#and i will 100% respect that

[handlewithcharacter]

I just think it's completely reductive to have your leading lady go through several seasons of emotional growth only to plop her right back where she started - grieving one man and having to choose between two others, because all a woman is in this world is who she marries.

[casscainmainly]

Why Duke Thomas Should Be A Dick Grayson Hater

Dick and Duke is such an underrated and underexplored relationship. Here is my pitch for why Duke should be a Dick Grayson hater.

1. The Rooftop Thing

Reason number one and the start of Duke's grudge should be the rooftop incident in Robin War. Dick, as part of his plan or whatever, leads Duke to a roof and abandons him to the cops.

LOOK AT DICK'S SMUG FACE. Tell me you wouldn't hold a grudge too if this was the FIRST major interaction you had with him?? Duke should use this against him at any possible opportunity.

2. ACAB

From We Are Robin #2. Once Duke finds out Dick used to be a cop, it's OVER for him.

3. Jason and Damian

Duke is quite close with Jason and Damian (in my head, particularly Damian - that's his LITTLE BROTHER). Anyway, these two are obsessed with Dick. You have Jason, with his miles-long brother issues that puts Dick on a pedestal, and you have Damian, who thinks Dick is the best person on Earth who can do no wrong. They would talk Duke's ears off about him. Duke would HATE IT.

4. Robin

This panel from Night of the Monster Men sums up quite nicely the difference in the way Dick and Duke approach vigilantism. Duke is the 'idealised' Robin, whose Robin-ing isn't contingent on Batman; Dick is more or less too tied up in Bruce. I think, because the Robin identity means a lot to Duke, having the original Robin be like this would irk Duke a LOT.

5. Tom Taylor

SPOILERS FOR CURRENT NIGHTWING RUN: in Nightwing #116, Dick gets framed for murder and Babs tells him to reveal he's Nightwing to clear him of suspicion. She says Bruce suggested it, and recounts everyone who agreed:

Hm. Is someone missing here? Oh yeah: DUKE. TT probably just forgot Duke, but where's the fun in that? Instead, if Duke is a Dick Grayson hater, you have the funniest scene imaginable. Everyone gathered in the Batcave, laying down their identities for Dick, and Duke is like 'I don't give a damn. He can rot in jail.' and peaces out.

BONUS points if he does this to get back at Dick for reason number 1.

6. Parallels

Duke's origin deliberately mirrors Bruce's, but that means it mirrors Dick's as well. Duke and Dick parallels go insane: they both had loving families, lost both parents at once, were in the foster system (varyingly for Dick but for the purposes of this post I'm gonna include it), were wards/not adopted by Bruce initially, have a huge reverence for family, have a thing about heights, view Robin as separate from Batman, forged their own identities, etc.

Tell me this page doesn't slap:

Anyway Duke would HATE this too. He'd be so annoyed that the person he has the most in common with is Dick, and that would fuel his Dick Grayson haterism.

Dick, on the other hand, has no hard feelings towards Duke. Duke would be glowering at him from the corner of the room and Dick would meet his gaze and be like 'ah Duke is so cute' and smile back. This would make Duke 10000x angrier.

Anyway that's my ideal Dick and Duke dynamic, feel free to add or modify or disagree with anything!!

[egophiliac]

this is basically what happened, right?

(these guys are very lucky that everyone at NRC 1) has the combined intelligence of a sack of bricks, and 2) is easily distracted by shiny things.)

[demigods-posts]

we already have the percy whose scalp is always somewhat damp because he wants to feel the moisture on his skin. the percy who takes bubble baths twice a week soley so he can nap underwater when he's away from the beach. the percy who once drank four gallons of water in two hours and felt like he was king of the world for a week straight. but give me the percy who gets overstimulated from being in the water too much. the percy who spent his three-day weekend putting a stop to a war between the fish of the pacific and atlantic ocean. the percy who returned home with his hair dry as a bone. the percy who locked himself in his room and refused to touch water unless he was nearly dying of thirst. the percy who damn-near asked his father to disown him for a few days because being directly linked to water made him want to cry.

