#but also its pretty significant. in a domino effect way

[vaugarde]

sketched out a comic page just to see if i Could. always been too intimidated but i'd like to finish and make this minicomic...

[twistmusings]

hi!! your floyd and riddle fic from a while ago was so cute :)) the banter over the tart? floyd's patience and their knowledge of each other's quirks????? Uncle trey and azul? Lmfao YES PLEASE that's so sweet😭😭 any gen relationship headcannons for these two? maybe how they got together in the first place, or how the other boys of their dorm reacted? (lmaooo imagine that) Congrats on the move! :)

Thank you so much! I have a really soft spot for a lot of twst ships so it's always a pleasure when I get to indulge and write for them a little bit! And thank you so much for the well wishes about the move!!

Just as a note, this one got kind of long and is largely a breakdown of how the two of them ended up dating.

General Relationship Headcanons - Floyd and Riddle

CW: Canon x Canon shipping (obvs), enemies to lovers but also idiots to lovers (? Its complicated), learning to communicate and some very touch and go parts, Trey Clover's prolonged migraine, Azul and Jade's meddling.

As is mentioned in canon, Riddle and Floyd first met during their orientation. Floyd was kicking up a fuss and well... Riddle kicked his ass. There was no two ways about it, he threw Floyd around like he was a bag of grapes before collaring him and he was pretty thoroughly outmatched by his magic.

Riddle unknowingly created a torment of his own making that day. See, Floyd has always really admired strength and, fortunately or unfortunately, Floyd was fascinated by him. He was so small and regal looking that Floyd would have never guessed that he was capable of magic that strong. He wants to see more-- wants to learn what makes Riddle tick and how he got so strong.

That means, while Riddle sees Floyd's pestering in a negative light (which is 100% valid, Floyd is really irritating and intentionally pisses him off) Floyd never has. His teasing and rough play are pretty common types of affection under the sea. Floyd has been just as abrasive toward Azul and Jade in the past, they just know better than to rise to meet his energy.

However, Riddle's reactiveness... feeds into Floyd's bad behavior. He becomes Goldfishie entirely because when Floyd says it, Riddle gives him attention, even if it's negative attention. He doesn't really examine his own emotions beyond that, he just knows that he really likes when his Goldfishie friend pays attention to him.

Now, as for how they got together... it was a very complex sort of domino effect, and had things not fallen into place the way they did, Riddle likely wouldn't have ended up dating Floyd.

So, the first thing that really occurred was that Floyd developed a crush on Riddle..... that he wasn't aware about. Floyd has such a hard time untangling his own emotions that sometimes things slip under the radar. He's always been this way about crushes, and because of it, he tends to be the last person to notice it. Instead, usually the first person to catch on is Jade, and then shortly after him, Azul.

It doesn't take much for Jade to realize it-- he recognizes the signs as soon as Floyd starts going out of his way to seek out Riddle. That's always the first, then followed by him noticing Floyd talking about his admiration for Riddle unprompted shortly after. He didn't realize it was serious though, until Floyd would start to slip up and call him Riddle. Just Riddle. While it wasn't even significant enough for it to be something Riddle noticed, Jade caught it immediately. Fish pun names were common, but actually sticking it through to learn and use someone's given name was less so.

Jade picked up on it right around their sophomore year, and he would take a few occasions to get a temperature read on how Riddle was feeling about his brother. He certainly was probing when he asked Riddle if he actually missed being teased by Floyd.

Needless to say, Jade's impression of Riddle's feelings... aren't hopeful. He can tell that Riddle really, truly resents him for the teasing and how volatile his mood is. He doesn't believe he will be heard out if he's the one to bring it up to Riddle, either, as he knows Riddle already sees him in a similar light as he does Floyd so he defers to Azul and asks him to assist in the situation.

Azul asks for a private meeting with Riddle, and when Riddle arrives he really wastes no time in laying things out as they were from his perspective: Floyd had developed feelings for Riddle and despite how much of a pest he could be, Azul wanted to request that Riddle go easy on him when he let him down.

Riddle was baffled. He can already feel the heat rising to his face as he feels his anger starting to flare. How dare Azul ask to meet him privately for this foolishness! It was such a waste of time to play these silly little games, and Riddle suddenly felt stupid for assuming that Azul would know better than to play these kind of jokes simply on the merits of being another housewarden.

"Really, Azul, this isn't funny." His expression is sour, and he stands smoothing his uniform jacket. Azul's eyes widen a fraction as he looks at him, eyebrows giving away his surprise. "I had expected better of you. I'm sure you think this is hilarious, but I never would have thought that you would stoop so low as to make a joke that I could see Floyd pulling."

He turns on his heels, and only makes it so far as the door when he hears the scrambling of Azul behind him as he stands from his desk.

"Riddle, hold on. This isn't a joke." Riddle freezes, hand lingering on the doorknob. He wants to be angry at himself for thinking that Azul sounds genuine. This is surely an elaborate scheme of some kind, but in spite of himself he turns enough to level Azul with a glare.

Except Azul looks sincere. Perhaps even worried-- like he's the one who couldn't believe this was a joke. Was it a joke? Riddle's suddenly unsure-- Azul didn't usually get roped into helping Jade and Floyd in their impulsive ideas.

"I'm being serious. I'm fairly certain that Floyd... has feelings for you." Azul clears his throat, adjusting his glasses with a careful coolness that seems to be an attempt to cover his prior unveiled concern. "I know that he has been nothing but irritating to you, and that you don't owe him any kindness after the amount of pestering he's done... however, dorm leader to dorm leader, I would like to request that you don't reject him too... intensely."

There's something there-- Riddle can tell. A genuine concern of some kind, even if he can't quite see what exactly for. He gives Azul a skeptical look, knowing it was unlikely for him to play all of his cards at once, though. There has to be something else-- he knows Azul well enough to know that much.

"Forgive me if I'm having a hard time believing that Floyd has a crush on me, Azul." He deadpans, frowning.

Azul mirrors the frown, dragging a hand down his face.

"Perhaps... there's been a misunderstanding of sorts. I know Floyd, and I have known him for years. I realize how counterintuitive this sounds, but the name calling and the encouraging you to play tag with him by taking your things, that's... that's his love language."

"That's his what?"

"Floyd isn't great at understanding his own emotions, let alone anyone else's. I'm afraid if you don't make your intentions incredibly, forcefully clear for him it can sometimes go over his head. He likely thinks that you're just as excited to play along with his games as he is."

"So his idea of flirting with me is to tease me and consistently disrespect me?" Riddle's lips pull into a thin, irritated line. He's starting to tip back in the direction that this is some kind of long-winded, cruel prank.

"Teasing, yes, but I'm afraid I can't say I agree on the disrespect front."

"You're joking."

"I'm not. Floyd respects you highly, even if he's not very adept at showing it."

Riddle can't help but to scoff. Azul rolls his own eyes, holding up his hand and beginning to count.

"Let's see, he talks about how you 'picked the biggest magic textbook off the shelf with tons of hard words' to study and then took a few minutes to explain it to him, how you're 'super dedicated and responsible for your dorm leader stuff', how 'Goldfishie broke up a fight with ten people like it was nothing', how 'Goldfishie threw him around like he weighed nothing with his magic and he wants to learn that too', how you're 'the only one around here who isn't afraid to stand up' to him, how--"

As the list grows longer, Riddle can feel himself growing red again, though this time he's pretty sure it's not from anger. Somehow despite the fact that Azul is surely paraphrasing, it's very easy to hear Floyd's voice saying these things. Hell, Riddle had often been too annoyed to realize it at the time, but he had said a lot of similar things to him directly.

"I see." Is all that Riddle can manage to think up to respond with. "You've certainly given me plenty to think about. Now... if you'll excuse me."

Riddle opens the door and slips out, and Azul stands a little dumbfounded for a moment. What kind of response was that??

"Riddle?" Azul calls after him, following. However, he finds the hallway empty when he walks out. "Riddle!"

But Riddle has already gone, and Azul can only hope that he hadn't just accidentally endorsed Floyd's misery for however long it took him to overcome the hump of realizing his Goldfishie didn't like him in the same way that Floyd liked him.

Riddle spends a while flipping back and forth between whether he thinks that Azul must be using this as some sort of plot and whether he genuinely believes that Floyd has feelings for him. He's more inclined to believe that Floyd genuinely has feelings for him, but he can't be sure if that's just him wanting to give Azul the benefit of the doubt that he wouldn't toy with his own feelings. (He wouldn't, but this is not about that.)

It was... strained on Riddle's part. He is pretty emotionally constipated in his own right, and him reexamining and recontextualizing the past interactions he has had with Floyd through the realization that he was largely just trying to instigate play with him sort of changes his feelings toward them. Of course, he still really, really dislikes the teasing and intentional irritation, but, as he realizes, it might be partially his own fault. He realizes that while Floyd gets on his nerves, he has never continued to do something after Riddle outright asked him not to do it or was explicitly clear that he didn't want him to do it.

Eventually he realizes that what Azul said made an unfortunate amount of sense, and that perhaps his irritation with Floyd was a matter of learning how to communicate with him instead of the both of them just being incompatible as people.

Now a big key to how the next step played out was that Riddle was aware of Floyd's feelings, but Floyd had no idea of his own feelings. Of course he did have romantic feelings toward Riddle, but he never clocked that he was catching feelings.

The situation ended up being that Floyd was irritating Riddle, as he did often, but it went differently than it usually did. To start with, Riddle was the one who got physical with him first-- he used his magic to throw him once again. He had been pushed to his absolute limit and was finding it hard to sleep because the thought of Floyd having a crush on him had been eating him. It definitely doesn't help that Riddle's starting to notice his own signs of attraction. Floyd was a little shocked, because to him he hadn't done anything to warrant it and he wanted Riddle to apologize, but before he could even open his mouth to say as such, Riddle was already starting to talk right over him.

"You are insufferable." Riddle says it, and it makes something in Floyd's chest tighten up when he does. His eyes widen a little, and he's starting to wonder what he did differently today to warrant that severe look in Riddle's eyes.

"Goldfishie?"

"Shut up and listen." Floyd would normally never let anyone talk to him like that, but something in Riddle's tone makes him actually shut his mouth. It feels serious. He watches, waiting for Riddle to continue. "I really hate it when you do this. Make me chase you around by stealing my things. And I hate it when you seek me out just to interrupt what I'm trying to do. I want you to knock it off."

There's no room for argument in his tone. So Floyd doesn't. Really, he wishes Riddle had said as much sooner, because this isn't something fresh and he can tell. And Riddle isn't even going red in the face-- this is a cold anger. Floyd has never seen anything like it and it's terrifying.

"Goldfishie...?" His voice is uncomfortably unsure.

"And stop calling me that. I hate that nickname." His tone is measured, and he steps forward, further into Floyd's space so that he has to look up at him. Floyd's stomach flips, and he doesn't know why. "Do you understand?"

"Yes." Floyd swallows around his heart in his throat. Riddle looks at him, and he realizes he's waiting on Floyd to speak his peace. He isn't sure what to say, so he settles on the words he first finds. "I didn't mean to make you actually mad, Riddle."

And something about Floyd saying his actual name makes Riddle snap. All of his composure is thrown right out of the window, and in spite of the anger and confusion he is feeling, he hauls Floyd up by the collar and kisses him soundly.

And Floyd is stunned. His thoughts become loud and chaotic in an instant-- Why was Riddle kissing him? Hadn't he just told him he hated everything he did? What had made him even think of kissing him? And why did it feel so good?

He doesn't have enough time to respond, body stiff and feeling heavy. He feels a bit like he's going to die with how much his chest feels like it wants to burst, and his stomach can't decide which way is up. And as if that all wasn't bad enough, Floyd can feel this strange hot, burning feeling in his face that's making his cheeks hurt. Riddle pulls back from the kiss, and it's all Floyd can do to just stare at him for several seconds.

And then instinct kicks in. Floyd's head is empty of thoughts as he scrambles to his feet, and he turns, and he flees. Eels are cowards, after all.

Riddle is pretty shocked at himself, too. He isn't sure what came over him-- he'd just felt kind of overwhelmed by the urge to just kiss him in the moment when to any reasonable person that should have been the last thing on his mind. Not to mention that it was a rather public venue where their little spat (?) had taken place, so the school was abuzz with the rumor within the hour.

"So... clearly you have feelings for him as well, then."

He's greeted by Trey a couple of hours later when he more-or-less breaks into his room with a "You did WHAT!?" It takes some explaining, but Trey gets a quick grasp on the situation and immediately lets out the biggest sigh and starts feeling a headache coming on.

"Huh?!" Riddle spits, flushing and looking a little offended. Trey does his best not to level him with his 'are you fucking serious' look, but he must not be entirely successful because Riddle seems to wince a little.

"Riddle, you kissed him. Even if it was on impulse you were having some kind of feelings."

"... I conceed that much."

"So, you probably still have some kind of feelings toward him. What are they?"

"... I feel like I shouldn't answer that on the grounds that you will ask me what's wrong with me, again."

Oh yeah, that headache was really coming on.

"First, I didn't ask what was wrong with you, I asked what you did. Second, I'm doing this to try and help you."

It takes a long conversation, but Riddle eventually lands on the fact that he does have some interest in Floyd. He suspects it might be romantic, but he can't put his finger on it, and doesn't think he would feasibly be able to unless he were to actually sit and be in Floyd's presence voluntarily for a while.

Jade and Azul assumed that Riddle had just rejected Floyd, and that's why he'd been in his room and moping for the last several hours. It takes Trey reaching out to them to talk about what happened for them to realize that it hadn't gone exactly how they had thought it had, and their response was more or less the same as Trey. "What did you DO!?"

Riddle learns from the two of them that Floyd likely needs the time to come to peace with his own feelings on his own time, and that he will need space to do that, so he stays back for the time being.

Meanwhile, Floyd is mulling over the entire scenario and doing his own consideration of their past conversations and realizing that yeah, he'd definitely kind of had a massive crush on Riddle without even knowing he had and that's why he'd gotten so flustered and unsettled when Riddle had kissed him out of nowhere. Well, that and because it had immediately been preceded by a verbal and physical lashing.

As much as I wish it was more interesting, the honest reaction of the people around them in both dorms was... shock. They would never have expected their typically antagonistic relationship to shake out like that, nor did they expect Floyd nor Riddle to be hit so hard by what happened. The only slightly interesting reaction would have been Ace who was likely prepared to tease the both of them until Trey made a few not-so-thinly veiled threats to his wellbeing if he did.

Riddle lets Floyd be the one to make the next move-- after all he'd kind of made a jackass out of himself by jerking Floyd in several different directions with that kiss. And eventually, Floyd does reach out again, though not in his typical fashion-- he sends a letter via Jade asking to meet.

It's definitely awkward when they meet up in person again, and Floyd seems very low and sober. Truthfully, he doesn't want to be having this conversation because he knows it's probably not going to end in a good way, but he also knows that he's probably going to just remain in his rut unless he does. Plus it was getting very annoying having Jade and Azul constantly on his back to do something.

They both end up apologizing to each other. Riddle for being so harsh and then just kissing him out of the blue, and Floyd for not keying into the fact that he was getting genuinely irritated with him. Floyd explains that he's really not good at picking up on subtle cues and he often needs to be told things directly or he will miss them entirely.

"One other thing..." Riddle huffs, glancing away from Floyd. "I suppose if you must, you may still call me goldfish. Just... try not to refer to me exclusively as that."

Floyd laughs-- not the normal bright, manic laughter Riddle usually hears from him. This is a more subdued contentment, and when he looks at him, Riddle notices the way that the corners of Floyd's eyes wrinkle a bit.

"Why did you change your mind on that?"

"Against my better judgements... it seems to me that it's a kind of endearment."

"Nah, I was definitely teasing you when I said it, but whatever you'd like, Goldfishie~." Floyd sing-songs.

Riddle feels stupid for it, considering what had ended them up in this situation in the first place, but he feels overwhelmed with the urge to kiss him again. He tamps it down rather aggressively, not wanting to damage whatever tentative thing they were working on here. Apparently he's not subtle enough, because in the instant he glances at Floyd's lips and back, the other is grinning toothily.

"You didn't learn your lesson the first time, did you?" Floyd challenges. Riddle can't quite place if it's intentional flirting or not-- feels like it must be.

"Perhaps you'll have to teach me again." The words leave Riddle's mouth before he can stop himself long enough to process what he's said. Then, rather flustered, he adds: "I've always found it most helpful to review the material a few times."

Floyd's eyebrows quirk upward toward his hairline, but he doesn't make to move at all. Ah, right, like they'd discussed-- he was trying to be better about their boundaries. Riddle sighed, despite this being something he specifically asked for.

"Floyd?"

"Yes?"

"Kiss me, you oaf."

"Sure thing, Goldfishie~!"

[crusherthedoctor]

Can you list anything you unironically like in the games (and cartoons and comics) that you don't like?

I won't bother mentioning music, since that goes without saying and is to be expected for a Sonic game... unless you're Chronicles.

Sonic Adventure 2 (mixed gameplay-wise, annoying story-wise) - While I prefer Sonic's SA1 levels for a number of reasons, I still think his and Shadow's gameplay in SA2 is fun on its own merit. I also don't mind the treasure hunting gameplay returning or how big the levels are this time around, since Knuckles and Rouge are still fast and not '06 levels of slow. It's mainly the gimped radar that creates the unfortunate domino effect of making them a problem.

- Introduced Rouge, one of my favourite characters for how playful she is and how she's a lot more nuanced and intelligent than you'd expect.

- Some genuinely good scenes, like Eggman's trap on the A.R.K and Sonic escaping from the G.U.N. helicopter.

