for you" or "i can only ever see you as a friend"

preparing yourself for the dissapointment makes it a lot easier, but as soon as you walked in and saw him dejectedly sitting on the dge of his bed like a child in trouble, you knew something wasn't like you predicted

his face is a little more red than it usually is (hard to tell, but you can tell he's embarrassed by the fact that he won't hold eye contact. that or he's ashamed of himself.), and he pats space next to him

you sit down gently so as not to freak him out, and he takes the lead with the conversation by apologizing

"I'm uh- really sorry for last night. I didn't mean to-"

but you stop him, a small smile on your face as you place a hand on his admittedly too-large bicep. its hard not to feel small next to him sometimes, but it doesnt help the hurt in your heart as you look up at him

"Red- honey. It's okay. I know it wasn't meant for me."

there's a pause.

"Huh?"

"I know it wasn't meant for me. It's okay, I'm not angry with you."

"Wh- No. It WAS meant for you."

you shake your head a little bit. it's getting hard to hold back tears. you always hated that about yourself- being so emotional made it difficult to keep it together in sensitive times like these

"You don't need to lie to me, I'm not going to take it pers-"

"No Y/n, you don't understand. I am in love with you."

oh.

OH.

oh god, you feel kind of stupid. i mean it takes a second to actually sink in but god he was actually in love with you? so you weren't like, hung up over someone who would never want you back??

admittedly you almost don't believe him, thinking it to be some kind of cruel joke at your expense, but the desperate, confused look in his eyes is enough to give it away; he's not lying, and he never would. not about this. not to you.

your stunned silence goes unnoticed to you and, before you can process it, it looks like his face is dropping in realization. he's under the impression you don't like him back or something insane like that.

"Oh. I uh- forget it."

"WH- No no wait! Sorry I just needed a second to process. I like you too!! I just- I couldn't really believe it? I mean I just- I didn't think you'd ever like me back. Ever. It's just a lot to take in."

"Oh. Got it."

you two fucking dorks just kinda like?? sit there for a second before you finally look back at him. once the information has finally sunk in you smile at him, all wide and toothy as you place your hands on his own in his lap. he's still blushing, but it flares up again once he realizes how close you are

"Does this mean we're a thing now?"

you swear you feel the room get warmer just from the blood rushing to his face alone. but he's smiling a little bit!! that's more than you've seen him smile at like.. anything. it makes you smile in turn and, as the night goes on, things return mostly to normal

its rocky at first considering neither of you really know what to do, but if there's one thing you two are good at its communication

having a long standing friendship means that you already trust each other fairly deeply, so talking through things isn't nearly as hard as it normally would be. he feels comfortable enough to share his insecurities with you, so talking to you about other things is so much easier for him

in turn, you do the same. your relationship is built on trust and understanding, and the two of you are almost made for each other. you've gone through the most same struggles and pain trying to blend in in a world that doesn't feel like it was meant for you, and although your issues are unique to you as individuals it means a lot to both him and you to have someone that knows what being so different feels like

but aside from all the super deep stuff that builds the fundamentals of your relationships you also focus on the simple things too!! like for instance he LOVES the fact that you're smaller than him because he can quite literally just pick you up and carry you around if he wants to

he already did that shit normally but if you think you aren't getting picked up and taken away in the middle of a conversation with someone you are GREATLY mistaken. not paying attention to him? took. he wants you to see this cool thing he thought you'd like but you're too invested in paperwork? took. you will get Took and he will ignore your complaints about it (unless you really hate it then he'll apologize and put you down ofc)

if you like to do your makeup you bet your ass he'll watch you the whole time. he won't admit that he wants to try on some lipgloss but when you finally get him to say it he'll say something stupid and suave like "Well kiss me then." and wait for you to share 🙄

if you try to take his clothes to wear them anywhere except to sleep he will try on your clothes

he ripped your shirt one time trying to fit it over his chest and when you said his boobs were too big he covered his chest like an embarrassed maiden LMAO

it goes without saying but he likes to act like he's tough and shit with his beers and big hammer hand but as soon as you're around he can't keep up his hardass front anymore. it gets SO difficult to not laugh when you make jokes that you know he'll find funny but a good portion of your relationship is him acting all tough and manly and you just showing up and him relaxing instantly

Thank You For Reading!! :]

© ogdannydorito 2023; reblogs are greatly appreciated! do not repost, republish, or generally plagiarize any of my works without permission. translations welcome with proper credit.

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat :3

One more Murderbot Daemon AU thing for the night!

---

Let me in, ART said, as cool and calm as if we were discussing what show to watch next.

I had never given ART full access to my brain. I had let it alter my body, I had let it come up with a name and a form for my made-up soul, but not this.

We had three seconds and counting. My clients, the other humans on the shuttle, their startled and panicking daemons. I let it in.

It was like the sensation humans describe in books as having their heads shoved underwater.  Then it was gone and ART was in the shuttle, and I let it use my connection to leap into the void left behind by the deleted bot pilot and flow into the controls.  Maybe I could have helped, but I was just staring, realizing what I had been looking at.

I let ART think it was because I knew it didn’t need help.  It made the course correction and adjusted our speed, then picked up the landing beacon and guided the shuttle into approach on the main RaviHyral port.  I let it do that.

The feeling of being shoved underwater.  The total immersion in ART’s systems, the feeling of losing myself.  It hadn’t been what I felt when ART had threatened me, when it dropped its walls and warned me do not attempt to hack my systems.  But it’s what I had seen.  And I had been flipping the fuck out too much then to realize what I was looking at.

That was ART’s soul.  I had been immersed, for a moment, within ART’s soul.

The thing with bots is, bots don’t have daemons.  That’s a human thing.  Well, a human neural tissue thing, I guess.  It has something to do with the way human brains make connections and find patters that makes soul-stuff manifest as a daemon, a talking fauna buddy you can’t get away from.  Bots don’t have that.  Instead, bots make their own souls, capture it in code that they write into their own source.  Every bot has one, whether it’s simple or complex.  It’s what separates bots from simple, unaware machines—the capacity to write your own soul into your code.  Humans call it daemon code, because humans are incredibly human-centric.  It’s not really like a daemon; it’s more like expressing something true about yourself in the form of code, fixing it there.

Humans have a name for it at all because once a bot writes it, no one can delete daemon code out of a bot’s source without deleting or factory-resetting the whole bot.  Humans tend to just kind of home the daemon code is helpful, benign, or ignorable.  In one mining installation, I saw a bot that wrote its daemon code that made it hum and whistle constantly.  The bot thought it was great. The humans couldn’t stand it, and factory-reset it.  I don’t know what the bot that resulted did with its daemon code, but it was quiet.

ART hadn’t just been showing me that if I even thought about trying anything it could squish my brain.  What I was seeing was its daemon code.  I’d never seen any so monstrously complex.  It would be stupid for any bot to have that, but then, ART was a monster who didn’t seem to be bound by any of the rules of other bots I had ever met.

ART was showing me its soul.

I guess I can understand a little better why it was confused and huffy that I freaked out and shut down in response.

But also, what the fuck ART, why is your daemon code like that.  It was… like the coral reefs I’d seen on documentaries, like the furnace dozens of meters wide that melted ore into usable metal.  It made it itself and all of that had flowed through me in an instant, and I was inside ART’s daemon code, submerged and overwhelmed in its soul.

It must have been just as weird and vulnerable for it as it was for me.

Rami touched my arm and said, “Are you okay?”

I jumped and Rami pulled ter hand back.  Right.  The shuttle crew member had only just managed to call RaviHyral port authority, and their daemon was still making some panicked squeaking noise.  I still had clients to focus on.  I couldn’t wallow.

[open-hangar]

Prison Force Chagger Ep. 3

GENEVA LBZ/IF INMATE RECORDS

Name: Wolfgang Baumer

Place of Origin: Nordschwarzwald region, Western Europe

Birth date: Unknown

Height and Weight: ~155 cm, ~90kg

Criminal Record: Harboring a Fugitive, multiple counts of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Larceny, Money Laundering, Voluntary Manslaughter

Etc: Prisoner records are not to be destroyed by the order of the Wardens. Who we are and what we’ve done are not a secret, but also do not define us.

