#bugs and rot were corruption

[boygirlctommy]

ah yes, the infamous Fears of tma: lost, bugs, music, death, burn, dark, books, alone, hunt, spiders, balance, and rot

[basilpaste]

ggugh theres officially a corruption statement in the plans and oh boy oh man i fucking hate. the corruption.

[obxsprincess]

Okay but I read somewhere on here that Luke def has a corruption kink and I can’t stop thinking about it

Like I can’t

oh he definitely definitely does !! imagining my version of dark!luke with this so warnings for that love bugs <3

———⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

he loved your sweet, delicate pureness. how you watched over the younger campers n braided flowers in their hair, when you broke the camps dress code by wearing those pretty little skirts n tying the t-shirts just to make them a bit tighter around yourself

and your personality was oh soo teeth-rotting sweet. fragile smiles n batting lashes, it was like you were begging to be his.

you were the daughter of persephone, how could he not imagine you on your knees before him?? n your skirts scrunched around your middle?? your glistening cunt and puffy pretty clit??

it was only some time until you were his :(( fingering you n stuffing himself between your thighs was one thing !! it wasn’t impure right ?? … until you were here

“l-luke wa-it! what will the gods think? n’if we get ca-” your shaking n squirming, his large hands prying your legs open

“why does it matter baby? since when have they ever cared about shit, they don’t care bout’us, m’kay?”

your mouth was all dry as he pumps his twitching cock, kneeling right above your tummy, like he was getting off by your inexperience

“o-k, your right—”

“good girl, princess. but the person we can’t get caught by is chiron,”

“mhm” your so nervously nodding n your eyes fluster closed as he leans down, his breath smothering your face as you feel lacy fabric fill your mouth

you yelp surprised n confused, words all muffled

“so I gotta keep my girl quiet,”

you suddenly realize it’s your lace adorned panties, stuffed in your mouth like his own personal play thing

n he grips your jaw, closing your hung open mouth n pushing his tongue in. the taste of your wetness blurry and strange to your senses

you whimper when you feel his cock probe agaisnt your tight cunt

“fuck, look how messy you are for me. m’gonna fill you up okay pretty girl? than you’ll really be mine,” his n his to corrupt.

his hips rolled agaisnt yours-

“mhpm a-auh luke!” the feeling is painful n new n hes groaning, but your whines are trapped. only whimpers leaving your strawberry stained lips with your nails clawing at his back from the mere size of him-

“goddd- baby. auh fuck so good for me, so tight-” you feel every inch his cock slides into you. your puffy, drooling walls squeezing around the burning stretch-

“just think how mad this is going to make the gods, its part of our revenge sweetheart”

his words make you jolt, squirming underneath him but the delicious pleasure was beginning to fog your pure, n suddenly cock drunk head

“b-ut you said!-” his cock pushes into you in deep. mind melting thrusts

“shhhh, let me take care of you. fuckkk- your so sweet, too good for this fucking camp.”

warm tears of sudden realization of what being his really meant fell down your soft skin. n his lips found those too

“auhh princess look at you- you, this beautiful body. s’my destiny to be your first fuckk your pussys so perfect— don’t you think the gods know that by now? that they will”

———⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

[spiderlilywritings]

a rotten angel's retribution

Trigger Warnings: blood, gore, murder, graphic depictions of violence

You've always been a good person.

At least, you try to be. Your parents always taught you to keep your head down. Keep calm and keep your temper in check. Be kind. 

"Do unto others what you want done unto you."

And for the people who wronged you, let them be. Karma will find them one day.

You took their words to heart. You always tried to be kind, to grow into someone they're proud of.

—But overtime, you came to understand that this fucked up world devoured kind people. Chewed them up and spit them out as a hollow shell of their former selves.

In Uptown's Purgatory, sickening wet sounds pierced through the otherwise quiet night. 

The scent is disgusting. It makes you hurl. The dead body you're thoroughly beating with a metal pipe is ugly. But alongside disgust, elation coils in your gut.

The person that tormented you so long ago is finally gone. Gone because of you. Tears streamed down your face (what are you doing? shouldn't you stop? you're better than this. stop. stop. stop. sto—), but slowly, slowly, soft giggles started escaping your lips.

You've always been a good person. But the Devil had ways of corrupting you. Or... no, instead of corrupting you, making you turn to the dark side or whatever cliché term that people liked to use— maybe the Devil was your key. Maybe he unlocked that ugliness that was already festering inside your heart and from there, you let that ugliness consume you.

Your parents must be disappointed. Maybe they're rolling in their graves, screaming and crying in heaven at what you've become. Those heavenly gates never looked so far away before.

A blood splatter there, a bone breaking here...

This person was beautiful when they were alive. And so very cruel. You kept your head down (like your parents always taught you, good people that wanted you to live a peaceful life), letting this person walk all over you like you were nothing but a dirty rag under their shoes.

"Karma will get them one day." You'd whisper, maybe to cope with the pain, the hate simmering within you. You prayed that some higher being would administer divine retribution.

Years passed. People went their separate ways. The pain and hatred seemed to have dulled. You thought you got over it. But seeing this person's face, realizing that they were still that awful monster that gave you nightmares all those years ago—

You figured it was time for one less trash in this fucked up world. 

If some higher being refused to give them the karma they deserved—

You'll be their karma.

It was easy enough to lure them to Purgatory. All you had to do was act like the scared little rabbit they remembered you to be.

And then, you grabbed the metal pipe. Broke their legs. Broke their arms. Ruined their beautiful face. 

Their screams were grating to the ears. Their blood looked dirty and black. Their innards looked like they were rotting, infested with every disgusting bug known to man.

You keep hitting. And hitting. And hitting. Until they're nothing but a pile of flesh, guts and gore. No matter how beautiful a person is, they're just a lump of meat in the end. 

When the adrenaline, the thrill of murder and retribution finally fades, a shaky exhale escapes your lips.

The pipe falls from your hands.

You look at yourself, covered in that person's blood. Gross. You looked like you were covered in tar.

You wondered if their soul was as black as their dirty blood. 'Hah... Tar soul...' You thought, like it was some sort of funny joke. You hope they end up in the deepest parts of hell. 

You sit on the dirty ground now, letting the aftermath of your brutality stain your clothes. Your gaze focuses on the body again, eyes blank.

All was silent.

"Well, well, well..."

Until the Devil's voice reached your ears. You turn, seeing Ronin casually leaning against the wall.

"Aren't you a sight for sore eyes, darlin'." 

He comes closer, letting the blood stain the soles of his shoes.

You look away. "You need to get your eyes checked."

He laughs at your retort and you feel that familiar, fluttery feeling in your chest. You've always loved his voice. 

Stupid, beautiful, murderous Ronin.

You feel his arms wrap around you. "How was it, darlin'? Did you have fun? My sweet, little fallen angel, delivering divine retribution."

"...I didn't think of murdering them at first." You murmur. "I just... I thought maybe, they might have changed. Like... like character development." A choked laugh follows your words.

"I thought... they would realize what they did wrong. Try to become a better person. But then they opened their mouth and. And. I realized that they were still the same."

Ronin listens as you start to ramble, incoherent words merging together. You're spiraling. But that's to be expected from your first kill. You don't need to worry though. You're spiraling into hell, but the Devil's there. He'll catch you so you won't crash and burn.

"...Ronin? I don't get it. You said that this..." You gesture to the dead body. "This kind of thing was beautiful. I don't see any beauty in this at all. I only see a pile of rotten garbage. They're rotten garbage."

"Because that's all they'll ever be to you, darlin'. Trash in life. Trash in death. But 's fine. Beauty is subjective, yeah?"

"...Yeah." 

You bury your face in your hands. You didn't know what to do now. Laugh some more? Cry? 

"God... I..."

"Baby, there's no God in this purgatory. Just me. Just your Devil." Ronin whispers in your ear, just like a devil on your shoulder. "You did well." Ronin turns your head towards him and his lips make contact with yours. As intense as ever. With teeth and tongue, like he was devouring you.

"...Can you help me get rid of this trash?" You gesture to the lump of flesh after you broke apart.

"Sure, doll. Was plannin' to have a bit of fun tonight too, but there's no way I can leave my rotten angel all by their lonesome, now can I?"

#announcements

<goreboy>: Congrats, @/killerwriter your murder Dropped this morning.

www.killer-news.com/gruesome-murder-at-purgatory-a-new-killer-strikes

#main

<LUCA_IS_SO_COOL>: AYO??? LOOT DROP! LOOT DROP!

<hitmeupppp>: omg a murder from the enigma themself?! finalllyyyy!

<Angelic>: wow @/killerwriter you can't even recognize them. excellent work

<killerwriter>: yes

<killerwriter>: well

<killerwriter>: let's say it was personal :')

<goreboy>: it was Glorious, was there Myself

<goreboy>: i posted some pics on #killer_shit too

<killerwriter>: ???

