#and as im thinking about death i wake up

[ghostssmoke]

Sketch of a dream I had

[nomoretumbler]

the morning after the storm (avm 30)

reference (found on pinterest):

[sad-leon]

Something about a big leo hugging a little leo in the mindscape just hits different

this time flavored with @remedyturtles's Death Wish boys!

i care about them so much lakdjfalsdjflskd if i had the spoons, there would be a second animatic made already, but alas, school >:(

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Fanfic idea: Nocturna, after disappearing during the crisis, wakes up to find herself in the current universe, where she spots the Red Hood, and can't help but compare him to the blood night sky she last saw, and oddly, the young Robin whom she had tried to adopt

[skrunksthatwunk]

this could be kuwameshi if you guys would like. take my hand and trust me

[mortysmith]

i think s6 (and some of the newer seasons in general) have kinda lost the og r&m spark because they’ve neglected a really important asset and character that made earlier seasons work aka MORTY. s1-2 use morty as a sort of audience insert and HES THE REASON a lot of plots get kicked into motion in the first place. newer seasons seem sort of unsure what to do with him? and i kind of understand why, because he’s not the same bumbling naive anxious idiot he used to be, his development has made him angrier and louder and more... complain-y? he expresses his opinions and he seems to understand a lot of alien stuff now. s6 morty would never ask for rick to make him a “love potion”. he seems so much more grown-up now, i guess the show kind of has no choice but to incorporate the rest of the family while sacrificing most of morty’s spotlight i’ve noticed this with season 6 especially because while he does appear in episodes he doesn’t play any actual role in them. you can remove him and its fine, the episode doesn’t suffer in any way. earlier episodes would basically shrivel up and crumble to dust if morty wasn’t the focus of AT LEAST the b-plot because he’s so heavily built into the core of the episodes. it’s frustrating because rick seems to have infinite room to expand and develop while morty is just . there and any character exploration is just abandoned for the sake of rick. im not exactly mad at the Very Apparent rick favoritism, because i understand that, especially to mainstream audiences, he is far more interesting, but i just wish there was more effort to focus on the other Title Character.

[swordsmans]

finished writing the last section of The New ZoLu Fic on my work break today................ tonight after ~job 2~ i will finish the epilogue, then i'll update with the final wordcount. accounting for a few days of line edits and possible beta-reading..... it will be up in its entirety by this weekend.

i am almost free

[bambiraptorx]

okay can we as a fandom please stop ignoring the fact that the infamous line "she's crazy and she needs to go down" comes literally a day or two after Azula shoots Iroh with lightning and almost kills him?

I personally would not be too charitable to someone who almost killed me on the day after they almost killed me either

[orcelito]

I'm tired of dreaming about my dad. I know it's part of processing, but I am just so tired.

[urproblematicfav-arsonk]

Izzy gets bonked on the head real bad and gets amnesia and when he meets Lucius for the second time he asks if they were friends before and Lucius responds with "no not really" and Iz just says good and walks away

[bluejaybytes]

@snowshinobi Hiiiii :3 I'm responding to your tags on a new post and not the original since the original was already somewhat lengthy, and I plan on being LONG and RAMBLY, but I have sooo many thoughts on what you said and I'm going to say them. Also my browser crashed TWICE (TWO TIMES. 2) when trying to write this post so I'm really fighting for my life out here to get my silly little OC posts done. Also it's under the cut because it's looooong as hell LMAO

Firstly, you're so nice to me forever <3 Secondly, I think you've basically hit the nail on the head. The majority of the issues Maggie has coming back from death and her 9 years gone are really tied almost exclusively to her close family, because she... never really had anyone else. While in-universe it's only 9 years, realistically the jump in technology and culture is around ~20-30 years (Maggie died in the 90s/early 2000s essentially, and wakes up in a just barely futuristic city), but... the most jarring thing to her in terms of what she missed out on is just. Flipphones are no longer popular. Other than her family, she's only close with one other person... who just so happens to be a ghost, and therefore both 1. Wouldn't change much over the timespan due to how long she's been a ghost and 2. Unlike her family, was aware that something happened, since she could see the ghost-of-a-ghost Maggie left behind (The ghosts name is Opal, she positions herself as a sort of "guardian angel" figure, though she's not actually, and serves as just another parental figure for Maggie while also getting after the ghosts that constantly harass her to pass on messages to the living). Maggie has no real relationships outside of her family, and while her relationships with her family are massively impacted by her unknowing death, other than that... the timeskip itself doesn't weigh on her because she had no one regardless. Her struggle to adjust to everything thats happened would've happened regardless of the timeskip for her, because she was such an isolated shut-in that it's the same whether it happened the next day, or nearly a full decade later

