#best approach

[girl4music]

Best approach to ‘Tears Of The Kingdom’?

Don’t do any of the shrines apart from the mandatory ones on Great Sky Island before completing the main campaign. The weapons and armor you get as a reward improves the further along you are in the game and the more powerful you become as a result. Yes, it ultimately means you’ll be stuck with 4 (or 3) hearts and 1 (or 1 and a quarter) stamina wheel for most of the game but it’s worth it. Not to mention the puzzles in the shrines are a lot more fun once you’ve gotten used to the mechanics of the Zonai abilities Link has.

Just focus on main campaign and side quests.

Do not complete any shrines. Trust me. Getting end game gear is so worth it. And you get it in the shrines.

[whalesfall]

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

[clementine-kesh]

[chechula]

I did not have time to draw creatures for last goblin week, but I have time now. So, here are orcs of Moria and drums in the darkness ♥

[flame-shadow]

As a commissioner, I love seeing how artists interpret and stylize my characters, but as an artist, I often agonize over if I should try to match the style of the provided reference or lean into my own style.

[yuseirra]

been listening to her songs lately!! they're a blessing

[vaguely-concerned]

it probably says something either sad or deeply unfortunate about me as a person, but I'm darkly amused to see some people react to the reveal of the ultimate permeability of souls in tlt as a triumphant thing -- the "you can't take 'loved' away!!!" side of it all -- when my first reaction was such an immediate wave of 'oh, oh so this is why this series is horror, I truly understand now' distress haha. ngl the final confirmation of the self not being inviolable in the deepest way freaks me the fuck out far more than any moment of body horror in the series has managed. (these two elements are of course the two sides of one thematic coin; it's about the horror of our bodies and minds and selves not being inviolable things, and about the effect of violence on them on so many different levels. violence psychological and interpersonal, physical, subtextually sexual, emotional, medical, political, a whole unlovely smörgåsbord of indignity and violation a person can be exposed to, and on a broader scale the spectrum of violence colonialism wields). The world and other people being capable of leaving indelible marks on us for good or ill through their presence in our lives is of course a pretty self-evident demonstrable truth in the real world, but somehow having it be proven metaphysically just uh. Fucks me up! 

It also drives home to me just how perfectly Muir has captured the dilemma at the heart of human connection and intimacy: the fact that the thing that gives us life and meaning is also capable of harming us so deeply. the same thing that can be so beautiful — even in a bittersweet, violently transformative form like with the creation of Paul — when done mutually and consensually and compassionately, is the same process that means someone like John can touch someone else's soul and 'after he's put his fingers on something, you'll never find anyone else's fingerprints on it; too much noise'. I think the text itself — the whole series, because to me this is what it is ultimately about, this tension between individuation/self vs. love/connection/enmeshment — is far more ambivalent in its treatment of it than saying it’s inherently a good thing or inherently a bad thing. The only thing it says for sure is that it is always a thing, that thinking you’re ever getting away from it is the height of futility, and that through being alive (or even through being dead lol) it is something you have to engage with in some way no matter what. Contact with other people is deeply necessary — without it we sicken and die. it can be the most beautiful and meaningful thing in a human life, and the most unspeakably horrific. All of these people are searching for some way to be whole, whether in total self-contained sufficiency on their own or in melding with someone else as their ‘other half’, and stumbling around in the dark they reach for each other and score deep wounds into the thing they’re trying to touch even when they don’t mean to. Taken to horrific extremes with the form of lyctorhood John guided his disciples to when they were ‘children — playing in the reflections of stars in a pool of water, thinking it was space’, because while people hurt each other all the time with differing levels of intentionality behind it, what John did was deliberate. It weaponizes the misapprehension of what closeness must be and destroys everyone involved in the process… and all because it leaves John the one sun their ruined lives have left to orbit around, because that’s the closest thing his soul will allow to connection. He doesn’t understand that to truly touch something you have to truly let it touch you back, and then wonders why he’s never satisfied.   

‘The horrors of love’ has been memed to death, I know, but… yeah. That is what it is, isn’t it.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Detectives at the Disco (Elysium)

[hypewinter]

We've seen a lot of Danny is Damian's twin or older brother but I haven't seen many Danny is Damian's younger brother.

Dick Jason Tim Cass

I see this going two ways:

Danny gets whisked away from the league. Probably because Ra's was going to have Damian kill him as a test of loyalty but Talia or one of his nurses was having none of that. He ends up in Illinois, becomes a ghost, bla bla bla. They meet again when Sam drags Danny to a gala in Gotham with her and Damian is like "Danyal!?". Danny is utterly confused because he was too young to remember Damian or the league. Cue Damian going into overprotective 'I'm never letting you out of sight again' mode. The giw doesn't stand a chance once he finds out about them. The batfam is absolutely shocked because no one knew their youngest could be that protective of another person (Damian is 16 in this while Danny is still 14 btw). Him and Jazz are about to duke it out for custody or at least for the position as the most reliable sibling. Danny meanwhile is still processing that he has an assassin older brother. Neat.

Danny reincarnates. He retains his ghost powers somewhat which makes him special in the eyes of Ra's. This means he gets a separate training regimen. Damian sees his younger brother winning all of his grandfather's attention and promptly proceeds to pretend like he doesn't exist when he leaves for Wayne Manor. Out of jealousy and all that. Until one of the batbros is needling him about something or another and he lets it slip. The batfam is instantly like "we gotta rescue him" which Damian is not happy about. The entire rescue mission, he's complaining about how pointless this all is and how Danny is probably living like a king until they break into his room. Danny's room is bare except for a bed and when he sees Damian, he runs to him crying "you came back for me!". It turns out that Danny's training was much crueler to truly bring out the fullest force of his powers (no better trainer than survival and all that). Danny thinks his older brother came to save him and gets attached quickly. Damian refuses to admit how much the guilt is eating him up on the inside. (In this one Damian is 12 and Danny is 10)

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[skylessnights]

HANGMAN "ADAM" PAGE and SWERVE STRICKLAND AEW Dynamite 14.02.2024

[im-the-queen-of-stardust]

After three weeks of almost obsessively working on this project I've finally completed it! @mouseonamoose amazing fanfic Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach (read it if you haven't already) is a hardcover book I can hold in my hands and put on my bookshelf now. It's not perfect, I made some mistakes, but I'm proud nonetheless:

The headbands I made red and black on the top for everyone's favourite demon and the bottom I made white and gold because you can't have that demon without his favourite angel:

And how could I not think about Crowley and Aziraphale when I found this amazing design of the words demon/angel? I just had to put that on the end papers. I hope it's not only me who can see the word demon this side up and angel if you flip it on its head:

And here a bit more of the insides:

Thank you mouseonamoose, not only for writing this amazing story but also for inspiring me to pick up this hobby of bookbinding again. I can't wait to read it again now.

[softly-and-suddenly]

People are so boring about classic literature sometimes. Like I know it’s cool to be critical of men in books from the 19th century or whatever but it just leads to ripping out all of the nuance in favor of “Uh all of the Brontë men were evil and abusive and that’s all there is to those characters.” Say something interesting. I’m begging you

[corpusdiem-seizethedead]

Husk: When I said "bring me back something from the beach", I meant like a seashell.

Angel: *struggling to hold a seagull with all six arms* Well, you didn't fucking say that!

[woefuldev]

So there won't be a second time. I have no need for those that aren't mine.

[jakeperalta]

taylor calling out a nyt article about her sexuality is cool good for her I guess but I am begging her and her people to stop throwing "this wouldn't happen to a man" at literally everything... like sometimes that is.. not the point