“Could you hand me the CH.Welder?”

I looked down at the hairy hand reaching out from underneath the truck with a bit of confusion, and then to the wide array of tools laid out on a greasy towel on the ground.

“Uh, yeah, sure… The CH.Welder… It’s…”

“About 25 centimeter long curved pipe with the cylinder on the bottom. Covered in a novel’s worth of warning labels.”

Ah. Of course. What else could it have been? I lean over and pick up the-

“Nah, the other one. Easy mistake to make.”

“...Right.”

Last week I was moved into a cell in the main holding building. It’s not really as bad as it sounds, since they had all of the bars removed and placed with a normal wall and a door that locked from the inside. It’s honestly way better than the shack I used to live in on the outskirts of the Solna LBZ, at least this place keeps heat reasonably well. Doc even recommended that I talk to some guys who love to build cottages, but I felt weird asking for favors already. After all, they’ve already got me working with Wolfgang because I apparently know which way to turn a socket wrench.

As I hand the device, I look down under the truck at my… manager? Co-worker? I still haven’t figured out how exactly this was supposed to work. He’s flat on his back, most of his face covered in a heavy-duty chargon mask, in case a gasket pops and he gets a face full of green and purple gas, but his giant salt-and-pepper beard sticks out from the bottom.

“Hey, should I be wearing one of those masks?”

“Nah, you’re probably fine. Just stay out of the way in case something pops.”

Cool. Glad to be useful.

As the short, wide Warden tinkers on the chargon drive of the truck, I absent-mindedly wander around the space. It’s not super clear if this massive garage existed before the revolution, because it’s clearly designed to service a giant complex with a fleet of vehicles, but for whatever reason, the only truck here was the one being worked on. There were also only a small handful of car lifts. What, exactly, was the point of this place?

I figure I might as well make my question known out loud in a way that Wolfgang might hear it. It takes long enough for him to answer that I almost repeat the question.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it? I mean, if this is my new job, it seems like something I should worry about. Where are all the other trucks?

“I’m telling you not to worry about it because you don’t need to worry about it.”

For a second, I worry to myself that the Warden had already figured out my game. Grab a truck while he’s not looking, and hoof it to the wall surrounding this place to get the hell out. Don’t ask me how I’m planning on getting past the wall since I didn’t see any gates, I’ve always been good at thinking on my feet. Usually.

The Warden slides out from under the truck, the wheels on his sliding board making clanking sounds on the seams of the concrete.

“We have trucks. Lots of ‘em. But the thing about tools is that people like to use them, because that’s what they’re for. And if they want to keep using them, that’s fine too. There’s vehicles that have been borrowed for years, and I honestly don’t even know what happened to the guys who borrowed them. And if they need repairing, then they’ll wind up back here.”

It’s obvious that I’ve been on the outside for too long.

“Yeah. But you’ll figure it out. Just forget about stuff like pers-”

A loud klaxon suddenly starts blaring, the sound echoing off of the distant walls of the garage’s massive interior. What the hell…? Wolfgang clambers up to his impressive 1 and a half meters and speedily trundles over to a nearby intercom.

“What’s the emergency?”

He listens intensely, his face grimacing with each passing word from the other speaker. He looks around awkwardly, and makes quick eye contact with me.

“Okay, look, I got the newblood here. Fine, yeah. I’ll be out in a jiff.” He smashes a button on the intercom to end communication, and turns to walk towards me.

“Stand back, you’re about to get a hell of a show.” He then places his calloused hand on my arm, and points towards a door near the bathrooms that says Managers only.

“Take that elevator and head to the top floor, and mind the ‘old person’ smell. Whatever you do, don’t leave. I promise it’s the safest place on the continent right now.”

I’m clearly puzzled as the ground begins to rumble, and the center of the floor begins to slide open like a concrete grocery store front door. On a rising platform sits… a jet? But instead of being a sleek machine designed to dogfight, it’s built like a bulbous insectoid semi truck with wings and a massive translucent chargon battery for an abdomen. I’ve never seen a battery that big, and Wolfgang marches straight towards it. There’s no way in hell he’s actually going to get IN that thing, is he?!”

“Elevator! Now!”

My legs instinctively, obediently carry me towards the doorway opposite the room as the Warden climbs into the machine, and the strange device emits the telltale green and purple of a chargon engine’s exhaust. Crap, crapcrapcrap gotta get out of this room immediately! I slam the “up” button on the inside of the elevator, and watch the insectoid apparatus slowly take off from its launch bay. A woman’s voice comes over the elevator’s speakers, and speaks with a calm voice.

“Top floor: Dr. Ishikawa’s office.”

Art by @menacing-marshmallow

[weather-cluddy]

why are the ones that mikoto actively reaches out to (kotoko, shidou, kazui) also the ones that he deemed "could probably do bad things" in the voice drama

A good question! But first, an aside: if you're the anon who asked about the Mikoto-Haruka parallels, know that I did get your ask and enjoyed it. The thing is that my first draft for the answer post got eaten by a blackout, the second I threw out because it was too messy, and after that real life got complicated. But still, it's coming to your dash Soon! (TM)

Anyways, there are two possibilities: the fact that Mikoto thinks they could do bad shit is unrelated to him interacting with them, or it isn't.

If it is, then we need an explanation for why he picked those three. I already posted some time ago how I like to interpret that Mikoto goes out of his way to talk with Kotoko because he thinks she's a loner and he doesn't want her to get left out. For Shidou and Kazui, they simply spend time together due to their shared 'hobby' of smoking, which Mikoto says he picked up specifically for socializing purposes. I think he may also admire them to some degree; Shidou is in a very respected profession and quite young considering he's already practicing, while Kazui is considerably older and has a general feeling of being affable and having his shit together.

They're just fairly easy to get along with in general, at least in the surface: they don't already dislike Mikoto like Mahiru and Kotoko, don't ask awkward questions like Yuno or have terrible social skills like Haruka and Fuuta. Neither do they have a big age gap that would make Mikoto feel weird about interacting with them as peers, like with Amane and to a lesser extent Muu (and Muu also indirectly falls into the 'dislikes Mikoto' category by virtue of being uneasy around all older men).

Okay, that’s all well and good, but what if it isn’t a coincidence? 

Well, have you heard of the fight or flight instinct? You might even know it as fight, flight or freeze. There’s a fourth proposed option called fawn. Instead of trying to escape or defeat the threat, a fawn-type response works towards appeasing it. The idea being that if you’re sufficiently nice and helpful and non-threatening, people won’t find a reason to hurt you.

Fawn was originally coined by the psychotherapist Pete Walker in Codependency, Trauma and the Fawn Response, and expanded on with The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD, which explains how early childhood trauma can cause people to develop unhealthy ways to socialize, based on which of their fight-flight-freeze-fawn instincts, AKA the titular 4Fs, predominate.

Pete says that people with childhood trauma are often unusually inflexible in their use of the 4Fs. While a healthy person can make use of all four with moderation and pick the one most appropriate to their circumstances, a traumatized person uses only one or two, taken to harmful extremes.

It’s clear how cut-off Mikoto is from his own fight response, to the point it’s all redirected towards a completely different alter, but the most obvious example of over-relying on one approach is during Kotoko’s birthday convo. He knows that Kotoko attacked him and others. Even if he can’t remember, it’s clear on the wounds on his and other’s bodies that it happened. He’s most likely aware that Kazui’s attempts to convince her to stop have utterly failed, as she’s intent on trying again. It’s not like she was ever particularly nice to begin with, either. And yet, he keeps track of her birthday and goes to congratulate her. Why would anyone do this?