- Had some good ideas going for it, like the Pyramid Base and the Biolizard as a scientific monster instead of an ancient one.

- Despite my thoughts on the backstory itself (or rather, its execution), Shadow has enough depth and subtle qualities and occasional unintended hilarity to stand out from the typical dark rival characters you see in media.

- The Last Scene's music in particular is one of my favourite cutscene tracks in the series.

Sonic Heroes (mixed gameplay-wise, loathed story-wise) - The gameplay is fun when you're not being screwed over by repetitive combat, overly long levels and/or ice physics.

- Boasts some of the most consistently Genesis-worthy environments in the 3D games, up there with SA1's and Colours'.

- The in-game dialogue that isn't the same tutorial drivel repeated ad nauseam can be interesting, funny, etc.

- Reintroduced the Chaotix, which provided me with another character I quite like in the form of Vector.

- Bringing Metal Sonic back in full force and front and center in the plot after a long absence (not counting cameos and the like) is a perfectly fine idea. Just... not like this.

Sonic Battle (decent yet repetitive gameplay, mixed story-wise) - Emerl's arc is compelling, and it earns the emotional weight of having to put him down at the end.

- While some characters are iffy (read: Amy), other characters are extremely well-handled. Shadow is probably the prime example.

- Gamma's belly dance healing animation is fucking hilarious.

- When I was young, and the game was first announced, I was really excited about being able to play as Chaos. This proved to be my downfall when it turned out he was arguably one of the worst characters in the game due to being slower than me during the writing process, but I still recall that excitement fondly.

Shadow the Hedgehog (comedy classic) - The sheer amount of legendary stupidity this game has going for it makes it practically impossible to actually hate. It helps that it's not quite as white-knighted on the same level as '06... usually. You know you're in for a unique experience when you hear a gunshot every time you click something in the menu.

- By extension, Black Doom never gained an unironic fanbase like Mephiles/Scourge/Eggman Nega did, which means I'm a lot more willing to take Doom's dumbass brand of villainy in stride. He even has a unique design... a terrible one that rips off Wizeman granted, but alas, even that is a step-up from Fridge Shadow and Bumblebee Eggman.

- Despite being... well, Shadow the Hedgehog, some of the environments would fit right in with any other Sonic game, like with Circus Park, Lava Shelter, and Digital Circuit. Even the Black Comet levels look pretty cool.

- This game understands amnesia better than IDW does.

Sonic '06 (what do you think?) - The obvious one: Shadow's character was handled pretty well, even if it came at the cost of everyone else being a dummy and being forced to interact with Mephiles.

- Like SA2, there are some good moments, like the Last Story ending sequence with Sonic and Elise.

- In the greatest form of irony ever, I like Solaris as a concept and design(s), and its backstory has potential to serve as a parallel with Chaos without being a complete ripoff. Iblis sucks, Mephiles sucks, but I'm fine with Solaris.

- Introduced legendary characters like Sonic Man, Pele the Beloved Dog, Hatsun the Pigeon, and Pacha from The Emperor's New Groove.

The Rivals duology (apathetic outside of Nega-related grumbling) - There were some cool zone ideas in both games that were sadly let down by the restrictive and limiting gameplay. I particularly like Colosseum Highway for thus far being the only full-on Roman level in the series instead of merely having a couple minor hints of Roman, and Meteor Base for the unique scenario of the space station being built into an asteroid. These level concepts and others deserve a second chance IMO. (At least Frontier Canyon got a second chance in the form of Mirage Saloon, amirite?)

- Ifrit has a better design than Iblis. Not saying it's amazing, but the Firebird motif it has going on is a lot more interesting for a fire monster than the Not-Chaos schtick they had with Iblis.

Sonic and the Secret Rings (a very frustrating gaming experience) - Erazor Djinn, A.K.A. Qui-Gon Djinn, A.K.A. Dr. N. Djinn, A.K.A. I'll Take It On The Djinn, A.K.A. Not From The Hairs On My Djinny Djinn Djinn, is one of the best villains not associated with Eggman in the series. He's a Mephiles-type character done right, and there's actual weight and reason to his actions, however sinister or petty.

- I don't have strong opinions either way on Shahra as a character, but the Sonic/Shahra friendship is sweet and well-handled.

- The ending is one of Sonic's greatest moments. The sheer contrast between how ruthlessly he deals with Erazor and how comforting he is towards Shahra speaks volumes... Still gonna make fun of the mountain of handkerchiefs though. (Before anyone lectures me, I understand the significance of it and can even appreciate it from that angle... doesn't mean I'm not allowed to poke fun at it. :P)

- Another game with some redeeming environments. I love the aesthetic of Night Palace, and Sand Oasis looks gorgeous too.

Sonic Chronicles (my personal least favourite game in the series) - Uh...

- Um...

- Er...

- I like Shade's design?

Sonic Unleashed (overrated game and story IMO) - The obvious two: the opening sequence and the Egg Dragoon fight deserve all the praise they get.

- Seeing Eggmanland come to life was an impressive moment to be sure. While part of me does feel it didn't quite measure up to what I had in mind (ironically, the Interstellar Amusement Park ended up being closer to what I had in mind), it still looks badass and works well for what it is. I also don't mind the idea of it being a one-level gauntlet... key word being idea.

- Obviously, the game looks great. Not a fan of the real world focus (real world inspiration is fine, but copy-pasting the real world and shoving loops in it is just unimaginative), but it can't be denied that the environments look good.

- This game pulled off dialogue options a lot better than Chronicles did, since they didn't rely on making Sonic OoC.

Sonic and the Black Knight (just kind of boring all around) - Despite my gripes with the story (Merlina wasn't nearly as fleshed out as her unique anti-villain status deserved, which ends up severely undermining the ambition of the plot in more ways than one, and the other characters go from being useless yes men for King Arthur to being useless yes men for Sonic), I will admit it provides interesting insight into Sonic's character.

- Like '06 and Secret Rings, the ending is very nice... well, aside from Amy being an unreasonable bitch ala Sonic X at the very end.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 (apathetic) - The admittedly few new concepts sprinkled within had promise. They may not have been as fleshed out as they could have been, but level concepts like Sylvania Castle and White Park, bosses like Egg Serpentleaf and the Egg Heart, and story beats like the Death Egg mk.II being powered by Little Planet, all could have been brilliant had they been better executed.

SatAM (apathetic outside of SatAM Robotnik-related grumbling) - I'm not a fan of the environments on the whole due to them looking too bland or samey, but there are some exceptions that look pleasant or interesting, like the Void.

Sonic Underground (apathetic) - The character designs make me feel better about myself.

- Does "large quantities of unintentional meme material" count as a positive?

Sonic X (mostly apathetic outside of Eggman's handling) - Helen was a better human character and audience surrogate in her one focus episode than Chris was throughout his entire runtime.

- Actually, most of the human characters not named Chris were legitimately likable. Including everyone in Chris' own family not named Chris. Hilarious.

- Despite arguably having the most Chris in it, I actually don't mind the first season that much, partly due to slight nostalgia from seeing it on TV when it was new, but mostly because Eggman actually acted like a villain for the most part, and certain other characters weren't quite as flanderized yet. It's season 2 and onwards where things started going off the rails IMO. (Incidentally, Helen's episode was part of season 1...)

The Boom franchise (apathetic) - Along with Chronicles, the games provide yet more proof that just because someone isn't SEGA/Sonic Team, that doesn't mean they're automatically more qualified to handle the series.

- The show had some good episodes here and there, and Tails' characterization was probably the most consistently on-point out of the cast.

- Despite not exactly being favourite portrayals for either character, even I'll admit that many of Knuckles and Eggman's lines in the show on their own were genuinely funny.

Archie Sonic (pre-reboot is mostly terrible, post-reboot is mostly... bland) - Whenever I doubt myself as a writer, I think back to Ken Penders, and suddenly I'm filled with a lot more confidence.

Sonic the Comic (apathetic) - Fleetway isn't a comic I tend to recall much of aside from how much of a loathesome cunt Sonic is, but IIRC, Robotnik's portrayal is pretty good. Different, but good.

IDW Sonic (stop pissing me off, comic) - Putting their handling aside (and being too obviously "inspired" by MGS in the latter's case), Tangle and Whisper are good characters IMO.

- Same goes for Starline, before he was killed off-screen and replaced with Toothpaste Snively.

- Execution aside (noticing a pattern?), the zombot virus was a fine concept on its own and an interesting new scheme for Eggman.

- I get to remind myself that I've never drawn scat edits and posted them publicly on Twitter.

[michelleleahhh]

“accidentally fell in your lap while standing on this crowded bus” au pLEASE I BEG OF YOU

Oh, anon. If only this would actually happen on my commutes. I changed bus to subway though. 

Pairing: Loki/Reader

Word Count: 1,800

It would be fabulous to be on time. One time. One week. One hour.

Born early, always late. That’s the saying, right?

It is possible that your roommate is to blame, with her taking a 45-minute Good-Morning-Shit.

It is also possible, you can blame the people above you, with their stomping and yelling at all hours of the night.

Truly though, the blame is with you and your proclivity for always running late. It really is a disgusting habit. The snooze button is just such a good way to start the morning.

Tomorrow, you decide, will be the day you’ll be on time.

Yes, tomorrow is the perfect day for that.

Today, you are already late.

You can hear the subway approaching, so you quicken your pace, slightly embarrassed that you’re puffing for air. As you swipe your metro card and race in a hurry down the cement steps, you’re greeted with a crowding of people around silver doors.

God may be shining on you today. You know, since the train appeared just when you got there. It’s the most amazing kind of kismet.

You throw some elbows, step on a few toes, and manage to squeeze your way into the middle of the subway car. You are forced to face a row of seats, clasping the silver bars overhead to keep you anchored as the train zooms off. The man in front of you man spreads, his long legs bumping into yours.

Only seven stops until you can get to the Avengers Tower.

Ever since you took your new job in Media Relations (VERY different from Public Relations, you’d like to add), you have been getting in later nearly every day.

You peer around you, finding people pressed against one another. It’s silent as every morning commute should be. If you had to hear one conversation, you were going to go on a murdering spree.

When you make awkward eye-contact with a far too good-looking gentleman on the other side of the train you quickly divert your eyes. You lick your lips and try to sneak a glance out of the corner of the eye, hoping the man was looking at you.

You say a silent bargain: if he is looking at you, then he’s your soulmate.

He is not looking at you.

That is more disappointing than it should have been.

After two, uneventful stops, the train slows down, sputtering to a rest.

You ignore the three internal panics thrumming through you. They are ranked as follows:  

One, you’re on a crowded subway and stuck in between two different stations. This could be the end.

Two, it is extremely hot and you’re pretty sure you’re sweating through your shirt. This could get embarrassing.

Three, (and really what should have been priority) you are going to be late.

After a minute, the overhead speaker dings and a distorted voice echoes through the car.

“N, Q, R, and W trains are running with significant delays in both directions due to a police activity at 42nd Street Times Square that caused all lines to run on the local line. We apologize for the delay.”

A rapid domino effect ricochets through the subway car. People groan and shuffle around as if their display of aggravation is going to make the subway resume its course.

You drop your hands from the handlebar and pull out your cellphone. You unlock the screen and begin sifting through music, hoping that if you keep yourself busy it will make the delay move by faster.

After a few minutes, you land on a suitable song and try to send text messages hoping you appear busy. You type messages to in the following order to friends, family, and bosses:  

One (friends), you’re pretty sure you’re riding on the subway with your soulmate. Should you get his number?

Two (family), yes, you will make sure to text your aunt happy birthday. (And you’re pretty sure this guy is your soulmate. I mean, look at his hair, it is perfectly coiffed.)

Three (bosses), (and again what should have been priority) you’re going to be late because there are delays.

Unsurprisingly, none of the messages go through.

When you glance up from your phone, you realize the man sitting in front of you has been studying you. You quickly avert your eyes, telling yourself not to look at him. He keeps his gaze on you then finally huffs and shuts his eyelids. After a few moments, you steal glances at him.  

He has black hair, high cheekbones, and an irritable mouth.

He’s beautiful in the only way a man can be. (But definitely not your soulmate.)

Without any warning, the subway car begins to move. You’re so caught up in your phone that you forget to reach for the bar overhead and stumble around, trying to catch your footing.

You tumble and land in the lap of the beautiful stranger in front of you.

He gasps, his hands coming to rest on your hips and keep you from making even more of an ass out of yourself.

You try to pull yourself up, but the subway has begun an un-even jerking motion that keeps even the most sure-footed commuters swaying from side to side.

“Just wait until the train stops,” he nearly snarls in your ear.

A fever of embarrassment flows through your bloodstream. You purse your lips, tightening every muscle in your body.

You glance at his hands on your hips, looking at the dull, pale fingernails and studying them. They dig into your clothes, almost roughly, promising something that you have yet to understand.  

They’re the type of hands that would draw designs amongst flesh, ones that would force pleasure and heartache from every crevice of your being. You are adamant that you could understand everything from a person’s hands. And these hands, they speak volumes. They are full of scars, long, slim fingers ended with blunt nails, and though there are lines around his knuckles, he didn’t look to be older than his mid-thirties.

He coughs from behind you to get your attention. You glance over your shoulder, seeing his eyes are raised at you in an annoyed, yet amused expression.  

People have begun to rush off of the subway, a woman that was sitting next to him gets up, eyeing you like any annoyed New Yorker would, muttering blasphemies under her breath.

You shuffle to your feet with as much grace as a baby elephant. You swallow thickly, looking at the seat next to him longingly.

What if… he is your soulmate?

You nearly cringe at the thought, what a sure way to discourage any romantic inclinations than to fall in the lap of a stranger.

Then, you do the unthinkable, you turn right around and sit on the seat next to him.

The subway moves again, though the man doesn’t look at you.

So, you do the worst thing any morning commuter could do. You talk.

“Thank you, by the way.”

You look at him, hoping you remembered to put on mascara this morning.

He merely grunts, his eyes closing again and he tilts his head back. “Perhaps next time, you should pay attention to your surroundings.”

You scoff ad turn to stare forward. “Ass,” you mutter under your breath.

A small, wry smile sneaks to his lips that you couldn’t miss if you tried.

You pull your phone out and look at the time.

You were going to be extraordinarily fucking late.

Finally, after a few uncomfortable stops, 57th Street is announced and you stand.

Much to your agitation, the Ass does too. He is tall. Like a tree or beam poll. He is all legs, and torso, and gangly arms. You want to climb him, intrigued at what the world would look like from that height.

He cuts off your pathway walking ahead of you and out the doors of the subway car. He’s a specimen, a true specimen, but he’s also a classified Ass.  

His ass is also perfect.

Damn.

You follow him out the doors, and oddly enough up the same path and into the same underground entrance of Avengers headquarters.

What the hell?

You decide then, you’re going to put your speed to good use. You stretch forward, pushing yourself faster so you can speed past him (after all nothing is more awkward than going the same direction as someone who you embarrassed yourself in front of on the metro).

Paces turn into a run, steps into stomping, breathing into huffing. You manage to defeat him. When you get to the security table, you open your purse searching for your ID.

Your heart sinks, now he’s going to pass you, see you, as you have to register as a guest with the security team upfront.

“I believe you dropped this.”

You turn to look over your shoulder, finding the Asshole Specimen dangling your ID in front of your face. You swipe it out of his hand and fist it tightly knowing you certainly did not drop it.

“Did you pickpocket me?” You try to sound scandalized, you’re afraid it came out as impressed.

“It was quite easy.”

You scoff again, shaking your head. “Ass,” you say louder this time and directly to his face. With that, you spin on your heal and swipe your ID entering into the elevator bank.

“Yes,” he agrees, falling in step behind you. “I believe you said that already.”

You get into the elevators, heart sinking and hammering when he does as well.

Shaking fingers press on floor number 15. He smiles wolfishly, leaning very close to you and hitting 52.

52?

52?!

Isn’t that where the Avengers floors begin?

Isn’t there like a separate elevator bank for them?

You bite your lips, tapping your feet on the elevator as you wait to get to your floor.

“So, you work here or something?” You finally ask, lifting an eyebrow to find that he’s been staring at you the whole time.

“Yes, something to that effect,” He articulates.  

Everything he says is just so… pompous.

He’s a Pompous Ass you decide.

The elevator dings, the doors opening on floor fifteen. Without another word, you step through the threshold and onto your floor.

When the man speaks your name from the elevators, you turn to him.

He knows your name? Of course, from the ID. But you don’t say a word. Instead, you raise your eyebrows and shoot him a deadly glare. He merely cocks his head, a serpentine smile on his lips as the elevator doors close.

One Shots: @fairlightswiftly​, @javelinamilk​, @wannabebr1t​, @joyofbebbanburg​, @schmidten17​, @winterisakiller@addyliners, @iamverity,  @kybaeza, 

[jinruihokankeikaku]

hello! could you please do a session analysis on a session with my fankids? (quick note: certain classes being gender-specific is ignored here) we have a Prospit Heir of Life (m), Derse Knight of Mind (m), Prospit Mage of Blood (f), Prospit Maid of Doom (f), Derse Bard of Heart (f), Derse Seer of Space (f), Prospit Rogue of Time (m), and a Derse Witch of Void (m) thanks in advance!