[horsefigureoftheday]

Horse figure of the day: Trail of Painted Ponies "War Pony"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 2: Indocktrination

(Part 1, Part 3)

[cheesy-two-liner]

So you know how in the show, Annabeth is a black girl? Annabeth in the books is always mentioned to not be very careful of her appearance. She has curly blonde hair that she never really takes much care of and stuff, for instance. But in the show, she has really nice braids, etc. Now mind you, annabeth ran away from home when she was 7 years old, and her stepmom is Asian in the books and canonically wasn’t the most caring to annabeth for the years they spent together. This means, to me, that show-Annabeth never had anybody to teach her how to do her hair. She gets to camp half blood at 7 little years of age and is obliviously running around with a messy head of hair that she has no idea (and also probably doesn’t really care) how to take care of. My headcanon is that some black girl from the Aphrodite cabin saw her and was like “not on my watch” and took it upon herself to both braid annabeth’s hair and to teach her how to do it herself.

I also like to think Percy 100% learns how to braid hair just for Annabeth. And she doesn’t even know it because it happens during some school year. He stepped inside a braiding salon a couple of blocks from his apartment one day and was like “hi, sorry to bother, I wanna learn how to braid my friends hair” and the ladies at the salon where enchanted with this weird kid who came out of nowhere and who would NOT stop yapping about this cute black girl at summer camp who he absolutely was in love with but none of the ladies had the heart to tell him that because he seemed oblivious to his own feelings. So they taught him for free as long as he helped around the salon. And then one day at camp, he goes to get her at the athena cabin and Annabeth is sitting in her bed with a couple of mirror and a cloud of hair all around her and Percy’s like “need a hand?” And Annabeth’s like “as if you could help, seaweed brain” and percy just goes “is that a challenge?” And he helps her part her hair which can be a pain to do by yourself and then they both sit on her bed for hours doing knotless braids (Annabeth was wholly unconvinced he knew how to do them until he started working on a section of hair and it was all she could do to not hang her mouth open in surprise). Percy wasn’t quite as fast as annabeth had gotten after so many years of doing her own hair, but with his help it took half the time it would’ve taken her alone. The other kids of the athena cabin would stare at them from the door of the cabin and proceed to hightail it out of there. The amount of gossip going around camp that day was astronomical. But the two of them were oblivious in their little hyperfixated adhd bubble. After that it became tradition, as long as he could, Percy would help Annabeth braid her hair.

[catsauceeartofficial]

Get love-struck idiot

Did I ever tell you I enjoy drawing Dragon-Hybrid Serizawa, because I do. In this essay I will-

[fuckmeyer]

the choice between Edward & Jacob is not a question of which relationship is healthier or which partner is best suitable for Bella. neither is correct. neither is best. neither produces a happy ending for Bella. at the end of the day this is still a vampire novel. any choice Bella could make would yield, at best, a bittersweet happily ever after.

if she chooses Edward, she gets the terrifying Breaking Dawn ending: a girl who rejected her call to grow up has hung her love & her eternity on an emotionally stunted partner who hates himself marginally less than he loves her. she's a teen mom with a kid she never wanted who perpetuates the generational trauma passed down from her parents. by keeping this child, the Cullens have set the stage for an uprising/cold war against the Volturi who are likely to take revenge in order to maintain power. Bella is living in a tenuous "dream come true" wrapped in a nightmare & doesn't realize it.

choosing Jacob is the true coming-of-age ending that rips the stitches out of a wound that never fully healed. even if we ignore the fact that she ends up with a man who sexually assaulted her (we must bear in mind Jacob's character is influenced by smeyer's racism, but it did happen), they can't have a secure romantic relationship. based on the high imprinting rate of the pack, Jacob will likely find his imprint in his lifetime & will lose himself to the imprintee. he will no longer be her Jacob. he will inevitably abandon her (whether he wants to or not), & she must reconcile with the reality that she will always be inadequate to Jacob's imprint. & say he never manages to escape the vampires? he will presumably not age for a long time, meaning the relationship Bella always feared with Edward (her being an old grandmother while he stays forever young) remains a possibility. this is the story of a girl who slaps a Band Aid on an open wound & calls herself healed while flinching every time she sees the shadow of the knife that cut her.

if she chooses neither (team therapy), her healing requires her to lose or be at least partially disconnected from everyone she cares about. Bella must spend the rest of her life shut out from one world while never fully existing in her human world ever again. she must always keep secrets. she can never go back home. even in the unlikely event that she manages to escape the Volturi, the threat of being hunted by vampires will never leave her. in addition, she must face her worst fears (aging, losing Edward) while always keeping in mind the immortal life that could have been hers, if only.

even the "healthiest" option produces scars that will never quite heal.