<killerwriter>: since when did you have time to take photos?

<goreboy>: I got My ways, baby

<killerwriter>: ��

<killerwriter>: the police suck in Uptown btw

divider by: @/fawndollie

[clouduru-chan]

Hi! How are you? English is not my first language, so I apologize for any spelling or translation errors.

I hope you like it.

Não sei mais editar nessa buceta-

Mark Grayson Variants with a Cynessa!Reader

Mark Grayson

- He thinks you're a complete freak. Damn. You're wearing a corpse as clothes;

- You're a planet eater, of course you're a threat. The dumbest threat he's ever dealt with;

- Mark can't stand the smell of rotting flesh and the metallic, bone-shattering sound his body makes;

- Fighting you is a struggle, even though you're a piece of rotten meat it's hard to take you down easily. He can even rip your head off, you can put it back on like it was nothing. You're a damn cockroach;

- The disturbing fact that you say you'll love tasting his meat, because you've never tried viltrumite meat;

" You were fighting for half an hour, Mark looked around intently, expecting at any moment the reader to teleport in front of him as if he were a damn computer bug. Soon he heard a metallic sound, yellow glitches appeared behind him, when you teleported in front of the invincible with a huge smile on your face that tore the flesh and muscles of your rotting cheek.

Mark turned around quickly, grabbing you by the neck, looking at you furiously through the lens of his mask's glasses, you had a manic look and a big smile on your face as you looked at him with amusement.

"Why are you so angry?" he asked sarcastically, his voice distorted, robotic and glitchy, it sounded like his voice box was broken. – "sarcastic laugh" – this damned failure to speak his actions left him disturbed – "relax, when you're done... I'll love to taste your meat... You know, I've never tasted viltrumite meat" – this was not a warning.

Mark was disgusted, the smell disturbed him, blood and oil dripped down that failed replication of fucking Frankenstein.

"shut the fuck up"."

- Mark after restraining you, he was intrigued, you were a threat, for sure, you couldn't leave any technology near you, as there was a high chance you would corrupt it. But damn... You're a misfit idiot;

- When you are confined in a prison that prevents you from using the solver, Mark always visits you;

- He wants to understand this grotesque aberration;

- You're always complaining, but you like the visits from the invincible one, he's a fool... but a nice guy;

- You keep drawing him and you (like awkward sticks on paper) holding hands;

- Mark now keeps buying you hair bows, you have terrible hyperfocus with it;

- You keep complaining that you want to devour the earth and you have the ability to do so, but it would be a total pain if you killed him to achieve your goal. Since it wouldn't be cooler if Mark wasn't with you... He considers it a step forward;

Sinister Mark

- At first he hated you, you're a damn pest;

- It was hard to kill you, you could rip your limbs off, but you would regenerate or even put them back in place. It was impossible to actually hurt you, and you kept that damn shitty smile;

- You were fast and physically strong, he had to admit, and to make matters worse you had the absolutesolver ability, which always threw you;

- Mark loves meat, obviously he does, but damn you were rotten, he would just kill you;

- But after all that destruction, you didn't die, one of two things: he gets incredibly angry or he admires you;

- If he gets angry, he will do everything he can to kill you;

- If he admires you, he will stop fighting with you, he will ask you what the hell you are;

" Mark's yellow cape flapped behind Mark's back, he glared at Reader. You were a slut, and you were testing Mark's patience.

"What the hell are you?" he asked, you just appeared causing more chaos than he caused on earth. You smiled broadly, showing your deformed teeth – "What am I? Intelligence of absolute absotura, the void, the exponential end." – the aberration says what it was while several strange codes appeared on the creature's face.

Mark arched an eyebrow beneath his mask. "What?"

- You're a fucking piece of shit, how can a planet eater, in your words "The intelligence of absolute absolution", be a complete imbecile?;

- Let's say you became friends, but there's no way he's going to give you the land to devour;

- Let's say you had a nice cup of tea and used severed fingers as spoons to stir the contents in your porcelain cups, while the owner of the fingers cried in front of him;

- He felt incredibly chic drinking tea;

- You are a fun freak.

Omni Invincible

- He fucking hates you;

- You are weird and unnecessary, you shouldn't exist;

- Its existence is a mistake;

- Mark is fast, he wants to incapacitate you, but baby, you are unstoppable;

- He finds the tricks of holograms to deceive him unbearable, it's a dirty game, he hates it;

- Can't stop the void;

- Even if I dismember you, it seems impossible to kill you, but of course you are a damn robot that wears a human body like a fancy dress, that would be like asking for the sense in you;

- He can tell you're having fun;

"The buildings were destroyed around him, Mark flew above the rubble, his cape slowly swaying behind him, giving an aura of seriousness. While you were on the floor looking at him with a huge smile on your face.

"It seems like I irritated you.... Giggle... Hehehe I am so naugthy" – You laugh in amusement, finding his frustration hilarious. The Viltrumite growled at that smug attitude of yours, how could you be so annoying?

Angry, he advanced towards you, punching you in the face and throwing you into the wreckage. The sound of flesh tearing, bones breaking and metal crumpling from the impact was not a pleasant sound, it was far from a pleasant sound. It was grotesque.

You got up with difficulty, the solver regenerated you instantly, but your smile remained on your face.

"Just die soon" – he growls in irritation."

- You didn't die and now you're chasing him like a plague;

- You gave up on consuming the planet, and now your life goal is to make it hell;

- You jump on his back and put a hair tie on his head, telling him that look suits him;

- He obviously hates you for this.

Mohawk Mark

- You two are a freak, but you outdo yourself;

- You guys fought a lot, but you got bored quickly and started teasing him;

- Mark found it amusing when you pinned him against the wall with one of your crab claws that emerged from your back while you glared at him manically;

- Its smell is unpleasant, but bearable;

- You two are little shits;

- He wants to expand his empire and you want to devour planets, the unlikely dynamic is fun;

- The healthiest game you two can have is playing volleyball with a severed head;

- Your friendship is the basis of violence;

"You are now Mark's best friend, and you have decided to break into a guest house to play one of your violent pranks. You entered, kicking the door open with your strength, even though you are a "corpse" you have very brute strength.

You decided to sing a silly and grotesque song while destroying the place and killing the people who were there.

"Violence! Violence! You're the one for me!"– you rip out the heart of a random human who tried to run away from you, the heart still beating through one of your metal hands – "I'll steal your heart!" – you squeezed it crushing it – "And then I'll crush it into smithereens" – You throw it on the floor as if it were nothing, and climb on the table finishing your song. – " You're my special fella. We'll slaugther all our enemies. And send'em staight down to hell" – Mark thought it was fucking funny, you're a clueless idiot. He flew towards you, both of you covered in blood. – "Damn that was awesome!"

Violence brought you together"

- He loves to have fun with you, even though you're a big idiot.

No Goggles Mark

- You're so fucking funny;

- You both share the same neuron when it comes to violence;

- He loves the fact that you want to devour him, you bite him and tear off pieces of his flesh, it's fun;

- É engraçado quando ele arranca sua cabeça e você vai atrás dele pra pegar de volta;

- Your two favorite game is who can kill the most people in a short period of time, and he always wins, because you always take a break to devour your victims;

- He likes to play with you;

" Mark saw you lying face down on the floor, in front of you was a Sylvanian Families dollhouse, in your hands were two Sylvanian Families dolls, they were two bunnies.

You were hitting each other, it looked like you were kissing, it was adorable if you didn't know the context.

"Are you playing house?" – he asked, you just nodded – "Are they kissing?" – Grayson asks in a provocative way, so you answer in a simple way – " no... They are fighting to the death ".

Mark found it funny and amusing, he also lay down on his stomach and took one of the dolls from your hand, and the two of you began to play.

The two little rabbits were crushed in his hands."

- You two are unpredictable, this makes you extremely dangerous;

- Mark loves it when you put multiple hair bows on him.

Viltrumite Mark

- You deceived him, and that's why he kind of doesn't like you very much;

- He was on Cooper 9, as there was no life on the planet, it was easier for him to obtain its natural resources;

- But you were there, pretending to be a human wearing a spacesuit, and you were on that planet (which was a colony of Earth) and was responsible for fixing the problem that arose with an anomaly;

- In fact, you were the anomaly. You were there to get rid of an antivirus patch that could kill you, and with Mark there, it would be easy to get past security;

- He pretended to be a good Samaritan and so did you;

- He was the first to betray you, "killing" you at the first opportunity;

- But you stood up, put your head back on your body, and removed your spacesuit, revealing the dead body you wore as clothing;

- Mark was surprised and disgusted by you, obviously you fought;

- He wanted that planet for the Viltrumite Empire, what about you? Get rid of the fix patch and devour the planet;

- His arm went through his chest, ripping out his heart (its core) and crushing it;

- But it didn't kill you, it just made things worse for him;

"After crushing his heart the reality around him was adulterated, Mark was attentive. The colors disappeared, gravity wasn't working, and soon a black hole expanded, swallowing them, everything was dark, Mark didn't understand anything that was happening around him.