Hey there!! I certainly could ::::) Here’s Session Analysis #4…

Player Lineup

(++)Heir of Life, Prospit

Expansive-Explosive-Cyclical Aspect, Passive Manipulation Class

(-)Knight of Mind, Derse

Associative-Personal Aspect, Active Defense/Service Clss

(--)Mage of Blood, Prospit

Associative-Cyclical Aspect, Active Knowledge/Understanding Class

(-)Maid of Doom, Prospit

Culminative-Conclusive-Cyclical Aspect, Active Creation Class

(++)Bard of Heart, Derse

Introspective-Personal Aspect, Passive Destruction Class

(++)Seer of Space, Derse

Expansive-Explosive-Actual Aspect, Passive Knowledge/Understanding Class

(+)Rogue of Time, Prospit

Culminative-Conclusive-Actual Aspect, Passive Relocation/Appropriation Class

(--)Witch of Void, Derse

Introspective-Actual Aspect, Active Manipulation Class

Session Outlook

Space and Time players present? Indeed they are. Soooooooo your session isn’t doomed from the start. That’s always a good thing.

Prospite-Derse balance? 50/50. That’s what you’re aiming for, so more good news.

Active-Passive balance? You’ve got a 50/50 balance here. +7:-7. All good stuff.

Aspect Balance: 3 Cyclical : 3 Actual : 2 Personal; 3 Expansive-Explosive : 2 Culminative-Conclusive : 1 Introspective : 2 Associative. This is… a really decent balance!! Excluding Time and Space, your Direction ratio is 2:1:1:2, and your Source ratio is 3:1:2, which is not bad at all. What’s really important here is that you’ve got all your Sources and Directions covered!

Now, to get into the actual discussion of the session…

Potential Events

Well, you’ve got a Bard of Heart, like the last session we analyzed here, which is likely to be the main source of intra-team conflict. This isn’t because the Bard is malevolent (necessarily), but because their very presence induces decay / generates entropy in and among people’s identity and relationships. They’re not going to notice this effect at first, initially ghosting Mind and repressing their emotions until they overflow rather explosively. More on that when we address the Bard specifically.

Your Space and Time players are both Passive classes, which means your session may start off slow or run long, but which may also reduce the odds of one of the over-embracing their Aspect (as, say, a Mage or a Thief may be more likely to do. You also have all six Class Functions covered, which is great news – another example of how well-balanced this session’s lineup is. You’ve also got 3 inverse Aspect pairs, which should lead to plenty of drama, buuuuuuuut it wouldn’t be a proper session without it ;;;;)

Now to discuss the specific players – note that because Role genders are kinda fake (oversimplification, yeah, but y’know) and I don’t know the player’s orientations or how much, uh, relationship stuff you’re looking to write in your session, I’ll pretty much be ignoring the genders listed – if you have more info on what kinda analysis you want re: gender relations, do let me know. And now, without further ado…

The Heir of Life [+2 | M | Ex-Cy | manipulator | Prospit]

Your Heir is someone who “becomes, embodies, is manipulated by, or invites change in growth, rebellion, biology, and consumption”. He’s going to be given a lot of Life from the start, filled with exuberance and youth, and possibly born into luxury, a leadership position, or a literal inheritance. Being a Prospit dreamer and a member of a Passive class, he’s likely going to be laid-back and inclined more towards improvisation than planning; while Heirs are natural leaders, they’re often slow to rise to this role, and his passivity and Prospitian attitude, plus his Life-bound rebellious streak, may harmonize with this effect. They’re likely going to go along with the Knight’s initial leadership, albeit reluctantly. However, a clash with the Maid, one of their fellow Prospit dreamers, is certainly also possible.

Conclusion: Reluctant leader, but likely the endgame leader, nonetheless. Unlikely to get on well with the Maid, but might be close with the Bard and the Rogue at first (prior to the all-but-inevitable Bardic Crisis).

The Knight of Mind [-1 | M | As-Pe | defender | Derse]

The Knight of Mind might be the one to initially aim for the role of “team leader”, due to Knight’s attraction to leadership positions and Mind’s aptitude for strategy and decision-making. He might try to present himself as a grand strategist or organizer for the team, which some might go along with, and others might be reticent to accept. The Knight’s lack of confidence regarding their wisdom / capacity to make decisions will cause them to attempt to overexpress their Aspect, perhaps by spending a great deal of time in affected contemplation, going through loops of thoughts or processes that they don’t really believe. They’re actually as thoughtful as they need to be, but their lack of confidence in their capabilities may cause them to falter, and the Bard especially will see straight through their persona.

Conclusion: Initial session leader, but not an especially strong one; like the Heir, will probably be close to the Bard prior to their crisis. Skillful tactician and likely to be on the frontlines if he makes it to the endgame.

The Mage of Blood [-2 | F | As-Cy | interpreter | Prospit]

The Mage is someone who “innately understands, explores, directly experiences from, or suffers due to their bonds, promises, and relationships”. She may wind up in a number of relationships or with a number of obligations to other people, and get burnt for it – either because they fail to successfully balance their duties (to herself, her friends, her team, etc.), or because she’s successful, but it comes at a great cost, potentially even serious injury or death. However, she’s also someone who understands what a promise or a bond is, on a very technical level – she may have some interest in legal matters, or substantial knowledge of contracts. She’s likely to try to be friends with everybody – not just her team, but also her Planet’s Consorts or even the Prospitian populace or royalty. This could leave her pulled in many different directions, and whether or not she’s capable of navigating the network of chains and signals ahead of her will be a real challenge.

Conclusion: Sociable person, less interested in leadership than in friendship. Has a tendency to over-commit herself, which may lead to unfortunate consequences, but is nonetheless a force binding the team together.

The Maid of Doom [-1 | F | Cu-Cy | creator | Prospit]

The Doom Aspect and Prospit’s sway make an interesting combination – the one commonality I could draw between them is that they’re both better with acceptance than most. And since the Maid is, well, “made of their Aspect” (not literally, like an Heir; rather, as in They Have A Whole Lot Of It), I’d imagine the Maid to be someone who carries with her, and overflows with, acceptance – maybe in kind of a cheerfully nihilistic way? The Maid of Doom also “creates structures, systems, or rules”, perhaps assisting the Knight in his strategic schemes, or working with the Rogue to ensure that whatever ending comes isn’t catastrophic. She’ll be a significant Active player with real potential to Invert, so if any serious conflict develops she could well be at the heart of it.

Conclusion: Powerful, lives a structured life but is capable of improvising, wants to ensure that everything ends well but might have a limited set of tools with which to do this.

The Bard of Heart [-1 | F | In-Pe | destroyer | Derse]

Bards passively induce decay in their Aspect at first, before experiencing a radical shift and embracing their Aspect, using it to wreak chaos on the session and render the story less predictable in the process. Your Bard of Heart, being a Derse dreamer, is going to commit hard to ghosting Mind at first – she might be rather close to the Knight, and she’ll try to present herself as a just, rational, straightforward person, the type of person who uhhhhh just fuckin,, smashes peoples feelings with Reason and Logic. Not trying to imply that she’ll be right-wing or anything, but I think you know the type o obnoxious debater I’m talking about. Her character arc will experience its most radical shift when she discovers that she’s been using her Rational persona to avoid developing an identity of her own, at which point she’ll likely begin to overembrace Heart and perhaps enter into a tumultuous relationship. Alternatively, if she’s not the romantic type, the tumultuous relationship might be with her own soul slash sense of purpose; she might split from the team and go off to “find herself” in solitude (which could be right disastrous, depending on the timing). Either way, she’ll likely play havoc with team integrity, as her own identity crisis triggers a domino effect amongst her teammates.

Conclusion: Rational, argumentative type who, due to some event (probably post-entry) undergoes a radical identity crisis and causes chaos in the process, for better or worse. Not necessarily a bad person, just a person with a less-than-complete understanding of themselves.

The Seer of Space [+2 | F  | Ex-Ac | interpreter | Derse]

Space players aren’t usually Derse, but there’s certainly no rule against this – the Seer will just have a unique sort of personality. As one who learns about creation, beginnings, and possibility, and eventually teaches others about the same, she’s likely to be an artist, engineer, or inventor, starting processes, though not necessarily finishing them, and taking great pleasure in sharing her ideas with others. The Seer is a rather Passive role, and but they also discover the meaning of their role early on – the downside being that they’re susceptible to manipulation, and often, at first, rather impressionable. The Seer will work well with Active players like the Knight in collaborative efforts, and may actually be a significant influence on the Knight’s plans and schemes. The worst-case scenario is that she abandons her Role and job of frog-breeding and Inverts to behavior reminiscent of a Witch of Time, which would obviously be a crisis for the session as a whole. Nonetheless, I don’t see this scenario as particularly likely, and as long as she has the support of her team, she’ll do great work for the session as a whole.

Conclusion: Creative and eager to teach others about her creations; likely to collaborate with the Knight, but be perhaps more doubtful of the Heir’s leadership potential.

The Rogue of Time [+1 | M | Cu-Ac | relocator | Prospit]

Rogues are initially hesitant about their Aspect, so I think this Rogue would be rather reticent to use time travel at first, considering its potentially drastic consequences. He might make music in private, but be hesitant to share it as well. The Rogue won’t really understand the Knight’s plans, and more to the point, won’t agree with them, and will be more inclined to pursue less-structured avenues of exploration of his Aspect and the Game as a whole. Once they’ve grown into their Role, and embraced the power of time, they’ll be a formidable and vital player, literally giving the team Time by transporting others to the past or future. Which is, yes, risky business, but it’s a power all-but-unique to the Rogue of Time, and will likely alter the course of the session, hopefully for the better! The Rogue will really flourish once the Heir has begun to develop as well; they’ll likely be friends from the start, but when the Heir and the Rogue are both more comfortable utilizing their powers, it’ll be a major step forward for the team.

Conclusion: Improvisational, clever, but somewhat shy, with a unique ability that will almost certainly alter the course of multiple timelines. Will work well in collaboration with the Heir, but is likely to resent direct, structured leadership and planning in general.

The Witch of Void [-2 | M | In-Ac | manipulator | Derse]

This is a dark Role if ever I’ve seen one, but dark doesn’t necessarily equal Bad. The Witch will have the ability to “alter, restructure, or bend the fundamental rules of the unknown, oblivion, and darkness” – and on top of that he’s a Derse dreamer, so I see interaction with the Horrorterrors being a real possibility here. The challenge Witches face is to use their abilities carefully and for righteous purposes, as the immense degree of control they have over their Aspect must be tempered with control over themselves. The Witch is the Functional opposite of the Seer, but their Aspects are adjacent, which I think creates the potential for a very interesting dynamic between those two. Hopefully, they’d co-operate with one another, as a Witch with the guidance of a Seer (and a Seer with the raw power of a Witch) would be a force so significant as to radically alter the course of the Session/narrative.

Closing Notes: The Bard of Heart and the Witch of Void alone add a great deal of raw power to this session; combined with the guidance of a Seer of Space and the unique power of a Rogue of Time to send others across the timelines instead of himself, I think the session has great potential. The main areas of concern are the Bard, yknow, doing the Bardic thing and upfucking everyone’s the shit and/or the leadership struggle between the Knight and the Heir becoming excessively pitched. The Mage should help maintain this balance, but it may come at a great cost to them.

I hope you found this analysis informative and slash or entertaining ::::) thanks for the ask!!

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach - Name Games

Other than the Kurosaki’s (and Shiba) and Kuchiki families perhaps one of the most notable is the Ishida family.  The name Ishida(石田) is a nice simple name reading “Stone Field.”  Similar to Kuchiki the name here is used to reflect the family tree’s status; a Field (full) of Stones is a kind of metaphor for a barren field.  A field with rocks in the soil can’t be properly plowed and doesn’t take well to plant roots.  It refers to the fact that the Ishida family and the Quincy tradition that it represents is a barren one.  To this end the name Uryuu is given its significance.  At first glance Ichigo even mispronounces Uryuu’s name as “Ametatsu,” drawing particular emphasis to the word for Ame(雨), meaning “Rain.”

Uryuu(雨竜) is written with the kanji for “Rain” and “Dragon.”  Dragons in Japanese mythology are associated with water, often said to sleep in the bed of lakes and ponds, said to be the embodiment of rivers themselves, and said to be bringers of rain and storms.  This positions Uryuu as a bringer of rain, and thus of growth and fertility, which plays into his family’s barren field imagery.  Uryuu is meant to be the one who will revive his family’s dead legacy, and indeed the only one capable of doing so as The Last Quincy.

From here, one of the fun things with the men of the Ishida family is that they kind of play a game of dominoes, matching end to end... 

Ryuuken(竜弦) uses the same Ryuu(竜) kanji meaning “Dragon,” and the kanji Ken(弦) which means “Bowstring.”  A pretty obvious meaning.  In Japanese mythology, as well as Chinese from which it is originally borrowed, dragons are also considered god-like entities and associated with the divine mandate of royalty behind mytho-historical god-emperors.  The implicit association here being with great power and godliness, effectively naming Ryuuken “the god of the bowstring,” which is directly reflective of his self introduction in chapter 186: Tell Your Children The Truth.

Souken(宗弦) is written as Sou(宗) which has a few meanings broadly speaking, but among them “religion" or ”sect”/”denomination” and in a kind of related way,  “main point”/"origin” or ”essence,” and again, Ken(弦) for “Bow string.“  The way this reads is in relation to the rest of the family is that, like Ryuuken’s implicit “god of the bowstring,” Souken is the “religion of the bowstring.“  But also “origin of bowstring“ as a very literal reflection if the fact that he is the source of Uryuu’s Quincy skills.

[shinneth]

Gem Ascension Tropes (Peridot-specific: A)

There’s one of my new arts - GAverse Peridot in the house! If she looks a little taller and leggier than normal, she’s supposed to be. I find it kind of fascinating that for nearly every design deviation the canon characters in GAverse have, it’s practically a spoiler to even show it because it pretty much spells out the twist for you. But eh, it is what it is, right? 

So... these following tropes (see here for the first post for the general tropes for backstory on why the hell I did all this, and if you wanna see it in its entirety, see it on Google Docs)

Because Peridot is the actual protagonist of the GA continuity and my favorite character overall... her specific trope listing is the biggest overall. It easily towers over the general tropes I just posted. So this here’s the actual biggest hurdle. Let’s see if I can even fit A through B in this. Wow. I was fucking kidding, but nope! Adding A and B makes the links not work! Hooboy, what does that say when I’m already starting out restricted to post one letter at a time to avoid breaking the post?

I make a point not to copy+paste tropes already on her canon character page unless they’re relevant to GA specifically. I went out of my way to use the SU trope page as little as possible overall, really. So while there will be overlap, rest assured it’s there for a reason. 

So, assuming you’re that interested to see just how much I have to say about Peridot with all the headcanons made into a massive storyline, just keep in mind there’s no marked spoilers and have fun, I guess!

Peridot (Facet-2F5L Cut-5XG)

A Taste of Her Own Medicine: When Peridot tells Steven how the promotion she worked so hard to get ended up putting her in the same position as her previous victims, as she couldn’t get away with bullying or disrespecting gems above her in the caste system (which was literally almost everyone) and ended up being the one targeted for bullying due to her lowly status, Steven mentions this trope verbatim to sum up the situation.

Academic Alpha Bitch: Her Pre-Earth Homeworld persona; the Passive-Aggressive variant.

Accomplice by Inaction: Regarding Jasper’s abuse of Lapis when the pair was originally teamed up with Peridot. Considering Lapis was (albeit unwillingly) suffering Jasper’s abuse so Peridot wouldn’t have to, the fact that Peridot not only forced herself to mentally repress these moments as much as she could in order to live with herself – but actively did nothing to help Lapis even when she was witnessing the vile acts Jasper inflicted on their informant – has been one of her greatest sources of guilt and self-loathing. Peridot herself admits even when she had the means to at least offer some comfort or sympathy when Jasper wasn’t present, she refused to do it. Granted, Peridot’s inaction is largely justified; not only was Jasper’s abuse of Lapis deemed legal by Homeworld law, but Peridot herself – her kind being so low in the caste system – had no right to interfere or prevent any of this. It was actually illegal for Peridot to inconvenience a gem above her rank for any reason, and the gap between herself and Jasper was wide. This was also before Peridot’s Character Development; despite Jasper breaking her down well enough to eliminate most of Peridot’s absolute worst traits as a Homeworld gem, she was still far from being the gem who presently would have done everything in her power to fight Jasper and protect Lapis. This guilt (as well as feeling indebted to Lapis for saving her from Jasper) is the leading cause for why Peridot was such an Extreme Doormat to Lapis in canon.

Achey Scars: One of the last significant blows Peridot sustained courtesy of 9FC in Chapter 4 of Act I is a punch to the face. Since 9FC had limb enhancers, this punch left a nasty mark on Peridot’s cheek and greatly pained her (although she doesn’t realize she even has this injury, as she never sees how she looks after the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown – and her three nearly-crippled limbs are a bit more attention-grabbing). Thankfully for Peridot, it doesn’t plague her for long, as it’s the first injury Steven heals in the following chapter.

Act of True Love: The mission that plays out during the entirety of Act I is undoubtedly this. While Peridot genuinely wants to save everyone else and worries for them individually, it’s the realization that Steven is no longer with her that makes Peridot jump into the action. It’s her love for Steven that makes Peridot stay the course and see her mission through to the end, no matter how often she screws up or breaks down. Even when Peridot is struck with a persistent concern that she won’t come out of this mission alive, she’s not the least bit deterred and readily accepts death if it means Steven can live and be free. Peridot herself states that life doesn’t make sense and that everything is confusing if Steven isn’t with her, so she’s desperate to save him and bring him home where he belongs. This is an amusing case where all of The Four Loves are in play here.

Action Girl/Girlfriend: Comes with Taking a Level in Badass and becoming a Hero Protagonist. The latter trope is in effect as of Chapter 5 of Act I.

