#anyway back to your regularly scheduled program

[kakavashazz]

I AM LITERALLY SO UNWELL AND HOYO KEEPS FEEDING ME

[selfshipping-haven]

why can't I ever be flirted with in a normal way?

[soybean-official]

The parts of you that support me

[purrfectlycontent]

i may be going insane

[hurrakka]

Violet Mizutsune Leon and Thunderlord Chris

Every time I'm at that cutscene in RE6 all I could think of are the monster hunter turf wars and this has been eating away at my brain so uhhhh ye had to get it out of my system lol

[mumms-the-word]

Duke Belynne Stelmane and the Emperor

currently reading lore stuff about mind flayers for an upcoming deep dive and anyway here's some depressing content about how the Emperor turned Belynne Stelmane into his thrall (probably)

This is not Hot New Lore or a Brand New Theory by any stretch of the imagination, but hear me out

Remember when Wyll talks about meeting Stelmane? How he only saw her twice, but the second time she was very different? They attribute her changes to a stroke.

Wyll: I met her twice. The first time, I was a boy of seven or eight, at a banquet in the Flaming Fist's honour. One look and I was smitten. Chesnut hair that flowed behind her like willow fronds. She floated from one room to the next as if carried by clouds. The second time, Stelmane was...different. Even with the aid of a cane, each step she took was a struggle. Every word she spoke took great physical effort. 'A stroke victim?' I asked my father later. 'No,' he said. 'A stroke survivor.' Not a mere stroke, as it turns out - but the scars of her possession. Gods, what I wouldn't give to drive a dagger through the Emperor's building head. We can never let it do to us what it did to Stelmane.

The last part, the part where Wyll realizes that it was more than a stroke, is conditional upon you calling the Emperor out for possessing or messing with Stelmane, which is when the Emperor literally shows you him possessing her.

Note the glowy purple eyes and then later the mechanical movements, the fixed stares, the way Stelmane toasts the Emperor as if moved by puppet strings. Her gestures are stiff, as if she's being controlled.

Wyll and his father attribute Stelmane's movements to being part of a stroke. Slurred speech and difficulty moving parts of your body are stroke symptoms, so it's a convenient explanation for her change in behavior and her difficulty with movement and speech. But possession?

No, dear readers, I don't think the Emperor was possessing Stelmane. I think he genuinely made her a literal thrall.

(please excuse the horrible quality lol)

From Volo's Guide to Monsters on Mind Flayers:

A thrall-to-be is first rendered docile through psionic means. Using a low-power version of its Mind Blast ability, the mind flayer bombards the victim with energy that washes through its synapses like acid, clearing away its former personality and leaving it a partially empty shell. This step takes 24 hours. Over the next 48 hours, the illithids rebuild the victim's memories and personality, and the victim gains the skills and talents it needs to perform its intended function.

A Mind Blast that "washes through synapses like acid" sounds a lot like a stroke-adjacent experience to me. Strokes attack the brain, causing parts of the brain to literally die (usually due to a lack of blood flow or oxygen). It could explain Stelmane's stiff movements.

The "clearing away" of her personality and the suggestion of "rebuilding" her memories would also be extremely useful to the Emperor. Rather than exerting the mental energy to possess her all the time, constantly keeping her under concentrated surveillance, all he had to do was literally break her and then rebuild her. She becomes a Stelmane that is only partly herself, and empty shell that he can mold as he pleases.

This is veering into headcanon territory, but I imagine if it was just basic possession, she would move a little more fluidly and naturally than she does in the Emperor's memory. She wouldn't be exhibiting movements and speech that mimic stroke symptoms. That, and there is always the potential she could break free of possession.

But if she's a full-on mind flayer thrall, broken and rebuilt? An empty husk that has had her memories and personality pumped back into her, still under the control of the Emperor? That makes a ton of sense to me. There's no snapping out of that. As the Emperor says when he threatens you...she becomes a puppet.

And the fact that he keeps the threat of doing the same to you in his metaphorical back pocket at all times is honestly quite terrifying.