There was a small yellow glow over his hand where he crushed its core, a small black hole.

Soon he heard grunts, flesh tearing, and metal grinding, slowly approaching, his wrist was held tightly with one of his hands.

He saw his black eyes, oil and thick blood running down his cheek, nose and mouth. His grunts were terrifying to hear.

The Viltrumite didn't have time to react, you lifted his hand and put it in your mouth, swallowing the black hole.

"LET ME GO" - He was disgusted by her attitude, feeling her metallic tongue on his heated skin.

You removed his hand from your mouth, his hand was covered in thick black liquid, which made him feel sick.

His eyes now returned to those neon yellow X's, and his smile widened as reality returned to normal."

- Now you torment him.

I hope you liked it, I would have liked to have done it about the other variants, but my creativity died hahaha. Maybe I'll do part two.

By the way, there are some more projects to post here.

For example:

• Mark Grayson with reader who has Andrew and Ashley Graves as brothers (maybe I'll put the variants).

• Mark Grayson and variants with J! Reader

• Mark Grayson and variants with Brazilian reader;

• Mark Grayson headcanon nsfw.

(edit: KKKKKKKKKKKK EU ESCREVI ERRADO, EU SOU BURRA KKKKKKKKK)

[entities-of-posts]

I fear I've come victim to the corruption and I'm not all that upset about it. Most of my life it would've been more reasonable to think I was with the Eye due to reasons not being mentioned at this time, but something changed recently. I realized quite a few things.

I was sick last week. It was just a bad cold but it got me thinking. Whenever I'm sick I always want to lay with the earth. I always feel like I need to be outside and I need to feel the dirt under my nails. Laying in the grass, sitting in the woods, and I always thought it was simply because I loved nature.

But the longer I thought, the more I realized I enjoy being sick. I always have. When I was a kid I thought I just enjoyed skipping school and, as a teenager I thought I just enjoyed being locked away in my room. But now the longer I think, the more I realize I actually like being sick. I don't enjoy not being able to breathe through my nose, but other than that it's wonderful.

Maybe it's the feeling of weakness? Succumbing to the disease of whatever plagued me at that time? I couldn't say. But I just feel so right. So natural. Like I was always meant to be sick.

And then there's bugs. My whole life I've loved bugs. Hell, I'm going through college to study and preserve them. As a kid I thought they were neat, but now I realize how many there are in my life. When I was younger, the house I lived in had a terrible bug problem. It was bad enough to be annoying but not enough to need an exterminator. And even as a teenager when we moved, we moved to a house with a mold problem and an ant infestation.

Every time I think of any moment in my life, there's always been rot or bugs or mold or illness in some form that I always loved but denied until recently. I recently looked at it from a different perspective and it's beautiful. The thought of it is genuinely wonderful, and I welcome this newfound realization with open arms.

It’s lovely to see fledglings fully realize and accept the call! The Corruption is one of the Entities whose chosen talk about it with the most genuine love. It’s sweet.

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[bayeis]

I've joked about it in the tags a lot but I've decided to sit down and actually compile a list on why I'm only half joking when I say my job is conditioning me to be the next Jonathan Sims

The Buried: A lot of my job involves putting people in small confined spaces, often with no windows and and a single, locked door. We frequently have people with claustrophobia that realize agreeing to be locked in a small space means being locked in a small space. 9.9/10 times they are peer pressured into doing it anyway, and have a miserable time

The Corruption:

The Building is rotting. There is no nice way to put this. The walls are slick with mold and soft to the touch, the ceiling drips despite us being on the ground floor of a two story building, the carpets squish with unknown water, and yet people's eyes just glaze past it. Our landlord for the building is a thick accent russian man who, for the past 4 years I've worked here, has changed his name on the emails several times, despite it undoubtedly being the same man, who I have met in the flesh twice before. The first time was to come into the building, shake my hand, and leave. The second time was to ask me to bring him upstairs (not apart of our business but we still have the key for some reason), which I did, and then have not seen him since. Speaking of upstairs, the handful of times I've been there it's just. Bizarre. An entirely furnished office space, completely abandoned. There's everything from paintings on the walls to files still in the cabinets and scattered across desks. I could not tell you what the office space used to be, or whatever the employees that worked there used to do, but I do know it was officially, genuinely abandoned because it was deemed unsafe to be in, from the sheer amount mold and rot. How it is somehow safe for us to work directly below with leaking ceilings I have no idea. I've occasionally had to dart up there with our key to snag a pair of scissors off one of the desks or some other office supply we can't locate in our own half, though I always disinfect them the second I bring them downstairs, and always wear a mask when I'm up there. There's also the bugs. I am so genuinely serious when I say one day I swept the lobby of our building and discovered the shelled corpses of around 300 dead superworms. Like the kind you would feed a pet lizard. I have no idea why they were there, how they got there, or anything. I just swept them up and disposed of them as my coworker watched in horror. Weird worm sightings aside, the building is frequently swarmed both in and outside with bugs, despite weekly exterminator visits. The stairwell to the second floor (located outside) spends about half the year covered in what has to be hundreds if not thousands of moth caterpillars and cocoons. Walking in that back porch area is near impossible as you cannot look anywhere without seeing the walls, floors, stairs, doors all bumpy and withering with the sheer amount of caterpillars (of the not so friendly verity as well. They feel like shattered glass to the touch and will frequently leave a rash). My old manager once found one in her ear. There. Are. Bugs. Everywhere.

The Dark:

Fairly self explanatory. The building gets zero light. The lobby has full glass doors, and walls of windows facing multiple directions but no matter how many blinds you open or what time of day it is you'll find your eyes slightly straining in the just slightly too dim setting. It's never bright enough. When we can get our lights to work (frequently blow out, and when they are attempted to be replaced we find that nearly every light fixture required a different kind of special bulb, meaning that to fix it requires hunting down that kind of random bulb, which will be different from all the others. An effort frequently left undone, dotting the building with random spots of shadows) they don't really help, not because they aren't bright enough, but because the building was designed with weird corners, so all the light the fixtures could be potentially giving, is almost immediately blocked out with odd shaped walls and randomized corners. Some rooms just don't have windows to even attempt to sap out some of the sunlight. The room the employees are made to sit in (about an 8ft by 8ft room) for the majority has no overhead lights, no windows, and like the rest of the building, the walls are painted solid black to sap any remaining light out. The only way you can see in there is from the glow of the monitors and two dim lamps shoved in opposite corners. We get complaints from customers that it's too dark and they can't see well, and we've tried everything to fix it, a desperate combination of lamps LEDs, and fairy lights, but no matter how hard we try, how many blinds we throw open, it's never bright enough.

The Eye:

Remember that employee room I mentioned with the monitors? Workers are instructed to sit in the room (control room) and watch their designated cameras. This is not a security job. Off the top of my head, our (relatively small building floor) has about 30 cameras. There is no where in the building you can be that doesn't have a camera. Even the control room has a camera so we can watch the employees watching people. Some of the cameras are on (all the cameras are always on, with the only way to shut them off being to physically rip them from the walls) but we have yet to find out how to access their feed. The cameras like to frequently switch, in that I mean their security codes, IPs, and registration numbers will jump and switch with each other to no rhyme or reason. When that happens I have to grab the notebook dedicated to writing down whatever this weeks IP numbers are and attempt to metaphorically shove the cameras back into place. We are not a security job, but we are, if you didn't know or guess, an escape room. The entire job, as I previously mentioned, is to sit and watch people freak out through the cameras. Everywhere a guest turns if they look up, there is a camera. Every word they say is recorded and logged. Every action they take is carefully judged. All while a worker sits in a completely dark room, all day, watching their designated cameras intently. I think, for the sheer inherentness of what this business does and advertises, we are the most closely working with the eye. I am one of the managers now, and there are even cameras pointed and trained at where I sit, even thought there shouldn't be anyone to watch them.

The Lonely:

This one applies less to our customers and more to the poor employees. This job is soul crushing. You can go an entire shift, sitting alone in a small dark room, watching people have fun, as you silently observe. I have thankfully graduated out of the control room into front desk, and yet I can go entire days not seeing a soul, watching people chattering as they enter and exit our neighboring buildings through windows that never seem to catch the sun. The "employee area" where we are supposed to be able to hang out in between games isn't really built for socializing. It has been overcrowded and shoved with chairs, so many fucking chairs, that it becomes near intimidating to try and navigate. The most use the room sees is when an employee shoves some of them together and takes a nap, because there is nothing to do. It's not like the employees don't like each other either, we all get along wonderfully for the most part, as well as coworkers relatively around the same age can (helps that we're all queer too), but once you're halfway through a shift, and absolutely nothing of interest has happened you start to drift. A typical lull between games (which can stretch for days in the off season) will usually result in me sitting alone at front desk, answering an occasional ghost call that hangs up immediately when I answer it, an employee sitting in the back area, surrounded by empty chairs facing the graveyard where we write old employees names, and another employee choosing to nest down in the control room, in the dark surrounded by monitors reflecting myself and the other worker being alone, angles scattered across the dozens of cameras. Even when we are busy, there's almost no time to socialize. I still sit alone at a front desk made for two, mindlessly checking people in with no altercation to the script, and the game hosts focus on their game, crammed into the control room with several other game hosts, all willingly silent as they watch whatever designated family they have through their cameras.