Twilight is a horror. Twilight is a vampire novel. Twilight is gothic. Twilight is fiction. neither Edward nor Jacob is a "bad" choice because neither will give Bella her happily ever after. the choice between Edward & Jacob is simply a matter of which horror story you prefer to read.

[heartstopperthoughts]

Anyone who’s been saying that Nick and Charlie are too sexually pure like “oh they’re teenage boys, they’d be having a lot of sex” has clearly never read the novella

[fernsfabulousfloweringfacility]

Silly little comic that almost killed me witha chainsaw <3<3

DDVAU by @kitsuneisi and @xmaruu11!!!! so much love for them :D

[candycatstuffs]

screencap redraw + color palette fuckery bc the hyperfixation is reaching critical levels in my neural pathways

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[coockie8]

I saw someone on twitter claim that lolicon/shotacon and other adjacent type tropes only exist because pedophiles know they can't rape children, so they just draw it instead.

And I am not even remotely joking when I ask, if that were 100% factual and not a blatant strawman; how is that a bad thing?

How is someone with a mental illness choosing to cope with their desires through artwork instead of going out and raping a real, living child a bad thing?

Look me in the eyes and explain it like I'm 5 how intentionally going out of your way to avoid hurting a person because you know it would be wrong is bad.

[quincywillows]

like i remember the vitriol that came out when the mere PREMISE for ballad of songbirds and snakes came out bc it was “about the villain” and wasn’t instead a novella of one of the many cute likeable faves of the masses. i remember how fast people were to tear down the book before it even came out (and still do now). and it’s like look, i get it, suzanne created so many interesting characters that it would be incredible to learn more about and get more content for. but her choosing to write about snow for a prequel isn’t like Romanticizing The Villain or whatever bullshit y’all are claiming as hot takes on twitter -- ballad fits right into the common themes and tone of the series in that its not a romanticization but a reflection on how snow became what we know him as in the original series. both in how he already had some less than charming or healthy traits (just like katniss does -- suzanne is always clear that people are not inherently good nor evil and parallels were drawn between how snow and katniss view the world and think strategically, etc, from the second book), but also in how society and the choices of the greater community in panem created snow. like ballad is a really interesting piece of lore and history and worldbuilding for an already rich and elaborate setting that suzanne created, allowing us to see how that world even came to be and the kind of toxic impact it had on the people surviving in it while still pointing out that those people are human and that everyone has humanity and yet can still cause unfathomable harm to one another based on circumstance and need to survive and pressures of all kinds and like i have lost the plot here now but suzanne is one of the best authors of our time who actually gives a shit about creating layered, nuanced characters and worlds rather than black and white good and evil and unfortunately the hyperpolarization of our hot takes social media culture nowadays just can’t handle her anymore. suzanne im so sorry we don’t deserve your storytelling. anyway i’ll be seated for this movie y’all can skip and keep giving lukewarm takes on twitter to make urself seem so smart for hating a book you probably didnt even actually read

[maxellminidisc]

Idk call me a fucking bitch or something but sometimes I get really sick of having watched something with a lot of depth, creativity, or some real sense of artistic exploration, and then wanting to share something about it on here, going to the tags to maybe find some gif sets or something and having to wade through the most reductive fanfic brained shit about it. Like maybe I dont want to see au's, self inserts, or god awful mischaracterizations somebody pulled out their ass about tragic figures or raconteurs in fiction or media. Maybe I would just like to appreciate and bask in what the story is giving me, maybe I'd like to entertain or a have a mature in depth discussion on what themes it may have for me and what other avenues of discussion it might prompt, what it may have spoken to me in terms of my experiences as someone with intersecting identities if it did and if it applied, all without reducing the goddamn story to shipping and shit.