[flandesuka]

tl;dr here's my thoughts on the game awards this year

[o-wild-west-wind]

tumblr algorithm stop feeding me takes that this show is just a silly goofy comedy that shouldn’t include death or that Izzy is the token disabled elder queer on the show where an actual disabled elder queer is literally the romantic lead or that Lucius and Pete being called “mateys” is diluting their gayness because it’s not “husbands” or that it’s sexist that Zheng lost her fleet and later prioritized her love for a man or that Ed is Izzy’s abuser because we conveniently forgot all of season 1 or that trauma is never followed through with because sometimes actions are used instead of words or that Ed learned nothing because the inn was apparently a whim as if he hasn’t been obsessing over retirement from day 1 I swear did we even watch the same show?? I literally feel like I’m in backwards land?

I have a really novel concept for y’all complaining about character’s arcs not being fully resolved or healed and that’s called there is supposed to be another season of this show

I also have another really novel concept as to why every single character did not have a one on one trauma apology session and so much time was spent on Ed and Stede and that is because this is literally the Ed and Stede show and also sometimes parallels are meant to be inferred and extrapolated because that is what efficient storytelling does instead of spoonfeeding you

And my most novel concept of all as to why some beloved characters had less screen time is because Max is a massive jerk and cut the budget

Y’all this wasn’t personal and maybe this show was never about Izzy maybe the show called our flag means death is actually about death maybe sad does not equal homophobic letdown maybe the brown gay character introduced as the love interest from day 1 gets to outlive the angry white guy that had a redemption arc after actively bullying and trying to break up every gay couple for a season I don’t know what to tell you just can you please let non-white people have this arc for once without assuming it’s an attack on you I’m BEGGING y’all

[puuuders]

Definitely not what I usually post but this freaked me out enough I wanna talk about it.

Do you see someone you are attracted to? Do you wanna approach them? DO NOT SCREAM AT THEM FROM ACROSS THE STORE, ASKING FOR THEIR AGE AND THEN HIT ON THEM! Especially when you are a CASHIER WORKING THERE.

How about you kindly ask them? How about you do not humiliate them in front of other strangers?

Its really that simple!

[drabbles-mc]

picking up where i last left off with my mayans mc rewatch and let me be so fucking clear: if miguel galindo has no haters it means I'm fucking dead

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

Time for a lighthearted review!

By now a number of people have heard of ボクの神隠し(boku no kamikakushi), aka “My Spiriting Away” or “My Mysterious Disappearance,” aka the BL manga that Okamoto Nobuhito, voice actor of Bakugou Katsuki, was involved in. It is available to read for free in Japanese here with a total of three chapters. This post contains spoilers for the ending.

Here’s a Q&A peppered with my thoughts on it.

The Premise

Crybaby Uzuki idolizes his childhood friend Haruto who always protected him, but since they started high school, their relationship has soured, leaving Uzuki utterly alone. One day, the pair are kidnapped by a strange man and forced to participate in a mysterious game of life-or-death.

How is Okamoto involved?

Okamoto is credited for the 原案 (gen’an). A corollary industry term in English would be “original idea” or possibly “scenario.” In my experience with comics, this suggests he created the characters and premise, then wrote the concept out and submitted it to a second party to be fleshed out for full production.

The script is credited to Production Beijyu (プロダクションベイジュ), a company who offers a variety of production and promotion services with a focus on editing and proofreading books, magazines, manga, and anime.

The manga—so the artwork and all of its production—is credited to 戸真伊まい, a name I can only guess is read as Tomai Mai, which sure sounds like a pen name and doesn’t appear to be linked to any other published work. This could be for a lot of reasons; the artist might be totally new or they might have worked in other genres and chose a unique pen-name for BL, but the only thing I found attached to this name online was their Twitter account.

How’d it get made, anyway?

As far as I can tell, Okamoto must have personally reached out to Beijyu and applied for their services to help make his idea a real thing. Beijyu gear themselves towards small, independent artists and authors, especially those who haven’t debuted with a magazine or printed publication yet.