The Spiral:

Again, we are an escape room. The whole appeal is to present ourselves as confusing as possible. From room layouts, to our hallways, to the way the building wraps and twists, dumping people out at one door, opposite of where they just entered from, it is designed to drive people crazy. Honestly we don't help either. For our own entertainment, game hosts are particularly obtuse and confusing, partially because we don't want you to get out too early and partially because we have been watching the exact same thing over and over and over and it's starting to drive us a little crazy. People always do the exact same thing in the rooms, there's very little variation from the jokes made the to ideas brought forward. So if the game host wants to keep a little sanity, it's up to them to reek havoc on their game in hopes of startling out a new response, which, if one does occur, gets snapped up and thrown around the control room to the other employees for a slice of entertainment like a sliver of meat thrown to a starving pack of dogs.

The Stranger:

The doll room. Not a traditional "the stranger" kind of presentation, but gives that same prickling unnerving feeling.

In the exact center of the building layout there is a tiny room that is decked in as many old porcelain dolls as possible, all strung up from their necks and twisting around gently in non existent wind. Walking past the only physical door into the enclosed room, you'll usually hear the door rattling in it's frame, or one of the dolls knocking against the door. The room has no vents, no fans, no overhead lights. It's only light source is two red light bulbs, and the room was custom built by our owners. And like, I get it. It's an escape room. There's a creepy room. 1 + 1 equals 2. I cannot even being to describe the feeling this room gives or brings. Almost every time there is a group in there, one person in the group will become more unnerved then the rest, because one of the dozen of dolls looks uncomfortably similar to a doll they or a family member had as a child. The doll will sway on it's string noose as the cameras pick up the trickle of "doesn't that one look just like grandmas doll?" "this one kinda looks like my Betsy doesn't it?" with a chorus of agreements and half given glances, as the rest of the group gets absorbed with the next puzzle, and the single member who brought it up stares, and eventually leaves the room, typically not reentering the rest of the game. It is the strangest thing to watch (no pun intended). Occasionally, the similarity is met with delight, but more often then not it just seems to unnerve. The doll room also shares a wall with the control room, which means nothing, but is occasionally fun to kick.

The Web:

There's the obvious ones, our rooms are meant to trap people, the game hosts jobs besides watching the cameras is to manipulate the line of thinking the customers have, ect, ect. The most unnatural thing to note here isn't the standard workings of an escape room however, but the sheer vast amount of spiders in this goddamn building. I have never seen so many spiders in my life. We can't shake them. From how disgustingly rotted our building is at this point I think the spiderwebs are one of the only things keeping our building together. Again, we have an exterminator come by every single week both in and out of the building. The spiders refuse to let up, every day is a constant battle of knocking down their webs only to turn around and see they've put several more up. We've all but given up on trying to get them out of the employee only areas and now focus our war to the battle grounds of where customers can see to only mild success. This isn't even a regional or habitat thing, no other building I have lived or stayed in in this town has ever even come close to touching the spider infestation happening here.

In terms of other entities such as the Hunt, Slaughter, and Desolation, I can think of a handful of things that might align my job and them, but nothing solid enough that's worth mentioning. There has not yet been anything that reminds me of the End, Vast, or Extinction.

Other things to note,

Quitting is weird? People do, don't worry it's not a genuine hostage situation, but once they leave they are very rarely every sighted by coworkers again. I don't just mean not visiting the building, I mean like going completely off the grid and moving states if not in some cases countries. The entire time this business has been open and operable I've been the longest standing employee, at a record 4 years of the 7 it's been open. I could not name a single employee that has ever truly quit and has been easy to contact again by anyone. If you are able to, it's usually polite conversation with any mention of how you know each other (meeting at the job) being laughed and shut down quickly. No one whose left this place wants to talk about it and I get it, believe me. When we get an influx of summer employees to help with the rush the heat brings, I'm no longer allowed to help train because I would try warn the employees to pace themselves so they didn't experience Game Host Death too early (what we call when a game hosts snaps, having watched the same thing over and over and eventually loosing their mind over it, resulting in crying when told they have to run a game, weird twitching/manic-esque break downs, or in some memorable cases, game hosts just walking out in the middle of hosting a game). This is incredibly ironic considering the majority of employees have admitted the only reason they stick around is because they like working with me but I'm not here to toot my horn. There's also a large collection of employees who are neither employeed nor not, who have moved an hour or so away and have gotten a different, closer, better paying, and enjoyable job, and yet inexplicable will show up once in a blue moon asking for a shift at the escape room for no other reason then they felt compelled to. Typically anyone whose worked here for more then a season falls in this category. Currently we have four official employees for the off season (including myself) and yet if I count this stragglers who all genuinely hate this job (also including myself) our employee numbers easily go over 20. I cannot even imagine what the owners taxes look like for that (all paychecks and stubs are handled by a women who I have only ever emailed and never met). The owners themselves actually don't even live in the same state as us, and we are not apart of a chain. This is the only escape room they own. They're main business? Sheep farming. Which actually, that might be the slaughter right there. Despite working for them for so long, the amount of times I have met them can be counted on one hand. They are completely uninvolved, this business is no mans land. I've thought about quitting multiple times, even briefly lived in another city states away, and yet still found myself back, inexplicably every time I think about leaving again a nice little bonus or raise hits my paycheck, a system I can't really complain about. As for the other managers, I've outlasted several. The only way I have ever seen anyone on the management team leave is to have the biggest mental breakdown known to man and disappear. That's literally it. I've watched it happen so many times. The only employee that came close to being here as long as me was my original manager, who, a couple of months before she left, started loosing her mind, twitchy, paranoid, at her wits end. She isolated and locked herself in one of the rooms for about a month, only emerging at the end of the shift. I tried to approach her once about it and she shaved her head as a panic response. This fucking job, it was choking her from the inside out. Eventually she couldn't handle it and left, effective almost immediately. In the span of a month I watched several new managers cycle in and out, from the women who would sit behind me and silently cry, to a previous employee who realized the jail cell of a role she was being forced into an dipped before the owners could lock the door on her. The current manager is the ex fiancee of the women who locked herself in a room for a month. The horrors are a cycle fr

[sophieinwonderland]

In light of what has happened recently; Every passing day makes it more and more incomprehensible to me that the American electorate voted for clowns like Trump and Vance when there were red flags everywhere. Jesus...

This is something that bears repeating: The Republican candidate being a bully and all around horrible person is a feature to the people who voted for him, not a bug.

Yes, what tipped the balance might have been neutrals who were misinformed into thinking Kamala would be the worst option, or people "protesting voting" or staying home... but Trump's base... the people who have been loyal to him through all of this... they don't see his behavior as "red flags."

The term "sanewashing" has popped up a lot lately in how the media refers to Trump. But I think it started with his electorate first.

There was this idea among Democrats back when Trump was first running that he was too radical to win the Republican primaries. When he beat out all the competition, Democrats would cope by saying "well, look at all the Republicans who didn't vote for him." But it didn't matter because those people did vote for him in the general election.

Democrats have been acting for the last decade like there is going to be something Trump will do that will be so horrible that the Republican electorate will turn against him.

I think that this is because most Democrats are fundamentally good people who expect that even if they disagree with their political opponents, those opponents have some shred of humanity and human decency somewhere inside that will be appalled by what is clearly monstrous behavior.

Democrats and Republicans both project. Democrats are largely good people who tend to project our goodness onto Republicans, thinking Republicans should be horrified by things that are so clearly horrible. Republicans are terrible people who only care about themselves and want to hurt everyone who isn't like them for being different, and project by seeing us as just as vile and nasty as they are.

One example of this that I've seen a lot is the "Russian Bot" narrative. Yes, I'm sure that there are plenty of Russian bots out there. No doubt! But it also seems like a way of shifting blame. An idea that the most horrible messages have to be coming from bots because you just couldn't imagine a real human being that terrible or monstrous.

It's not that all Republicans are terrible either. There are or at least were some good or okay ones.

But remember that moment when John McCain corrected supporters who were claiming Obama consorted with terrorists in 2008 when he was the Republican presidential candidate, and he was booed by his own party at his own rally?