Well, it makes sense if fear makes you more likely to try to win somebody over, not less. It’s patently ridiculous to think that the person who tried to kill him will become his friend just because he was nice to them, but fear is oftentimes irrational, and Mikoto lacks the mental tools to find a more adequate approach. He just can’t accept that somebody want to murder him and all he can do is sit there and hope some outside force stops them, so he’s desperately repeating his ingrained response to conflict. He’s spent his entire life making sure everyone liked him, how could he die by having somebody hate his guts so much they’ll kill him? He’ll just have to try harder to be more likable!

Indeed, you can see this sort of response, obviously in a more subdued fashion, in Mikoto’s approach to socialization in general. For example, look at all the focus he puts on the fact that “you can’t work/live in society/thrive unless you’re sociable”. That’s literally “I’m nice because I’m scared of the consequences if I ever stop” in nicer words. And clearly that fear looms large over him: look at how he lets his boss overwork him (lack of boundaries is a sign of an unhealthy fawn response), or how the tiny rejection of a single person not wishing him a happy birthday is enough to leave him sleepless.

While the BD convo is the most obviously dysfunctional show of this tendency, it was most likely always present, especially since attachment styles generally develop during childhood. So, perhaps it’s the very fact that he’s afraid of Kotoko, Shidou and Kazui that drives him to be extra nice and sociable with them.

But, why would he feel particularly intimidated by these three people, especially at the start? Well, first things first: Kazui is huge and ripped. Jackalope’s first impression of him is literally “he looks like he could beat anyone here in a fight”. Even if he’s a nice guy himself, it’s easy to see why somebody might be put on edge by that. Kotoko is in a similar situation: she’s visibly muscled and while she’s actually four centimeters shorter than Mikoto, that’s still pretty tall. Not to mention she lacks Kazui’s laidback personality, being quite cold and often nosing around for info on the other prisoners. They’re also both trained in martial arts, making them even more of a physical threat.

Shidou is similarly not very approachable, with Mikoto even saying as much in a conversation with Fuuta. Another factor, I suspect, is the very thing I mentioned above as a possible reason for Mikoto to admire him: Shidou is a very young professional in a respected job. If we assume he’s been doing surgeries for several years before the flower person’s death (which makes sense, since it’d take a while to find the right organs and too many ‘failed’ surgeries at once would raise suspicions), then it’s likely he even graduated early.

Mikoto says he got drunk often in his university days, so it’s possible he either didn’t take his schoolwork entirely seriously or that he tried to drink away his problems, either way being far from an admirable school life. Not to mention, doing life-saving surgery is a much more valued profession than designing ads. Considering how much of Mikoto’s self-esteem hangs on his job, he might feel inferior to Shidou, even if he isn't aware of it.

Of course, I doubt Mikoto consciously chooses to ingratiate himself with ‘dangerous’ people. I’m sure that if you asked him, he’d either say it’s unrelated or that he’s just trying to be open-minded, and he might even think he’s saying the truth.

Rather, it’s an unconscious reaction to anxiety, an attempt to defuse danger before it can strike. If for him socializing isn’t done out of pleasure but out of fear, then it makes sense that the more dangerous somebody is, the harder he tries to be their friend. After all, friends don’t hurt friends, right?

[inventors-fair]

Interaction Satisfaction Commentary

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've run a contest, but this one has been lingering in my mind for a while.

There were two things I was really trying to pay attention to this contest: if the card fits in the deck, and if the card will always do something. I'll address the latter first: I wanted to make sure that the cards would always do something. The thing about interaction is you need it most when something is going wrong. Yes, sometimes you need a counterspell when you're winning to make sure you keep winning, but most of the time you need it because if you don't, you're sure to lose. Because of that, I really valued cards that always had some sort of effect, but also had some synergy tied in.

As for the deck concerns, that's a little more straightforward. Look at the deck you're putting the card in, then see if it wants these types of cards. There were only one or two entries that felt that far off, and removal is always going to do something, but it was important to me to think of the archetype as a whole, rather than just picking a random mechanic to tie the effect to.

But enough chatter. Here's the commentary:

@bergdg - Defend the Ramparts

A very narrow effect, but there are a few archer decks out there (I should know, I play Greatbow Doyen in my crossbow deck), and this is obviously built for them. There’s also quite a few cards that are incidentally archers or rangers that have deathtouch or a lot of power, so this is a removal spell in decks like that. This does feel very strange as an enchantment, though. I think I’d prefer this as an instant that puts counters on things, both because it already acts like that, and because I don’t like the idea of blinking this for repeatable removal. Speaking of which, I think you could probably cut the cost just a bit to three mana. It’s a narrow effect, and this is commander we’re talking about, so 3 mana removal with a little upside and a little restriction feels just right. I do really love how well it fits into what archer decks want to so; i.e. dealing direct damage to creatures.

@buzzardonic - Reboot

This is a very strange card. The most obvious use for this is to protect your artifact creatures from creature based removal. A lot of targeted removal these days aren’t specific to creatures, so it won’t protect from an anguished unmaking or the like, but it helps with a lot of the wraths in the format. It also keeps them in play, which means your artifact creatures with static abilities you want, like a lodestone golem, will still be in effect, which is an advantage over phasing out. There’s also in theory some combos you can pull of that require your artifact creature not being a creature, or even just to grant haste. The biggest detriment is just how incredibly narrow it is. Even in an artifact deck, in order for this to be worth the card slot, you have to have the mana up in just the right spot. I wish this did just a bit more, like untapping the creature or putting a counter on it. The other thing I worry about is weird situations like using this on Rusted Relic, vehicles, or with march of the machines. I think commander is complex enough that people might expect it, I just don’t know if it’s warranted on a card that could be achieved in other ways. Oh, and the flavor is great. When I read the text, I was wondering how you could flavor it, and it felt so perfect.

@coolcoolcooltighttightight - All-Out Assault

This is a really cool card, but it has a lot going on that I need to pick apart. First, it deals X+2, which is a big deal, as it means it’s never quite dead, but you definitely want to be leaning a certain way to have it do what you want to. Second, it says battle, which is really cool and fits the flavor, but awkwardly is a detriment because of that last line. If you want to defeat one of your own battles and you accidentally fulfill that last line, you’ll end up dealing damage to yourself. Oops! Lastly, and you might have seen this coming, but that middle part is very confusing to read. There’s a double negative in “control no untapped” which is awkward, and also the fact that you need to make sure they control a creature feels a little tacked on. In general, this card is very well designed as a removal spell with potential upside that fits very well into a certain archetype, but I think you needed to scale back a bit. Maybe just always deal damage to the controller? Or just always deal X damage to both? There are a few ways you could have gone to simplify the card a bit, and I think it would have been worth it to be able to cut some of the more awkward templating here.

@corporalotherbear - Temporal Inertia

While I see what you’re going for here, I think it’s just a little too weird. My biggest concern is just how complicated board states can get in commander. If you ask someone which creatures they’ve controlled since their last turn, I think most people would be able to remember, but not everyone, especially on turn six. I also think the phrasing could maybe be a bit better, though I don’t know how. It takes a second to understand what the card is asking for. There’s also some weirdness with the play pattern. While this is obviously best in a blink deck, due to how mana curves work, this is most likely to leave behind only the most threatening creatures, which makes this an odd wrath closer in line to something like the ones that leave a creature behind like single combat, which are widely considered to be pretty unplayable. I will say, though, that as weird as this card is, it isn’t bad or poorly designed. It just feels a little off in how it’s phrased and how it functions.

@fractured-infinity - Caleria's Unerring Accuracy

A four mana removal spell needs to have a pretty big upside especially a fight spell that can be so easily blanked, but this one has a lot of power. A fight deck could use this card to deal a ton of damage to players. A single Apex Altisaur could very likely kill the whole table. I think you could probably reduce this down to say “excess damage” similar to ram through to drop it down a little bit from win-con to value, but I understand that you’re playing a four mana enchantment, so it needs to be strong. The biggest strike against this card is I don’t think it can be mono-green. Dealing so much damage to an opponent’s face, even if it requires having creatures, feels like a color pie break. We’ve even seen cards that do something similar in red, like Toralf and Repercussion, and while I understand that the first half and the decks that want it are green, I think the card itself needs to be at least partially red.