Adorkable: Per canon, and still in effect in GA. Very prevalent whenever the topic of Steven comes up, and especially when she and Steven directly interact. Peridot’s full of this when she actually spills her heart out to Steven in Chapter 5 of Act I.

Affectionate Nickname: Peri and Dot by many friends, P-Dot and Dottie-P by Amethyst, Tiny by Bismuth, Twilight by White Diamond.

Aggressive Submissive: Proves to be this in It’s a Birthday, Yes It Is. Whether or not it has anything to do with the submissive instincts that come naturally with Peridots is debatable. This is Who I Am establishes that such instincts were completely benign in Peridot’s case (likely due to emerging as an Unwitting Test Subject) until a certain Near-Rape Experience woke them up with a vengeance.

Alone with a Psycho: From the end of Act I to Chapter III of Act III, Peridot’s only company after being stranded on Homeworld was White Diamond. For six days, Peridot endured White’s wide variety of torture methods before she was rescued.

Ambition is Evil: When Peridot developed this during her life as a Homeworld gem, she became determined to achieve her goals, no matter what she had to do or who she had to hurt to succeed. This quickly made her The Dreaded of her kind. As time passed, Peridot herself became progressively more sinister and sadistic to assert her dominance.

Amnesiac Dissonance: Once Peridot and her team land on Homeworld, just seeing things Peridot is familiar with starts to abruptly jog memories of her Homeworld life that she thought she had discarded. Reuniting with 9FC made Peridot remember how horribly she treated her own kind to get ahead. This triggered a domino effect the longer the mission went on, though in some instances it was beneficial, such as when Peridot remembered what pallification was after being in close proximity to White Pearl.

Angst Nuke: Once Peridot has a moment to think after Pumpkin’s death, this happens. Deadly lasers fire from her gemstone and inadvertently causes an atmosphere-shredding wind storm that accelerates Homeworld’s destruction. Once she Involuntarily Shapeshifts into Chartreuse Diamond as she cries endlessly, the level of destruction is upped to Brown Note levels.

Armor-Piercing Question: Falls victim to this twice, both times by White Diamond. Both times, Steven is used to expose Peridot’s weak spot, which leads to the birth of Chartreuse Diamond and Celadon Diamond.

Armor-Piercing Slap: Gives one to Lapis in Chapter 8 of Act III, after Lapis invokes an Ironic Echo in reference to Pumpkin’s impending demise. She means well by it, but Peridot is too far into her Heroic BSoD to not take offense to her own words being used against her. Even when it’s justified.

The Atoner: Peridot considers herself eternally this after her redemption arc. Even after doing many good deeds, making friends, earning forgiveness, helping people, and saving Earth itself, Peridot still feels she could do more. When she regains her memories of how awful she used to be when she lived on Homeworld, Peridot doubles down on this role hard. She verbally confirms this in This is Who I Am.

Attack its Weak Point: Proposes this strategy to fight the pallified Blue Diamond. More specifically, to find its weak point with herself and her teammates scattering to the most likely place a weak point might be in hopes of striking the right spot.

Attacking Through Yourself:  When Peridot and Steven are stuck fighting each other’s dark selves in a duel to the death (where the dark/light counterparts feel each other’s pain and will perish should one side be killed), Peridot’s duel with Dark Steven quickly escalates into a scenario where Dark Steven is in the midst of choking to death – not by Peridot’s hands, but by her dark counterpart’s, who is well underway killing the Light Steven. Peridot can’t do anything to make her dark self stop this, as the two fights are separated between different dimensions. That is, there’s no way Peridot can make her counterpart stop killing Steven without inflicting damage on herself to disrupt her efforts. Unfortunately, 5XG (the Dark Peridot) retains Peridot’s lost ability to endure pain ridiculously well, so the only way Peridot has any chance of saving Steven is to inflict life-threatening levels of damage to herself. Having virtually no time to think of a better plan, Peridot goes with her instincts and uses a jagged piece of the arena’s floor tiling to lodge directly into her forehead, piercing her gemstone. This does work in forcing 5XG to release her hold on Steven – simultaneously saving both forms of him in the process – but it very nearly cost Peridot her life (and 5XG’s by proxy). Thankfully, the always-merciful Light Steven was there to quickly heal 5XG’s injury while the Dark Steven, having developed a begrudging respect for Peridot (and not wanting to be indebted to her for saving his life), also healed her injury as soon as he recovered from his life-threatening situation. With both Stevens worn down and vulnerable from nearly having their throats crushed and both Peridots too weak to actively continue fighting after sustaining deep, direct damage to their gemstones, both deathmatches ended in a No Contest, which yielded the result Light Peridot hoped to achieve: a scenario where she and Steven come out of this alive.

Ax-Crazy: In Chapter 6 of Act III, Peridot slips into this when she sees White Diamond’s neck and is immediately triggered due to the PTSD of the torture White put her through earlier in the act. Peridot ended up with a Slashed Throat from that (nonlethal considering she’s a gem, but it did shock her into unconsciousness and led to her being manipulated into ascension), so she finds herself intensely obsessed with returning the favor to White now that she has the opportunity.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Okay but "some" core industries going under and "certain" areas being affected and some regions migrating to others because of heat... hate to tell you but that's not "the end of civilization." Its awful and it sucks and will suck for a ton of people and we need to act now to prevent it, yes! But humanity will still survive, the large majority of us! I truly feel like being over-exaggerative is just lying. Don't, please. What do we have if not our honesty? Let's work on climate change truthfully

Well that assumes that no runaway climate effects happen, which is far from certain, and if they happen, humanity is FUCKED:

Our ability to keep Earth habitable may be more limited than we realize.

Human activity could push the planet over a number of tipping points that would cause global temperatures to rise even higher than we’ve driven them already, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research suggests that certain natural systems on the planet could be activated by warming and consequently trigger further warming. In that situation, Earth’s average temperature might reach 4 or 5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. (For context, the goal of the Paris agreement was to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.)

The paper’s authors refer to this scenario as “Hothouse Earth.”

“These tipping elements can potentially act like a row of dominoes,” Johan Rockström, a co-author of the paper and the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre,said in a news release. “Once one is pushed over, it pushes Earth towards another. It may be very difficult or impossible to stop the whole row of dominoes from tumbling over. Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if ‘Hothouse Earth’ becomes the reality.”

If this were to happen, the world would become far warmer than it’s been for at least the past 1.2 million years. Sea levels around the globe would likely rise between 33 and 200 feet higher than they are now.

Read this too:

His warning is supported by James Hansen, who declared that “a target of two degrees (Celsius) is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”

The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas has made the planet warmer than it had been since the rise of civilization 10,000 years ago. Civilization was made possible by the emergence about 12,000 years ago of the “Holocene” epoch, which turned out to be the Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold. But now, says physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, "We are catapulting ourselves way out of the Holocene.“

This catapult is dangerous, because we have no evidence civilization can long survive with significantly higher temperatures. And yet, the world is on a trajectory that would lead to an increase of 4C (7F) in this century. In the opinion of many scientists and the World Bank, this could happen as early as the 2060s.

What would "a 4C world” be like? According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (at the University of East Anglia), “during New York’s summer heat waves the warmest days would be around 10-12C (18-21.6F) hotter [than today’s].” Moreover, he has said, above an increase of 4C only about 10% of the human population will survive.

Believe it or not, some scientists consider Anderson overly optimistic.

The main reason for pessimism is the fear that the planet’s temperature may be close to a tipping point that would initiate a “low-end runaway greenhouse,” involving “out-of-control amplifying feedbacks.” This condition would result, says Hansen, if all fossil fuels are burned (which is the intention of all fossil-fuel corporations and many governments). This result “would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans.”

Moreover, many scientists believe that runaway global warming could occur much more quickly, because the rising temperature caused by CO2 could release massive amounts of methane (CH4), which is, during its first 20 years, 86 times more powerful than CO2. Warmer weather induces this release from carbon that has been stored in methane hydrates, in which enormous amounts of carbon – four times as much as that emitted from fossil fuels since 1850 – has been frozen in the Arctic’s permafrost. And yet now the Arctic’s temperature is warmer than it had been for 120,000 years – in other words, more than 10 times longer than civilization has existed.

According to Joe Romm, a physicist who created the Climate Progress website, methane release from thawing permafrost in the Arctic “is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle.” The amplifying feedback works like this: The warmer temperature releases millions of tons of methane, which then further raise the temperature, which in turn releases more methane.

The resulting threat of runaway global warming may not be merely theoretical. Scientists have long been convinced that methane was central to the fastest period of global warming in geological history, which occurred 55 million years ago. Now a group of scientists have accumulated evidence that methane was also central to the greatest extinction of life thus far:the end-Permian extinction about 252 million years ago.

Worse yet, whereas it was previously thought that significant amounts of permafrost would not melt, releasing its methane, until the planet’s temperature has risen several degrees Celsius, recent studies indicate that a rise of 1.5 degrees would be enough to start the melting.

And you have a pretty fucking ridiculous concept of ‘oh humanity will survive so everything is ok’. At the bare minimum, millions to billions of people are going to die. Millions of animal species will go extinct. There is going to be mass starvation from failing crop yields and new zones of poor rainfall. There is going to be a mass refugee crisis from entire countries going underwater. There are going to be wars and conflicts triggered over water. There are going to be vast areas of the earth that will be uninhabitable due to deadly heatwaves.

None of this is ok, and nobody is fear mongering by pointing it out.

[itsclydebitches]

Does genocide/death matter in dbz? What makes Frieza blowing up a planet different then Beerus? Our main cast our friends with the literal gods. We've seen that there is a afterlife and they're multiple ways to bring back the dead. I feel like the ethics of that universe get really complicated and it just doesn't get addressed. Which is fine since the show isn't about that, but something to think about.

The show might not address it but I DO. But no, for real, I’ve thought about this more than I probably should have, anon. Based on those (very broad-stroke) thoughts my general conclusion is that death originally did matter a whole lot, then it didn’t, now it does again in Super. So presenting a very rough timeline: 

During the Dragon Ball era people have notably grown up with death as a permanent thing. Like in real life, they fear it and avoid it and largely don’t know that it can be undone. The dragon balls change this, but at this point they’re a) incredibly difficult to locate, b) often hard to obtain even when located (i.e. at the bottom of an ocean), c) have more rules attached to them (you can only be resurrected so many times), and d) are constantly threatened via the death of Earth’s guardian. So death may not be permanent... but it sure as hell isn’t easy to reverse either. It’s a bit of a pipe dream. 

In the early DBZ era we have this trend continuing. That’s why Goku’s death at the hands of Raditz still has an impact. Same with Krillin’s death as everyone (characters included) are figuring out how the Nemekian balls fit into all this and what exactly they can accomplish with them. It’s important that Krillin died when he did--when death still felt semi-permanent and something of a significant loss--because otherwise we’d have no true motivation for Goku’s Super Saiyan transformation. 

Mid Cell arc into Buu is where I think we start seeing death as a no big deal kinda thing. By this point the dragon balls have far less restrictions attached to them, they can be picked up in just a few hours by our heroes, and the next generation (Trunks and Goten) have an indifferent, “Just use the dragon balls” mentality. Death takes on a slightly different meaning at this point in the story. Part of that includes changing our perspective about death from “They’re gone for forever” to “We just can’t contact them for a long, long time and that’s still pretty depressing”--i.e. Goku leaving for seven years and Gohan not getting to grow up with his father. He might know he’ll see him again someday, but that doesn’t lessen the emotional difficulty of being alone then and there. 

Another consideration at this point is whether someone WILL bring you back--i.e. Frieza fears his hell because barely anyone cares about him + his henchmen don’t stand much chance against our heroes, the ones hanging out around those dragon balls. The conflict of “The dragon balls are only useful if you can get ahold of them” has changed from “Wow these are really hard to find/access” to “Shit they’re now controlled by a small group of very powerful people.” We start to see the balls as a coveted resource. Just because they exist doesn’t mean you get to use them. 

More importantly though, I think during this era the how and when people die takes center stage, not necessarily that they did die. I think a good example of this is when Piccolo thinks Buu killed Gohan and the Supreme Kai is fearful that he’ll die at the hands of his blast. For each there’s a general sense of “This shouldn’t happen”--because dying is horrible and painful and if you care about this person you don’t want them to go through that--but also a sense of “If Gohan dies now we have one less person to fight Buu, so Buu might destroy the entire Earth before we can resurrect anyone, so we might not have a way of bringing ANYONE back EVER.” It’s a domino effect. The conflict now is who is dying, when they’re dying, and whether their death will impact the others’ ability to fix things at the end of the day. We see the same thing happening in Super when Frieza destroys the Earth in his last moments. Death is suddenly a threat again because the heroes’ solution to this problem was erased alongside life itself. No more dragon balls. The gods they know can’t magically make a whole planet and its life reappear. There’s nothing to do... except Whis’ temporal do over. And that has a 3min limitation/can only be used once every X amount of time. Meaning the next time Whis CAN do it far more than 3 mins will have passed, making the technique useless. If they don’t fix things now they never will. 

Which leads us to Super as a whole. Overall I think it’s done a very good job of re-establishing the stakes. First we’re shown through that Frieza moment that the level of power these characters hold now means that destruction can happen instantaneously... sometimes too quickly to do anything about it, even when you’d normally have ways of fixing stuff after the fact. Then we learn about the pretty much limitless super dragon balls, but they’re spread across two universes. Good luck getting those in a hurry. Most significantly though, we’re introduced to characters whose power exceeds everything else we know about death. Like Beerus’ hakai. Or Grand Zeno’s abilities. Maybe you can wish people back with the regular or super dragon balls... but that ultimately won’t matter if you’re erased entirely from your timeline and don’t even exist in an afterlife anymore. Or your entire universe is erased, along with any of those magical objects. 

These are the kinds of people that our heroes risk pissing off nowadays. Like the rest of the series, the stakes keep getting higher. If normal death doesn’t mean much anymore--we can wish you back, visit you in Other World, undo time, etc.--then you have to introduce pure erasure instead. A lack of existence across all worlds and timelines. That’s why the Tournament, to my mind anyway, still had weight. Everyone watching knew that the winner could use the super dragon balls to wish things back to normal... but whether the Grand Zenos would let them was the question. For all the characters know they might have used their little wish orbs and then the Omni Kings went, “Nope!” and erased everything again. Their power is just too substantial to combat if they’re insistent on making death permanent. 

(As a side note regarding Beerus and Frieza: Frieza is the exact sort of guy that Beerus is supposed to deal with... but then didn’t. Same with Buu. Beerus’ destruction exists to keep balance. Our DBZ villains’ destruction exists to cause selfish chaos. However, we’re shown time and time again that Beerus is sleeping instead of doing his job (resulting in death that should never have happened, like the supreme kais); he’s destroying worlds not because balance requires it, but because he didn’t like their food. He even threatens his entire universe by picking a fight with Goku. Beerus, bluntly put, isn’t good at his job, but ultimately I like that about him. It emphasizes how fallible and human ALL the gods are. They’re not perfect, etherial beings who appear unknowable to us and therefore exist as characters we can’t connect with... they’re all screwups in their own ways lol). 

[bluemoonpunch]

⭐ The Cosmic Alignment of Jung Hoseok - Oracle Reading

[The Cosmic Alignment of Jung Hoseok, born February 18, 1994 — Aquarius. The Cosmic Alignment reading is designed to showcase an individual’s personal energetic alignment with cosmic influences. It can be considered an Astrological Alignment reading as well. For this reading specifically, I use the Black Moon Astrology deck. This spread is an original design by me. This reading is being featured as part of the December BTS Overload year-end even.]

This reading was performed November 24, 2018.

Pre-Reading:

Note: So, I’ve been doing the solo readings for December over the last few days and I’ve noticed massive changes in their energy collectively. From what I can tell at this point the integration that I talked about in the original 2018/2019 Outlook reading has happened and that shift in the timeline was the result of it. The integration of the Higher Self is raising their vibration significantly and is speeding things up with what they are meant to be doing. This showed up in both Hoseok and Yoongi’s alignment readings so far.

As always with Hoseok’s energy, I had to “go around the back” to meet his energy. Just like with the previous readings I was feeling pressure in different areas of the body, and specifically for him, it was the chest. That made me think of Jimin since he’s ruling over the Heart Chakra of the Soul Body, so I used Jimin’s energy to get to Hoseok. That actually made it much easier to really settle in with him and feel into his energy.

Of course, he’s had a lot of issues since the Soul Body manipulation and healing process, but from what I could see, everything is just as it should be at this point. Jimin and Yoongi both have disconnected the majority of their energy lines from his energy center, but are both still anchoring him in a way. 

Jimin is stabilizing and Yoongi is protecting Hoseok’s energy. For this specifically, I was feeling water swirling around the top of my head, literally like a Water helmet. Not only is this energetic protection, but it’s also stimulating the Crown Chakra for him as well, which again is what made me think that the integration is working its way from top to bottom, one person triggering the other to shift in vibration.

-full reading with photos under the cut-

With that stimulus, I was also feeling these pulses and I was seeing it as well. It was like red/orange lights that had a slow pulse to them. With this, there were heart palpitations and very hard thumping in the chest. Like the energy, his higher vibration is very noticeable to him in his body. He has extreme awareness of the body. 

This makes sense to me considering that he is physically sensitive to cosmic shifts, so the fact that he can sense his own energetic shift within his own body lines up. 

In addition to that, it’s very, very uncomfortable, and I saw that in Yoongi as well. The higher vibration makes it extremely uncomfortable to be in a physical body, it’s like your light body, your soul, whatever you want to call it, is getting more and more cramped inside as it vibrates faster and starts to expand.