This is what Democrats seem to consistently not understand about the Republican party.

The rot is in the electorate. It always has been. The politicians are terrible and corrupt, yes. But a lot of them are also still representing what their voters want.

What you see as "red flags" are traits Trump's voters WANTED from McCain and he couldn't deliver on.

They like Trump bullying our allies because they see that as strength.

They like Trump taking away rights from trans people and locking immigrants in concentration camps because they don't have the capacity to empathize with anyone not like them as a human.

They like Trump breaking the law as he sees fit, being accountable to no one and declaring himself a king because they want a dictatorship as long as the dictator is theirs.

And the hardest pill to swallow is that these horrible people who would have gladly supported the Nazis in the 30s and 40s are not bots. There are not some distant enemies. They're your neighbors. They're your family. They're the people who will smile and wave as you pass them on the street.

This is what modern Democrats cannot seem to process. That there is this actual blight of evil in this country that are otherwise normal people, but politically would gladly support the most heinous and monstrous of policies.

[30somethingautisticteacher]

Jee Dates

Enjoy some tooth rotting fluff...I love Uncle Buck and Uncle Tommy. 🥰 I have been writing so much but I guess it's because I definitely won't have the time once school starts back up!

_______________________________________

"Tommy, wake up," Buck said softly, gently shaking his boyfriend's shoulder. "It's Jee date day."

Tommy stirred, a smile spreading across his face even before he opened his eyes. "Already? What time is it?"

"Early," Buck chuckled, "but you know how excited she gets. We promised to pick her up at 9."

As Tommy got out of bed, stretching, Buck couldn't help but reflect on how they'd gotten to this point. He wasn't quite sure how it happened. He had always been close to his niece, but once he and Tommy started dating, she was drawn to Tommy like a magnet. And Tommy definitely didn't mind his adoring fan.

At first, it was casual outings - they would take her to the park or out for ice cream, or she'd come to their house for pancakes. But somehow, those casual meetups evolved into what they now called "Jee dates."

Now they had a standing date once a month where they would spend the whole day with Jee, doing activities of her choice. It had become something all three of them looked forward to, a special tradition that strengthened their bond as a family.

"So, remind me what the plan is for today?" Tommy asked as he pulled on a t-shirt.

Buck's grin widened. "To your delight, and Maddie's dismay, Jee has chosen the Monster Truck rally."

Tommy's face lit up with excitement. "Yes! I knew that kid had good taste."

"Well, she certainly takes after her Uncle Tommy in some ways," Buck laughed. "Maddie's convinced you're corrupting her daughter."

"Hey, expanding her interests is not corruption," Tommy defended playfully. "Besides, Jee loved Disney on Ice last month. She's a well-rounded kid."

Buck nodded, remembering how Jee's eyes had lit up watching her favorite characters glide across the ice. "That's true. From Disney princesses to monster trucks – our girl's got range."

"Exactly," Tommy agreed. "And who knows, maybe she'll grow up to be a professional ice skater who drives monster trucks in her spare time."

Buck couldn't help but laugh at the image. "Now that would be something to see. Maddie would probably blame us for that career choice too."

As they continued to get ready, both men felt a surge of anticipation for the day ahead. These "Jee dates" had become more than just a fun outing - they were a chance for Buck and Tommy to share their love, to be role models, and to create lasting memories with the little girl who had stolen both their hearts.

"Ready to go pick up our favorite girl?" Buck asked, keys in hand.

Tommy nodded, a soft smile on his face. "Always. Let's make this a Jee date to remember."

With that, they headed out, ready for a day full of monster trucks, cotton candy, and the unbridled joy of a child they both adored.

As they got into the car, Tommy grinned and said, "Ready for another adventure with Jee-bug, fellow Guncle?"

Buck rolled his eyes fondly. "You know, technically that's not quite right. I'm not gay, I'm bi."

Tommy's face took on an exaggerated look of shock, his voice deadpan and dripping with sarcasm. "Wait, you're bi? How come you never told me?"

Buck couldn't help but laugh, playfully shoving Tommy's shoulder. "Oh, shut up. You know what I mean."

Tommy's facade cracked as he chuckled. "I know, I know. But 'Quncles' doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well, does it?"

"True," Buck agreed, still grinning. "Though Maddie still thinks the qualifier isn't necessary."

Tommy nodded, his expression softening. "Right, because we're both just Jee's loving uncles, regardless of our sexuality."

"Exactly," Buck said. "But I have to admit, I do like our little 'Guncles' thing, even if it's not technically accurate for me."

As they pulled up to Maddie and Chimney's house, they could see Jee's excited face peering out the window, clearly having been watching for their arrival.

"Guncles!" she squealed as she ran out the door, Maddie following close behind with a backpack full of Jee's things.

Maddie shook her head with a fond smile. "I still say you're just uncles, but I guess I'm outvoted on this one."

Tommy grinned. "What can we say? The kid has spoken."

Buck just laughed as he got out of the car to scoop up their excited niece. "Ready for some monster trucks, Jee-bug?"

As they drove towards the Monster Truck rally, Jee chatted away happily in the backseat. Suddenly, she piped up with a series of questions that caught both men off guard.

"Hey Uncle Buck, how come you date boys? Are you guys ever gonna get married and be husbands? Can I be the flower girl if you do? And please don't get married at the hospital like Mommy and Daddy did, okay? And how come Mara and Denny have 2 Mommies? Are you ever gonna have a kid? Will your baby have 2 Daddies? If they do, will they be sad they don't have a Mommy? Will they call both of you Daddy?"

"Well, Jee-bug, that's a lot of questions," Buck started, his voice gentle. "I'll try to answer them all. I date boys, or in this case, your Uncle Tommy, because that's who I fell in love with. Some people love boys, some love girls, and some, like me, can love both."

Tommy nodded, adding, "And yes, we do plan to get married and be husbands someday. When we do, we'd love for you to be our flower girl."

"And we promise not to get married in a hospital," Buck chimed in with a grin. "We'll pick somewhere much more fun."

"As for Mara and Denny having two mommies," Tommy continued, "families come in all different shapes and sizes. Some have a mom and a dad, some have two moms or two dads, and some have just one parent."

Buck picked up the thread, "Tommy and I would love to have a family someday. And yes, if we do, your cousin will have two dads."

"But they won't be sad about not having a mommy," Tommy added. "Because they'll have two parents who love them very much, just like your mom and dad love you."

"And if we do have kids," Buck concluded, "they might call us both Daddy, or we might use different names to avoid confusion. We'll figure that out when the time comes."

Jee seemed to consider this for a moment. "Okay," she said finally. "Can we get cotton candy at the monster trucks?"

Buck and Tommy both chuckled at the abrupt change of subject, typical of a child Jee's age.

"Sure thing, Jee-bug," Tommy said, catching Buck's eye with a warm smile. They both felt a surge of love - for each other, for Jee, and for the family they would have someday.

[aetherghouls]

I am relistening to the entirety of The Magnus Archives and it's the first time I've done full relisten since I got infected with Modern Warfare and now I am plagued with a thought of codmw x tma

I'm trying to figure out what Fears would fit each one of them

Of course, considering that they are military, the most obvious answer would be the Hunt; considering that all important police officers in TMA are servants of the Hunt. Besides that also Slaughter, maybe, considering that many statements are about soldiers, however the Hunt makes much more sense, looking at what exactly TF141 specialises in. But I do also think the Hunt would be both too easy and would ignore the complexities of the characters as a whole. So, here's a rough idea of what Entities I think would match each of them the most:

(and a quick TW as I will be discussing many common fears and it's a bit too much to list them all)

— Ghost would either be the End or the Buried – the latter in case we talk about '09 Ghost or take the comic book as '22 Ghost's background too. I don't think there's much to add about him here, he is, after all, considered to be the embodiment of Death in cod.

— Gaz would be the Vast or the Hunt – first one is, I admit with shame, inspired by the heli scene in MW2, but some of the missions we play as Gaz just match it too, though it is kind of a stretch. I was thinking about the Lonely, but he doesn't strike me as the type to be targeted by it in the long run, even more to be its servant. Vast makes much more sense here.

— Soap would be the Desolation – the Lightless Flame is quite obvious in his case, being demolitions expert and all, the way he looks at explosions. It is such a simple choice I didn't even hesitate here. UNLESS we talk about Captain MacTavish, then it's Hunt through and through, no questions asked, he is the hunter.

— Price is kind of tricky in my opinion – he matches the Hunt the most out of them all I think, though all of the team does. Maybe aspects of the Slaughter, the things from statements related to military (which, also drives it into the territory of the End in this case). If we talk about '09 Modern Warfare Captain Price, it is the Lonely, mixed with Slaughter and Hunt and maybe the End, but Lonely is the biggest part of it, looking at how he's the only one that survived through the games.