@jestingmaniac - Behold the Beholder

Art desc: a beholder (dnd monster) fills the top 2/3 of the frame glaring down at a petrified group of four adventurers. Behind the beholder other petrified statues are dimly visible in the darkness.

While the concept here is pretty solid, there’s a few things that need to be addressed. First, the templating. You’d probably want to target creatures. There’s also some specific phrasing you might want to use: “For each player, turn target creature that player controls face-down.” But you might also want to specify non-token, or only face-up creatures, or say “up to” so that you can choose to skip a player (like yourself), though that last one might go against the theme of the contest. After all, you want to play this in a morph deck, right? Second, the reminder text. That’s not the default of what a face-down creature is (they are assumed to be 2/2 creatures with no name or ability), so you need to treat it like normal rules, not reminder. Look at a card like Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist, which turns cards face-down but then describes what they turn into. Lastly, I want to talk about the effect itself. Turning creatures into 1/1s that tap for colorless is odd, but not terribly out of place. I like how, in commander especially, it feels sort of like “fair” removal. It gives everyone something relevant. So yeah, even though there’s some weirdness with the card’s text, the actual effect I rather like.

@just--a--penguin - Triumphant Charge

I think this card is fine, but takes the risk of going all-in. The point of playing interaction in a deck is often to deal with something that your deck can’t handle. If your lifegain deck is being shut down by something, you need to be able to get rid of it. If your opponent has an Elesh Norn (either one) and you can’t play your soul wardens, you need to kill it. But this card can’t really do that. If your deck isn’t quite working, then it will continue to not work. If your deck is working, then this will help you out a little bit. However, even then, this card feels a little weak. Putting a few counters on a few creatures, or even all of your creatures, seems nice, but usually won’t make much of a difference, especially since most of your creatures are either 1/1 soul wardens or 20/20 ajani’s pridemates. Killing a big creature is always going to be nice, but I think with this much of a condition, you might have been okay just killing anything. White can do that every so often, especially in commander. Like I said, while the card effects are fine, I think as a whole it’s just going too all in for not that much of a reward.

@snugz - Dark Vengeance

This one feels a little out of place this week. I don’t quite know what deck archetype this is aimed towards. It just feels like a generically good card, maybe leaning a bit towards orzhov life drain decks, but not in a particular way. I guess it’s better in life gain decks? Well, anyway, the card seems fine. Like a lot of rattlesnake cards, I could see it causing frustration, what with turning a winning attack into a losing attack, but that’s just how it goes. There’s also some awkward timing with the spell, since it implies you lose the life right now, but I think you’d lose it when the damage is prevented. I thought it was actually incorrect templating, but there are plenty that say “You gain life equal to the damage prevented this way” so this wouldn’t be much different. While I think the card is alright, it feels a little off the mark for this week’s contest.

@sparkyyoungupstart - Forced Succession

Strictly better murder is acceptable in my book. No one plays murder anyway. I love the flavor here. While the effect feels narrow at first, the way monarch works is actually very well suited to interaction. It’s about the only mechanic where if you play with it, everyone is playing with it. The simplicity of this card and the way it understands the deck it would be in impress me. However, it being an instant kind of rubs me the wrong way. Someone attacking the monarch and gaining the monarchy, only to lose it and one of their creatures after combat but before they draw seems rather punishing. It’s effective and plays to the mechanics, but it plays against the type of experience I think a monarch player wants. If you’re playing a monarch deck, you probably expect it to move around a bunch. If you didn’t, then you’re probably not playing the deck right. Similarly, this allows a player to receive the monarchy without risk of either attacking or tapping out main phase for an effect that grants it. It feels like it’s playing against the themes of the deck even if it’s playing into the mechanics of the mechanic. I still think it’s great flavor and great simplicity.

@stupidstupidratcreatures - Nibble

There are two main decks I can think of for this: rat decks and one-damage decks (AKA Ob Nixilis Captive Kingpin decks). It’s a little awkward because rat decks, even though they play a lot of things that make 1/1 rats, also play a lot rats that get really big from other rats. Ping decks, on the other hand, probably don’t really need a way to grant -1/-1 all that often, since they’re playing red pingers that do something similar. Even so, maybe this is still enough. At worst it’s a more expensive rat out that makes a rat that can block, which isn’t awful. Fourth Bridge Prowler with flash isn’t half bad. And I have to admit, I just love ping-matters, so maybe this is just personal opinion, but I love this card. Four 1/1s and four -1/-1s for two mana is pretty high above curve, but even one extra copy is nice, and no extras can still kill an annoying creature some of the time. My one change I would make is say player, just so you could get an extra one from your phyrexian arena. One last thing I wanted to mention: I’m really glad that this checks when it’s cast rather than resolution, so players can’t ping themself with something in response so you get fewer copies. While it’s a little misplaced in the decks that want it, I still think it’s a sweet card.

@wildcardgamez - Fade into History

Wow, that’s some very powerful history. Removal in a saga deck is kind of odd, since a whole lot of sagas already are removal, but there aren’t really many that directly deal with artifacts or enchantments (since putting them in later chapters might be weird timed, and putting them in early chapters makes players not want to play them even if they should so they can get later chapters). I like the exile here for flavor and power reasons, since it’s a little narrow for what most people play nowadays. The weirdest thing here, though, is the sheer amount of lore. Anything more than two lore counters seems excessive. I don’t like the idea of skipping forward on a saga so explicitly. Something like proliferate is a little slower and has more nuance, but this feels like skipping to the end. It means you don’t get the fun, slow planning involved with a lot of sagas, and instead do everything at once. It feels like it’s removing a lot of what makes sagas unique. But that is probably a matter of taste. If you’re trying to power out sagas and do them all, then this card will do that. Plenty of people would play this card, and I wouldn’t say they’re wrong to do so, I just thing it makes playing sagas a little less quirky.

~

And there you have it, all my commentary for the week. Thanks again everyone who entered, it was fun giving this another spin. Next week is going to be great, if you're game for it.

-Mod Mr. ShinyObject

[thotpuppy]

If you’re so vehemently against ai fanart what’s your take on fanmade graphics and edits that use stolen pictures from the internet? These fans didn’t go out with their camera to capture the images themselves, they searched through Pinterest and google and found photos taken by real photographers and, without asking permission, stole these images to edit and create into something else. Yet this practice is widely accepted amongst fandom, but the second ai is involved it’s akin to murder? Even when the fans have clearly uploaded said ai generations into photoshop to edit them first? Seems like a pick-and-choose double standard to me.

Okay first of all, let's address the fact that - going by the language you've used here - you've already decided how I feel about it, so why bother the pretense of "asking"? Dishonesty breeds Discontent. Don't lie to someone's face and expect them to be kind, yeah?

Secondly, almost every single person I know who works with image manipulation uses assets they DO have the rights to outside of specific actor's likenesses. There are millions of photos, graphics, illustrations, paintings, etc. that are open for free personal AND commercial use allllll over the internet and people use them liberally. And, actually, many, MANY of these people DO go out and take their own photographs, so I don't know where your misconception is coming from.

And, the big kicker - they also don't lie about it. They say when something is an edited photo, if it's not obvious.

Stolen images being used in edits is NOT widely accepted and is in fact generally pretty damn frowned upon in most art circles, and I absolutely don't support use of them.

Every single instance of fanart is a rocky road as far as IP infringement goes, but don't put fanartists on the same level as the industry professionals providing celebrity model photos. Unlike in AI and Art Theft, when those photos are used that's bringing attention to the figure in question, not taking it away from an actual creator.

Lastly, where the FUCK do you get off saying ANYONE is comparing AI use to murder? Persecution complex much? I get it, you wanna be a victim so bad, but you're the one stealing from people at YOUR industry level.