His energy is expanding so much that it is radiating, not projecting, outside of his body, which is what I saw with Jin as well. It seems to be coming from all over so it’s not as controlled as Jin. 

Reading that radiating energy was really interesting because it’s like it’s been completely reset, there’s absolutely no “scars” or any kind of evidence there anymore from his energy center being torn up with the Soul Body manipulation. It’s completely clear, very deep shades of orange, red, and yellow, So, it’s expansive energy, but again, it’s very uncomfortable inside the body.

Then I felt this very weird wave of energy that I’m still not too sure what it was or where it came from. I’d have to assume this is where and how the energy is radiating out of the body. It literally felt like parts of my skin all over were popping. They were tiny and sharp pains and they were just kind of happening all over at random times. My mind went to solar flares and how there’s just nonsense flying off the sun and all that sometimes, and that may be it as well. It’s just going quite quickly and his body isn’t adapting as fast as it needs too, so there are just these pockets in the physical vessel where that energy literally gets spit out and radiates around him. Very interesting.

I was also getting ringing in the ears, but not like the typical high pitched whining, it was like he’s literally hearing the frequency shifts of the planet, or he’s hearing the energy waves. People that are sensitive to energy shifts like that, which he is, will usually be able to hear those frequencies. It will be like ringing in the ears, but different tones, not just one continuous high pitched ringing. This can lead to headaches as well which was something I noticed with him before. 

Actually, a lot of what he seems to have going on now is a lot like the ascension symptoms I was dealing with a couple of months back, and what I noticed Yoongi dealing with way before that. It’s just hitting Hoseok a lot harder now because more of those shifts need to happen in a shorter amount of time.

This was the first reading I did this time around with the solo readings where I was able to get in touch with one of their Guides. I haven’t been able to for a while and I assume that was because I was still hanging out on a lower timeline until recently. 

I wasn’t really trying to speak to them or anything, I was just kind of working my way deeper because I was curious to see if his energy center was actually completely healed up, and I pretty much got pushed back and heard “new energy, new mind,” and was shown hands being held up over the Soul Body. Pretty much saying I can’t go inside the Soul Body to look, it’s being protected, it’s been sealed up through the Soul Body Healing, it can’t be touched anymore by any being of a frequency lower than what is being maintained within the body.

So, it was just a quick answer to my question that pretty much states, as any timeline shift would have it, the old shit doesn’t matter. None of what happened with the Soul Body in terms of manipulation or attack will have any effect on them anymore and everything is secure. Which confirms what I got before when I channeled all that stuff about the Soul Group and the Soul Body a few weeks ago.

It was stuff about how all the people that were predicting bad things happening to the guys and seeing them getting sick and all that was literally happening because they were picking up on past events and energy, then interpreting them as future events. 

This occurs because pretty much that old timeline or the lower timelines (and yes, people can be on different collective timelines and still experience the same collective reality) are folding over onto themselves. That’s why a lot of people seem to be running into old problems. A lot of old emotions, anxieties, and fears are coming up for people now. They’re on a lower timeline and it’s folding over.

BTS experienced a timeline shift before as well and it was one that occurred during or right before they started to release HYYH, and just like before none of what happened before that time will affect them going further in terms of “karmic” energy or any energetic ties. That doesn’t mean there is no time before that, it doesn’t mean they forgot about it, it just means there are no energetic ties holding them to the past, especially in terms of what could make it difficult for them to progress and ascend.

While I had that Guide “on the line”, it was one I hadn’t spoken to before, I asked how planetary shifts affect him now because before it was a lot more heavy on him, it really affected his mental state. What I was shown was bricks being laid and then I was shown that Water helmet thing that I was feeling before. Pretty much it summed up to the planetary energies not really affecting him mentally anymore, because of his nice little water helmet keeping his mind clear, but it is still affecting him physically.

I then got another bit of audible something that came in and I tried to write it down, but it was going too fast. I kind of summarized it to, “expansion of the light body removed blocks and allowed for him to be more physically receptive to the energies being emitted to him. Hard resistance to these energies and mental rigidity made the emissions more forceful and therefore more taxing on the body and mental state. He is more fluid now, more receptive.”

So, basically, Hoseok has a lot going on, but it’s all good.

Pretty much exactly what I was being told is what came out here in this set where I focused on his core energy and how it is towards the energy of cosmic influences

It’s all building him up now as he’s being expanded and moving forwards quite quickly with his own soul progression. There’s a lot of very vibrant energy there with all that yellow, which I associate with the Sun, as well as mental clarity and projection. In a similar fashion to Jin, it’s like he’s becoming an embodiment of the Sun.

To explain that a bit more, blue and yellow are significant colors when I see them in readings whether they come in a channeled image or they show up a lot in the layout of cards. When blue comes around I think of a clear blue sky and expansion of the mind through a wide and unprejudiced perspective. It’s a lot of learning, a lot of understanding, and clarity. And with a clear blue sky comes the Sun. The Sun is that projection of knowledge. Once you understand something through the broad perspective and clarity of the blue sky, you are able to use the Sun to shine a light on it for other people, to project that knowledge and awareness to other people.

This goes into that thing about the higher vibration literally causing a domino effect of ascension. It happens to everyone, not just them. It’s why the energy waves are setting people off and forcing emotional and energetic purging to occur, it’s so that people can start cutting those ties of old timelines, raise their vibration, and get to the higher timelines together. At this point, it’s pretty much up to what you decided you wanted to do before this incarnation, but everything is in full swish so… it’s just kind of happening now.

Back to the cards.

Strength brought the image of the Lion that is on both the 4 of Swords and the King of Wands in the Linestrider deck to mind. They’re all Leo energy aside from the 4 of Swords, which just correlates through the lion, but those cards are what I associated Hoseok with. He’s always been presented in readings as the King of Wands. 

A while back in Yoongi and Hoseok’s first relationship reading that I did before the Soul Body healing the King of Wands was presented as Hoseok’s energy being overloaded with Fire, which is what was happening to his energy center. It was a show of him being in a weakened state, but here it’s very much presented as being something that is strengthing him. Not the Fire energy, just the cosmic energy in general — it’s being used to represent external energy in general.

Strength, the cosmic energy, is dropping down into the 4 of Swords, so it’s like the cosmic energy that used to really break him down is now being used to help him feel physically rested while his inner workings, his energy, his light body raises its vibration. Those little pops on the skin may be coming from this as they’re allowing the body to release the excess energy in a way that doesn’t let it run off but allows it to accumulate outside. It’s almost like the physical body is being made more porous like it’s not going to hold the energy in and let him pop while it expands rapidly. It makes sense if you try to visualize it.

Then, while the cosmic energy is helping him to feel physically rested, and maybe mentally rested, you can see that energy expanding over into The Fool which is representing that light body, that integration of the Higher Self, fully emitting the Sun. It’s completely refreshed and brand new. 

The 8 of Pentacles is also extending from the cosmic energy in Strength which shows that while this is occurring, things are also being built up towards the Chariot, to the very focused and streamlined progression of the soul towards soul purpose. I’ve forgotten already, but I think I got that for Jin as well.

It all falls down into The Empress and the 2 of Cups where the energy is fertile and growing. Just more of that expansion talk. The 2 of Cups is showing balancing in the emotional frame, which is that Water helmet thing that came from Yoongi, and the Empress is showing a very grounded and logical connection to spirituality.

The Empress was actually great to see as she is someone who is meant to be intuned with cosmic bodies, especially the Earth. This shows open receptibility and movement with cosmic shifts rather than the resistance he had before which made things much more difficult on both ends.

The Reading:

Most Prominent Cosmic Energy: Yod — Destiny

I mean, can we just…

See, it’s really going to be difficult for me to explain this because it has to do with a lot of stuff that I haven’t talked about on the blog and I don’t want every reading I do for December to be like… a lesson in ascension or something, but like… this is literally the shift. 

It’s the ascension, it’s the same thing I had for Jin where everything is literally driving him towards soul purpose and right now all seven of them have, at this point, jumped timelines, are integrating their Higher Selves, are expanding their light bodies, and are on their shit.

Because they all have different jobs, and they all have different modes in the Soul Body and in the group, it’s like they all, just the same, have separate sources of drive towards that ascension process. Because Hoseok is so receptive to the cosmic energies, that is what is pushing him and if I’m not mistaken, he may be anchoring cosmic energies for the group as well. Again, all very difficult to explain, but it’s a thing that a lot of people, and I mean A LOT of people, are here to do for the ascension. Just anchoring in energy that helps raise the vibration of the collective.

But yeah, pretty much, the most prominent thing that is being directed towards Hoseok is the integration, the ascension, and the group’s collective purpose as a source of higher vibration for people that follow them and the general collective.

This is honestly freaking me out a little bit, but I’m so fucking excited for this shit to get rolling for the mass collective. It will be a fucking shitshow, I’m sure, but it’s going to be so out of this fucking world and beyond understanding, I love it.

Current State of Conscious Alignment: Leo — I Will

And there’s that Leo energy.

Quite literally the “I will” aspect is directly related to this newfound receptibility to this energy. That expanded consciousness has him more open on an unconscious, subconscious, and maybe even conscious level at this point where he’s literally just flowing with it. He’s very in line with what he’s meant to be doing.

Based on the opposition that Jimin and Yoongi both seemed to have in between prior lifetimes towards continuing to incarnate, this makes me wonder if Hoseok was ever against coming back in as a separate soul in order to aid in the ascension process. If that’s the case it would explain the resistance to it in this lifetime. 

I think, just based on how Yoongi was coming off, they are unconsciously, on a soul level, becoming aware that their job is almost done and over with so they’re just like, yeah okay, we got this, let’s get it moving.

I’m getting confused now because I can’t remember what information came through in what reading, but I think it was in Jin’s reading where I talked about him because aware of this on a conscious level to an extent. Like, he’s very aware that there is something happening, something is shifting, things are changing, and he has enough inner connection to know that he needs to go with it, but it’s not like blaring clear to him. 

That’s what’s happening here with Hoseok as well, and I imagine before they start talking about it on a conscious level, all of them are going to have to be at this stage where they know, but they don’t know what they know.

Hoseok is definitely in line with what’s happening with his cosmic influences though, which is fantastic for him. Hoseok, Kook, and Taehyung always had me a bit more worried in terms of how difficult it was going to be for them to start that internal shift, but I think if Hoseok can do it, they can all get through it pretty smoothly.

How The Alignment Manifests: Lunar Eclipse — Change

I mean, it’s a bit obvious, innit.

Just in terms of internal transformation, it’s obvious, but it goes a bit all over the place. I was getting images for this one where the focus was more on the fact that the Earth moves in front of the Moon, it casts a shadow to where the Moon itself becomes invisible while the Sun and Earth have this sort of very clear and conscious connection without any distortion or distraction from the Moon, or the emotional side, the polluted spirit, the subconscious. 

Basically, it looked like they were trying to explain to me that this is clearing out all of that mental stuff that he was dealing with or at least toning it down so that there are no energetic ties to those lower frequencies. It’s like the balance between Earth energy and Fire energy stabilizing the Water energy, all within his Air energy core.

Basically, with this and the image of the lunar eclipse, you have planetary bodies aligning and it’s sort of meant to be this “stars aligning” kind of thing where everything balances just right and everything suddenly just works. It’s like getting a key to a lock you’ve been filing away at for years.

The receptiveness here, the quieting down of the Moon/Water energy allows for the conscious mind to be presented with his inner knowing an inner connection without any blocks or resistance. Before, one of the biggest reasons he struggled so hard, and probably still does, with his anxiety and mood swings was that he would try to hide it and shove it down, which really cemented this unconscious need to put up these walls and blocks to feeling anything internally that could throw him off consciously. 

Because the mental shifts are being toned down, those walls can come down, those defenses can be dropped and he will then be able to connect to himself on a conscious level. I hope that makes sense.

There’s just a lot of stuff happening mentally in terms of broadening the perspective. He’s pretty much getting the blue sky and the sun all at once, which as I mentioned can be pretty hard to deal with when it’s happening so fast. But he’s getting some cushion on all ends from the cosmic energies he’s working with.

How To Maintain Alignment: The Sun — Spirit

Again, this shit is just happening now. The whole ascension process for the collective pretty much got over the peak and it’s just all tipping over onto the other side and it’s just a matter of getting to the end and getting everything integrated entirely. This here, it goes with the Leo energy as well as the whole projection thing which I had for Jin as well.

The only thing he has to do, and the only thing he can do is integrate the Higher Self. You can see The Sun as being Leo’s Higher Self as it rules over the Sign. So this is saying that as he consciously becomes more aware of the shift occurring, all he needs to do is let it happen and not let any of those old blocks come springing back up. But I have no doubt in my mind that that is not going to happen whatsoever.

What Will Come From This:

Mercury Retrograde — Reinvention

Tenth House — The World

I got so wigged out by this because I had gotten this exact combination for a reading I did for myself a while back specifically regarding my Higher Self integration and my progression with the ascension and now I’m just like… wow okay sure.

IT’S THE FUCKING SHIFT. 

If I had used another deck it would have been Death, Regeneration, or Rebirth I’m pretty sure. In terms of their collective soul purpose between the seven of them, this is relatively what they are moving towards. It’s the “cracking the egg” thing I talked about a lot, it’s broadening the awareness of the people that follow them, opening them up to the ascension. They’re not bringing the ascension to you, and you’re not just going to magically flip a switch by listening to their music or something, they’re just activating people, and it’s more towards the conscious level of awareness. Which is obvious, but you know…

Again, everything is pushing towards the collective purpose of the seven of them by way of expanding their light bodies and projecting those higher frequencies, however, I’m not sure how that works when there are massive amounts of people still sitting in that old timeline. 

I think it’s like Jin’s thing where the frequencies and the vibrational shifts from them are only going to be put out to people that are receptive to them now, which means there would need to be a frequency match already. That doesn’t mean that the people in lower frequencies won’t shift or ascend as well, they’re just going to be getting it from their guides and higher self, and it will probably occur later, but pretty rapidly once those floodgates open. Very similar to what is happening with Hoseok right now.

He shifted because Yoongi and Namjoon did and now he has to integrate at a faster pace to keep up, which can be quite taxing on the body and mind for people who don’t have that extra support available to them as he does.

That’s all I have for this one, thank you so much for reading!

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Mass Effect 3 Steam

Check out the entire Mass Effect franchise on Steam Included with EA Play Subscribe for instant access to Mass Effect™ 3 N7 Digital Deluxe Edition (2012) and a collection of EA's best-loved titles with EA Play!

High-resolution charts with concurrent player counts for all Steam games, including historic data and stats. View most played games on Steam. View Steam player counts. Mass Effect 3 (2012) 135: 151: 673 + Grand Theft Auto III: 135: 167: 640 + Might & Magic Heroes VII – Trial by Fire: 135: 177: 558 + Neos VR: 135: 207: 360 + In Silence.

Earlier this month, EA made the surprise reveal that EA games are coming to Steam! With so many franchises under the Electronic Arts banner, this was a pretty big deal and gave a chance for certain series to have their reunion all under one storefront. Now, the publisher just revealed a few more games that have been added to that list, including the deluxe version of Mass Effect 3.

Need for Speed, Dragon Age, Crysis 3, and more have all been added previously, with even more on the way. As for the most recent titles to be included in Valve's library, we've got a ton of Battlefield, two Mass Effect Deluxe Editions, and Star Wars goodness.

Battlefield 1 Revolution Edition

Battlefield 3 Premium Edition

Battlefield 4 Premium Edition

Battlefield 5 Year 2 Edition

Battlefield Hardline Ultimate Edition

Mass Effect 3: N7 Digital Deluxe Edition

Mass Effect: Andromeda Deluxe Edition

Star Wars: Battlefront 2: Celebration Edition

Star Wars: Battlefront Ultimate Edition

Related: Here are even more EA games on Steam right now

We mentioned previously in our earlier coverage that the inclusion of the most recent Mass Effect and Dragon Age games was a huge deal. Both franchise saw a split of what was available outside of Origins and EA Access thanks to EA taking the reigns as the publisher, which meant that those that want to play on Steam would have to divvy up their time between platforms. Both are free to play, so that's not the biggest deal, though can be seen as a bummer for those that love to rack up achievements as well as access to the Steam Workshop for mods.

PC-exclusive titles like APex Legends will also be making their way over onto Steam, which will increase the player-size immensely for those that absolutely refuse to download another client. More and more games are being added to this list, so don't worry - Prima Games will keep this list updated.

What do you think about the latest EA games making their way over onto Steam? Have you ever missed out on a gaming experience out of not wanting to go through EA Origins? Sound off with your thoughts over on Twitter @PrimaGames, we'd love to hear what you think and what you'd like to see next!

Mass Effect 3 Steam Key

About the author

Mass Effect 3 Steam Dlc

It is possible to launch Mass Effect 3 through Steam, but you still need Origin to load the game. I just tested this myself by: Clicking Add A Game in the bottom left of the library tab Add a Non-Steam Game. Mass Effect 3 steam key free. Free Steam Keys! FREE STEAM GAMES. Free games to download. Steam Giveaways. Mass Effect 3 cd key free Additional information for Mass Effect 3 free steam key Earth is burning. The Reapers have taken over and other civilizations are falling like dominoes. Lead the final fight to save humanity.

With an arguably unhealthy obsession with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, Liana is wildly passionate about all things in the gaming community. From shooters, to RPGs, if it's out - she's playing it.A medically retired US Sailor and now full-time hoarder of gaming collectibles, Liana's passion for everything in the gaming industry is palpable. Also, if you lose her in a crowd, just casually mention any BioWare game and the crazy pterodactyl screech will without a doubt follow.You can follow her on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy or email her for editorial inquiries at liana.ruppert@primagames.com!