— Talking about the '09 Modern Warfare, Roach! Couldn't miss him, of course. Lonely, probably, he does strike me as the type that would relish in being alone and so being its servant makes sense, somehow. Though if we play with it more, take his call sign into consideration, the Corruption, but not the way Jane Prentiss was the Flesh Hive, just bugs and the skin crawling parts, no rot or decay. It would tie together with how he could have gotten his call sign.

— Laswell would be the Eye – another easy one, considering that she's mostly there as a kind of an informant, gathering intel and all. Not much more to say.

— Nikolai would also be the Vast – it's tied to him being a pilot more than anything else, spending so much time alone in the vastness of the sky. No notes here.

— Makarov is the Slaughter – just like before, easy one, but I do think that, unlike with Price, it includes all of the aspects of the Fear. Pure, unpredictable violence, cold blooded murder. The Hunt, too, maybe, only if we were to think of him as a hunter who kills for the sake of it, not for the hunt itself but for the end goal (so it's a slight sprinkle of the Hunt, as it is about the process itself, not the end). Honestly, thinking about it like that, I think he could lean into the Flesh more than Hunt? Something to think about for the future.

— Shepherd would be the Web — with how he plots and lies, with everything he did "for the country", the Web is another obvious choice here, it makes perfect sense. He is the one pulling the strings behind the scenes, getting others to do his dirty work, it's perfect.

I have some other thoughts (Graves and Shadows being the Hunt/Slaughter maybe), but this is all I have for now I think. It could easily be mixed more with other AUs (looking at bluegiragi's Monster AU, which itself could give much more nuance to the Fears that could fit the characters based on what creatures and monsters the characters are in that AU. Example: Simon in that AU would be serving the Dark and the End)

No one is probably reading this either way and I don't think there's much overlap in the fandoms, but I do think this is a fun idea of mixing both universes and there's much more to be said about it all, if anyone ever wants to hear me yap more :D

It is heavily unedited and just written in the moment, it may not make much sense and I may revisit this to correct some stuff (like how I keep mixing Flesh and Slaughter into one thing 🧍)

[divine0rdainment]

When Adam opened his eyes, he found himself sitting in a void of Darkness. He saw nothing, he felt nothing, just the emptiness of forever and everywhere. He didn't even feel himself breathing. He didn't know how long the emptiness filled him, didn't know how long he was going to be stuck here... He felt so empty. Incomplete. He didn't even know who or what he was. 

That only changed when he heard a voice. A soft deep voice that filled in with breath. 

Adam~

The man gasps for air as he feels hands wrap around a body he didn't realize he had, he feels the arms are cold, almost as if they are observing heat instead of radiating it. Adam is left shivering in his spot of the void of space, he is pulled in to a chest, he thinks, one that has breasts if he can remember correctly. It made sense for that to be so, the voice he heard was feminin.

Oh my sweet Adam...

The voice speaks again and he feels like his heart has started to beat again, his chest ached from it. Oh... Oh that felt good... to feel again...to breath again. To feel alive.  He blinks, he wasn't even sure if his eyes where opened or closed till this moment, it was pitch black either way, without any form of light to be distinguished. He didn't even know if he was upside down or side ways or right side up...he supposed it didn't matter, there wasn't anywhere he had to be, he thinks. 

Come here love...I'll help you find your bearings...

The voice whispered, and Adams hands slowly reach to wrap around the woman's hands. 

"Where...am I..." He asked his voice strained and weak. He doesn't know how long he had been not breathing...unalive? Without a heart beat or the ability to feel like he existed. He didn't even know he could speak till now. 

The woman's voice giggled as he  felt like he was standing on something. Or was he placed on something? It was hard to tell, maybe he had been on a surface the whole time... Or maybe he was floating and was just placed somewhere by this woman. He supposed that didn't matter. 

Nowhere and everywhere. The place God was formed.

She spoke once more, her voice echoing in his brain like he was in a deep cave.

Purgatory…people think this place existed after god. But they were wrong…no, god came from here. And in the end of existence, god will die here. The Void has told me so…. she giggled. 

All that truly die come here. Heaven had sent me hear in hopes I would not corrupt the world…but they were wrong Adam.

Adam feels a kiss on his cheek from the woman, and it feels just as cold as the rest of her. Just as without life or color or hope. He whines at the feeling, he tries to pull away from the cold but the grip tightened around him. 

The void is everywhere as much as it is nowhere. Putting me here allowed my evil to leak in to the universe. My chaos to inhabit every human. They thought it was Becuse all children come from me, but they were wrong. No…with every ounce of pollution and violence and cruelty, I seep out more into the world…

She sighs, as if lost in thought.

Into heaven, and into hell, I have made my mark…but I must say, even with thousands of souls handed to me by you and Sera's choices, I had become quite lonely. But now…no I have you, and with the soul of the first man…

Suddenly a bright light appears Infront of Adam and he's forced to shut his eyes. 

I can open the gates. She whispers excitedly. 

After a few moments the brightness decreased and he felt like he could hear wind, smell dust, and the sound of birds. As he opens his eyes he sees he is standing infront of a tree with a large crack in it, the ground had large cracks in it as well, like something had exploded up from the ground. The dress was long since dead and begun to rot, thanks to the destruction it had faced. There was no grass in this patch of land. No life. It had been avoided by bugs and by time. Nothing to eat away at the decay that lay before him. 

Adam breathed heavily as the cold arms leave him. He hears footsteps but doesn't dare to turn, he feels scared. Truly terrified by whatever has dragged him back to life. He remembered everything all at once. And he knew where he was…a place he was told had gone missing with the loss of its purity. Sera had told him this place had been destroyed, and yet…he found himself in Eden. Infront of the tree of knowledge. He knew if he turned around he'd see a healthy tree with golden apples that matched the red that had grown and glowed here long ago. 

“What…what is…” Adam tried to speak. He hoped the woman was gone, would leave him here, but she didn't, she simply walked a few feet away, then her heels walked back to him, and after a moment, he could feel her standing right behind him. He cowered a bit, his head lowering as he hugged his arms around himself. He flinched when he saw a black gloves hand reach from behind him and hold up a golden apple. Shining in the moonlight above, glowing lightly in her hand. 

"Eat my beloved…I do not wish to lose you a third time…” 

The voice was normal now. Without the echo of the void. Less terrifying and ominous, but that didn't change the fact that her presence felt cold and empty. Sucking the life out of things around it. Adam shakes his head, but then he yelps as he feels a hand on his hair and he's forced to his knees by the woman with a swift kick to the back of them, and than the golden apple was placed on his lips, forced to his lips and teeth so hard it caused him to bleed. 

“I do not have time for this game anymore Adam. I had to convince you last time to take the first apple I took a bite from, now you need to be easy and take a bite of this…” she growled. 

"I will not lose the two loves of my life this time. I will not do it. I will have what was taken from me returned. Including you, including our angel.” she whispered the last sentences. “Now eat before I shove it down your throat….it isn't a choice this time. There are no more choices…only what will and won't happen.” 

Adam shakes, but slowly, he opens his mouth. He doesn't know why he's doing it. Is it out of fear? Or maybe out of a strange sense of wanting to obey as he was trained to by heaven. Or is she willing him to in some way? It's hard to tell…but either way, it didn't matter…he opens his mouth and he takes a bite. 

When he does, he doesn't chew right away, doesn't have the strength. The singular bite filled him with a sense of electricity racing through him, making his body feel like it was vibrating and on fire. His eyes widened as he saw something start to glow so brightly on the apple tree before him…or maybe it was him who was glowing so bright. He felt energized but unable to move, it was too much. The body could hardly handle it and yet…yet he was forced to handle it. Forced to endure it. 

The woman rubbed his back gently, between a pair of wings he forgot he had. “Good…good boy. You are doing wonderful. I'm so sorry I was so rough, my sweet dove. But we have no choice. We don't have much time. We must make it out of here. Before heaven realizes the air has changed…that I am back…” 

The woman stands and moves around Adam. He looks up slowly and sees a pair of red eyes underneath a hand. Colors of black white and red are all he can see, even her skin seemed to be so pale it matched Lucifers. Her smile was painted with deep red lipstick on her face. Her eyes glowing down at him. Her hair seemed to move even without the wind blowing it. Constantly swaying and curling in on itself. 

"Now then…let's go find our man…" she takes a bite of the same apple, but it didn't seem to affect her in the same way it did him. She didn't seem paused or overwhelmed by power and heat. She just dropped the apple on the ground. And it rolled a few inches away. Adam’s eyes followed it till he saw another rotten apple covered in dust and dirt…one that he recognized as the first apple he and Eve bit from. It was black and covered in rot. Just like the tree. No animals or bugs had come to eat away at its decay and death, leaving it in its own little time capsule. 

The woman holds up her hand and shadows come from it, forming a large swirling circle, and from it Adam sees a portal open, and the smell of sulfur and death meets his nose…he recognized it. The pride ring. Hell itself. A place he had visited for thousands of years. 

