#before i move forward

[loppiopio]

anatomy of a heart // open up

cardiogram.carrd.co

[ohithankyou]

the way the theme of home and tommy being buck’s home has been following them since season seven with “come home and be with your man”…..his loft becoming more lived-in when he was with tommy….the closest he came to finding a sense of “home” after moving out of the loft was after a night spent with tommy….how they have yet to find their way back to each other and buck still has yet to find home…..

[artilite]

stuck... forever?

drew this right after finishing act 4! had a day of intermission before going on and finishing the game so this ending really got to soak with me...

[curseofdelos]

mentally I'm still here:

Nico insisting that neither of them are going to be sacrificed/left behind to satisfy the prophecy is a perfect encapsulation of his growth over the series and it makes me SO soft to think about

Nico as a character - particularly in BoO - doesn't have a lot of self-preservation. He doesn't really care what happens to him as long as the mission gets done. We see this most explicitly after he almost fades into nothingness after the Bryce Lawrence incident:

And again when he considers shadow travelling into Octavian's tent to assassinate him:

(Nico himself notes here that it was unlikely he would survive another jump. If Will hadn't stopped him, he probably would have died.)

In both cases, Nico was willing to risk death for the sake of ending the war. He puts very little value on his own life, and repeatedly argues to Reyna, Hedge, and Will that the possibility of saving camp (a place he never felt welcome at, might I add) is worth the risk of losing his life.

Even before Nico went on the quest with Reyna and Hedge, the others were concerned about his safety. Percy tried to remind him how unpredictable his shadow travelling could be, and Hazel notes that he has been acting strangely lately:

It's not quite clear what Hazel is worried about here, but my interpretation of this scene is that she's concerned that Nico isn't thinking - or perhaps, isn't caring - about what effect the constant shadow travelling will have on his wellbeing. Between Tartarus, the jar, and the Cupid incident, Nico's mental state is at its worst at this point in the series, and I think Hazel is worried he'll do something reckless - something he can't come back from.

And so in TSATS, when Nico is told that he's going to have to leave something of equal value behind in order to save Bob, the old him would have had zero issue sacrificing himself if that's what it took to ensure Will and Bob's survival. This version of Nico, who's been going to therapy w/ Mr D and opening up more and built a little support system for himself, can't fathom it.

Nico in BoO did not have a future. He had fully convinced himself that nobody cared about him or would miss him if he was gone - not Percy who fought for him at every turn in PJO, not his sister Hazel, not his new friends Jason and Reyna. He was ready to leave both camps behind because he couldn't see himself ever being happy there. He couldn't see himself being happy at all.

But now, in TSATS, he has a boyfriend that he loves, he has friends that he loves, and he has a community in Camp Half-Blood. He has experienced so much loss that losing someone else is his worst fear. The old Nico would have considered sacrificing himself to protect Will and Bob. At the very least, he would have kept that option in his back pocket as a 'just in case'; he wouldn't have sworn on the Styx that he wouldn't stay behind.

This Nico, however, is doing much better - not perfect, but better. He loves Will, and he wants a life with him, and he's not willing to give that up for anything. Nico has hope for the future, and he's clinging to that hope with everything he has. He sees a light at the end of the tunnel, and he wants to reach it. He's not willing to sacrifice himself because it means losing that future.

Gone is the cynical pessimistic Nico who assumes the worst because the worst is all he thinks he can have. Here is the Nico who has had a taste of happiness and is willing to fight to keep it. He's not going to sacrifice himself because he wants to live. He's not just fighting for Will here; he's fighting for himself too.

And seeing him go from "if it kills me, it kills me" to "it's not going to be me" makes me so ASDFGHJKL

[4lbon]

i will not be gaslit that this is normal cutthroat sports behavior. this is not normal. being cut after two races is not normal. this is less about liam and more about red bull making increasingly desperate decisions that only make their van headed for a cliff drive faster

[dandelion-roots]

[ID: a digital drawing of riz gukgak from fantasy high. in the front is a relatively small drawing of riz juggling books that are falling out of his hand and a phonecall, and he has a huge backpack on. he looks a bit overwhelmed, hair flying in all directions, and has a nervous smile on. in the background is a large shadow of riz, only one glowing eye and a shining gun visible. the background is red, giving an eerie feel. End ID]

Kill your best friend

Cheat your way to your rogue teacher

Announce your presidential campaign

Don't let them know how angry you are

LEARN TO RECOGNIZE A MONSTER

[anthqnystark]

i hate love triangles but frank has been jealous of whatever isn’t going on between matt and karen for the better part of a decade and if this storyline forces him to finally confront those feelings? to admit that yes, he does want an after and he wants it with karen? to take his own advice and use two hands and never let go? delicious

[clockworkreapers]

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Eddie being shown hugging Ravi rather than buck in this scene has me up in my feels actually.

Especially in combination with the conversation about Eddie being in the army and having been to a lot of funerals like this.

