#and most especially her choice.

[nyxreads]

So what do you think the next book will be about? We know it will be about Elain, but how do you see it going? What will be the main storylines? I am curious about what everyone is thinking.

Hello anon, sorry this kinda took me long to answer and honestly I am lazy and can't explain articulately what's in my mind but I'm gonna link you to some theories/analysis (based on canon) that I truly loved and agreed on about Elain and her upcoming book:

[celestialowlryx]

Rayla + being told how a m a z i n g she is

[letsmcfreackingloseit]

Hey-ho! I'm back again with some Apex Polarity art, but this time it's some designs for the humans' snow gear!

It started out with me just trying to figure out a design for y/n in my little comic, but then I thought it would be fun to also try and visualize the other humans, so here's my take of y/n, Vanessa and Michael! I really like how they turned out, although I don't think I got Vanessa's "patchwork" look quite right, but I still like where I landed. I added a blue scarf and I was really tempted to give her those red goggles, since it would've made her resemble Vanny even more, but in the end I desided against it.

So yeah- nothing too big this time, just something fun and easy!

But to round this off, I will of course credit the wonderful author @naffeclipse who is writing Apex Polarity, which you can go read if you click right here (can 100% recommend, especially if you like stories with a bunch of fluff, mystery and drama~!) and today I give credit to myself for the designs of the humans! ;P

[shorthaltsjester]

sometimes people will say “going dark” and then what they’re actually talking about is just people no longer presenting a carefully constructed version of their emotions and experiences.

like. emotional turmoil is not the same as darkness. laudna in this Fictional Universe that has tangibly different stakes wrt to death and killing than our own, is at best like . morally neutral for what she just did like. man has been secretly trying to kill you, and then just tried to do so again, killing him back is a fair choice. and even if i was someone who is excited by delilah’s inability to escape from the narrative, this shit isn’t about delilah. laudna made a choice. if delilah is back or whatever it’s a choice that laudna made because something in that grants her more control than her existing conditions did. this isn’t some Delilah Takes Over, it’s Laudna Expressly Makes The Choice To Call Forth Something within Herself to remedy the lack of control that’s been thrust upon her. if y’all want to Continue to limit Laudna’s agency (as the cr fandom is so, so want to do when a female character makes a choice that isn’t Good according to some weird system of virtue ethics) go ahead.

likewise with orym. little guy is not “going dark” because he has finally made direct action about his emotional turmoil in dealing with a situation which has similarly left him without control and has also placed him in a position where his stalwart conviction towards protecting and honouring those he loves and has lost alike is constantly met with other people he cares for going well.. what if they had a point/we are killing other peoples loved ones/etc. which like . yeah that might be frustrating and in fact might lead him to go, actually, i can’t afford to try and maintain some abject morality where I carry a locket that will literally only provide guilt. orym is completely committed to his beliefs, the locket and what it represents has never been a limit to what he will do, only a reminder of the consequences of what he might cause in those actions. but they Are at war and orym has a billion things on his plate. he can put down the locket. especially when bor’dor is the explicit manifestation of that locket’s symbolism. the subtext rapidly became the text and orym doesn’t need a reminder. it’s there in the fact that team issylra is walking away with two friends, not three.

these are character who have at every turn denied their own emotions in various forms while still being acutely aware of what they deny, whether that awareness was/is fully realized or not. many of laudna’s early convos with ashton show us that there is some awareness to the lighthearted spooky goth girl and how that persona fades when she thinks too much about what has led her and maintained that reality. likewise the entirety of orym’s story thus far is defined by his grief in a very literal sense, it Has extended from that grief to also the commitment he had to the purpose of figuring out the assassination attempt on keyleth but as we have seen, that purpose has fallen apart. paired with the quasi-reopening of his grief that was getting to see will again only to have to turn away, i don’t think there’s a lack of awareness in orym of how much he hurts. but between his actions and 4SD, that hurt tends to get buried under guilt or Responsibility.

and now, finally, both of them have admitted to that Not in the safety of small introspection or one-on-one conversations but with actions that they cannot shy away from or deny. laudna killed bor’dor and orym encouraged her to. and it Is a complex situation but truly I don’t really think it’s a “going dark” one. because they’re not giving into some overhanging Darkness of Morality™, they’re admitting that they are hurt and have long been hurting.

or, y’know, tldr for those who continue to deny laudna and orym agency or fully villainise them for whatever weird reasons . you could listen to laudna and ashton’s conversation that pretty much lays it out explicitly. laudna claims she’s weak for having chosen to kill bor’dor. ashton denies that and affirms instead that, no, she’s hurt.