For those unaware, manga is a massive industry in Japan, and it can be extremely difficult to get your foot in the door. Many creators talk about having their concepts rejected repeatedly by magazine after magazine, or getting a single one-shot published and then struggling to keep the momentum. There’s a reason all of the huge Shounen Jump creators talk about the intense pressure to keep their work popular and to avoid getting dropped from publication by any means necessary.

Boku no Kamikakushi is available for free and I haven’t heard of any plans for a physical release. To be honest, this suggests to me that Okamoto genuinely wanted to get his story made regardless of profitability—he isn’t just a celebrity attaching his name to a series for attention. There wasn’t some industry demand or opportunity that he took advantage of for professional gain, he must have been the one to initiate this endeavor, and honestly, good for him.

Is it really bkdk?

Nah. I will grant you that the tropes at play certainly reveal Okamoto’s tastes, and we sure could extrapolate about his feelings on bkdk from those tastes. But beyond the similarities in backstory, base themes, and design aesthetic that people have pointed out, the couple have very little in common with bkdk, and in fact, the way they diverge is kind of hilariously shocking??

Okay, fine. What’s their deal, then?

Uzuki is a yandere rich boy who likes to get choked. Haruto is honestly a hapless, horny victim in all this.

What!?

Yeah. The “mastermind” behind the kidnapping is Uzuki himself, who staged the whole thing with his butler. Basically, their high school classmates tease Haruto for being associated with Uzuki, the son of the richest noble in town; Haruto resents it so he distances himself from Uzuki and rejects him. Uzuki ends up lonely with no friends and missing Haruto, so he stages his own kidnapping and puts them both in the “death game” as a way to force Haruto to remember his childhood promise to protect Uzuki as his hero.

That’s insane???

YES. IT IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

It’s especially funny because the parameters of the death game don’t technically require them to have sex or get intimate, Uzuki is just a fucking freak and Haruto is confused by his own horniness and goes along with it. The first trial involves a selection of drinks, one of which contains poison, and they have to keep choosing one to drink from until someone dies. Haruto ends up poisoned, and Uzuki uses his prize (“one wish”) as the winner to get the antidote and save him, of course passing it to Haruto via full-on mouth kiss.

Haruto has a gay crisis about it.

The second game: whoever raises the other person’s heart rate to 130 beats per minute first wins, and the person with the elevated heart rate dies. Haruto’s heart rate spikes from aftereffects of the poison, and Uzuki’s solution is… for Haruto to choke him… on the bed they woke up on… so his heart rate increases as well. And then he asks Haruto to kiss him, too, and they just start making out until Uzuki’s heart rate hits 130. Haruto gets upset because he lost his head and ended up dooming Uzuki, but then somehow they arrange for this death to also be nullified, and they end up continuing to play the game for three days.

Three whole days!?!

THREE DAYS! This kid traps Haruto in a dungeon so he can make him participate in weird, sadistic, horny shenanigans for three days!

And then when they finally escape and everything is revealed, Haruto is just blankly confused and has this absent look on his face, repeating that he’ll protect Uzuki. The butler says that Uzuki performed excellent mind control, but then Uzuki imprisons the butler so it can be “just the two of them.”

What the fuck, Okamoto???

Right? And you know what, it isn’t my jam at all, but can we just take a moment to recognize that a professional voice actor who is popular and prominent in the public eye wanted his weird horny BL idea to come to fruition, so he went forth into the world and made it so? And he didn’t even hide behind a pen name or anything, he wants people to associate him with it, he’s promoting it! He loves the hell out of it!

Like, I’m pretty astounded by that, and honestly I respect it. More people should just make things that cater to their own tastes without any self-consciousness about it. Wave your freak flag high, Okamoto.