So another very interesting thing is that you've actually completely seen where I was going with everything, in spite of everything I said being very surface level and not actually delving into the plot at all. I completely skimmed over Jenna (She's very important to the plot, but she's by in large a regular person as opposed to Maggie's... everything), but for some additional context, Jenna has a horrendously shitty homelife, so her moving in with Maggie is both a gradual process (It goes from spending time there, to spending nights, to eventually just never going back home and moving in fully), and also serves as an escape for her. Part of that is also, so vitally, the food aspect. For some additional additional context, souls essentially serve as a persons lifeforce, practically every bodily function is improved by a soul that's stronger, though the "strength" of a soul is essentially entirely random, and not dependent on the individuals actions of any kind. Maggie had a generally weird soul before (Seeing ghosts inherently means she has to have something going on with her soul), but when she wakes up after her death, her soul is now even weirder, and part of that is that it essentially lets her get away with bad habits she absolutely should be seeing more consequences for. She barely eats, and when she does, it's basically exclusively crackers and whatever other safe foods she has around the house, because actually making food is a level of care and effort she just... doesn't give to herself in the slightest. Part of Jenna staying with her is that Jenna, without really discussing it, entirely takes up the mantle of caretaker of the apartment, with the biggest task being food prep, Jenna sees Maggie's unwillingness to take care of herself and silently steps up and starts making her actual meals so she's eating properly.

The problem is is that this also kinda... just straight up sucks? Jenna doesn't think much of it, it's something that needed to be done so she's doing it, she wants Maggie to be well fed even if she won't do it herself, and she's already been responsible for making all of her own meals for years prior anyways, so it's just another thing she does. Except that's shitty! Maggie's seen firsthand how terrible her homelife is, and it really weighs on her how even in her escape from that, Jenna's still being put in a position where she feels like she must care for her or else she just won't eat properly. So food is such a massively important thing to both of them, it's this symbol of love for both of them, it's love on the part of Jenna, for stepping in and taking care of Maggie when she can't do it herself, and it's love on the part of Maggie, for realizing how her own bad habits impact the people she cares about and wanting to lift that weight by taking care of herself better. It's also very vital for Maggie because she just... doesn't... have hobbies. Learning how to cook becomes really her only hobby and she puts all of her love and care into it, because for the first time in a long while she's actually passionate about something! ...Unfortunately she also is very very bad at it. She's inventing new dishes like "Burnt Salad" and "Please Help I Fucked Up Kraft Mac N Cheese" and still having to have Jenna come in and help her. But it's the thought that counts, and it'll only be a matter of time before she can make something vaguely edible.

And finally, the stuff about names! I didn't post it here, but while idly talking about her in a Discord server I'm in, I definitely think that had I made Maggie like even a few months later than I would've done she would've been nonbinary. As it stands right now though, I'm saying she's probably some form of genderweird but too busy trying not to die to think about it <3 Growing up knowing that ghosts are real and routinely being shut down by authority figures in her life about it has made her very aware of how bullshit a lot of things are and how the people who claim to be knowledgeable tend to not know what they're talking about (Beyond just the "people don't think ghosts are real", she's also got ghosts willing to tell her when people are lying because they've got nothing better to do than just gossip) , so if she spent even just a moment thinking about gender as a social construct she'd instantly recognize that and probably take up some form of genderweird label, but as it stands she's just too stressed with Being The Protagonist to think about that

Now, the thing with Margaret. I'm not even going to lie to you, I think you made a better connection to how a name connects with community in terms of the narrative themes than I did. The thing with Margaret denying the name "Maggie" existed for two reasons, the in-universe explanation is that, with the little scrap of soul Margaret has leftover from Maggie, it's essentially working overtime just to keep her vitals working, it can't dedicate time and energy to making her an individual with preferences and a personality, so part of that is that she doesn't respond to "Maggie" because ultimately, that is not her name. Her name is Margaret and she's not going to respond to "Maggie" because "Maggie" isn't her name. Of course, out of universe the reasoning is that I wanted an easy way to distinguish between Maggie as she is the protagonist, and the version of her that lived in the years she was gone, so different names makes the most sense.

I think your connection to how name relates to community genuinely works on a level I hadn't fully pieced together myself yet and I really love that because I think that absolutely works with everything. One of the main conflicts of the plot is how Maggie is entirely disconnected from her family thanks to the years she was gone, with Margaret having no priorities beyond "survive", she basically never spoke with her parents or brother for years. While her family tried to reach out to her repeatedly (Especially given that, while they're unaware the truth of what happened the night Maggie was murdered, they do know something happened, and they believe that whatever it was severely traumatized her, and that's where the sudden and drastic shift in personality came from), there's a point where they just... gave up. She wasn't trying to talk with them or contact them in the slightest, so around a year or two after Margaret moved out, her parents gave up on her. Her brother would still be there a bit, but he also didn't really... try... anymore.

