#but no of course she hasn't

[skania]

I checked your list of fav couples and some are my faves to! CielxLizzy, tsumuguxchisaki, yukixkaname (hello? Hahaha), luluxshir. I remember i was so obsessed w/ ciellizzy, lulushir during my highschool days 😂 and tsumuguxchisaki became my only reason to watch the anime

I missed your message anon, I'm so sorry about that! 😭 Omg me too! Lulushir were everything to me and TsumuguxChisaki were indeed the only reason I kept watching that anime 😂 The fact that you ship CielLizzie and YuMe as well is great, I love how many ships we have in common!

Now here is to hoping CielLizzie have a good ending, Yana's pace is SO unbearabably slow that I haven't touched the manga in years lmao

[aroaceleovaldez]

i am once again thinking about Percy and Annabeth and their respective relationships with their step-parents, particularly how the other views the other's dynamic with their step-parents.

Because there's a really interesting subtle thing that we see which is when Annabeth talks about her step-mom to Percy, Percy's assumption is that Annabeth's step-mom is like Gabe. He just presumes that because that's what's familiar with him and based on his own experiences he assumes their situations are similar.

But then when Percy actually meets Annabeth's step-mom (and her dad) he realizes their situations aren't at all the same. He was expecting another Gabe, but instead he just found a genuinely caring family that was just struggling to find their footing with one another.

The interesting thing is that this implies an inverse - especially with what we know about how Percy and Annabeth describe their experiences. Percy doesn't really talk about Gabe ever. To anyone. Grover knows the whole picture there but he's basically the only one of Percy's friends who does. As far as we know, unless Grover told her at some point, Annabeth doesn't know about Gabe. She knows he was a jerk, but Percy out loud doesn't ever really get into details about it. She knows they didn't get along and eventually Gabe disappeared and Percy basically never spoke of it again. Presumably, Annabeth thinks Percy's dynamic with Gabe was like her dynamic with her step-mom, like how Percy had thought their situations were the same. Especially given we know Percy assumed their situations were the same and likely spoke about it as such if it ever came up.

Like. That's such an interesting tiny aspect of their dynamic that never gets touched upon. Annabeth likely doesn't know about this very core traumatic experience Percy endured before they met because she's operating under the assumption that their family just was a little rocky like hers was.

[andmineisyellow]

✨Two very unserious people✨

[hedgehog-moss]

Just some animal friends hanging out on a balmy May afternoon :)

[booasaur]

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters - 1x04

[aadmelioraa]

When your oldest brother dies on a religious crusade just as you feared he would and your father refuses to deal with his grief just as he refused to deal with it when your mother died (you were a baby btw) and then again when your other brother left home (because your dad was impossible to live with) and in spite of feeling entirely abandoned by your dad you use your newfound higher status to put yourself out on a limb in order to downgrade his punishment and that of your close friend despite grieving their involvement with the queen who led your brother to his death but instead of your father acknowledging your pain and your attempts to do what you believe will bring justice he lashes out at you by comparing your current position to the horrific way your mother died…just Eärien things

[fromtheseventhhell]

I ignore about 95% of the conversations surrounding Arya having killed people because, outside of Arya stans, people refuse to include the context of the very violent circumstances she experiences + her trauma which influences her actions. She wasn't destined to be a killer and her being forced on the run, having to survive during a war (at times on her own), having to witness countless people being tortured and murdered, being enslaved as a prisoner of war, having to witness the deaths of her family, etc. are all hugely important factors. Not to mention the times when her life is literally on the line and she has to make tough decisions to ensure her survival. The only time her trauma is acknowledged is when people are using it to prove she's "too far gone", otherwise it's essays on how she hasn't suffered that much. It's so boring how people ignore well-developed characters just to reduce them to one or two aspects of their story. And this treatment is only for certain characters; let someone mention Sansa being part of the plot to poison Sweetrobin and all of a sudden, people can understand being forced to make questionable decisions under difficult circumstances.