[toddhewitt]

"Because I thought it would hurt too much." "I believe I could have coped."

[astrangergivingthestrangewelcome]

Something else about the 1977 production that I just noticed right now rewatching the shaving scene is they have a shot of Jonathan going to bed the night before, and 1) they have try and sleep before stopping and putting on the crucifix, which I think is a great way to emphasize that he's comforted by it through the medium of film and 2) as he's going to sleep it's you know morning, so you can hear outside the bleating of sheep which is just 👌👌👌👌 delectable symbolism right there mmmmMm.

[dirtytransmasc]

^^ screenshot. blends in on mobile/dark mode ^^

that wasn't why she was mad though, well it was and wasn't. it wasn't that she had sex necessarily, but more the weight and nuance of it all, of Rhaenyra being the princess, who Alicent had been trying her best to serve the best interest of and protect in terms of betrothals and Viserys, having sex in a very public place. she was clearly upset and holding back tears when she confronts Rhaenyra that first time, but she isn't especially angry. she's angry when Rhaenyra lied to her face on her dead mother's name, going so far as to act upset and offended Alicent could ever insinuate anything about her, played the victim, had sex with two separate people in one night and said she was still a maiden (from Alicent's perspective she couldn't have known Rhaenyra only tried to have sex with Daemon and was unsuccessful, she could only believe that she had sex with both Daemon and Criston), and then used her power to have her father (the only person Alicent had) banished from kings landing, all the while she had put her ass on the line for her in front of Viserys, who never believed Rhaenyra to begin with. it wasn't simply the fact that Rhaenyra had sex, she's mad because Rhaenyra used her, hurt her, did harm to her name and the work both she and Viserys had put towards giving her a choice no royal girl, especially a princess, could ever imagine, and she spit in their faces.

there's also the fact that Cole admitted IMMEDIATELY what had transpired, asked not for forgiveness but for death, and admitted that it was dubcon. it's a very different situation. she also sympathized with the fact he felt great remorse for both the act of sleeping with the princess but also his breakdown that lead to the murder of Joffery. all we see is her stopping him and then a near decade has passed and they are close friends, we know nothing of how this friendship evolved, when she fully forgave him for his acts, what it took for him to earn her trust and forgiveness.

not saying either of them are saintly and perfectly correct in that situation, but you boil it down to the point that the situation is unrecognizable. you ignored all of the nuance on both sides. Alicent was never mad about the sex, upset yes, mad no, she was mad at how Rhaenyra could hurt her so horribly (amongst many other things. I don't think she, someone who shared her grief with Rhaenyra over their dead mother's, could ever get over how Rhaenyra lied on her name. me personally? I'd be sick to my stomach every time I looked at her for the rest of my days). Cole was coerced into sex, which he was honest and seeked death for repentance, had a breakdown and murdered someone (I won't defend this, you can't, he did murder an innocent person, that is a fact) but felt so guilty he tried to kill himself and seemingly spent the last 10ish years making up for it (where as I can name multiple people Rhaenyra outright in level head and mind maimed/murdered/otherwise allowed or dismissed the deaths/injury of, for her own goals and didn't give a second thought to so.... girly walks atop barely cooled corpse's time and time again).

[donna-medusa-gorgon]

*taps mic*

Have we considered that Cain is the son of Eve and Lilith?

[misspickman]

very compelled by elsters gender both in a transmasc and transfem way bc well elster transmasc lesbian? beautiful wonderful 10/10. she is a robot whose body was made to fit the standards of what people consider a woman to look like, as is the case with most other replikas, so once she starts being treated more like a person of her own instead of just a worker robot, its fun to think of her chafing against it. on the other hand theres elster who was made to look like a woman/her neural pattern is copied from a woman, but is still treated like an object thats only there to do the job. shes referred to by others as 'it' in a dehumanizing way altho not purposely degrading bc they dont consider her a person enough to see this as cruel to her in any way. and slowly she ends up regaining her personhood and a concept of gender that feels right, as much as it can, considering the circumstances

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 6!!!