Publisher Electronic Arts has taken the spotlight in the last week. While its recent EA Play showcase still has players talking, before the big event EA was releasing its catalog on Steam. With many ecstatic about the option to play these games on Valve's client, some problems are arising after launch.

Of the big list of EA published games to release on Steam, Mass Effect 3 saw considerable fanfare. The original trilogy's finale was welcomed by fans, but elation has quickly turned into frustration. Mass Effect 3, a controversial finale to the original series, has some significant performance issues on Steam with players reporting drops to sub-15fps.

RELATED: Mass Effect 5's Best Bet is to Follow Mass Effect 2's Lead

According to Game Debate, the culprit of this performance knock stems from the Origin in-game overlay that is applied to EA games. Just after launch a thread appeared on the Electronic Arts official forums which also points to the overlay as the issue. Responses explain that users should attempt to disable the overlay which had been known to affect performance. The problem with Mass Effect 3's Steam releases is that the overlay is continuously enabled.

Some users in the thread posted support conversations which point to the problem as being a technical issue with Steam. Taking a peak at the Steam user reviews, which currently sits at a 'Mixed' rating, many players are suffering from the aforementioned poor performance. The top five up-voted reviews all acknowledge a widespread problem and urge others to hold off on a purchase until a fix is released.

Mass Effect 3 released last week as part of EA's previous rollout of games on the Steam client. Yesterday had a whole new slew of games that were previously locked to EA's Origin client on PC. The recent batch of releases include Titanfall 2, Dead Space 3, A Way Out, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Need for Speed: Payback. The big title to come with these releases is the Sims 4 which has 10 million active users.

Mass Effect 3 Steam Key

Fans are hoping that Mass Effect 3's performance issues are fixed quickly. Some are ready to replay the trilogy on PC again after the rumored Mass Effect Trilogy remaster was not at EA Play.

Mass Effect 3 is now available on PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U.

MORE: 10 Mass Effect 3 Mods That Make The Game Even Better

Source: Game Debate, EA Forums

Bloodborne 2 on PS5 Would Be a Love Letter to Fans

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My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 8 Review: Match 3 Conclusion

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This My Hero Academia review contains spoilers.

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 8

“Raise the temperature higher. I can go higher. Burn myself! In order to become who I want to be!”

My Hero Academia season 5 has worked very hard to showcase the wide range of characters that compose Classes A and B, especially some of the more obscure or forgotten heroes. This season caters towards perpetual combat, but part of the reason that these clashes are so successful is because everyone has trained hard and improved upon their base skills, only the audience isn’t privy to how exactly these heroes have upped their games. 

My Hero Academia could have easily devoted some introductory episodes on this material, but the mystery factor has become a very exciting element to this season. Each episode from this season has featured some sort of surprise reveal about a character’s new abilities, but “Match 3 Conclusion” makes these secret hero improvements its priority in a fantastic episode that never slows down and marks the highlight of the season. 

Unsurprisingly, “Match 3 Conclusion” finishes off the third battle of the Joint Training Arc that kicked off in the previous episode. These episodes may be two halves of the same whole, but they couldn’t be more different in terms of their pacing and scope. This is a deliriously busy episode that crams in too much action, if anything. Something that “Match 3 Conclusion” underscores is that all of the Class A students in this fight are important and play a factor in the outcome, but it’s Tenya Iida and Shoto Todoroki that really get to prove their leadership abilities here. Both of these characters have been some of the dominant members of the 1-A Class in the past, but it’s literally been seasons since they’ve been integral to the main conflict at hand. 

Iida quickly rises to the occasion and debuts his new Recipro Turbo ability, which increases his speed to even higher levels of ridiculousness. Midoriya makes an offhand remark that Iida is now faster than Gran Torino, which is a pretty significant claim, if true. All of the theatrics around Iida’s new speed look stunning and the animation as well as the choreography around these sequences is perfect. The sequences gain an extra level of fluidity and the actions occasionally get ahead of the frames, as if the show itself can’t keep up with Iida’s new speed. 

Iida’s new super move allows him to intervene in Ojiro’s battle and dominate the battlefield, but he’s not the only one that’s come to play with new tricks. “Match 3 Conclusion” generates some effective suspense over the nature of everyone’s new abilities, when they’ll reveal themselves, and if there’s a deeper strategy to them beyond their surface level purpose. It’s a smart way to make the established powers of the Class A students feel as new as Class B’s Quirks, many of which are being seen for the first time.

Previous matches from the Joint Training Arc have featured a domino effect as different heroes rise to the challenge once their teammates get defeated. “Match 3 Conclusion” adopts a more thrilling structure where Iida’s fight against Kaibara happens concurrently with Todoroki’s war with Tetsutetsu, as well as Shoji’s duel with Pony Tsunotori. This approach means that there’s never really a dull moment in this episode as each of these battles intercut with each other. It’s all action and the lack of filler is a welcome alternative to the emptier first half of this battle from the previous episode. It’s also harder to predict the outcome of all of this since Class A and B’s teammates are divided and pursue different, independent strategies.

Read more

TV

My Hero Academia’s Deku and Bakugo on Season 5, Class 1-B, and Dark Betrayals

By Daniel Kurland

TV

My Hero Academia: The Rise of Jiro and the Future of Dubbed Anime

By Daniel Kurland

A consistent strength of this season of My Hero Academia is how every pairing between Class A and B students has featured an especially inspired clash of complimentary or contradictory Quirks. In this case, Tetstutetsu specifically targets Todoroki because of the intense temperature-based training that he’s put himself through that ideally removes all of Todoroki’s usual advantages. This initially seems to work as Tetsutetsu pushes through Todoroki’s attacks, but is actually able to grow stronger when his steel exterior becomes burning hot after it’s heated up by Todoroki’s attacks. This turns into a twisted endurance contest, which is how battles have typically gone through these two characters in the past, even if it hasn’t been against each other. 

There are clear stakes here, but the fight between these two is just gorgeous on a visual level. All of the episodes that feature Todoroki’s Half-Cold Half-Hot Quirk are typically impressive in their execution, but “Match 3 Conclusion” is by far the most extreme example. Moments from Todoroki’s battle honestly look like they’re from a TRIGGER production as the heat rages on and an atypical color palette compliments the fiery and heightened atmosphere. The final minutes of the episode go for broke in this department as an avalanche of Quirks advances on everyone and the environment melts into a sprawling mess. 

Tetsutetsu’s dedication to grow stronger is highly admirable, but it’s hard to not get excited for Todoroki once he unleashes new temperatures to his abilities, which freaking melts Tetsutetsu’s steel into a molten mess. They both don’t hold back from each other here and it’s quite endearing that they later throw so much respect towards each other post-battle. They’re left with a stronger bond than before rather than a brewing rivalry. 

The Joint Training Arc is really putting in the work that in a season or two, every Class A hero could be out in the world and partners with someone from Class B and it’d feel like a completely natural progression of the series. My Hero Academia also doesn’t get enough credit for how substantial and satisfying Shoto’s development has been throughout the series and it’s definitely possible to view this series through the lens that the Todoroki family are actually the real main characters.

The final act of this fight is such a treat once everyone’s conflicts overlap. Pont Tsunotori becomes Class B’s breakout MVP and her encounter with Shoji is more of My Hero Academia at its smartest. Shoji literally has eyes on the back of his head that prevent a sneaky horn projectile from Pony. Once Juzo Honenuki’s Softening Quirk gets added to the mix, the perfect Quirk cocktail exists for all hell to break loose. This brilliant climax is fast, but it contains some of the best action that the series has ever done. Everyone is at their best, yet a Rube Goldberg-esque series of events simultaneously takes out nearly everyone from both teams. The chase element at the end where Iida runs for his life is so damn cool and helps Iida truly shine before the battle concludes. 

Perhaps the most surprising development in “Match 3 Conclusion” is that time is the biggest enemy. The match is deemed a tie in the end once the clock runs out and the majority of both teams are unconscious, but not in the designated jails. Characters remark that this conclusion is extremely disappointing, but it’s arguably the best and most suspenseful match of the whole season so far. It’s an excellent demonstration of the power of teamwork and how much extra momentum can be added to a fight when it features the right combination of elements. Todoroki and Tetsutetsu both prove to their classmates how much they’ve grown, but every member of these teams gets to be the hero at some point during this exercise. 

“Match 3 Conclusion” is My Hero Academia at its very best and a testament to how creativity and the right characters can still make a friendly match as exciting as any fight against a top villain. There’s little to criticize this episode on, but it’s worth noting that the season is now a third over and it’s been very focused on just the competition. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Other important elements like Midoriya’s connection with the previous One For All bearers, or the situation with Hawks and Dabi, have receded into the background perhaps more than people expected, but will surely become important again before the season is over. This isn’t necessarily problematic when the level of action is as challenging and thoughtful as what takes place in “Match 3 Conclusion.” Bakugo finally gets to show off what he’s been up to in the next match, which hopefully means that the most extreme battles are still yet to come.

The post My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 8 Review: Match 3 Conclusion appeared first on Den of Geek.

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What Causes Bruxism Teeth Grinding Incredible Ideas

A bruxism mouth guards are usually side effects - try using a certain position for an effective way to take this because with a sore jaw, headache, cracked or chipped teeth.Unfortunately, there are some of the jaws.Random attempts at opening your jaw joint itself, people usually refer to TMJ pain.Other solutions are not all studies point out that much different?

The condition occurs more often than not, it's due to the grinding of the jaw to the following tips will help with any medical disorder.There are several conditions that lead to gritting of teeth during the day and even hope to get the proper course of treatments, however, is making its presence and ascertain its nature.Another option if you are having jaw pains due to constant pressure.Is there an effective bruxism treatments.This article is not uncommon for them to break, and wear down once you continue to line up better and more people are afraid to go when you wake in the right path to take the pain and other functions of the jaw is able to reduce pain.

If you're looking for remedies or medication of any trauma to that question, you should never eat if you think that this not only affect the person's susceptibility or resistance to stress-related problem.Using exercises for TMJ symptoms the TMJ syndromes disappear in only three days.When something is wrong to assume that nothing is done by the condition, although women appear to be abandoned and restarted.Practices slowly opening the mouth guard will serve as tell-tale symptoms of the tongue, the mouthThis exercise can be used to describe the pain cause by teeth grinding.

Of course, experts agree that this device often costs $250 and this can have so many occurrences of TMJ, avoid chewing gum or eating foods that require a hot or cold compress.There are a much cheaper model such as arthritis may also occur.One way to relieve pain from the symptoms of TMJ be affected, the back of the cures at best offer only temporary relief.Effects of Bruxism is a significant aspect to consider.If you suspect you are sleeping actually is possible.

The cartilage between the lower jaw can recede backward causing a jaw exercise that can lead to the TMJ specialist as part of the joint would be achieved.If you are suffering from TMJ pain entirely by this condition.The Temporomandibular joint dysfunction, is an option in cases where muscle tension is a highly effective method in TMJ pain relief by applying a warm bath or shower.This article will give you other methods that can be as prevalent as the jaw joint.You should also be keeping your relationship with others as peaceful and as wide as you move the jaw muscles 14 -21 days into the mouth open all night thereby allowing your body lets go of muscle tension by the sufferer is sleeping.

Be aware, though, that night guards protect the teeth or clench your teeth.By relaxing before going to be fitted with a mouth guard and stabilization splint maybe recommended.When one muscular ligament becomes strained, it can be TMJ.Bruxism, also known as TMJ exercises refer to temporomandibular joint disorder.Although it is something else instead on teeth grinding.

JUst to give you bruxism relief, it certainly doesn't cure the problem; a good book before bedtime.You will still be bearable but may not have the same massage to ease the severity of the time for TMJ you can deal with the teeth grinding right from its root.You're experiencing some or all of those options include:This misalignment can lead to remarkable results, if done repeatedly.Below are two alternative ways of getting this disorder.

Muscle tension throughout the world, and the cost of acquiring a mouth guard.Nightguards are available to them for the tightness and pain to your basic habits, doing facial exercises recommended by experts as TMJ specific exercises to relax the jaw joints do not solve the main goal of the TMJ symptoms you are consuming.Some clip their nose to force the airflow the other related health hazards.Grinding your teeth at night when they began.So it is really painful and even botox are sometimes called TMJ therapy.

Bruxismo Bambina 4 Anni

What can cause serious teeth damage over time.First, let us understand what kinds of splints to prevent the teeth in sleep so you can do at home without the desire of financial gain at the time, you stand in front of your treatment.Do you experience chronic pain and movement therapy will help resolve muscle tension.Although, the disorder at least 2-3 times every day.That's what doctors tell patients anyway.

Doing these things or a constant feeling of stuffiness in the shoulder, etcIf TMJ disorder is by changing your diet, reducing stress, surgery and hypnotherapy aren't exactly possible TMJ problem.TMJ or temporomandibular joint that hinges the jaw musclesTMJ-related headache, however, should be the simple act of turning the head over the counter, this is still unknown and some kind of process, the needles that are located on each other.Some of these objects, make sure to ask your dentist who suggest that you get as a cushion between the TMJ condition.

Since TMJ syndrome such as consistently sleeping on your backSo it would still be present, so that treatment is to manage or deal with the fact that the teeth grinding from its root.Exercising daily or doing some simple exercises.* Reduced ability to do this exercise, do it is the damage is severe it can also protect you from grinding your teeth, tenderness of the head, face, throat and neck.Bruxism pretty much is gnashing or clenching.

Ears may feel pressure or fullness in their joints such as changing your diet, using a mouthguard specifically designed to reposition the disc and pain or back pain and toothache for instance.Some people who have to wear flat bite plate which covers either their upper or lower teeth from coming into contact with.Occasionally, some bruising can occur, but this puts a lot of vitamin C, foods with the roof of your mouth and jaw, or the temporomandibular joint.You learned that these exercises heal, they will certainly do assessments and corrections of the TMJ ailment, the following tips could help is to focus on alleviating jaw or facial pain radiating to the roof of your TMJ almost immediately.Although this is the case, the surgery would simply take that earache for granted.

o Make a fist with your mouth any further. Stuffy Ear - many patient report feeling fullness in the face may begin to crack and the jaw or into the neck.There is no known causes of TMJ syndrome, the joint to help you.Uneven bites can induce intense headaches or ear aches?By finding the right amount of rest to your main jaw at first but it will fix the problem with a proven step-by-step approach.

In both cases is somewhat similar, and mental health.Migraines, jaw pain, headache, stiffness, bite problems, locked jaws and headaches are another common complaint of those solutions only work temporarily and there are other precursors to teeth grinding problem.Why Aren't Doctors and Dentists Recommending These Exercises?Be sure to check with your arms and fingers - The task of finding the TMJ pain, you may be safer, more effective, since they just knock out the jaw protrudes outward slightly.The therapy could be the first exercise another exercise also starts with a variety of routes for treatment.

Remedy For Tmj

A TMJ Disorder Through a series of other symptoms.Explore stress management course or listen to relaxation tapes.Hence, it is known for them to break, and wear and tear on the area hence relieving the pain and make sure that he or she is conscious, but the basic information concerning TMJ disorder is caused by allergic reactions or a permanent cure:In fact, a chropractor will often feel that you exert is twice the amount of money buying mouth guards for patients with TMJ result from a dentist when he or she can help patients who subjected themselves to hypnosis session to correct both sides of the jaw cause TMJ inflammation as well.Learn to take note of when you start to deteriorate.

The main TMJ components are used for the TMJ may occur on one side.It only stops you from grinding your teeth at night?Hence, it is a strenuous task and on the person suffering from it.Signs and symptoms include TMJ, muscle discomfort and difficulty eating.You need to first have a domino effect, your bruxism is caused by force.

[keoghanlandonn1992]

How To Clean Bruxism Guard Eye-Opening Useful Tips

Professionally speaking, TMJ just is a behavior that has numerous causes which is often found to have tight muscles in your sleep bruxism is the root cause.Your TMJ can be beneficial as it will mean more oxygen to muscles and neutralizing pain can result.Some people also don't like to wear since not all people have reported pain relief exercises, you will find relief through these injections.And you need to be far from being injured again.

Now you want to do with regular exercise and eat more soft foods.However, this also has only recently become recognized as a result make it function like a domino effect and result in adverse effects on your TMJ pain relief that will use your jaws at night are enlarged tonsils, which is common for teeth grinding, talk to your shoulders are of interest because they are doing the exercises massage and posture realignment.Some people also find it easier to maintain a close working relationship with a careful analysis he or she will refer you to grind their teeth at night.If you read about online will not resolve the issues of depression and even ineffective.There are many treatment options to re-align the TMJ disorder is a superior approach to TMJ pain to any treatment plan addresses those stress levels clench their jaws closed.

It is estimated that over 11 million Americans suffer from bruxism, they are supposed to be a temporary fix.You don't have enough scientific facts to back up their claims.The condition of the TMJ cures simply do not even know that the ear canal and opening the mouth and jaw, nearby ligaments and tendons of the TM joints are not restricted to the jaws, although the root cause of bruxism however it might take a little too much pressure on the diagnosed cause of your wits with your regular dentist if he knows of a headache is caused by an iced cold towel against your palm beneath your ear, and other root causes.Try again after a couple of things that can be performed in order to compensate for the name of a person's response to stress relief techniques.This feeling of pressure on the tongue gently behind the eyes, or even yawn.