[crimeronan]

in canon, vee took on luz's exact appearance for a reason, but in the empress au, it might actually be beneficial for her to visibly differ from looking like luz, or even have obvious intent to look related to her. thoughts?

yeah!! i've been thinking about this.... camila first meets her in toddler!luz form and then in full basilisk form, but vee needs a human disguise that is NOT a missing toddler. iirc i established at one point that vee hasn't seen luz in the castle before and doesn't know exactly what she looks like now, so even if she Wanted to, she couldn't steal her face. (which saves her from what would inevitably be a Very fraught interaction with her offering to show camila what luz looks like now. oof.)

i'm not sure Exactly what her humansona looks like right now, though. it stands to reason that it would be at least a Little different from her s3 humansona, the way everyone's appearance in this AU is at least a little different. but her s3 humansona is a good baseline i think.

my main thoughts on Differences are that i think she's likely to more consciously resemble camila, here -- maybe darker hair or st. she wants to choose an appearance for herself, but she also wants to feel like she Belongs, and looking more like camila is an easy way of getting external validation.

[nocturnalazure]

[nell0-0]

Some of my Elesa designs ^^

[eikichi-supremacy]

nooooo don't think about kuwabara picking up smoking when yusuke leaves for makai as something to remember him by you're so sexy hahah

[invinciblerodent]

... so does anyone have any clue on how undeath is supposed to affect elven souls?

Because I have been building my own elf character, and thinking about this a lot, and it's a thought that just will not leave me (hard not to think about this with an Astarion romance), so it's time for another one of my navel-gazey thinkpieces i guess lol.

Like, my main source is Mordekainen's Tome of Foes, and that book states clearly that elven souls are immortal. Their numbers are more or less fixed, or rather "capped" (that's why they haven't "outbred" every other race even with their long lifespans), and each elf currently living is the reincarnation of an elven soul that's already been to Arvandor (their afterlife) at some point, and then returned in a new body. That's why they have such few children: because a birth is as much a joy as it is a sorrow. It's both the arrival of a new life, and the death of another- either decades, centuries, millenia past, or as soon as barely a few months ago.

As a quick and dirty run-down for those who don't really want to wade into the lore (I don't blame you, it's murky in there), early in their lives and when they are nearing death are the times when elves are most intimately connected to their previous lives, and in their sleep-trance (their "Reverie"), these individuals can call upon memories of those past lives. The young elves relive exclusively the experiences and adventures of their immortal soul until their second or third decade- then, slowly, those memories become interspersed with those from their current life (the First Reflection, the first time that happens, marks the start of their "adolescence" of the mind essentially- they are physically fully mature by then), until roughly the end of their first century, which is when their access to these primal memories is cut off. From that point forward, the elf loses access to their previous lives. This is called the Drawing of the Veil, and from that point forward, the elf may only relive events from their current life in their trance, right until they start nearing the end of their natural lifespans some 600 years later.

This is all fairly clear in the case of a living elf.

But what happens if that immortal elven soul, that's so intimately interconnected with the afterlife and the very passage of time, finds itself suddenly housed in an undead, unaging, immortal body? How does that change things?

It's got to change things, no?

Like this is such a specific thing, I don't believe specifically elven intelligent undead (that is also a protagonist about whose soul we are supposed to care) has been written about super extensively in the sourcebooks, but my guess personally is that the moment of undeath, it... severs the bond of the soul to Arvandor. This is not unrealistic, as that bond can break for many reasons: Drow for one are never invited back and die true deaths with no way to be reincarnated, and so do elves who have turned to gods outside of the Seldarine. (.... that also means that, with the drow's propensity for casual murder, the number of elven souls available for rebirth is in a constant and steep decline, but that's a whole other thing.) (I've no clue what this means for the Seldarine drow. I wanna say that they can gain admission back, but that's just me being an optimist, I've no recollection of a source literally confirming or denying that.)

This loss of the primal memories, it's said to be a traumatic experience in itself, even if it comes naturally, as just part of the elven life cycle, and it coming on the heels of such a profound upheaval of one's life (such as being turned into a vampire), it may just be the least of the person's worries... but it would explain some things in a way that goes beyond the traumatic experiences of Astarion's current life.

If that moment of being cut off were to happen before the elf would naturally lose their ability to access primal memories, I assume that they would... be forced to more or less "grow up" (at the lack of a better term) in an instant. And to be denied roughly half the time you would have otherwise had for regaining experiences and memories from your past lives, it's got to leave one a bit... emotionally stunted, when compared to a living elf of a similar age, who had time to go through their natural life cycle as one should.