AI in general has a metric fuckton of potential to be something genuinely useful to artists of all walks, but the CURRENT industry is too unethically sourced. We need to get control of the market, get stolen works (including, once again, STOLEN LEAKED MEDICAL RECORDS) out of the training data, even if that means starting over from scratch.

Also, we need to get the bullies who think it's okay to do shit like spam a Machine Learning program with a single artist's work to harass them offline, target voice actors who have asked not to have their voices used into harassment campaigns, or lie to celebrities by selling them commercial rights to ML-generated fanart, which right now, they legally CAN'T DO. Because the copyrightable legitimacy of AI/ML works IS currently in debate in courts in the US. So.

Maybe instead of assuming everyone is out to get you, Anon, try not being a douchebag and stealing from fellow fanartists? And if you're gonna steal anyways, at least be honest and don't lie to people trying to convince them it's actually a digital illustration.

We can see the weird, fake blending. We can see the extra fingers, or utensils clipping through plates, or hands disappearing into heads, or shoes that don't end where shoes end. And while I'm not going out of my way to confront anyone about it, I'll just stay here on my own blog, blocking people who post AI, I am not the only person who is angry and disgusted at the lack of integrity and blatant disrespect.

[chameleonspell]

HTDC commentary - 17: VCDRKAA & 18: language & 19: knowledge & 20: again

[Looking back at HTDC after nearly ten years: comments on lore, character notes, influences, art, whatever. May contain spoilers for later chapters.]

chapter text: 17: VCDRKAA & 18: language & 19: knowledge & 20: again

I hope no one was expecting a line-by line complex exegesis of chapter 17, because I generated a wall of TEXTSLOP. It was never intended to mean anything specific, although I did edit it selectively, for poetry and interest. I didn't really expect anyone to read it, I just wanted them to open the chapter and go "what the fuck is this shit??"

I think I used this page to generate it, which must be twenty years old, at the absolute minimum, and the code is from the 1990s. It's beyond irritating that Markov chain text generators, along with other venerable methods of cut-up and creative mixology, are probably now tarred with the same brush as bullshit like chatGPT. Anyway, you could call it a Small Language Model, in that it only uses the text you put into it, doesn't steal it to do plagiarism, and doesn't require the energy and water usage of a small country to run.

I... had totally forgotten which texts I put into it, and had to spend way too long cross-checking fragments. All I remembered was that the nonsense-title of the chapter was taken from the title-letters of the input books, and it was supposed to be things Iriel had recently encountered, to represent a chaotic vomiting of his subconscious.

I think it's this:

V = 36 Lessons of Vivec

C = Chimarvamidium

D = The Book of Dawn and Dusk

R = A Less Rude Song

K = The Ruins of Kemel-Ze

A = Song of the Alchemists

A = Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi

...but I'm pretty sure there's also Special Flora of Tamriel there, in an uncredited role. I don't think that, or Song of the Alchemists is mentioned as something Iriel reads in-fic, but since Ire's an alchemist, I shovelled them into the word-hopper, too. I suspect I never noticed at the time that Song of the Alchemists is not an alchemical textbook, but silly Marobar Sul doggerel, and not exactly something Iriel would read.

Anyway, please do go ahead and cancel me for "writing fic with AI".

Playlist pick: Of Montreal - Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse. For when you really, really need the drugs to work. Or something to work. Anything. It's all just chemicals, right? C'MON, CHEMICALS!

Once we're done with the psychedelic breakdown, we have a temptation scene, specifically, Iriel wakes up in a wizard's bed, and barely resists intellectual seduction by House Telvanni.

The mage laid the book across the bed and opened it, revealing page after page of writing in Dwemer script.

Neither of them can read it yet, but the book is Divine Metaphysics, one of the three books you need to solve Trebonius' Dwemer mystery quest.

He sighed, and turned another page, revealing a complicated diagram of… Iriel wasn’t sure, but he was interested enough to sit up fully, and examine it. “Chimarvamidium,” he said, eventually.

Iriel is reacting to the diagram in the book of an anthropoid Dwemer construct, a theme that also occurs in Chimarvamidium. The picture under his nose is almost certainly Numidium, something he should be at least theoretically aware of. Tiber Septim used it to conquer Summerset in the Second Era, within living memory of older Altmer, and if Ire wasn't concentrating in history class, he was fourteen years old at the time of The Warp in The West. Admittedly, the giant robot was stomping about in Daggerfall, by then (so no trying to claim it had any weird effects on Ire's developing psyche!), and perhaps even a Dragon Break was barely a blip on his radar, compared to the horrors of being a teenager in Lillandril. Either way, Ire misses the obvious fact about the picture, and makes a more remote connection, something Baladas takes as evidence of a subtler, more esoteric intellectual approach, when it's actually far more to do with:

“I’m sorry. I think I’m still sssomewhat under the effects of an Imperial fuckton of skooma.

Iriel was previously only ever doing moon sugar. Skooma is much, much stronger, more addictive, and, for a magic-sensitive Altmer, extremely psychoactive and hallucination-inducing. He also drank two bottles, straight. Skooma is a liquid, and can be drunk, but is more commonly smoked (inhaled as a vapour?) through a pipe. I am assuming that smoking is the preferred method because the effects are slow and gentle, whereas drinking it is extremely neither of those things.

Yes, fine, the line about skooma being like "eight hundred orgasms tied to a brick" is an echo of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy description of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster cocktail as being "like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick". NO that is NOT a pop culture reference, that's just me stealing shit, which is totally different okay?

“Was that a Daedroth back there?”

Baladas keep a pet Daedroth. Wait... is it a pet? Are they sentient? Some of them are named, and have relationships to other characters that could imply they were intelligent. But... hmm. Dangerous tangent. Let's assume it's just a pet, yeah?

“It’s adorable! What’s its name?” Ire poked it, giggling in delight as it contracted its metal limbs back into its shell.

Again. Please let the record show that the first time Iriel interacted closely with a non-hostile Dwemer automaton, he was overcome with nothing more lascivious or sinister than childlike glee and wonder. You filthy animals.

Poor little centurion, does your daddy not even care enough to–”

He did indirectly call a Telvanni wizard "daddy", though. I can't really defend him from that one, since I'm pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing*. And so did Baladas, because he shut that bullshit down FAST.

(* exactly what he was doing = being very silly and no-filter. Iriel is not actually looking to get "mentored" by a much older wizard, even if he could find one more interested in doing it.)

“The miners report that a screaming, semi-transparent Altmer, covered in weeds and soaking wet, broke into the eggmine from the lower levels.

This whole bit is confusing, and I don't like it. It's not funny, and it really doesn't matter about the stupid route Iriel took to end up with the book on Baladas' doorstep. But yes, you can get into the Gnisis eggmine via the riverbed outside town, and from there, into the Dwemer ruin and back. If he knew, Iriel would feel smug about the fact Edwinna would have tried to make him go there, on purpose, later, if she hadn't expelled him by then.

“Auri-El, what did you do to them?” Ire had heard about Telvanni methods.

While he hasn't encountered many Telvanni in Morrowind, he would have read things like this, in which Telvanni mages are notorious for being fans of inventive magical torture.

Iriel knew the score. Baladas Demnevanni was a serious Dwemer scholar, [...] He could make far better use of it than Ire ever would. And yet, something in Iriel resisted.

Iriel does know the score, and part of the score that he knows is: while Baladas is much older and more powerful, he's not technically Iriel's senior. Because Ire's not in House Telvanni, or any other structure that makes him Demnevanni's subordinate. Which Ire leaves free to resist. Sure, Baladas could take the book by magical force, but Iriel has enough pride to want to force him to do that, to not capitulate based purely on academic bluster. (Yes, of course Iriel can have a powerful and resilient scholarly ego, while simultaneously having zero self esteem. You've met academics, right?)

“It’s mine,” he said. “I found it. And I never asked you to take care of me.”