She grips Adams hand and pulls him up, dusting him off. “Beloved, I know a lot has happened, but we don't have time for this…” she whispered. " I feel him. Don't you? Our sweet Lucifer is aching and alone. I have felt it for seven long years. Honestly, maybe even longer than that… He has lost the damned witch who took him from us…we can have him back now.” She runs her cold hands over Adam's cheeks, leading him to look at her. Her red eyes look at him with a mix of love and desire.

“We will be together again…just like in the garden…and this time, no one will take him, or you, or me away ever again…I promise.” 

And she pulls Adam through the portal harshly, the world changed from being cold to warm and smokey. The depths of hell were filled with pollution and suffering. And it made Adam always feel so unwell when he first entered. She led him to an alleyway, where no sinner would see and hums, “now…where to go from here…” she giggled. 

Adam spoke up suddenly, scared to ask but he had to know something. He didn't know if it made sense to even think what he was thinking. She was long gone, Heaven told him so…and yet the words she said…the memories it soaked…

“Are…are you..Eve?” He wasn't sure. In the thousands of years she had been gone her face had slowly faded from memory. Her voice as well, he remembered brown hair, he remembered brown eyes…but he remembered nothing else. 

The woman turned to look at him, and she chuckled. “Well, I was…but now….now you can call me Roo…” 

This is all I got for now. Hope you like it. Idk what I'd even add to it. But the thing is written so my brain will stop tormenting me with this idea.

[forsakenanchor]

🪱 avatar of the corruption and you know the bugs, the rot is there and know one will believe you. its getting worse and no one will believe you. youre scared and no one will believe you and youre angry. youre angry because no one will believe you. your screaming is nothing to them—means nothing to them and you feel like a hopeless.

🪱 avatar of the corruption except its done, you are gone and theres nothing left of you but a evergrowing and deep rot. on the other hand, however, you are now a host of something more than yourself. thousands of legs and lives under your skin are more than you could ever be and you can do nothing but accept, give in, and lose the person you were. for better or for worse.

🪱 avatar of the corruption except its all youve ever had. it has been the only things to truely stay with you. you cant feel alone because you never are and it loves you so loudly. it makes you feel a overwhelming love no one has ever began to make you feel. no one has loved you as it does, it loves you so much it is inhuman and above all and it is everything. you are only truely perfect to it, you think. you were always hopeless.

[mllemaenad]

You know what else bugs me here? I'm stunned that what happened at Weisshaupt is being presented as a defeat.

Now, yes, to be clear: hundreds of Wardens died. I'm not expecting anyone to be happy about that, and of course Davrin should be allowed to grieve. But ...

In War, Victory. In Peace, Vigilance. In Death, Sacrifice.

This is very much the purpose of the Grey Wardens. And not-Varric there is fucking right. Is nobody grasping the magnitude of what we just accomplished here?

We just speed-ran a Blight.

Even if we count the start of the Sixth Blight from the moment the elven gods were released, we have now beaten the Hero of Ferelden's already impressive one year record by several months. And we took out the Archdemon at its first sighting.

What metric for success are we using here? The First Blight went on for nearly 200 years. It crippled the Tevinter Imperium! The dwarves lost almost their entire civilisation and got so desperate they started ripping out their people's souls to make golems!

For the first half, they didn't even have Grey Wardens! People kept stabbing the Archdemon and the damn thing kept popping up again like the world's worst game of whack-a-mole!

People today have little concept of the consequences of the second sin. Oh, believe me when I say that when asked, pious, Chantry-going folk will curse the use of foul magic, spitting and snapping their fingers—but none live today who actually remember the horror that was unleashed so very long ago. Whatever records might have existed regrettably did not survive the chaos and ignorance that was to follow. We have only the tales of survivors handed down through the murky ages and the dogma of the Chantry to instruct us, and that is precious little indeed. I believe I am not understating when I say that the second sin unleashed the bane of all life upon Thedas. The darkspawn are more virulent than the worst plague, a heartless force of nature that came into our world like an ill wind. We know from accounts of later Blights (as these darkspawn invasions came to be called—never has a more appropriate name existed) that the darkspawn spread disease and famine wherever they tread. The earth itself is corrupted by their presence, the sky roiling with angry black clouds. I do not exaggerate, my friends, when I say that a mass gathering of darkspawn is an omen of dread cataclysm. It is said that those cursed magisters who became the first darkspawn scratched at the very earth to find solace in the darkness of the dwarven Deep Roads, and there in the shadows they multiplied. Whether by intelligent design or by some last vestige of worship in their minds, they attempted to locate the Old Gods they had once served. They found what they sought: Dumat, first among the Old Gods, once known as the Dragon of Silence before the Maker imprisoned him and all his brethren beneath the earth for the first sin: usurping the Maker's place in mankind's heart. The slumbering dragon awoke, freed from the Maker's prison by his twisted followers, and became corrupted himself. Dumat was transformed into the first Archdemon, his great and terrible power given will by a rotting, unholy mind. With the darkspawn horde following, Dumat rose and took wing in the skies once again, bringing ruin to the world the Maker had created. The Old God had become the eye of a dark storm that would ravage the entire world. —From Tales of the Destruction of Thedas, by Brother Genitivi, Chantry Scholar – The First Blight: Chapter 2

Two hundred years! Of that!

And yet civilisation survived. The Tevinter Imperium survived! Much reduced, yes, but they're still there. Orzammar still stands, as does Kal-Sharok. This was arguably the worst apocalypse Thedas had ever seen (there are some other contenders, obviously), and they weathered it. Those people knew what a crushing defeat looked like. They knew what loss looked like. They knew what it was to retreat and ration and lose everything.

If you lot ever work out time travel properly, bring some exhausted dwarven or Tevene soldier forward from the First Blight and try telling them you're sad because defeating the Archdemon lost you a castle and a few hundred men.

No Blight since has lasted so long or been quite so destructive, but most have lasted decades, and left utter ruin in their wake. Why does the Western Approach look like that? A Blight!

Once these wastes were a land of plenty. Can you believe it? The rain came north over the Gamordan Peaks, turning the plains green and verdant for three months of the year. Eight hundred years ago, that changed. During the Second Blight, darkspawn spilled out of an enormous crack in the earth, corrupting it with their foul blood… and it never recovered, even after they were driven back underground. The Grey Wardens built Adamant Fortress to stand watch over that chasm, but eventually even they abandoned it to the wind and the biting sand. What few of us eke out a living in this Maker-forsaken place do so knowing that any number of deaths await us: darkspawn raids, dragons, bandits—not to mention starvation from the lack of water and game. If we stay, it is because we know there are treasures buried in the bones of this place, ruins from the time when Tevinter ruled, and even earlier. We pass tales around our campfires of the things we have seen shrouded in the dust storms. My favorites are the ones about relics that could restore the Western Approach once more… but I don't believe them. Truth be told, on nights when the wind is calm, I can stand on a hilltop and see for miles in the moonlight over a stark beauty of which no other Orlesian can claim to know the equal. On those nights, I hope it will never change. —From Lands of the Abyss by Magistrate Gilles de Sancriste – The Western Approach

Even Ostagar was a catastrophe. A short-term one, sure, but a massive loss of life for no appreciable gain.

What happened at Weisshaupt? Even with a commanding officer whose strategy apparently came down to "What if we just charged straight at them? Wouldn't that look cool?" the Wardens held back the darkspawn long enough for Davrin (the Warden in this scenario! Rook is a supporting role!) to get through. The dragon trap worked. And they killed the damn Archdemon.

Now, yes: I recognise the problem. As the elven gods are free they can immediately wake up another Archdemon, so we are rolling straight into the Seventh Blight. This is not ideal! And the Grey Wardens are undeniably weakened after their fight.

But. You cannot tell me that decades of warfare in earlier Blights did not produce even greater casualties, along with the fact that the mere presence of Blight reduces a Warden's lifespan – their Callings come sooner.

We just had the fastest Archdemon kill in history. It may not be the least bloody (it's hard to count the casualties in the south, so the Fifth may still be winning on that front), but it has to be close. And let's face it: they finished the Fifth Blight with (probably) no more than three Wardens on the field. It's been months, at most. We should barely be out of breath. This Blight was over so fast, if you're some kind of official on a diplomatic trip to Par Vollen you might have completely missed it!

What is it Blackwall said? What can one Grey Warden do?

"Save the fucking world if pressed."

One more to go. Do this one more time and we never, ever have to do it again. I don't know why we're moping. This is incredible.

