#but then brain said

[scarfgremlin]

A very happy Valentines Day.

Have some Nova, from @venomous-qwille beautiful Ghost in the machine au, getting flowers.

It's such a delightful read! And while I am lacking a few chapters behind, seeing all the other art for it is certainly inspiring!

So! Nova! He's such a guy /aff

I'm putting the alt text under the cut bc it's kind of long.

[ID: a 15-second animatic of Nova from Qwilles Ghost in the machine au. Nova is a sun variant who wears a jacket. Underneath said jacket is a shirt with two pins on the right side. He has eight small spikes around his face and seven knife rays in between them. The animatic begins with Nova sitting on a couch, a smile on his face, staring into the distance before he blinks, and then proceeds to tilts his head to the side. His body slightly moved to the motion. It then cuts to a small person with big eyes and a small, blue bow tie on their chest, standing on a purple carpet. They look up at him and wave one arm, eyes glimmering and a slight blush on their cheeks while doing so. They soon after lower their hand, shyly looking to the side as they grab hold of their other arm, only to sneak another look at Nova. It cuts back to Nova, who looks at the small person, twinkling stars around his head before they disappear as he tilts his head in question to the side. A speaking bubble with a question mark appears to his left. Again, cutting back to the small person, they seem to startle, aware that they have his attention. Their lower arms halfway raised and hands in a tensed position. They promptly move their right arm to put their hand in a pocket at their right hip to search for something. Said pocket appears out of nowhere. Nova leans forward, curious as to what is going to happen next as he tilts his head to the right. Cut to the small person: they halt in their movement for a second, an exclamation mark popping up right next to them. Their eyes crinkle upward as they seem to have found what they were searching for. Red circles, a small blush, on their cheeks. They proceed to pull out a bouquet of various field flowers out of the pocket and hold it out toward him, eyes moving up to look at him in quiet anticipation. The flowers are a cropped photo of a real bouquet. It cuts to Nova, who has a redraw of the bouquet halfway shoved toward his face, eyes wide in surprise. His look softens, and his brows knit together as he pulls back, and the bouquet is lowered. He looks at the small person with a half grin, his right hand raised to take the flowers. He is looking at the small person while doing so. Cutting back to the small person, they have a bashful look on their face, hands behind their back as Nova takes the bouquet out of the frame. There is a small speaking bubble with a heart above their head. We cut back to Nova, who now holds the bouquet, that is significantly smaller in his hold, between his fingers. He looks down at it with an amused expression. On his right side, a bubble appears, featuring the small person holding a thumb up as sparkles surround their head. They are very pleased with themselves as they watch him./End ID]

[goldensunset]

'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do

[runawaymarbles]

Reading Mockingjay as an adult is extra devastating because. Of course the plucky teenager and her ragtag friends aren't going to sneak into a government building to kill the president with a bow and arrow. That's absolutely ridiculous. It's the kind of thing that's only possible in the kind of propaganda that Coin developed. But she's so good at it that in some ways she tricks the reader into thinking that's the kind of story this is, too--even after 3 books reminding us that pretty much everything that Katniss does the second she volunteers is manipulated by adults pulling strings to make propaganda in some form or another.

[hansoeii]

this one's for you, edwin paine

[luobinghelovebot]

cumplane au

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

[deep-space-lines]

IT'S FINALLY FUCKING DONE. I'M FINALLY FREE

UNTIL FRAUD COMES OUT

Tumblr shrinks it down pretty bad so please. please. I am begging you. look at the full sized image and zoom in. This art piece made my friends worried for my mental health I need someone to witness the amount of detail and effort I put into this

also the original sketch under the cut bc I think comparing them is really funny

[la-pheacienne]

I'm reading the lord of the rings and I'm once again amazed at how... good most characters are. Like, they are genuinely good people. They are a bunch of kindhearted, gracious, caring people, coming together under adverse circumstances and trying to figure things out and find a solution and support each other through it all. Like Frodo and Sam meet Faramir and Faramir is a bit suspicious at first and kind of implies Frodo may be a spy, and then when he hears his story and he's like Frodo, I pressed you so hard at first. Forgive me! It was unwise in such an hour and place. And this blows.my.mind. He wasn't even particularly mean or threatening to him in the beginning, he's just such a kind, considerate man, recognizing the kindness and honesty of another man. And they're all like that. Even Gollum starts slowly changing (for a short while) when he encounters Frodo because that's the thing about kindness and humility and grace, they are contagious. They transform people, even a creature like Gollum cannot be immune to that. Like, you may consider all this simple and basic and I get it but, hear me out. It is quite rare to see that in modern media and it is also pretty difficult to pull off in a way that is not corny and simplistic. It is mind blowing that you actually don't have to present the entire palette of human cruelty and vice in order to tell a compelling story, contrary to popular belief. Lotr does the exact opposite, and it is just beautiful and it warms my heart. Especially taking into consideration tolkien's pretty grim growing-up experience, him being a double orphan without a home, raised between an orphanage and a priest and having no family apart from his brother and then the war and then he almost dies and then he's poor as hell and then a second war and it all makes sense somehow. He writes to his wife who is also an orphan two days before the marriage "the next few years will bring us joy and content and love and sweetness such as could not be if we hadn't first been two homeless children and had found one another after long waiting" and, yes, yes! The love and sweetness just radiate from his work, the entire lotr series is a little radiant bubble of hope and love and grace that he imagined in his head to deal with a dismal reality and then he just gave that to the world, and isn't that what imagination and art is all about after all?

[rendevok]

Moon dance 🌕✨

[drulalovescas]

THINGS THAT HAPPENED:

Jensen Ross Ackles made the acting choice to pick up Castiel's trench coat and fold it gently like a flag because he believed that's what Dean would've done.

Jensen Ross Ackles was so pissed about the Destiel conflict and Dean treating Cas so harshly in the so-called divorce arc that he confronted the writer (Bobo) about it. He asked for explanation and toning the conflict down.

Jensen Ross Ackles, when asked about what he was most excited to tackle with his character in the final season of the show, took a time to think about his answer and then WITH ZERO HESITATION said: CAS.

Jensen Ross Ackles called Castiel's goodbye (aka the confession) a pivotal moment for the whole arc of the show.

Jensen Ross Ackles asked a crew member to record the confession ON HIS PHONE because he wanted to have the og, unedited version of the confession.

Jensen Ross Ackles said Dean would've said "I love you too" and then hugged Cas.

Jensen Ross Ackles admitted to the crowd of thousands of fans that Dean's biggest regret was not being able to save Cas.

Jensen Ross Ackles wrote a song about Cas.

[ruubesz-draws]

Come with Kong to Monkeyland!

Kong just wants to show his New Empire in Hollow Earth

My brain constantly nagging me to draw this as Kong:

[lazylittledragon]

so how about that durge

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[yashley]

"It would really just be a shame, I think, to deprive our audience of just like, one more perfume commercial."

bonus:

[beybuniki]

best friend with social anxiety

[shepscapades]

Your highness… I don’t feel so good