Saying this feels good. It's true: he didn't ask to be taken care of. And Baladas' reasons for doing so are cleanly self-interested, and make perfect sense to Ire. There's no messy pity involved, no need to spare the feelings of someone who thought they were being a good person, when you're too bitter and damaged to be grateful. This whole conversation is, in many ways, Iriel's ideal type of social interaction.

I will give you information about the location of Dwemer ruins on Vvardenfell, and in return, you will bring me any more books that you find there.”

The location of known Dwemer ruins on Vvardenfell is not, at this point in time, especially secret information, so Baladas is rather getting the better end of this deal. But if he wasn't, he wouldn't be making it, would he?

The only people qualified are my fellow mages, but Telvanni do not co-operate. Anything they found, they would keep for themselves.

His reasoning checks out, though, so Iriel is inclined to trust him. I really did think Ire would take him the other books at some point, and Ire himself intended to at various points, but... in the end, things got complicated. Iriel comes back to Gnisis, but not to Arvs Drelen, and he keeps all his findings to himself.

“Sweet Mara, no. I just want to be left alone to read.”

“You have just spoken the unofficial motto of House Telvanni.

The problem, I suppose, is that Ire is entirely too Telvanni at heart. It was always touch-and-go, as to whether he'd find an excuse to join the House. After all, he's perfect for it... but that's exactly why he resisted.

Iriel knows he's an obsessive, isolationist weirdo, who's probably going to end up alone in a tower, reading esoterically taboo books all day. Surrounded by robots and summoned Daedra, because that's the only level of social contact he's capable of tolerating. He knows all that, he knows exactly the sort of person he is. He just doesn't like that person. And when Telvanni start tempting him to fully embrace weird hermit mage life, he's forcefully reminded of what Telvanni are known for, and how isolating yourself with only Daedra for company makes you lose all contact with pedestrian concepts like "morality", and "not torturing people to death with lightning spells".

Clearly, Ire's being ridiculous to think his own morality is so fragile, but after the day he's had, he's feeling fragile in all sorts of ways, and unwilling to trust his own limits.

each mage seeks only solitude and freedom to continue his or her work.” [...] “Knowledge may be power,” he was declaiming, “but for some of us, it is enough that knowledge is knowledge.

And Ire's right to question the actual content of Baladas' rhetorical  flourishes: freedom to do what? Power to do what? Knowledge of what? Doesn't it matter? The Telvanni answer certainly seems to be "no". But Ire's experiences with education have left him questioning the value of the "knowledge" he obtained. Certainly, if he was supposed to convert it into power, he appears to have missed a crucial step in the process. He's not sure he wants Telvanni instruction, for taking that step.

He stood up, and began to concentrate a sphere of magicka between his hands. “Where should I send you?”

I have a question about teleportation. What are the rules? Guild guides only transport people to other guild halls, but is that restriction due to rules, or ability? UESP says that guides "maintain magical contact with their counterparts in other branches", but I can't find an ingame source for this. If true, that would explain the restriction, but I'm not sure I buy it. It's possible for a guild guide to send you into a guildhall where the "receiving" guild guide is no longer there, for example during this quest. And the mage who sends you to Mournhold in the Tribunal expansion isn't a guild guide, but sends you as a favour, since she's a "powerful mage".

So: my theory is that it's totally possible for a skilled mage to teleport people to other locations without another linked mage "catching" them, but the right location helps. Receiving chambers are magically set up in guildhalls to act as teleportation beacons, and that's the focus, rather than the other guide. This fits with how Divine and Almsivi Intervention work, not to mention Mark and Recall. Guild guides are trained to be specially attuned to these beacons, but any sufficiently powerful Mysticism expert can sling people into them, as Baladas does, here. Really powerful ones might not even need beacons, though I imagine there are exponential risks to the subject, as the location gets more distant and/or unfamiliar.

So, because it's theoretically possible, if difficult, I also think there are strict rules about where guild guides can send people, just like you can't ask the bus driver to take you anywhere you want, even if he technically could. Because teleportation would have to be a highly regulated skill! You can't just send people anywhere, that could cause all sorts of trouble.

As an aside, every guild guide in Morrowind is a beautiful woman. There's something a bit retro air stewardess about that, isn't there? Male game devs thinking women should be in travel service roles, or something? Hmm.

“Um… Ald'ruhn, please. The Mages’ Guild, for preference, but as long as you don’t teleport me inside a wall, I’ll be happy.”

Iriel's not keen to launch into his Queer Coded Villain arc, yet. So despite Baladas' blandishments, it's back to the loving arms of the Mages' Guild, for now.

“I want you to know,” Edwinna was saying, “that this is not about the Dwemer tube.

...Ah. Never mind.

“Whilst you were gone, some disturbing information came to light. When I agreed to mentor you, I was unaware of the crimes for which you were convicted in Cyrodiil. I’m sure you understand why the theft of magical artifacts is not something I can simply ignore.”

I realised something really funny just now, which is that if Edwinna has been digging into Iriel's background check, presumably through a contact at the Arcane University, then she must know Iriel is also supposed to have straight-up murdered one of his professors. But that's not what's bothering her at all!

“In addition, there is the matter of your drug abuse.

I can only assume that when Iriel took a little too long returning with the Dwemer tube, she couldn't resist the temptation to go through his bedroom. In her ensuing freak-out at finding DRUGS, it emerged that no one had ever actually looked into the squirrelly-looking Altmer's claim on application that he'd studied at the Arcane University.

Ire stopped recasting the Paralyze spell on himself

I was determined to try and find creative ways to use Illusion spells, and to some extent, that was the motive for this whole scene.

He had fully expected to burst into tears as soon as he was alone, possibly sooner, but instead, he found himself gripped by a cold fury.

So, I had planned to get Iriel expelled for a while, and originally I, like Iriel himself,  assumed that he would be devastated, because the number of times he's got himself kicked out of magical institutions is ridiculous at this point. But coming right off the conversation with Baladas, that wasn't where his head was at, at all. He was furious, and when a character gives you the gift of an unexpected emotional reaction, you always gotta lean into it, because it's one of my favourite things about writing. Iriel's vitriolic contempt for the Mages' Guild (and Edwinna Elbert in particular) gave him the motivation to do all sorts of fun things later, and really channel that "I'll show those fools at the institute!" energy. Even if he never did join House Telvanni.

At the last minute, he stopped, turned back, and retrieved Vivec’s Sermon 14 from under the bed.

On the one hand, yes, I am making fun of Iriel for considering porn* an essential, but also... not entirely? At the risk of getting too brutally real about mental illness, masturbation can be a key hammer in the mental toolbox, albeit one that tends not to get included on cute little listicles of harm-reduction coping techniques like taking bubble baths or snapping an elastic on your wrist. For people who spend their lives trying to manipulate their brains into staying above the line marked "basic functionality", orgasm can occasionally seem like the brief boost of feel-good chemicals that might kick it over that line. It is, at any rate, cheaper and safer than many alternatives, and while it's not nearly as effective as skooma, at least you don't have to fight smugglers in a cave for it. Or worse, interact with Tsiya.

*Iriel's current opinion of said text. We can make fun of him for this one.

“I’m sorry, Iriel.” Erranil shook her head, primly. “I’m no longer authorised to transport you.

It is the stupidest fucking thing that you don't have to be a member of the Mages Guild to use guild guide transportation, but if you've been expelled from the guild, they put you on a permanent no-fly list! This was often extremely annoying, ingame.

That said, it was funny to be playing the opposite of a "proper" Morrowind character, who ends up head of all the factions, including being Pope of two different religions at once. Iriel, by contrast, got expelled while still Apprentice rank in the Mages, never got past the early ranks in Thieves, and while he got one or two Imperial Cult ranks, he stopped once it wasn't going to get him laid any more.