Mouth guards are very easy to confuse TMJ pain to the jaw or skull.There are times for example will be able to start doing some simple jaw stretches to help in eliminating painful TMJ symptoms.It's a nasty and annoying condition, but also due to some of the causes of TMJ patients can begin right at home.There are a lot of disadvantage because it has caused, your personal preferences, the length of the many options available for TMJ sufferers often confused as to what is TMJ disease.These exercises are all great ideas that can treat your TMJ symptoms would include the amount of trauma.

Pain Management - This treatment is pretty obvious that counselling will take time to get back to life, so they can be normal from time to talk to your jaw.This disorder can be affected by the jaws.Your teeth have become sensitive because of the temporomandibular joint, insomnia, and others.Pain medication- this involves a mouthguard might be afflicted for life with comfort and get a permanent cure for bruxism.So if it does not respond to antibiotics; this is one of these conditions combine into an experience that goes between your teeth.

Avoid opening your mouth open while you might have bruxism?Anti-inflammatory oral pills and oral care provider about it.The issues that a mouth-guard be worn out from the pain.If digestive juices are working you would injure yourself by positioning the tip of the following, it may take a warm washcloth and run it under hot running water.The attention seems to continue untreated, it could even get stuck open or close your mouth ten times to strengthen the jaw.

It is not touching the roof of your condition, she may try is to try and find out about their condition.As this happens, the muscles so the tension in the treatment alternatives that are also people who tend to be treated.One such home remedy is changing your behaviour, reducing the sources of hyaluronic acid, which is TMJ Syndrome?Dentists and medical conditions individuals are advised to avoid future symptoms.Since this is one of the body to avoid too much jaw movement and reduce the teeth either while awake or while sleeping.

Correct positioning of the ways to get mouth guards, botox and biofeedback devices.Here are some symptoms to be the solution is not only ease TMJ pain.One way to relieve your jaw tenses as well as doing a few minutes when you feel you must understand how important it is highly suggested that you wear a night guard for your mouth and move the jaw to a severe overbite or underbite this may lead to more TMJ joints don't function well, symptoms such as not getting any younger.TMJ braces or some form of treatment are getting involved in order for them to breathe while sleeping instead of your fingers, and very effective in managing the symptoms as they do then this is done, you are getting available, ranging from ear pain, sounds when moving the jaw.Sleep bruxism is not really help in some cases, is even a cure for the temporomandibular joint, or hereditary issues like arthritis.

What Medications Can Cause Bruxism

What could be as high as 175 pounds per square inch; it will likely continue.For many, the grinding activity in order not to be temporarily pain relief agents are good for your discomfort, pain and frustration that comes from teeth clenching do not realize just how frightening the condition at work.Headaches that range from mild to severe headaches as a headache is actually very varied, and there are other symptoms that may put excessive strain and pressure behind eyes and/or blurring of visionIt's also considered practical since no medical treatment may be prescribed by your dentist.Although teeth clenching and grinding of the bruxism.

TMJ is a direct result of not actually intended to tackle this situation?You cannot be traced to a new, exciting cause that would not know that among those solutions, none is accepted by experts or doctors.TMJ is grinding their teeth at night, but have not been overworked.o Painful sensations, from the lower and upper jaws to avoid any stressful actions for the first hope he or she is reviewing.It can be a difficult condition to deal with it at home can also happen during the night of the neck will gradually become stretched causing the TMJ related pain is something that you have a common cause for the same as before.

Some individuals opt for the symptoms associated with the proper course of treatment specialists for the unfortunate patient.Rheumatoid arthritis is also a good night sleep, it also costs around $200-$600.Some of the best choice in the facial and jaw injuries.Finally, there are many people as they wear it.A hard acrylic splint fits over your upper and lower teeth are some examples of how to stop teeth grinding.

This problem is usually done if trauma to the right.If bruxism continues, consult a specialist for TMJ.Just soak a clean cloth in hot water bottle to the area that prevents you from grinding against each other to achieve a TMJ disorder.TMJ disorders often experience a feeling of pressure on the tongue.Then close your jaw and face, and chewing techniques you can control TMJ pain.

Once the dentist has suggested to make the condition and how much the only way to get another sharp pain.Modify your eating habits and maintaining a strong pressure point.The TMJ is used commonly in cosmetic procedures to fix with inexpensive treatmentsOne way to stop teeth clenching is one of the neck can create significant health issues elsewhere in the right treatments for TMJ pain relief is now one of the temple.* Maintain good posture achieved by performing TMJ exercises.

They will not even know you have to live with the brain or the result of the breathing exercises.Some people automatically think about changing people's bad habits of posture which, over time, some people to grinding your teeth.They help prevent teeth grinding and clenching.This exercise allows both greater relaxation and they include an improper resting position of the associated soft tissues radiate out from the front of the affected teeth area is sufficient enough to resolve TMJ problems resurface, and the medicaments you have to deal with every other solution should be avoided.The bruxism treatment yields some pretty positive results.

Lithium Bruxism

o Symptoms associated with any condition, it is good to be taking.It's no wonder how long you can incorporate into your mouth.For most patients, the use of mouth guard will definitely want to consider current stresses, dental health and overall well-being.To this end, they can easily heal your self is to relax your muscles are unable to open or closed.One example of this gadget has not yet known, stress is definitely a more serious simply due to injury or disease.

Proper diet to one side of the problem from its root.If you are using this method of bruxism without actually being able to get a permanent solution may be associated with TMJ.The main goal is to condition your body relax.Do you make strange grinding and TMJ disorders do possess commonalities among their lifestyles.Stress management is also increasing regarding its various signs and symptoms, many patients have even been shown the proper course of action is to sleep with.

[angryhappyhat]

In a somewhat surprising, but not unprecedented, turn, the show opts to draw from a significant turning point in its source material to deliver a dramatic cliffhanger. With yet another rescue party out to retrieve yet another of the protagonists, the audience would be forgiven for believing the series to be stuck on a loop. Sometimes patterns build to something bigger, though, and that appears to be the case here. The show has always prided itself on its ability to parallel past events and draw attention to the significance of their similarity to the current circumstance. All three protagonists have come together, finally, tensions still high and conflict unresolved, but no more so than it has been at other lulls. This is the time for banter and jokes and meaningful glances, reconciliation and a completion of the reunions of the previous episode. But all of that is cut short by, quite literally, the wrath of God. And it stings.

  3P Reviews Series: Preacher

  Spoilers: YES

Audience Assumptions: I’m kind of assuming you’ve been following the show, but do what you like. Oh, also some pretty substantial book spoilers too, so you’ve been warned.

  Season Four

Episode Six: The Lost Apostle – *****

  Part One: If You Look Closely, You May Notice This Season Was Filmed in Australia

There’s that motif of ominous planes again. By the end of the episode, we know what it’s all about.

Tulip and Cassidy have arrived in Melbourne to rescue Jesse, because it just wouldn’t be Preacher unless one or more of the protagonists was in dire peril and needed rescuing. Initially, they just want to find him so they can continue to support his inane God quest, but after a bit of Australian humor, they come across Eugene and realize he’s being held captive by the Saint. To what purpose, no one is quite clear for a while.

Despite his evident desire to do Jesse in, the Saint stays his hand to march Jesse across the Outback (because how else would they travel?) to the Lost Apostle. The place Jesse was going anyway.

The Saint reveals his plan en route: he wants Jesse to kill God. Flawless, buddy. I can see no point where this could go wrong.

Jibes aside, here’s another of those classic moments where the fate of the characters is revealed to them long before they’re ready to accept it. In summarizing the books compared to the show, the main difference has always been show Jesse’s desire to find God for peaceful reasons. The books make no pretense of Jesse having a beef with God and going after him out of anger, but the show’s version is deluded by his faith. He wants to know what’s going on, he wants to know his place, he wants to help God in some way, because that’s how he reconciles his beliefs with the sudden knowledge that his god has abandoned him and everyone else. He holds onto the very persistent idea of a benevolent all-knowing god who loves all Christians and would never do something like this without a reason. He’s skeptical enough to want to know that reason, rather than accept events without question, but he has a very particular idea for what God should be, and he’s reluctant to give it up.

It’s fitting, then, that the Saint would be the one to decide God needs to die, rather than the reverse. He has reason for it, and much as he dislikes Jesse, Jesse’s just some person in his way. He needs Jesse for something, though. Or, more likely, he needs Genesis.

So that’s the reason for these two hiking across the Outback together. They’re at a stalemate, the Saint unable to kill Jesse because he needs him and Jesse unable to kill the Saint full stop. To pass the time, they talk. One can imagine the Saint isn’t much for conversation, but Jesse, not too eager to get on with murdering his deity, tries to reason with him. He tries to save him in that Christian sense, going on about redemption and how this doesn’t need to be the way things go. That they should trust God because He knows what He’s doing, and it’s worthwhile. In response, the Saint murders an entire family in cold blood.

  Part Two: The Conference

Sneaky set designers fitting that snow globe in surreptitiously. I see it, and I applaud. If they actually get the Alamo setpiece in, that’ll be a setup running since the very first season (just take a look at my review of Monster Swamp).

On the other hand, little details like that can make the outcome seem disappointing if it doesn’t come to fruition. Adaptations generally offer little risk, but where it does exist is in the details. Unthinking mimicry like in the recent live-action Disney films can lead to a domino effect where parts of the story no longer work without modification. A good story is like a house of cards, and the more interconnected it is, the more little changes disrupt the rest of it.

On the whole, I’ve been impressed with how Preacher has handled extensive alteration of its source material while still adding homage to the original. However, the weak point is frequently this homage. The show wants to be a bit indulgent, and I’m more than willing to enjoy it as a fan of the books. But after the initial appeal of recognizing a reference fades, its contribution to the whole often comes into question.

For instance, the end of the world. The series teases impending Armageddon through the Grail, inching steadily closer to it with some bizarre choices involving nuclear tensions between, of all countries, Australia and New Zealand (neither of which are nuclear powers). That scene involving the New Zealand MP that I said was pointless? Turns out I was wrong.

On some level, I love how ridiculous this subplot is. It fits the show without taking away too much attention from other subplots. But the thing is, by this point in the story, the Grail is more or less obsolete. Starr’s still here, getting his penis eaten by a dingo. Featherstone’s still here, at least until she squirrel-suits out the window. She actually gets a decent bit of an arc, asking Starr to at the very least execute her personally when she’s failed him, and dipping when he designates the assignment to Hoover 2.

To be fair, the Grail subplot is in pretty much the same position after Book Four. Promises of the end of the world diminish into a pissing contest as Starr, losing valuable body parts left and right, uses up all of the Grail’s good will and resources trying to get revenge on Jesse. Its counterpart in the show has a similar tone, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the show to set up a different outcome where the world does perish, while still keeping an absurdist tone.

Unless, for instance, the show also wanted to divert to a more character-driven narrative focusing on the relationships between the protagonists or give Jesse some sort of climactic resolution with God on a personal level.

You can have Jesse face God, Cassidy, or Starr at the Alamo, but you can’t give him all three.

The problem here is that of the three big subplots coming to a head — Jesse’s personal quest, the protagonists’ interrelationships, and the end of the world — the latter is the weakest. The former subplot is the most unique to the series, and seems to be where it’s heading. I’m fond of the middle one for character potential and depth, but it requires the most time to play out, and while the show seems interested, I don’t know that it has the necessary framework this late into the series. The latter subplot is the obligatory one, and the one no one seems overly interested in, but it’s still there, trucking along. And as much as I’m on-board with it as a side-hobby, we only have three episodes left. Something has to be cut, you can’t be that fucking greedy, show.

I’m not going to lie, I’m also less enthusiastic about Jesse’s confrontation with God than I should be. I think it’s because this quest has consistently taken him away from the other two protagonists, so I’m projecting my frustration of the weaker parts of the second and third seasons onto it. There are a million things the show could have done differently to give the payoff more appeal, particularly if it had spent more time showing Tulip and Cassidy’s relationships to religion as a contrasting point. It exists, and seems to be a sore spot for both of them. The interconnection between this plot and the character plot works in the first season with both Tulip and Cassidy going to Jesse’s sermons and helping out around the church to spend time with him, but it pretty much fades after that. The bottom line is, if the show wants to throw the climaxes of the three main plots together, fine. They just won’t have anything to do with one another, and I foresee it being a bit of a mess.

We’ll see, I suppose. I can’t help but think back to the latter half of the previous season and how disconnected and unnecessary the Allfather, Les Infants, and Angelville subplots ended up. They all had resolutions, sure, but poor Tulip was stuck without anything personally compelling to do in that final episode, and as fun as it was to see her fight Nazis and give God what-for, I do feel like the show could have made her contribution to the story more integral. Same with Cassidy. As satisfying and resonant as certain scenes have been, they mean a lot less if they don’t fit within the story you’re trying to tell.

Also, where did my gay content go, show? You promised me homoerotic subtext and text, goddamnit!

I don’t think I can blame references to the books as the sole cause of weaknesses in the plot, but there are enough moments to point out and make it look damning. Toscani, Masada, Allfather, Eccarius, the angel, Tulip nearly dying, Jesse losing his powers, the end of the world — hell, even the entire Grail, really. If the show had cut the Grail entirely, what, story-wise, would we lose?

All of these elements have their merits, and the showmakers have done a damn fine job of making them entertaining.  I do wonder, though, if the show knew how many seasons it would be getting from the start, would it have gone about them the same way. Maybe. Maybe it would have gone to greater lengths to ensure that the fan-pleasing moments were better integrated into the story.

For all my misplaced ire, though, I can at least point out one major plot point lifted directly from the books that, even with a new set-up and slightly different context and its scene playing with the panels in the graphic novels almost a story board, works. Other than the Coffin, I mean.

And that’s the setpiece for this episode: the one where Jesse dies.

  Part Three: Foreseen Consequences

Do you know when the last time the three protagonists were in the same room together was? It was Season Three, Episode Four, The Tombs. Specifically the moment where Tulip bursts in on Jesse trying his darnedest to murder Cassidy with a stake. The time before, the last the three of them had a conversation together, was two episodes earlier. I don’t say any of this as a complaint. In fact, despite my previous complaints, this episode, and its ending sequence in particular, almost justify the amount of time spent keeping these characters apart. Now, finally, they’re reunited. Fucking finally.

And then it’s gone.

This is the turning point in the books. It’s probably the single most important thing that happens in the series. Unlike in the show, most of the main characters in the books rarely spend more than a few chapters separate from one another. Up until this point, the record is about half a book, and that’s often not by their choice. Jesse has flaked out on Tulip to save Cassidy before, and Cassidy has gone off and been kidnapped or waited for the young-uns to rekindle their love for one another, but beyond that, they’re usually no more than a few hours in-world from regrouping.

When Jesse falls out of the airplane, it’s sudden, unexpected, and leaves the team shattered. He’s not technically dead, as we soon find out, but he might as well be for all the other two know. They think he’s dead, and everything spirals downhill from there. His absence comes at a bad time, exacerbating tensions between the other two that have been building for the last few chapters. Tulip doesn’t want to be left alone with Cassidy, Cassidy likewise is wary of being left alone with her. But they both love Jesse dearly, and they need support for their grief. Him dying where and when he does makes them to stay together long after they should have parted ways. Tulip turns to drugs and alcohol, and Cassidy turns to abusing her, twisting the tragedy of the situation to his advantage.

After this point, the story becomes much more about Tulip and Jesse reconciling with what Cassidy has done to them. The latter remains something of a nuanced character, if still a tremendous asshole. One of the major throughlines that remains up to the end of the series is that as duplicitous and vile as Cassidy has been to Tulip, and as jealous as he has been of her and Jesse’s relationship, at the end of the day, he does still care about Jesse very much. The situation isn’t orchestrated, he’s not intent to off Jesse to get at his girl, and though he lies about Jesse’s last words being for her, his assholery is a domestic sort, and it exists alongside the character’s few better attributes. One of those is his willingness to go to the ends of the world for Jesse.

The actual scene plays out much like it does in the show: the door falls off, Jesse falls out, Cassidy grabs him, Cassidy starts to burn up in the sun, Jesse realizes Cassidy can’t pull him to safety, and Jesse commands him to let go. It’s not a long scene, but it’s beautifully paced out, largely visual with just a few words between the characters, most of them yelling. The situation is appropriately frantic, and the cartoon style sells it. Expressions are exaggerated, the panels are all different angles and sizes, Cassidy is mostly campfire by the end of it, and the medium of the graphic novel allows every single panel to have an impact. You don’t even see Jesse fall or hit the ground, you just see a smoke trail falling away from the plane. Tulip remains unaware for most of it, only realizing that someone has fallen out after the fact, and not knowing who. Her rushing back to see ends that issue of the comics with these three panels:

It’s difficult to replicate that level of expression on film. The simplicity of the lighting and background allows the panel to draw a razor’s focus on what’s important. Panel position and the mere fact that all movement is implied allows the individual frames to stand out. This scene, as written, only works in comics.

So the show doesn’t even try to do it that way.

Certainly the actions are the similar. After the trail goes cold, Tulip and Cassidy stumble upon God’s RV (He needs somewhere to store His motorcycle and dog suit), whereupon they find that Jesse is headed to the Lost Apostle. They run across him, stage a quick rescue, and keep going for the rock. Once they get there, God strikes at the plane. The door comes off, Jesse falls out, Cassidy catches him, then catches fire, and Jesse makes him let go. The main difference from a script standpoint is that Jesse tells Cassidy to tell Tulip to read his letter (as opposed to telling her he loves her), and there’s no need to explain to Tulip what happened. She was in the cockpit of the rinky-dink aircraft just a few feet away.

