#and i needed to change it lbr

[knowlesian]

i wouldn’t say the era of binge tv is the sole reason why right now, a lot of people seem to have issues with growth arcs and general patience re: letting a narrative unfold at its own pace, but i do think it’s a big piece of the puzzle

anyway i am lowkey constantly begging people to understand that a character undergoing a growth arc has to start from a place of needing that growth, which necessitates that their starting point is not Already Awesome In All The Ways, No Complaints Here.

[sciderman]

And like THAT we learned the cast for MCUs Fantastic Four and by extent.....Johnny Storm *shudders* God save us all from the Mouse and from how fucked the Johnny Storm (and also SpideyTorch) tag is gonna be once the movie comes out.

we are going to get SO MUCH johnny storm porn lads

[akkivee]

nabbing from twitter lol

who in hypmic:

caught ur attention first: ichiro

first fav: ichiro and jakurai

current fav: kuukou💜💜💜

first least fav: samatoki-sama lol

least fav now: ?????

fav division: bat 💜💜💜

fav ship: ichikuu, riodice, mtrOT3

fav song: kaigen and osaka billion dreams for fav stage song even tho no one asked LOL

fav media: drama tracks and manga

fav official art: i have a lot lmao but these came to mind

[tophattrio]

Why is oncie so TALL the other 2 can stack on top of eachother and he'll STILL be taller😭😭

Once-ler: I'm not THAT tall! Well… least… not anymore! That magical money thing was kinda weird. Professor: Our anon here is incorrect. The height difference between us isn't that significant.

Warden: I dunnoooo I think you could still loose a few inches. Maybe we could get the doctor to do you a leg surgery!

Once-ler: ....... Not happening. Professor: Thinking it over, perhaps it's the hat? If Warden and I stood atop each other without hats, I could see that adding up to your height with a hat. Not perfectly, but closer. Once-ler: Makes sense, but it's SUPPOSED to be tall. It's an advertising method. I'm the face of a company here!

[ominis]

Doomsday by Lizzy McAlpine is Sebastian/Ominis as Seb sucks Ominis farther and farther into his use of the Dark Arts

I'll feel like throwing up You'll sit and stare like a goddamn machine I'd like to plan out my part in this But you're such a narcissist You'll probably do it next week I don't get a choice in the matter Why would I? It's only the death of me

This perfectly describes Sebastian’s gaslighting of Ominis -- pulling him into everything in the Scriptorium while constantly telling him that this is the last time, despite knowing it isn’t. The only thing Ominis has ever truly wanted was to avoid the Dark Arts forever and Sebastian completely disregarded that, using him on his journey down that path. He knew Ominis wouldn’t walk away from him easily, so he never really gave him any kind of option but to come along with him.

I don't want a violent end Don't say that you'll always love me 'Cause you know I'd bleed myself dry for you over and over again

I always feel terrible for Ominis in the Scriptorium, watching Sebastian -- someone who knew the trauma the Cruciatus Curse has caused him and someone who has been helping him overcome that trauma -- encourage the use of it or actually use it himself. Rationally, he knows it was their only chance at getting out of there, but Ominis himself would have rather died there than used it. And he thought Sebastian would have understood it. But he ended up being very dismissive of that in that moment. Yet, Ominis forgave him and continued to stick by him and try to get him back on the right path, because he loves him. Ominis would bleed himself dry over and over again for Sebastian’s sake.

I think there's good in you somewhere I'll hang on 'til the chaos is through

Ominis stayed with Sebastian until he felt there was no other choice because he believed in him. He knew there was good in him. He’d witnessed it. He’d felt it. He’d been on the receiving end of it. He couldn’t easily comprehend that disappearing and clung to the idea that it wasn’t gone at all. Ominis knew he was doing everything he did out of love, even if it was wrong, so he stuck around until it was all over because wanted that good in him to shine through again.

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

I've only ever seen 'you get to kill one person as a baby' alternative history polls, but I think there's a more interesting version so let's play 'change one event in history'! (Go for what you think would do the most good or what would be the most chaotic choice. It's a thought experiment we're not the morals police!)

Very brief (and grossly oversimplified!) explanations under the cut.

unfortunately my education has been very eurocentric and I'm pretty hopeless at the nuances of history pre-19th century; this is as diverse as i could make it (which is not very diverse at all). Please feel free to add in the tags!

1) This assassination set WW1 in motion (triggered/enabled the first declaration of war)

2) Emmanuel de Grouchy was a general in Napoléon's army. Before the Battle of Waterloo he'd been given the order to cut off the Prussian General Blücher, but Blücher had already got to the battlefield so de Grouchy went off on a pointless search with his 40-50k soldiers instead of joining the battle, which many consider a significant reason for Napoléon's defeat.