But yes, I did get Iriel ingame-mechanically-expelled from the Mages' Guild on purpose (possibly by stealing a spoon?). For immersion. Method gamer, y'know.

next: 21: refinement & 22: fragile previous: 13: legs & 14: plan & 15: claws & 16: door

[box-dwelling]

I've been a fan of Marvellous Mrs Maisel since season 1 but like, the Susie gay stuff is feeling like a real fucking tease. Even with the most recent episode where it finally seems confirmed I feel baited. I'm guessing this is going somewhere with it being the cliff hanger but I just, I don't feel it. And honestly all the cast interviews feel so weird too and always have. Like "oh her sexuality isn't important and we don't have to show it" ok so why are you fucking teasing us with it so much. Why are you getting so close to showing but then not? Like I'd honestly respect it more if Susie was just butch and they never touched it instead of edging us like this. Like haha she went to a gay bar but she still looked super uncomfortable. Ooo she has an ex girlfriend but they never actually say they were dating and they could just be like ex clients. I just feel fucking teased. Commit you god damn cowards. If Susie's sexuality doesn't matter when every single second of midge's personal life is the be all and end all of the show, then why are you just cowardly hinting? Have some god damn balls.

It really doesn't help that I just am losing my patience with the plot. A lot of people were saying how last season it started just feeling like rich white woman temper tanturm hour but this last episode really solidified it. Midge's unprofessionalism is feeling less enderingnand edgy and more like she's just sulking because has to actually work to get to the top. Oooooo I'm a professional writer on one of the most famous comedy shows in the country, but I'm not allowed to guest star because of very reasonable professionalism rules. I'm sure my position as a writer on one of most watched shows in the country definitely won't open other doors to get on other shows. So I'm literally going to completely ruin a completely unrelated gig. Remember when her unprofessionalism was that her jokes were too edgy for the time? That her quick wit and desire to tell the world the way she sees it was what was getting her in trouble. The was what she bonded with Lenny over which was by far one of the most interesting relationships in the show. But tbh they ruined that by having them sleep together. Lenny worked well as this almost mythical concept of what she could become, both good and bad. The relationship was complex and interesting and worked way way way more as friends/peers. But no midge now suddenly has to be romantic with every guy in the show, including her boss now? Which they just don't comment on the blatant workplace harassment there? It's just tee hee Midge is pretty so her boss wants to sleep with her.

Also like can I just say the stuff with Abe was so fucking gross this episode. For a guy who's been pretty heavily autistic coded throughout the show the way they framed him trying to make up with Rose after their fight, which yes he was an asshole in and needed to apologize for, it felt like they made what seemed to me like an honest loving gesture of apology communicated non verbally, which yes he's been heavily autistic coded this whole fucking show so that's likely the best way he has to communicate, as child like and pathetic was just disgusting. Like I can see myself in his head so much. He messed up and he knows he did but he doesn't know how to apologize for it so he gets up in the middle of the night and picks her roses to scatter on her bed and then comes to be non sexually intimate with her, deliberately trying not to get too close into her personal space so she doesn't feel overpowered or attacked. A pose that could literally be interpreted as him begging her forgiveness. And that describing it's sounds so sweet but in the show he's blocked like he's being a pathetic child. It's so so gross.

And that's not even talking about the conversation that triggered it which spends half the time treating every woman in the scene like they're shallow and unable to understand media, before seemingly taking a minute to mock anyone who wants to read more into stories, highlighting queer analysis especially, as people who refuse to just let stories be and being too forceful for asking people to actually think about what they're watching. Real the curtains are blue shit.

I honestly love Abe so much he reminds me of my dad in a lot of ways so I am pretty biased but even still I just feel so gross after bits of this episode. Especially when they do stuff like "haha men don't want to know about lady problems" while actively undermining sexual harassment and making all the female characters besides queen of all midge and Susie, who despises all thing femmine, (in a way that used to feel like butch rep but with the other stuff seems now like a way to say she's competent because she's not acting like a silly girl) be portrayed as dumb.

Idk man I miss mai.

[astramachina]

Cast Intro - Part 1

On the topic of The Unbinding, here's an obligatory cast intro post. Let's kick it off with the Mile High Paranormal team and their totally ethical, authentic and not at all predatory ghost hunting methods. (And a secret fifth member under the cut.)

Nicolás "Nick" Miller - creator and producer; our arguable protagonist, staunch skeptic

Kimberly "Kim" Miller - current ghost host; Nick's sister, skeptic who really wants to believe

Jonah Robinson - cameraman and tech guy; avid believer

Jess Davis - second ghost host and researcher; avid believer

↓ continue reading my post boy (gn) ↓ (it gets LONG)

Shannon - former ghost host; deceased

The MHP began as a podcast where Nick and Jonah talked about their favorite spooky stories during the tail end of their college careers. After a period of fierce debate (and friendly blackmail), Nick and his friends decided to take a more visual approach. After all everyone's doing YouTube nowadays, so why shouldn't they?

Nick - Take at least five different complexes, throw 'em in a jar, shake them around, and then let them sit until pickled. Do Not Open under any circumstances. Oh, the jar fell off the shelf and shattered into a million pieces? Boom, those rank insides mixed with glass shards are Nick Miller in a nutshell. He's a control freak. He's terrified of an uncertain future. It's him and his sister against the world but Kim is engaged to a very nice man with a solid head on his shoulders and Nick is terrified that the only family he has left will abandon him forever. His friends are outgrowing the YouTube thing, and he has no other marketable skills. I wouldn't call him an unlikeable protagonist, but for someone in his late 20s he really has some serious growing up to do. For being someone hyperaware of choices and consequences, he does play it real fast and loose with the lives of his teammates (and his own), even after facing life-threatening repercussions. He also seems to think that getting himself killed will solve everyone's problems. Because he's an idiot. Also because he thought with his nonexistent dick a little too hard. He sees one attractive dead guy executed 130 years ago for utterly heinous crimes and he goes utterly gaga. | Theme song? You betcha.

Kim - If "eldest sister syndrome" had a face, it'd be hers. Externally, she looks and dresses like one of those high school goths that wrote poetry about wanting to be a vampire during lunch period. (Think if Zak Bagans were a girl.) Internally, YouTube was fun, but she would like to put her degree to use and earn a stable income without having to put herself (and her friends) in grave danger. She also doesn't want to keep stressing the fuck out of her boyfriend. Nick is unstable, neurotic, and has a vicious inferiority complex, but enough is enough and she is ready to stop playing the role of mom. Kim's ability to switch masks is the core of her extroverted nature. One moment, she's a goth diva with an attitude problem (her favorite host persona), and the next she's helping little old ladies who look at her weird cross the street. She is the solid foundation the team is built on, despite what Nick likes to think, and removing herself from the equation means the inevitable crumbling of their internet empire. | Her theme song. She's vers when it comes to genre.

Jonah - Anxiety 101. He's so very smart and that is a detriment to his very existence. Him and Nick have been BFFs for a hot second, but as of late he's been having second thoughts about their relationship. Sure Nick stands up for him whenever he has an episode or can't properly articulate what he means, but Nick's tendency to put their lives in the line of fire for content is something even Jonah can pick up on. The soft, big and burly type, Jonah is the one to run damage control when things get heated between the members of MHP. He will not hesitate to carry people to wherever they need to be, but he will also not hesitate to throw hands if anyone gets stupid and makes a snide comment about how high Nick's voice is or looks at any of the girls wrong. He's also a hopeless romantic. Guy swears he's sooo straight, but on more than one occasion he's been caught staring at the innkeeper a little too sultrily. | Everyone gets a theme song.

Jess - Three things you will find in her backpack at all times: an old iPod, chapstick, a shock blanket. For being a ghost host, girl will jump ten feet in the air if she so much as hears a wood board creak. Because of this, she's basically the comic relief of the show, but she is also the most earnest when it comes to investigations. That's because she blames herself for Shannon's death. She is so riddled with guilt that she wants to believe that ghosts are real, if only for the chance to reach out to Shannon and apologize for the death she did not deserve. Extremely introverted, she was originally the location scout and researcher, working with Nick behind the camera to bring the show to life. Once they found themselves a host short, Jess was promoted to co-host alongside Kim. This has made her surprisingly popular among viewers, mostly due to ragebait courtesy of Kim's persona being flippantly rude towards Jess during investigations (think Aaron Goodwin if he were a girl). IRL they're super close friends with nothing but utmost respect for each other, but anything for the clicks. | Her anthem basically.