[shentheauthor]

The Nightmare’s Curtain Call

So I have a LOT of thoughts on Grimm, Grimmchild, NKG, and the Nightmare Heart, and I’m about to dump ALL of them. Under the cut, bc it’s so long

First thing’s first, I must clarify: Grimm and the Nightmare HEART are NOT the same entity. I am distinguishing between the Heart and NKG, and I’ll get into it later, but for now, that is important information

Grimm’s deal

The first Grimm was ancient. He was around before the Dream and Nightmare realms split into two

When the schism happened, Grimm was very devoted to the Nightmare Heart’s purpose (more on this later)

So when the Heart was cast into its own, much smaller realm, who heeded its call for aid? That’s right: Grimm

The Heart cannot survive without a body to contain it. However, the body it’s meant for is gone. Grimm volunteered his own body to replace it

Containing the Heart is painful. Agonizingly so. To me, Grimm was once a moth. When he accepted the Heart into his chest, his original heart burned, and his entire body warped into a completely unique bug type

His voice was permanently altered, so even future Grimmchildren would have a hard time speaking without pain

He can no longer fly with his wings, using them as a cloak

As the time of the ritual approaches, the Heart begins to burn his body apart. Grimm is, after all, not a Higher Being. Containing one inevitably causes death and destruction (see: Hollow)

It doesn’t matter how you came to contain a Higher Being— your mortal body cannot sustain it

So a new Grimm must be found

The problem is, the Heart made a deal with Grimm with the last of its strength. It will never, ever recover its full power. So rather than burn itself out trying to find a new host, it’s easier to find a loophole

Each Grimmchild is created from the Heart’s flames, and it shares Grimm’s name and face. Technically speaking, Grimm is still the host. No unnecessary energy needs to be expended by the Heart.

There have been many generations of Grimm. The Radiance is old, calling the Void an “ancient enemy.” While it may not have necessarily been her as she is in game, she still has memories from the first Dream God’s lifetime. The Heart is the same.

Each Grimm receives the memories of the Heart and the previous Grimm, as each Grimm who dies is absorbed into the flames. However, every Grimm is slightly different from the last, based on who raised them. Needless to say, many a Grimm has not been happy with their arrangement, as their autonomy was taken away generations back

The Grimm we meet is somewhere along the lines of the 20th-25th Troupe Master

The Nightmare Heart

The Heart is interesting, because it’s not a Higher Being in the traditional sense. It is, quite literally, the still-beating heart of the original Dream God. It’s sentient, yes, but it doesn’t look or act like how you’d expect a god to

It’s pretty single-minded in following its purpose: cleanse the dream realm, recycle, burn

Basically it functions as both the heart and the liver. Dreams circulate through it, both good and bad, but the nightmares are the most important part. They keep the good/light dreams moving by providing a route for them to go through.

In its duties as the liver, it takes dreams that have “stagnated” or “corrupted,” processes them, and turns them into nightmares. It’s like a detoxification. If left to fester, well, you get things like the radiance that turn bitter and angry and cruel. Nightmares are necessary to help us process the fear that we feel!

The Heart cannot survive when cut off from its body. Conversely, the body cannot survive when cut off from the Heart. The Radiance and the Heart formed when the original Dream God’s body died, expelling both of them

They were meant to work together, still. But their ideas clashed, and neither really understood the consequences of separating. So their realms were cut apart, leaving both of their other halves to rot

Yes, the Heart is dying. It doesn’t matter if you stop the ritual or not. It will eventually perish. No amount of Grimms can heal it, because it will never be given enough time with any of them to truly start working again

The Heart and the Troupe are left to pick up the pieces of rotting kingdoms, because that’s all they have the power to do anymore. If they try to resume their original duties, the Heart won’t be able to keep up. It’s like when someone drinks heavily and doesn’t give the liver time to recover. The Heart is forced to regulate itself, even though it wants to regain its old power

The Radiance was dying long before the Pale King came around. That’s why she reacted the way she did. She didn’t want to die any faster

Nightmare King Grimm

Ok! So! The Heart and Grimm are not the same being, but what about NKG?

The answer is: it’s complicated

NKG is sort of a fusion between the two. He is birthed from the Heart, so you can think of him as like… a new being? Almost?

It’s Grimm and the Heart formed into one. In order to burn the father, he must fully embrace the flames and let them destroy his mortal shell

Afterwards, Grimm becomes part of the Heart. Another nightmare to be recycled.

NKG is stronger and faster than Grimm, but he will burn out and die more quickly too. Once Grimm dies, his flames and the Nightmare Heart transfer to the Grimmchild, killing NKG in the process

The next NKG will be the next Grimm, and so on and so forth

Ending the ritual

Ending the ritual is actually pretty dang bad!

The dreams and regrets of dying kingdoms NEED to be processed, or they will fester. Like the infection. Yes the Infection is a major result of the Heart not being there to detoxify the Radiance’s stagnant dreams that she’s forcing on everyone. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the two had never separated

Now this is not to say that Brumm is bad. Quite the opposite actually. He is correct! The ritual is torture! It’s genuinely awful for every Grimm involved, especially because NONE of them except for the first consented!

The thing is, regardless of whether you stop the ritual or not, the Heart will die. It’ll just die faster if you stop it

Stopping the ritual is Very painful, and the Grimm will die anyway, leaving the Heart to drift until it can gather its strength enough to form another Grimmchild. Note: the previous Grimm’s memories will NOT be absorbed into the heart— so in a way, he’s free!

When you join the Troupe, you lose your name and memories, even your original body. This is by design. The Nightmare Heart recycles and destroys, it does not preserve. The flames cleanse your body, mind, and soul, leaving a blank slate.

Leaving the troupe, your body is returned, but your mind is not. Nymm has amnesia, but he clearly knows how to function as a normal bug. This is why I think that, upon leaving the troupe, all of your memories from your time with them is gone. Everything from before is gone. However, you will still remember bits and pieces— like how Nymm thinks the carefree melody charm is familiar, and it makes him think of something he forgot

When Nightmares Die

What happens when the Heart dies? I’m glad you asked

Put simply, everyone still in the Troupe will either be banished, or consumed by the flames. It depends on what they desire, and how the Heart feels when its demise comes

As for Grimm… the Heart will cannibalize him. No traces of him will be left. He was the original kindling, after all. A dying god will cling to any fuel it can get. Unfortunately, that fuel is Grimm. And sadly, it won’t do anything to help

After the Heart dies, the world will find equilibrium again… but it will be hard. After the Radiance dies, the Dream Realm is not gone! The same is true for the Heart.

It will change, for sure. It will be a lot harder to figure out. But it will still be there

Slowly, but surely, things will return to how they should be. Dreams and Nightmares will work in tandem again, their realms merging smoothly as they once were. Maybe someday, a new Dream God will be formed, to continue the cycle all over again. Maybe not. Who can say?

All that will be left of the Grimm Troupe is a few bugs without memories, and with a strange sense of nostalgia for something they never experienced

[alice-blogs-things]

The Haunting of Hill House (Show) vs The Magnus Archives

Finally started listening to the Magnus Archives this summer, so of course I wanted to see if I could combine its lore with my other favourite horror production of recent times.

The Crain Sibs as Avatars

Steven Crain- the Eye

Places a lot of emphasis on visual evidence when conducting his paranormal investigations

"I've never seen a ghost" Has actually seen several, along with many other fucked up things his siblings did not, such as the warning signs of Olivia spiralling.

Placed in the role of protector of the younger four from childhood, expected to watch over them and keep an eye on them, a duty that never goes away

Come on, you can't tell me that if this guy met Jonathan, especially in the first season, they wouldn't get along.

Shirley Crain-Harris- the Corruption

Bugs feature most prominently in her episode, which features an actual wasp nest

Her kittens all end up being diseased, in effect corrupted before they have a chance

Her literal job is to paint over dead bodies so they're more palatable to look at, while fully knowing the rot beneath, which she is paid to conceal, but can't escape from herself

Theodora Crain- the Eye

Technically has touch-based powers, not sight-based, but her powers come with an immense burden of secret knowledge, Knowing things she shouldn't know

Can't shake hands with someone without getting a front row seat to the worst things they've ever done

Literally Saw her mother as a dead body long before it actually happened, and was terrified by it

Luke Crain- the Lonely

Everyone, the viewer included, thinks his childhood best friend is imaginary.

He's often seen playing alone in the flashbacks, and faces his encounter with William Hill's ghost entirely alone as well

His one friend as an adult ends up betraying him and leaving him alone- making genuine, non-familial connections seems to be an ongoing struggle.

Nell Crain-Vance- the End

Was literally haunted by her own death for twenty-six years and didn't know until it was too late

Her adult self doesn't appear in the second half of the show, except as a ghost

Is tricked into walking- or falling- into her own death by the promise of reuniting with those she's already lost- death is a constant presence for her.

Bonus: Olivia Crain- the Spiral

The more time she spends in Hill House, the more she loses her grip on reality

She's effectively lured into this by Poppy, similar to how Michael and Helen were

Ends up bound to the house, a twisted corruption of her best qualities, no longer able to really know what's best for her family