Because Ravi is a physical embodiment of bucks abandonment issues and Buck is watching on when the hug happens but not when the army stuff is talked about and that’s significant. It’s Eddie embracing bucks fear of abandonment when he’s feeling abandoned by his pseudo father and trying to live up to his last words - that the others are going to need him. So Eddie embracing Ravi is Eddie embracing Buck - having bucks back as he always has done and which we get a further representation of when they are carrying the coffin.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The girls are plottinggggg

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[severalowls]

Overheard a trans kid at the bus stop talking to somebody about how his school won't let him use either bathroom (the adult told him this is almost certainly illegal) and there's one teacher who's a total shit, so he says "Alright if you won't respect my pronouns I won't respect your proper nouns, lowercase mr [surname]" and he's got the whole class calling him "lowercase mr [surname]" which is fucking fantastic I love kids.

[koukouture]

Emet Selch is so much better than me bc if I had to chase my bestfriend/ex situationship/whatever-the-fuck-they-were throughout their various incarnations for the next 12,000 years and watch them as they fall short of the glory they once had WHILE ALSO USHERING OTHER WORLDS TO THEIR ENDS- I would have actually killed myself.

I have a job to do bc of the god I helped summon??? One of my co-workers is insane and the other one is losing his memory??? My other bestie/ex situationship's soul is trapped ON THE MOON??? I wouldn't have just rebuilt a shade of my home- I would have crashed the fuck out.

Honestly it's kind of astounding how Emet is still standing after... *gestures* all of that??? Ik a big part of it is probably Zodiark, but the fact that he's still coherent and civil (when he wants to be) and capable of making 5D chess schemes is amazing tbh I would have lost my mind. Bro's mental fortitude is craaaazy.

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[nimbusclan]

Moon 5 Part 1

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When Moonpool opens her eyes, she’s momentarily blinded by how bright everything is.

Shielding her eyes with a paw, she squints at her surroundings, then gasps. The rudimentary, half scraped together den of moss she fell asleep in underneath the wide, low branch of a tree on the mountainside is gone. Instead, there are stars everywhere.

They’re close enough that she could reach out and bat them around with her paws. Quite suddenly, she’s overcome with a kit-like desire to do just that. Pounce on a nearby star, wrestle it to the ground, and toss it with her back feet. A rush of giddiness sweeps through her as she looks around, stars as far as the eye can see and misty, snow-white clouds that swirl around her paws.

Against the raven-black backdrop of the sky, a collection of stars just beyond her reach takes shape, coalescing into the form of a young kitten. Moonpool gapes, staring in shock as the cat fully comes to be, bounding towards her with bouncing steps and a pelt sprinkled with starlight.

“...Condorkit?”

“Hi, Moonpaw!” The starry kit grins, her pelt as dark as the sky. Even with starlight streaking her fur and her eyes aglow with moonlight, there’s no mistaking it. This is Condorkit! “Or, Moonpool now, right? I’ve missed playing moss ball with you. You were the best moss ball player.”

“I… I haven’t seen you since before the camp caved in.” Moonpool’s voice cracks, a sudden swell of grief slashing through her chest as she looks down upon Condorkit’s shining, smiling face. If this is another one of Moonpool’s nightmares, it’s almost worse than the ones where she fails to warn her Clan again, and again, and again.

“Let’s stay focused, Condorkit,” A deeper voice mews, cutting through Moonpool’s maudlin thoughts, another constellation of stars taking shape.

“Dad!” Moonpool cries, rushing forward to bonk her head with his, relieved to find it solid against her own.

Cliffstripe mrrps with laughter, the sound of it rumbling through his throat as he nuzzles against his daughter’s head. “I’ve missed you, darling. It’s so lovely to see you again.”

“What’s going on?” Moonpool pulls back, looking between the two starry cats with confusion. “Why can I see you? Am I dreaming?”

“It’s your leader ceremony!” Condorkit chirps. “We’re here to give you your nine lives!”

“My–?”

More and more cats begin to take shape behind the two already present, Clan members Moonpool knew in life and some she doesn’t recognize. Seeming to melt straight out of the sky, Pitchstar steps forward to the front, his presence commanding in the lithe stretch of muscle under his panther-like pelt. Hovering just in front of his forehead is a star so bright, Moonpool feels almost as though she may have to shield her eyes again.

“Indeed it is,” Pitchstar mews smoothly, a pleased smile gracing a muzzle gray with age. He stands delicately before Moonpool, front paws together as he regards her.

“But I didn’t… I didn’t commune with StarClan on purpose,” Moonpool says in a rush. “I– there’s not even a clan to lead.”

“We will always be available to you in your time of need, Moonpool. StarClan is with you always. It is time for you to lead NimbusClan into a new future.”