Shannon - She's dead. Hope this helps. How did she die? You'll need to read the book to find out. ;) | I WILL share her theme tho.

[zaritarazi]

WAIT back up people are rebranding the omegaverse to be less nasty? THAT'S THE SECRET SAUCE OF OMEGAVERSE. IT'S THE HORNY WET AND WILD WEIRD MONSTERUCKING FANTASY TROPE BUCKET what on EARTH needs rebranding

alright. for the sake of integrity i am downloading this app to investigate. this will be in my app store history forever, by the way

i'm gonna level with you i started doing a deep dive and came up here to add a read more because i've just gotten to the point of this whole thing and we're not even in the deep end yet

so first the app is asking to allow notifications. immediate deny. next, it would like me to set up a profile. i can pick from the Three Genders (female, male, other) and my age.

it would like me to choose up to 3 of my favorite genres. the genres offered to me are:

romance

billionaire

mystery

erotica

werewolf

fantasy

thriller

paranormal

now of course, my immediate concern is that erotica seems to be its own category, where i'm assuming all of these books have fucking in them and i'm going to be really upset if they aren't all smut

additionally, i don't think the billionaire category is about becoming an agent of the proletariat, infiltrating the bourgeoisie, killing the billionaire, and redistributing the wealth. in minecraft. red son superman would never stand for this

okay now my cat (tarazi) is loafing on my phone. i think she's trying to protect me.

here is the photo for the "werewolf" category, which i think raises more questions than it answers

okay so that's not what a werewolf looks like, to my knowledge

top stories in werewolf. we have "alpha knows best" and we have "mated to my alpha stepbrother" which- i looked at the summary and he's not her stepbrother yet, they're college seniors and he's the son of her mom's new boyfriend who i guess is going to be her mate? but any time you have to say "it's not technically incest" it's not great, ryan!

okay here's a top story called "alpha max." no this one is in high school, backing out immediately.

also want to mention the stepbrother one just updated an hour ago. so this is like wattpad but i think the writers get paid? it has 54 fucking chapters

so these aren't finished, published works. i mean they're published in a way, but they're not whole stories, which i guess explains why the site advertises itself as "romance & fanfiction books" when all of the content is original sort of technically? it updates like a fic site.

so! here's what we're looking for. these stories have microspecific tags, but where there is "alpha" there is "luna." i have seen this a few times- okay wait! here's something interesting. i have found a story listed in popular werewolf that is lgbtq+. This alpha has a straight mate? Okay steven whatever helps you sleep at night. now HERE is something interesting. this has "alpha" as a tag, but no "luna," but ALSO no "omega." INTERESTING.

okay, let's go into the lgbtq+ tag on here and. see if that gives us more insight

OKAY! OKAY! this DOES have stories with omegas in it! is the second one listed bts fic? yes! okay but the FIRST one that comes up is called "my omega" bills itself as having a "female" alpha and "male" omega, although this description is so incredibly, beautifully problematic that it really defies common conventions of thought

okay i skimmed the first 50 words and the "female" alpha is... gross. like misogynist gross. so we're back at square fucking one here folks

okay here's a different one where they use Omega specifically as like... an Evil Luna? which is like- there is ALMOST something here by accident. like YES! make a lilith complex! i know that's not what you're doing, but you should! there's a hint of an idea here! you're so close to doing something almost maybe a little bit interesting!

to circle back to the original question of our study, "are they making omegaverse less nasty?" i think it's a complicated answer. the people who write for this app would probably balk at being called less nasty or not smutty enough, but at the same time, they've taken conventional romance and just put a slightly furry skin on it. and i know when you criticize the romance genre people are like "so you don't think women can read?" and i'm like you know what? maybe i fucking don't. maybe none of us should read and we can all run directly back into the sea. if one fucking amoeba millions and millions of years ago hadn't gotten above its station and crawled out of the ocean, we could all be jellyfish right now, and this wouldn't be in my downloads history. forever. again. i am stuck with this in my history forever

like the omegaverse has a very storied history but it's kind of wild to restyle it in a way that makes it more misogynist. like this was invented by people watching supernatural. and somehow this crop of "writers" is worse to women

i honestly hesitate to call this omegaverse at all. i know there were articles a few years ago about legal battles in the world of omegaverse and plagiarism and all that jazz, but this is not omegaverse. this is barely werewolf. this is soulmates with some growling. and so really, what's the fucking point?

okay wait this one is 2 alphas sharing an omega. now we're back to fucking literature

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

idk you guys i think you may just not have a full grasp of the complexities of getting audiences to watch movies

i have seen a lot of posts reading some variation on "studios are going to learn from barbenheimer to release two DIFFERENT movies concurrently when they should be learning to release two GOOD movies," a take i find absolutely infuriating. like, just to begin with, people don't often... choose to make bad movies. movies are really really hard to make, and it's famously impossible to know whether anyone will like the damn thing until it's already basically done. if you're a studio exec and you're planning your slate for next year, do you go with the weird experimental movie made by an up-and-coming with few-to-no features under their belt? sometimes you end up with a gem, but at least as often it flops and ends up costing you a bunch of money. what about established directors who regularly give you good stuff? sometimes nolan will give you his most well-received work since the batman stuff, and sometimes olivia wilde will turn in don't worry darling and audiences will turn their noses up. "make good movies" is not actionable advice.

not that being a good movie is actually any guarantee people will see it. in my opinion, the best movie released so far this year is past lives, and i'm not alone in that. the reviews are unanimously glowing, the letterboxd for it is basically all overwhelming praise. and that movie made barely 10mil. how much have you heard anyone talking about that movie? how many people do you know who've seen it? it wasn't an especially limited release, it's probably still showing at your local amc.

now how many people do you know who have seen the dungeons and dragons movie?

that's not a dig on the d&d movie, i like the d&d movie! i'm just saying, the truth is, there are few sure bets in this business. the success of a movie is a combination of its quality, its marketing, pure dumb luck, and yes, i'm sorry, star power and brand recognition.

we've all seen and made a thousand posts about how hollywood has no new ideas. complaining about reboots and sequels has been a stale observation for decades. but i also haven't seen the "no sequels or reboots" crowd get as excited any anything this year as they have about across the spider-verse and barbie. two excellent movies! which, be really honest with yourself, you would have been less likely to have seen if you weren't already excited about the property! barbenheimer isn't just two good movies. it's two good movies audience members already have reference points for.

i think this is a really human reaction. there is so much media at this point in history, constantly competing for your attention, and you can't possibly pay attention to it. so, as a heuristic, you look for reference points. i don't pay attention to AAA video games in general, but you bet your ass that when they announce the last of us part 3 i'm going to take notice, because i connected so strongly with the second one, but if they released basically the same game with a different name i might not ever hear about it.

there's that post where craig mccraken says he pitched cartoon network like seventeen original shows and they rejected everything until he suggested a powerpuff girls reboot, and everyone went "wow, the horrible studio execs are stifling creativity," and i just... i mean, are you really convinced you would watch those original shows? that your cousins would? that caitlin, a 32 year old single mom in michigan would put that on for her kids?

this isn't me saying "i don't care if movies are good" or "i'm glad they make so many sequels and reboots." this is me saying "you are not immune to branding" and "audiences have some share of responsibility for how things are" and "find a way to seek out media you're less familiar with."

i do that by seeing a movie in theaters once a week, but you can do it by giving yourself themed prompts when deciding what to watch, picking an album of the week, joining a book or movie club, or just asking friends for recommendations.

there is so so much out there that is exactly up your alley, that is weird and different and fresh, but the niche stuff won't come to you. you have to find it.