[onewholivesinloops]

satorika disembowelment scene is a literal take on the metaphor described in the beginning of minagoroshi, because it's the allegory of satoko taking the pain she's been feeling all this time and reaching into rika and pulling her insides out to make her feel it too. that's basically the type of metaphor satoko would use to express the torture her love for rika has made her feel, so she's cutting open her torso and pulling out her intestines before intimately embracing her and sobbing the feelings she's been circling around all this time by conveying them through hidden messages in the form of murders, with the hope that inflicting this pain on rika would finally make her capable of understanding her, as her feelings of love, hatred, anger and atonement all mix together in a very visceral way in every sense of the word.

[designernishiki]

I feel like I liked yakuza 5 a lot more than most people for some reason

[arabela25]

The Liverpool Songbook | Eurovision Song Contest 2023

[ilynpilled]

what do u think is jaime’s biggest flaw

oh he has a bunch

Biggest one: his fear of truly confronting things. his cowardice (the brave knight is deconstructed)

Arrogance is a given. His obsession with perception and his ego. His destructive dissociative tendencies and forced detachment. His self delusion and cynicism he uses to enable acts that his conscience knows are wrong. He also often falls into the trap of cynicism when he expects quick results and does not get them. When he makes choices to become better and people keep dehumanizing him and expect the worst from him he gets super frustrated and petty (less so atp, just compare his behavior to Brienne’s reaction when he gives her Oathkeeper and she misreads his intensions vs the gate not being opened for him in ADwD) His misogynistic and classist blindspots. Him weighing his values wrong even when his conscience is screaming at him (multiple examples of this, e.g Jeyne Poole: “her eyes were sad and wary”, “then why do you sound so frightened?”: vows from so many vows speech in conflict: obey your father vs protect the innocent. He obviously chooses wrong. George was telling us the way he changed by the end of ASoS is not enough he is not where he needs to be yet) His desperate want to make his “so many vows” compromise instead of making the correct choice and drawing the hard line he already did at 17. His desire to become Goldenhand the Just (just a mess frankly, gold tends to have negative symbolism in his story, his goldenhand also is associated with violence and is his desperate attempt to recreate his old self, his phantom fingers — again, has to be addressed in a dream.) While we are here also his need for his subconscious to literally repeatedly slap sense into him (his dreams addressing things he refuses to consciously address because it would hurt to do so). His tendency to repeat his father’s dogma when he is viscerally aware that that man is the worst man oat (Lannister sibling parallels! uwu!), unwittingly contradicting it in every way, then trying again. His desire to pursue glory as well as honor (and whatever they mean in the subtext) when the symbolism is very clearly established that the two cannot be achieved simultaneously for him, he cannot ride two horses at once. It might be that both get turn down at the end in some form. The honor related to the KG, and the glory related to duty to house Lannister. I think that conflict is getting picked apart right now with the choice he makes in ADwD to abandon his position/hunting down the brotherhood any kind of glory tying to house lannister pursuit etc to follow an injured and suspicious Brienne alone (mind you he was also riding Honor in that chapter, ntm the half moon). I think both honor and glory are very abstract and are rooted in some form in his desire for love as well (honor and glory paid their parts but in the end it was for cersei is something he reflects on) but “the things we do for love” has to be something not destructive and prejudiced. He is disillusioned by both honor and glory, especially after aerys. “What is honor?” A horse. Like deep down he knows. His arc in AFfC-ADwD was about about taking apart and looking at all of these flaws imo, put him in a spot to make his choice in adwd. and all that matters are choices. He is also an asshole.

[bleached-socks]

Ichigo Kurosaki but as Cat Noir

Well, his name is actually Hell Cat, but that’s not important. Basically I’m trying to design an Ichigo Kurosaki superhero look based on a black cat. This is for a Miraculous Ladybug AU, so he’d have the same power source as Cat Noir from the show.

I’d liked the green highlights from Lady Noire’s suit (who is Ladybug but with Cat Noir’s powers), but I worry I might have gone too far on some of the looks. Number 3 was my original design actually, and the others are variations, some of which I like better than the original.

Some choices I plan on keeping are the jacket and the tail. The jacket is cropped, and I’m keeping this as a vague reference to season 1 of Bleach where Ichigo just wore crop tops. The tail has a chain segment in the middle which is supposed to tie back to Zangetsu.

(I promise these are just mock-ups to get the design and coloring right, it will look much better when I actually work on it)

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on why you picked which option you did.

Or if you liked some aspects of multiple, please let me know what you think.

[lisbonsteresa]

i'm going to SCREAM