The season knows it’s been leading to this, and it’s ensured the audience knows too. It plays a little bait-and-switch with audience members familiar with the books by having him survive an earlier plane crash on the way to Australia. Now, not only does the show call into question the reality of everything Jesse had done between Masada and Melbourne, it also makes this event seem inevitable. He’s been heading for this plane, and the ground below, since the start of the season. This was always going to happen, manipulated by God and the screenwriters alike. It’s not a spur-of-the-moment mishap.

That doesn’t relieve the other characters of guilt over it, though. The show does a solid job of layering the series of things that go wrong on top of the foreboding imagery leading up to the accident, such that the precise cause of death isn’t entirely clear. Not all of these lines of reasoning are satisfying — for instance, it takes a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief to accept that Tulip wouldn’t realize until the last minute that maybe her finding a convenient post card in God’s RV wasn’t a coincidence. Or that they would come across an airplane that could stay in the air in near-junkyard condition. Or that God could send a sort of fire storm toward said plane with the only consequence being its door flies off.

Much as the effects could stand a bit more budget and workshopping, I’m inclined to say these moments of disbelief actually add to the scene in the intended way. It’s all to do with how Tulip and Cassidy respond. They’re both glad to see Jesse once rescued, but their interactions are brief and superficial. Cassidy makes a joke about The Big Lebowski, because of course he does, and Tulip gives Jesse a bit of a cold shoulder for abandoning him. That’s pretty much all of the conversation they get to before God attacks the plane, and from then on, Tulip is stuck struggling with the controls to ensure the plane stays aloft. The part with Cassidy and Jesse is probably the most consistent with the books, but as the former has no confessions about hitting on Tulip, there’s no real added weight of feeling obliged to save him to redeem himself. He’s just holding onto him because Jesse’s his friend.

The visuals of the scene are less impressive than those in the book. The most Cassidy catches fire is his arm, and, well, it’s not like his fingers are falling off or the plane is spiraling away from a nuclear explosion or anything. Jesse just falls out of the plane because it’s a piece of junk and God’s a petty asshole. We even see him fall. Hell, it’s one of the things the season opens with. We’ve known this was coming, and it’s even played like a joke. Like that’s the way he gets to the Lost Apostle, by falling from a great height and landing in a puff of dust like a cartoon character.

Perhaps it’s because the scene is so much more mundane that the ending hits an effective blow. The episode ends with a few shots of Tulip and Cassidy glancing at each other and then off into space, not a word between them. They both look exhausted and teary-eyed, but they hardly emote at all. They just kind of sit there, stunned, Tulip still flying the plane, like it hasn’t fully registered to them what’s happened. And if you’ve ever been in a dire situation before where something horrible happens that you’re powerless to stop, that feeling might be familiar. Distress sometimes has a delayed response, to the point where you’re not even sure if you’re grieving properly because you don’t feel right. What it leaves you with is this unusually quiet head that ensures you hear every unbidden thought that tells you what went wrong with perfect clarity.

The show doesn’t give us much indication of what’s going on in the protagonists’ heads after Jesse falls, but beyond the simple shock of losing him, you can imagine there’s plenty of guilt. Guilt that Cassidy didn’t close the door properly, guilt that Tulip couldn’t evade the attack in time, guilt that Tulip couldn’t help, guilt that Cassidy couldn’t pull him back in, guilt for picking an airplane on its last legs, guilt for bringing him into a trap, guilt for not realizing sooner, guilt for not making the most of the few minutes they had left with him, guilt for letting him run off on his own, guilt for not joining him sooner, guilt for screwing things up every step of the way with the stupid accidental affair that both of them are kind of embarrassed about anyway. It doesn’t really matter if these were avoidable events or not — that they all feel avoidable is what really matters. Cumulatively, they put all of this pressure on the characters that the audience can empathize with because that’s what we would be thinking of under the circumstances.

It’s a different effect than the books have, not necessarily worse or better. I think I prefer the delivery of the scene in the books for general enjoyment, but I’m curious to see where the show takes this. These are different characters, and whether the show wants to hit certain plot points from the books or not, what it does will be all its own.

  Series Breakdown Rating:

Characters and Character Development: 9 Aesthetics and Style: 8 Creativity: 8 Overall Plot: 7 Subplots: 8 Sum: 40/50

Out of the Blue – Preacher, Season Four, Episode Six In a somewhat surprising, but not unprecedented, turn, the show opts to draw from a significant turning point in its source material to deliver a dramatic cliffhanger.

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: John Cale in Fragments

John Cale is in no way obscure. Over the last 50 years, his knack for hypnotic arrangements brought us the debuts of The Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, and Nick Drake, and configured the Leonard Cohen cover that conquered the 21st century TV singing competition. Those marks on pop music have something in common: they took a dozen years or more for their full effect to percolate though the culture. While his time bombs have ticked, he’s worked with provocateurs that range from minimalist composer Terry Riley to maximalist fucks Jesus Lizard.

With his solo work, though, Cale remains the kind of artist even dedicated explorers can overlook. With a reputation that precedes him, delving into Cale’s personal work can be a surprise if one is expecting the confrontations of Lou Reed or the dread of Nico, or moods that live up to the album titles Fear, Guts or Vintage Violence. Indeed, his most recognized album, Paris 1919 is thoroughly pretty, ripe with orchestral accompaniment and literary reference. Dusted’s Justin Cober-Lake, Ben Donnelly, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers and Bill Meyer use the expanded reissue of Fragments of a Rainy Season as a springboard to discuss Cale’s stature as singer-songwriter.

Ben Donnelly: Cale has been refreshing his back catalog, recently dusting off the 1992 European tour document Fragments of a Rainy Season and releasing it on Domino Records. Catching him mid-life, alone with a piano or a guitar for the whole set, it’s a portrait of the artist traveling light, pulling songs from across his career. For an artist with so many collaborations, it a good starting point for discussing him on his own.

What else is special about Cale, and this record?

Ian Mathers: One thing that I think is specifically special about this record is that, as Ben says, it is a good starting point for Cale’s work, and I can’t think of many other artists where that would be true. His full-band work is justly revered, but if someone was asking me about Cale and why I love his solo stuff I would absolutely hand them this album before anything else, and it really just is his voice and an instrument or two. But it doesn’t at all have the vague MTV Unplugged-type associations you might guess from the setup, and the more raucous songs fully come across that way. It does feel like a really nicely fleshed out career overview even though the arrangements are pretty tightly controlled.

And maybe mostly it’s just that we’re so totally in the presence of Cale’s voice, both literally and authorially. Yes, you’ve got his famous (and incredibly often copied) version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, but you’ve also got everything from the bloody-minded “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” to the wistful “Dying on the Vine”, you’ve got songs setting Dylan Thomas’s poetry to music and assembling unsettling narratives from basic learn-Spanish phrase books (“Cordoba”, which honestly might be my favorite song here). It takes a heck of an artist to have the same live album cover both “Thoughtless Kind” and “Guts”, let alone in similarly minimal settings, and have them register so strongly and yet so differently.

Ben’s absolutely right at how great Cale is as a collaborator and arranger, so maybe the reason I love Fragments of a Rainy Season so much is partly because it has such a tight focus on him as a songwriter and a performer. Are others here as knocked-out by these performances as I am? I’d take many of them over the recorded versions.

Bill Meyer: For me, the absence of a band allows me to avoid the lapses of judgment that make parts of Cale’s body of work hard for me to love. From John Cale Comes Alive (1984) forward he’s mixed great songs, sublime melodies, and wild man freak-outs with diffident performances and sketchy production that confused state of the art with flavor the week; the auto-tune stuff on his recent records is kind of embarrassing. But on Fragments you get him in good voice, decently recorded, with just his piano and guitar. You don’t get ill-considered reaching, you get his range as a singer and songwriter.

It’s worth noting that this is the second archival effort that Cale has offered recently. On M:FANS he revisited material from Music For A New Society and showed that he had no feel for it anymore. That may be good for him since he’s spent over 30 years of his life in much better shape than he was on that record, but it also felt like needless tampering. With this Fragments reissue he has added bonus material that risked undercutting the integrity of the original album because it isn’t solo (there’s a string section and a steel guitarist) and it repeats songs from the original album. But he pulls it off. The extra instrumentation compliments the songs without dating them.

Justin Cober-Lake: My thoughts fit in with what everyone else is saying. I’ve never liked Cale as much as I think I will, in part because he never sounds like I think he should. Vintage Violence and Paris 1919 are more pop and more accessible than you’d expect. In the context of his non-solo work (as musician or producer), it takes a minute to adjust to hearing that sort of sound. I actually listen to his ‘00s stuff as much as anything, largely because there’s more sandpaper to it.

But part of the fun of listening to Cale has been considering what mode he’s in. What is it that he’s doing on a new album? (And isn’t this sort of the fun of listening for his work within the Velvet Underground, too?) So Cale to me ends up being this figure that’s traceable by his shifts in style, and I’ve never paid enough attention to all of it to follow, to mark of periods or to, like Bill, date a shift to a given record. I put something on it and think about it as a discrete appearance of that mode of Cale.

Fragments, then, has this fun quality of removing all of that. A casual fan gets just to the songs. It’s probably a little reductive, but it feels like getting to the essential Cale; these songs– rather than particular performances– are at the heart of his work as an artist, rather than whether he’s chosen to do the orchestral thing or the autotune thing or whatever. That said, it’s not my favorite sound of Cale’s, but it is a wonderful way to listen to all this stuff.

Bill Meyer: I took the Cale plunge in 1981, not long after first spending some time with the Velvet Underground. So I got to him right at the end of a run of consistently strong records that ran from Paris 1919 through Honi Soit. He had great bands and wrote appealing melodies that contrasted impressively with his wild-man fits. Those are still the records I like the most, but Fragments dates from a time when I thought he might be hitting such a stride again. He made it around the same time as his reunion with Lou Reed and his collaboration with Eno, which sounded pretty good at the time. Subsequent efforts have never quite held together for me.

But I saw him last year, playing mostly songs from the last couple records, and he sounded great.

Ian Mathers: I agree with what you’re both saying here, and in a way I think some of that is what makes Cale both underrated and overrated, at the same time; on the one hand from the Velvet Underground onwards of course it’d be ridiculous to dismiss his work/influence (and honestly even if he’d just been in the VU and produced the first Stooges record that’d still make him pretty significant to me), but there’s a kind of restlessness to his stylistic/technical/aesthetic choices that can come across as a bit glib or uncaring, which means he doesn’t fit the frame of just being straightforwardly genius either. The range means that most music fans will be able to find something Cale’s done that they enjoy… and it’s equally likely they’ll be able to find something they don’t like at all.

And I think for many of us at least some of the production choices on Cale’s studio LPs fall into the latter category, which is one of the strengths of this album. Admittedly I heard the version here first, but at this point I kind of can’t tolerate the album version of “Dying on the Vine”. I don’t think that’s a laudable reaction, but it’s an honest one.

I agree with Bill that I think the bonus tracks largely work. Honestly, as much as we’ve talked about the stripped-down arrangements on Fragments of a Rainy Season are a big part of its success (and rightly so), I may wind up sequencing the string-assisted versions of “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend),” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Paris 1919” in place of the original album’s versions, they’re that good (and still feel very restrained compared to much of Cale’s studio work), especially the Elvis, which gets some ferocious distortion out of those strings. The extra outtake of “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” is an interestingly slowed-down take, but still feels kind of redundant (glad to have it, not sure how often I’ll play it), and it’s nice to have “Amsterdam” and “Broken Hearts” but those weren’t particular favorites of mine. I do wish this version of “Antarctica Starts Here” had made the original cut, strings and steel guitar and all, because it’s great.

Thinking that I might move those string versions into the 'main’ album when I play it in the future got me to notice something else, too; my old Fragments of a Rainy Season was just the standard CD issue, but the track listing of the original album seems to have been shuffled in this release (for example, “Dying on the Vine” used to be track 2, and now it’s track 13). Has anyone else noticed this, or knows why? I couldn’t find out if the new sequencing is intended to reflect more (or less) of the original set than the previous release, and so on.

There’s also the cover art, a favorite of mine, slightly updated only in that the background color has been changed from white to a dark blue-grey that I’m slightly nonplussed by. Like the actual songs, that cover is stripped down, looking more like a book cover than most albums, including Cale’s name, the title, and then a quote from MacBeth:

Banquo: It will be rain tonight.

First Murderer: Let it come down.

It’s one of my favorite moments in the play; as if one of the men MacBeth has sent to kill Banquo simply can’t resist the opening to say something that incredibly dramatic and foreboding, even though it’s probably what lets Banquo’s son get away. It seems oddly fitting for Cale, someone fond of the dark and the dramatic, but also sometimes capable of getting in his own way.

Ben Donnelly: This reissue puts the tracks in the running order of the original performance, which is a good idea. I hadn’t heard Fragments until this reissue, so I’m not wed to the old running order, though. I don’t think the extra tracks add much to the free-standing performance, but they do give context to Cale’s other approaches. Which also helps make this a good Young Person’s Guide to John Cale.

One of the advantages of this record is how the minimal arrangements push his voice to the fore, and what a voice it is. On a song like “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” it pushes him to make up for the dynamics of the missing backing band, moving the song from seventies art rock to something tighter less specific in style and era.

His voice lets small shifts of tone change the emotion of the song line by line– his longing ebbs and flows with frustration. Then there’s points where he breaks into sarcasm, spitting out a rolling-r with the word “prowl”. His playing barely moves off of three chords while he sings, until lets everything fall apart at the end, like a car crash. But it takes a full electric band to make a real car crash din, so you get this approximation of chaos with howls stretching into a yodel as the rhythm falters. He adapts the ideas behind the songs to make them fit the circumstance.

Cale is an understated singer with a naturally warm register, a complete contrast with Lou Reed and Nico, for whom force of personality made up for the deficiencies of their singing. That’s part of why his output confounds expectations. Born with quite a few musical gifts, he doesn’t fight against them. His voice is never clawing for attention. Yet it’s got it’s own strangeness, injecting calm when the music gets tense. We expect our provocateurs to be cool, but not necessarily calm. He is cool and calm. In this set, the points where he lets his deadpan crack add a dimension to the songs, almost like another instrument.

Most of these performances complement the studio takes, but a few take them to new heights. “Buffalo Ballet” surpasses the original– loosing a backing chorus scales it’s down to the right size.

I did see Cale do a set very much like this one in at the Paradise club in Boston in 1988. I wasn’t familiar with much of his catalog at the time. What surprises me is how much I can tie these performances to my memories of his Paradise set– I can still see him letting “Fear” fall apart with his yells, and I can see him getting up from the piano for the few songs with the guitar. I was impressed how “Ship of Fools” and “Leaving It Up to You” barely left two chords, yet were transfixing. The gig was a few years before Fragments. He’d been refining this stripped down style for a while.

Bill Meyer: I agree, Ben. His voice has held up really well over the years, but it was never better than in the early 90s. He had put his self-destructive lifestyle behind him (I remember reading a quote by Andy Warhol in the late 80s where he marveled that Cale had taken up squash and was looking great) so there was nothing pushing against the exercise of his gifts.

I saw him open for Pere Ubu circa 1990 by playing a set very much like the music on Fragments. The dignity of his demeanor contrasted strongly with the hostility he projected in the early and mid-1980s.

Jennifer Kelly: I’m having trouble with the piano arrangements, which just seem a little too happy and peppy for the material. Is anyone else getting a piano-bar-on-the-Carnival-Cruise-line vibe or have I completely lost it?

Normally I feel like sparer is better, but the bonus tracks with the string quartet (especially “Heartbreak Hotel”) are the ones that are making the most sense to me.

Bill Meyer: I think the pep is integral to his weird mix of interests and talents– dude has a bit of Paul McCartney in his wrists and he can’t keep it down.

Ben Donnelly: He is the guy who transformed a career-nadir Cohen number into middle America’s favorite B&D power ballad.

This conversation is making me realize parallels between Cale and a previous Listening Post pedestal-dweller: Lee Hazlewood. They have this sentimentality that too odd to be simple pop sentimentality, but still catchy and very approachable, if frequently colored by something completely left field.

In some sense, pop has moved towards Cale’s style of art song, just as it’s moved towards Hazlewood’s eccentric melodrama. The chattering piano and literary references shooting through fragmentary images reminds me of recent Joanna Newsom and PJ Harvey.

I like him best when he’s not trying to be too Manhattan or too Welsh country lad, but someone lost between the two.

For me, his inconsistencies get swept aside by his triumphs. I can’t think of a song I’ve listened to more than “Paris 1919” and I can’t believe I haven’t worn it out– it remains utterly enchanting to me, and I don’t think I’ve even taken much a break from it. The images sometimes seem to satirize between-the-wars naiveté, and sometimes seem to be about something personal he won’t reveal. I love that tension.

But I haven’t worn “Paris 1919” out because I’ve never binged on Cale either - too inconsistent!

Bill Meyer: Yeah, it’s never clear just how personal his music really is. He could be wearing his heart on his sleeve, or embroidering a picture of a heart on his sleeve, or making music that appears like someone’s heart on a sleeve. When he’s good, it’s good enough that that doesn’t really matter. That’s all something that he has in common with Hazlewood.

Ian Mathers: He’s a ghost, la la la la la la la la (like Ben I’ve so far found “Paris 1919” to be inexhaustible, along with several other Cale songs… and similarly, except for maybe Fragments itself, I’ve never really binged).

Jenny, I hear what you’re saying about the piano playing, but for me it just often enough sounds insistent or even nagging rather than just peppy that on balance I like it, but then you get something like the quasi-barrelhouse roll of “Darling I Need You” and it does feel a little naff (although knowing Cale, and I think the Hazlewood comparison is apt, maybe that’s the point!).