3) i.e., make trouble after Columbus leaves for America but before he arrives there.

4) Georg Elser attempted to set off a bomb during a Hitler speech at a beer hall. (There were other attempts on Hitler's life both before and after this, I just picked this one). The explosion failed to kill Hitler as he had moved his speech up half an hour and was gone by the time the bomb went off. It killed seven Nazis and a waitress. Elser was arrested, sent to a concentration camp and murdered days before its liberation at the end of the war. This has nothing to do with the question, I just hate that everyone only knows about the Stauffenberg one.

5) This position allowed Stalin to pick functionaries for key positions in the Soviet Union and thus pave his way to becoming Lenin's successor.

6) likely preventing the USA from creating a functional atomic bomb before the end of the war.

7) Günter Schabowski held the famous press conference which communicated the GDR's intention to allow East German citizens to cross into West Germany again without having to apply for government permission. Asked when this would come into effect, Schabowski replied, visibly uncertain, "to my knowledge, that is immediately. Right away". This led to crowds overwhelming the Berlin border crossings. The officers stationed there had received orders to mark the passports of all those crossing with a stamp that would barr them from re-entry into the GDR, but did not uphold this and instead simply opened the barrier as they feared violence would break out. This became the night the Berlin Wall fell.

8) The battle was a huge deal for German propaganda both at the time and later on and made especially Hindenburg a war hero, but I mostly picked it because I figure it'd be easiest to get them both at once during a battle. Both men were central to the decisions the German Empire made in WW1 (to such a degree that people have argued they effectively led the country) and both played a role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power: Ludendorff lent his credibility and fame to Hitler's Munich Beer Hall putsch in 1922, and Hindenburg went on to become the last president of Weimar Germany and appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933.

[weepylucifer]

My opinion on Jean is that honestly by now i don't really find the whole issue to be awfully important anymore like... the Return is about to happen SOON!! The world is literally ENDING!! If the pale truly engulfs the world, what happens next? What kind of a future is possible under these circumstances, what is it going to look like? What about communism? Why are we arguing about this one random shitty cop again??

[spring-lxcked]

not really here ( was going to spend the whole morning writing but things got in the way ), but i have worked on that post abt a potential movie verse. the problem is it's actually way more complicated than i originally thought lmao

[telemiel]

Shipping bingo, Roslin and Adama duh

[dumbbookreader]

1/3 of the way through the song of achilles and dang they sure do talk about feet a decent amount

[whoreishghost]

not that its particularly interesting for any1 else, but maybe it *is* time?

[lightdancer1]

Now that I think about it:

It really is striking given everything with that one episode that there's no plotline where Tara accidentally kills off her love interest with that blindness spell early in Season 5 and Glory steamrolls everyone because the big gun went missing. It's basically one of this 'so this is how we done fucked up, don't do that shit' storylines that's seemingly begging to be written and.....nobody actually has. It'd be a perfect knife twist and it's not like the Scoobies would let Tara just leave with her obviously evil family even after that because they'd not want to lose someone ELSE after it.

So what does happen if they have to go through the Glory arc but there's no Willow (especially twistedly funny given later seasons if the Powers That Be cough her up again at the start of the equivalent of Season 6)? Would the butterfly effect mean she'd even brain-suck Tara, which was a pretty clear bit of her power boost that made her as formidable? If that never happens and they just use the hammer sooner, does anyone actually have to die?

I can also see if the PTB did decide 'oh wait, no, this one DOES have a destiny and she needs to get on with it' that a resurrected Willow after all that would be in the usual situation most of the 'Tara comes back' fics go of having entirely valid trust issues and having the 'wait HOW much time happened oh holy God WHAT is Glory and wow' reactions to a normal year on the Hellmouth.

Canon-wise Willow's an unkillable, fanfic exists precisely to do what canon wouldn't. And ultimately Tara was, after all, meant to be the replacement goldfish for Willow's old niche, so one can very easily see the Scoobies acting at a meta-level like that and creating something of the same dysfunction from a different route because she is very much NOT Willow in any of the ways that define her. She has a rigidly defined sense of ethics, she gets a backbone that has a more consistent sense of 'happens to me bad, happens to you because I'm traumatized nobody ever remembers it for the rest of anything ever'.

It would also be a suitably ironic knife twist given the 'big gun' thing that the very expectations here that set up the ultimate Dark Lord Rosenberg thing never happening lead to the Gang winning because Buffy beats the shit out of Glory with a magic hammer when she never gets her mitts on Tara because there's no Willow for her to argue with that one day and the butterfly effects are big, she never dies....and then the PTB have Willow turn right back up in the Magic shop alive, well, and utterly ocnfused at the end of the equivalent of that season going "What the Hell was that."