“Me first!” Condorkit yowls, knocking into Pitchstar’s legs as she bounds forward to stand on wobbly hind legs in front of Moonpool. A smile twitches the corner of Moonpool’s muzzle. She’s going to miss her Clan even more fiercely when she wakes. “Me first. Okay. I’m giving you your first life for tireless energy.”

A gasp punches out of Moonpool’s throat as Condorkit touches her nose to Moonpool’s forehead, a sense of vitality surging within her and burning all the way out to her claws and the tip of her tail. It… it hurts, the surge of energy, and she finds herself gritting her teeth as Condorkit grins as she drops back to all four paws, turning tail and bouncing back into the group of assembled StarClan cats.

Next, Cliffstripe and Frostcrest pad forward.

“Mom,” Moonpool mews, voice choked with emotion as the burning pain recedes, leaving her paws tingling, “dad.” She butts her head against each of theirs, brushing her pale pelt between their starry ones. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know that I’m meant to lead.”

“Sometimes,” her mother begins, voice gentle, “these responsibilities are thrust upon us, and it is wiser to let the river carry you than to fight it upstream.” Frostcrest smiles at her. There’s a slight bow to her eyebrows, something in her expression that Moonpool recognizes as worry, but Frostcrest continues before Moonpool can ask her what’s wrong. “You will be an amazing leader, kit. Stay true to you. Your Clan needs you now. I give you this life for confidence.”

“And I, a life for mercy. Tell your brother that we miss him, too,” Cliffstripe adds, and both of Moonpool’s parents lean forward to press their noses to her forehead. She braces against the rush this time as it surges through her, an alternating sensation of warm and cool, feeling as though it could lift her off of her paws.

Froststripe gives her one last lick to her shoulder, eyes sad but muzzle smiling as she turns with Cliffstripe and walks back into the crowd of cats.

Another kit bounds forward, a brown tabby with eyes that glow with ethereal light.

“Whisperkit,” Moonpool greets warmly, bending to speak with him face to face.

“Never give up, okay?” The seriousness in Whisperkit’s quiet tone is almost enough to make Moonpool chuckle, if the circumstances were different. If Whisperkit were still alive. “I give you this life for hope.”

Loudtalon, NimbusClan’s medicine cat, pads forward. “You’ve always been smart, Moonpool. Keep it up. I give you this life for wisdom.”

“If you weren’t fit to be leader, you wouldn’t have made it this far,” Pebblespore, the deputy, assures. “I give you this life for certainty.”

Currentpaw swaggers from the crowd, grinning at Moonpool. She used to be bigger than Moonpool, in life. Now, Moonpool is tall enough to look down at her. Friendly challenge is bright in her ghostly eyes. “You never could beat me in our sparring sessions, but I bet you’d be able to now. Keep practicing, so you can always keep your clan safe. I give you this life for strength.”

Finally, Pitchstar steps forward, his black pelt almost indistinguishable from the night sky surrounding them. There is pride in his gaze as he stares unwaveringly into Moonpool’s eyes, and something more. Something indecipherable. “You will make a fine leader, Moonstar. I would choose no other cat to follow in my pawsteps. NimbusClan is yours, now. I will ensure that you succeed.”

A shiver works its way through Moonpool’s fur, despite the lack of sensation up here above the clouds. With a start, she realizes she’s not cold, nor warm. There is no wind that ruffles her fur, no firm ground beneath her paws. She is snared by Pitchstar’s eyes, inches from her own, intense and otherworldly.

“I give you this life for protection.” He presses his black nose to her head, a sudden, violent burst of pain twisting through her that feels like she’s run full speed into a rock wall, then turns with the swish of a long tail. Moonpool stares at his retreating back. The pain fades and she feels full of vibrant energy, near to bursting.

She’s just beginning to wonder how she’s supposed to get back to her living body, back to her brother, when her thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of another cat. “You are not done yet. You have one more life left to receive.” Moonpool doesn’t recognize this cat. They’re dark-furred, with a ticked pelt and naked, scarred paws. “I am Oddghost, one of NimbusClan’s prior medicine cats, long before your time. You will face many challenges, Moonpool. Walk always in the path of StarClan, with your brother at your side. Believe not just in your ancestors, but in your own power. In the power of your Clanmates. You are only as strong as your Clan. I grant you your final life for faith.”

Moonpool’s final life surges into her, seeping through her body with such strength her vision whites out, the starry cats in front of her fading from view.

“Lead NimbusClan well, Moonstar.”

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[synonymroll648]

headcanon that the reason sophie still has eyelashes to pull on the regular is that grady and edaline worked something out with the dizznees to get a tasteless formula to help eyelash growth specifically to put drops of in her bottles of youth. because there’s no way her ptsd-induced trichotillomania (oversimplified definition for those who aren’t familiar: hair pulling disorder) is gonna die down during the war, so they’re trying to make sure she doesn’t move from eyelashes to eyebrows or her Hair hair by giving her More Eyelashes

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Wangxian goes to horse jail for their crimes against equines.