[ratatatastic]

hi 13 second clip that i will be obsessed with for years to come because mikksy and lombo are doing mikksy and lombo things in the bg as they usually do how are you doing

theres something about mikksy looking over to his left and spacing out but when he sees long brown hair in his periphery he turns towards it, sees lombo struggling to pass off the cup and stares at him until lombo comes his way. the pining is palpable. i can feel it from here. he has the targetting program of a turret hes locking on.

also someone seems to either dropped a hat(?) or something of that nature because right as lombo steps forward to where mikksy is he bends down to get it but mikksy seeing him, also makes to reach for it but lombo seems to have it covered so he just bows like a chicken for a bit because his gentlemanly code intiated (rare sight) seeing a beautiful man bend down to retrieve an object...

and then after lombo comes up he immediately gets an arm around him and ushers him into his side. MANS GOT A FULL TOOTHY GRIN ON SEEING LOMBO. TH- AND HE REALISES HOW BIG HE MUST BE SMILING BECAUSE HE JUST CLOSES HIS MOUTH AND TRIES TO PLAY OFF THE FACT HE DIDN'T JUST HAVE THE GOOFIEST GRIN ON HIS FACE.

THE WAY LOMBOS CHEEK IS SO SMUSHED INTO HIS SHOULDER HE BARELY REACHES. PERFECT SIZE TO SNUGGLE INTO THE COLLARBONES. IM SORRY WHERE IS PLAYGROUND BULLYING PRETENSE??? SO WE'VE LOST THAT. WE'RE JUST GONNA COURT EACH OTHER NOW. WE'VE FINALLY ADMITTED TO THE ELEPHANT IN YHE ROOM AND WE WILL BE ACTING ON OUR FEELINGS HONESTLY. IS THAT WHAT WE'RE DOING. IT ONLY TOOK BOTH OF YOU BEING DRUNK. OKAY.

Panthers Championship Parade | 6.30.24

[hawnks]

One of the most frustrating things for me personally aside from literally everything, is that we know canonically that getou smells like sandalwood, but we don’t know what gojo smells like

[distort-opia]

Hi!

I love your meta posts and I was curious about your opinions on the killing joke’s adaptions, I’m talking mainly about the movie and the novel.

Something that really bugs me is the way the story is considered, rightfully, misogynistic in its treatment of Barbara but every sigle time someone tries to “fix” it they are only capable of making it even worse.

I read the novel version recently and it was so bad 😭 not only they added an incel type character that Joker recruits (he straight up says “nice guys like us”, which is just cringe but at least he was being manipulative here) and made him witness Barbara’s torture (btw she forgives him at the end of the story…), they also strongly implied that she was raped and generally made the whole thing even more humiliating by setting up a camera that live shared a video of her, while naked and bleeding to death, all over Gotham ( coupled with disgusting comments on how the footage looks at first like a porn). These exemples are just the tip of the iceberg! The book is filled with sexualised female characters, sexist remarks and the decision to add Harley just to paint her as a dumb horny woman surrounded by incompetent people that ignore the fact that she is clearly having sex with her patient.

At the end, the authors have the nerve to dedicate the novel to women…

I feel like this is the same thing that happened with modern versions of Jarley, they just write Joker more and more abusive and Harley without any kind of agency (ex. the new origin story with the bleached skin…ugh) to make her story more feminist. At this point It’s not even funny to read a comic that feature both of them :(

Sorry for sending you such a negative ask 🥲

To conclude on a more positive note, I love your fics and I can’t wait to read more! 💞

To be honest I don't have much to add, I entirely agree! You've written great commentary. I also did not even read the novel adaptation of TKJ precisely for the reasons you outlined; I was told how shitty it was. But fucking hell, I did not know the full extent of it. As you said, they keep trying to "fix" Barbara's treatment in TKJ but they just keep making it so much worse... And a similar thing is happening with Harley, because DC wants her to be a hero now-- so her previously darker traits must be either erased or completely attributed to Joker's Evil, Abusive influence. It's indeed pretty infuriating, both for Harley fans and Joker fans.

(And thank you, glad you like my writing!)

[sailor-aviator]

Listen, I don't like the way I look half the time, but I WILL say that I have pretty great tits

[mosscreeper-ao3]

Now a normal person would just delete that post since it reached the wrong side of tumblr. But I am an insane man and every breath I take without TERF permission raises my self esteem so up it shall stay 😌