I would admittedly have the Dark Willow thing happen anyway as a result of overcompensating for realizing she was killed as result of relying on someone else's wisdom with magic and it's more Dark Lord Rosenberg, as I mentioned, rather than its canon aspect and Tara gets to be the replacement Willow and it does not spark joy while Willow in turn quite reasonably has major trust and communication issues and doubles and triples down on increasingly powerful magic sans magic crack analogy until she's full-scale Dark Phoenix and people belatedly have the 'oh shit we probably should have tried talking before now' reaction.

This may well end up the one other Buffyverse fic I write, though I'd basically breeze through the rest of Season 5 in the first chapter from Tara's POV and then at the tail end Willow comes back and the hilarity ensues.

Then again it's also equally possible for Willow to simply go 'nah, fuck magic, magic killed me, y'all already got a witch, computers it is' and then the Hellmouth Hellmouths and her destiny won't be denied and the paranoia of living on the place makes her take the same path while actually struggling against it when she gets a Monkey's Paw version of her own desire to be the big damn hero, but to be able to do that she has to be able to reach the power to do so and since she is who she is, it's impossible to have the power to abruptly start being capable of making reality do what you want without it going to her head.

And given that she did at least seem to be easily replaceable (with Willow and Tara equally unreliable narrators and the truth not quite matching up with what either of them think here and the two narrative POVs here) Dark Lord Rosenberg gets to be as much a case of venting that she in a sense was the replaceable sidekick on a television show and not a main character.

Almost every other canon possibility here has done this and having 'the person I love cannot see the demon for who she is' and then 'wait, she died, I didn't mean that' because the magic misfires a little harder in a laser-guided fashion and having Tara meet her intended niche a little harder than otherwise is....surprisingly under-used.

[buckdiazlafd]

no but im still on buck wearing eddies lafd shirt on accident bc ofc they do laundry together and it got mixed up and there’s DIAZ in big bold yellow letters on bucks back and eddie just. kind of stutter stops and bucks like what and eddie tries to cover it up, that quick jump of how right that seemed needs to be tamped down quick, so he’s just like, nothing it’s just. I think you accidentally grabbed my shirt lol, and buck keeps it on bc well he doesn’t have another shirt (and he doesn’t want to change lbr. bc it feels right to him too. to have eddies Name plastered there around his shoulders, displaying to the world what buck always feels an undercurrent of anyway, that he’s eddie’s) and they’re on a call and eddies almost forgotten about it bc the shirts hidden now under jackets and gear but bucks about to go into that building and he’s wearing eddies name, and they have dinner planned after this, and eddies getting less and less good at repressing the thought of how natural it would be to start kissing his best friend goodbye and hello and good luck and thank you, and he doesn’t have time to process it all but those four letters are under that jacket and bucks about to go where he can’t be right now but in some ways (shirt or not) he always carries a bit of eddie with him so without much thought he tosses out a “be careful out there diaz” and shoots buck a little grin and buck takes a moment but immediately catches on and that dopey little smile appears on his face that eddie loves and he just says you too diaz. and they can’t stop smiling at each other and the rest of the team just look at each other like don’t even ask it’s just another buck and eddie thing

[qqueenofhades]

I think the veepstakes are going to continue for another week or so, both to increase the profile of her potential running mates and see how they do with the public, time to vet, and give everyone a little more incentive to be extra enthusiastic about campaigning for her, but ALSO because there's a nonzero chance Trump may drop Vance and they'll need to pivot their strategy, though I think most choices will be sound either way(I like Walz and Beshear the best). What do you think are the odds of Trump dropping Vance versus doubling down because he doesn't want to look weak or indecisive?

She is going to have to pick pretty quickly, because the Ohio GOP attempted some fuckery by putting their ballot deadline before the DNC (and refusing to grant an extension as they always did for Republicans, so you know). I expect she will pick by the middle of next week at the latest, because the virtual nomination has to be made by, iirc, August 6th in order to outwit the attempted Republican ratfuckery. The DNC is then August 19-22, where the whole thing will be made official and everyone will pledge/endorse/etc. That leaves a pretty compressed timeline to road-test Veep picks, see how they work with Harris, how they play with the public, etc. But they've been on top of it so far, so there's that. I saw someone suggest that she let it go on as long as possible in order to have 6-10 white guys hyping her up on TV every day -- which is valid, yes, but she will have to pick soon. There are really no bad options, though I too have ones that I would like in particular. I am really warming to Walz, as I think he has a great communication style and would shore her up in the white Midwest. Though I did get a fundraising email from Mark Kelly on behalf of Kamala Harris yesterday, and lbr if you can pick an astronaut, pick an astronaut.