(Which, it's not a huge reveal that I believe our guy to be emotionally immature, and a bit stunted in his emotional growth. That's, like, clear, and I don't mean to say anything to the effect of "ooooh, he was so youuuung, still an uwu baaaaby---" no, we're unequivocally talking about a fully grown, adult man lol, but specifically in the case of how this all relates to this weird trait of elves, it's still interesting to think about this odd dissonance that... may very well exist between a living- and an undead elf.)

Hell, my personal little theory is that elven intelligent undead (like vampires, who do retain a soul within their bodies) specifically, while they do go into a trance and have dreams/nightmares/memories of their current lives, may just even lose the ability to recall events from their pre-undeath life (beyond conventional memory, meaning that they can't strengthen those memories and are bound to eventually forget them) as well, as evidenced by Astarion not remembering his own face, or what color his eyes were once. (You can't tell me that while he was alive, he didn't spend a shitton of time looking at his own face. If he could relive pre-undeath memories, he'd know these things, or would be able to recall them if he wished.)

There would be something... strangely tragic, in this kind of isolation, for an elf. By becoming a vampire, you'd become undead first, and an elf.... somewhere way, way, way down the line.

As a fairly young undead elf, you're somehow simultaneously ancient, adolescent, and middle-aged, and also pretty much confined to a singular existence of nothing but pain and abuse, with memories of a distant childhood slowly fading just out of reach, knowing that... this, this is just your soul's lot now. That a significant part of your fey heritage, your very ancestry as well as part of your immutable essence, has been torn from you in just one moment, in exchange for preserving this current life, as a simulacrum of itself. And now there is no next life, because this one is one without a natural end, and Sehanine Moonbow will now never invite your immortal soul back to Arvandor to be reborn, because it's been cut off from you, and your very body is holding you hostage. Six, sixteen, or sixty centuries can come to pass, and still nothing is going to change... unless you die, in which case you're just dead, like any non-elven creature.

Anyway, there's no real point to this, or a conclusion to be drawn, beyond just... fuck, man, they couldn't have made this fucker more of a tragic figure if they tried.

(...... Fun fact, Silvanus is not part of the Seldarine. So unless he maybe turns to worship Rillifane Rallathil instead, Halsin's soul would not be reincarnated either. But he seems to have made that decision himself and he seems content, so I'm guessing he's just cool with it.)

(I'm not fucking touching half-elves now, you can't make me, that's such a fucking can of worms oh my god)

[supersquiddle]

Spokane's local medical examiner, Marcello Marchetti, has a moment with his daughter Elisa.

[booasaur]

Willow (2022) - 1x01 - “She'll feel like I'm abandoning her when she needs me the most.”

[bookwyrminspiration]

I think Shannon gets too much flack sometimes with doubting what she plans. The execution sucks sometimes but I do thinks she plan. In Neverseen there’s a comment about Gisela and the Celestial Festival and a few comments about Orem in earlier books.

I think Shannon sometimes gets too much flack in general; I'm not saying she's perfect or above critique, but some posts I've seen over the years seem overly meanspirited for no reason.

A common example I've seen of this is, indeed, about planning and her plot. It irks me when people say things like "we can tell" when she says she doesn't (or didn't, she's switched things up a little) overly plan. There's an infinite number of ways to write a book, her method isn't wrong just because we/you don't like the end result.

Another that especially gets me is when people go out of their way to find "plot holes" and half their list are easily surmised if you put maybe 5 seconds of thought into it. Like "why can't sophie spy on her enemies with her spyball?" Because the spyballs aren't omniscient (she can't see Forkle, she couldn't see her human family after their registry files were deleted, etc.) and if they were the book would be a lot more boring. What happened to the Exillium training? It was a way for Shannon to introduce outward channeling and served its purpose; could it have been phased away smoother? Yeah. Doesn't mean Shannon did awful and this is something to weasel at

There's only so much you can fit in a book; part of our job as readers is to fill in the reasonable gaps. That's not being overly lenient, it's literally part of fiction/fantasy reading as a whole. Poking at the little gaps can be fun, but tearing them all into the light as genuine critique when all stories have gaps is just being needlessly mean.

Is Shannon a perfect writer? No. No one is. There are genuine critiques to be made about her books, but critiquing and being mean are two different things. And sometimes people take it too far--and no one is immune to it, including myself. Just something to be aware of

[aflawedfashion]

Elizaveta Tuktamysheva | Russian Nationals 2022/23