When Maggie wakes up, she tries to call her parents... and they don't pick up. They'd grown resentful over the years, and now that Maggie wants to talk to them, they don't forgive her for the years of not speaking to them, and aren't interested in whatever she has to say after nearly a decade of trying to reconnect with her and being met with nothing. It's her insistence that she wants to be called Maggie that actually gets her brother to realize she's telling the truth and that something happened. She shows up at his door, already something that Margaret wouldn't have done, and that combined with her being visibly upset when he calls her Margaret and tells him that's not her and that she's Maggie, it signals to him that whatever's going on is real (...though he would've figured this out eventually, given that she also literally 17 again and not in her mid-20s, and has a giant glowing stab wound in her chest). I think it works absolutely perfectly as being a symbol of community, her disconnect from her community is what led to her being called Margaret, and her desperation to be returned to that community is when she's Maggie again. So uh. Congrats on getting the themes of my OCs better than I did <3

And uhhhh closing thoughts! I honestly did still skim over the majority of the plot (Literally never even mentioned Eli or what's going on with her stab wound </3), but I think you reeeeally hit the nail on the head with everything I'm kinda getting at with these OCs, which is... frankly wild given how little main plot I actually got at. Basically everything I mentioned in my original post was the setup, not the main plot. But waaaaugh thank you for being so niceys to me and also giving me another excuse to ramble endlessly <3

[hecksupremechips]

Girl like. The reason he said "this is how it should be" and faced death with a smile....is cuz he wanted to die. For 2 years he sat there thinking he was worthless and deserved to die. If he hadn’t be shot, his death would’ve been suicide, he was fully planning to die in a gutter somewhere undetected. When saying "this is how it should be" hes literally saying "don’t cry because I’m dying, my death is a good thing actually because I fucking suck and you are better off without me". I don’t think that’s badass even slightly, it’s actually really sad and really shitty. Shinjiro is so convinced that he deserves to die and hates the idea of anyone giving a shit about him because he literally can’t wrap his mind around the idea that he will be missed when he’s gone, that his death is a bad thing actually. And his last words were meant to be comforting because he fully did not intend for anyone to be there when he died, he intended to die alone, so he says them as a reminder that he’s not worth crying over

Personally, if it were me, if I was holding my dying best friend in my arms who was deeply depressed and suicidal and he said "this is how it should be" uh. I wouldn’t admire him for it??? Like am I losing my mind when I say the way this game handles Shinji is bad or is anyone else seeing this too 😰

[dreamingofstarslight]

I am melting into a puddle like the wicked witch

[transphilza]

tis missin techno hours it seems

[hallwyeoo]

I'm reminded so much of Binghe in Cixous’ 'Stigmata' (specifically ‘Love Of The Wolf’)

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love... The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary." (pg 78)

"...who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive... and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth." (pg 78)

like cmon, you mean to tell me this doesn't remind you of them?

"The wolf says to the child: I’m going to eat you up. Nothing tickles the child more. That’s the mystery: why does the idea that you’re going to eat me up fill me with such pleasure and such terror? It’s to get this pleasure that you need the wolf. The wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude for ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment." (pg 77-78)

Now while I've yet to do an in-depth analysis of Bingqiu's relationship, I have done one of Binghe and I really really love how he aligns with a concept I can't fully name. it has something to do with love as defying your nature, or the expectations set for you, or your past. Love as a choice you make, and as a conscious effort to be better.

I don't know if I'm just connecting two things I enjoy or making everything I do about the Thing I Currently Like, but I thought id put it out there anyway (cause I'm pretty sure if it doesn't apply to Bingqiu, then it applies better to another ship from danmei I've yet to read *ahem a lot of them*)

[blastburnt]

Ooooh what's the book you're reading?

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister!

it follows a mother who witnesses her 18 y/o son kill a stranger outside their house. after he gets arrested and she sleeps that night, she wakes up the day before the crime. obviously now knowing what she does, she tries to fix things. but later that night, instead of going back to the present, she wakes up two days before the crime.

then again - she keeps waking up a day earlier than before

i'm halfway through the book, but i'm really enjoying it so far. i love that she's not forced to relive the same day over and over again, but rather several different ones because of the challenges that come with travelling backwards constantly. lots of recontextualising as she picks up on more details she hadn't noticed before - the power of hindsight and all that

i'm sure you can kind of see where my mind is going in regards to yj..... i'm more partial to either jackie or shauna pov because they are my girlies but i think the concept could be SO interesting with any of them