As for Trump dropping Vance, he's in considerably more of a pickle (everyone together now: AHAHAAHHAH! HAHAHAH! HAAHHAHAHAHAHA!) because the RNC has already happened, Vance is legally and bindingly the VP nominee, and if they change it now, there are a ton of legal and procedural steps that take time and make the GOP look incredibly weak. They will also piss off the Project 2025 people (who were all over the Vance pick because obviously, Vance loves it and they are horrible) -- which, if they were at all sensible, they might do. But they're fascists and that's actually what they want to do, so they won't. Biden was able to step aside and put Harris in so easily because he was not actually the Democratic nominee yet -- he was just the presumptive nominee, delegates are technically free to vote for whoever they want and the nominee is not official until after this convention process has happened, and he wasn't locked in. But if the GOP tries to drop Vance now, it's going to be a lot of legal hassle, they'll look incredibly foolish, and they'll piss off the core fascists they have been rallying every step of the way. Too bad, so sad. No good choice, huh? Seems karmically fitting that they can't abort Vance. Oh no. They must carry his ass to term.

[pepperf]

Listen, with all due respect, I don't give a fuck about what Five would or wouldn't do. It takes two to tango, and I don't believe that Lila would change so fundamentally from a chaos gremlin who loved Diego to distraction, into some lobotomised cottagecore manic pixie dream sex toy. This was all set up so that Five could get laid, lbr. They could have given him a mannequin and a Fleshlight for the same effect.

And if, as Steve Blackman claims, she and Five are so right for each other bc they have such similar experiences, blah blah blah, why did he need to shoehorn them into a situation where they're stranded alone for 7 years to even reach the point of having sex? He couldn't even convince himself that it was plausible without cooking up the most extreme nonsense - and even then, like 90% of the fandom has called bullshit.

As if the degree of similarity of experience is such a key factor in a romance, anyhow. All the Umbrellas had a background more similar to Lila's than to Joe or Jane Public, but those are external factors, they all responded differently. Hell, by that argument, why didn't he make Lila and Allison the endgame ship: after all, they were raised by sociopaths who turned them into weapons, they experienced life in the 60s as WOC, they were both parents...

(And that's not even getting into the fact that this was all a writing choice, as others have said. It wasn't inevitable, it didn't have to happen, it added nothing to the plot and contradicted past characterisations. It's just masturbatory.)

[kidasthings]

Kingdom has frankly made me feel crazy. I've seen the movie three times. Noa gives both "important" items to Mae. He doesn't choose between Soona and Mae when literally asked. He gives a bullshit "we were born together" answer (what does that mean, bro?) which literally sounds like he thinks of her as a sister. (Which checks out, bc that's the vibe they actually had lbr) He carries her. Rescues her on horseback. Bonds w/her through the whole damn movie. And all their tension? Not to mention Owen and Freya being the literal faces of the movie and all the promo. I just need to know if they have written the single most unintentional enemies to lovers story or if its all intentional and we aren't crazy.

Let me let you in on a little secret that might shed some light on what is going on, here.

Shhh... don't tell anyone. I don't think they could handle it!

The Planet of the Apes Franchise has had many, many examples of human-ape hookups and pairings before in the comics, and hints of this can be found on the big screen (Taylor and Zira kissing, the almost-was ape-human hybrid child).

Some examples of ape-human pairings in the franchise have been:

Malaguena (human woman) and the male chimp Grimaldi from "Terror on the Planet of the Apes"

Tonus, a human-hating gorilla, fell in love with a "chimp" named Valia who was really a human woman in disguise named Myndith. It more or less changed his stance on humans "Blood of the Apes" miniseries

Fauna, a blind chimp female fell in love with Pete Burke, a human man in an episode of the Planet of the Apes TV series

Various examples of human-ape hybrids, such as the mud people

Some examples of ape-on-ape mixes also occurred:

Minister Shiva was half chimp, half gorilla (Dark Horse comics)

The Chimerae were descended from gorillas, orangutan and chimp blood (Dark Horse, again)

Lieutenant Mungwort was part chimpanzee, part gorilla

You can find all of this detailed here for reference:

So, yeah, if they were hinting something between Noa and Mae, you can bet it would be on-point for the franchise to do that.

Intentionally.

Because, you know, the Planet of the Apes has this long history of mixing species, both on-screen and off.

I know some claim it's bestiality, or zoophilia, or whatever to ship Noa x Mae, and that's fine. Sing it to the rafters, you do you.

I still stand by the fact that if someone claims this and pays to watch the Planet of the Apes movies in the movie theater they are financially supporting their own claims of bestiality and zoophilia for a franchise that has always promoted ape-human pairings.

For the rest of us, it's just par for the course and a typical ship.

Hope that helps!