#cecils secret

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[fiction-podcast-lover]

Every time someone draws or cosplays Cecil with canon accurate fashion style an Erika gains wings

[evelynthecreature]

Reigen may be a sexyman, but the anime put a lot of effort into making him a sexyman, he's a generic sexyman, Cecil is a True Tumblr Sexyman, the Original Tumblr Sexyman, The Progenitor, The Alpha and the Omega, the Once and Future Tumblr Sexyman

[yolkchild]

please more cecil creepler art!!! 🙏your art style is sooo cute! I wanna smooch it!💋🥰

Thank you!

[just-an-enby-lemon]

There were fourteen fear entities. 

That was it.

Maybe there would be more at some point. Maybe there were more a long time ago and some just faded. Maybe there were more right now. 

But they were always, always about fear. 

It had been the first thing Carlos had asked upon hearing about the beings that were now a constant in his life. The beings that had taken away so many of his assistants already (at this point it was a small blessing his surviving assistants didn’t hate him), that had changed who he was in such a complex level that he couldn't stop questioning if he was still human or if they had fundamentally changed him in an irreversible terrible way, doomed him to spend eternity living of nightmares.  

He had studyied them. Learned all he could about the entities. Thought of all ill-concieved ways to end it all and found no perfectly satisfactory solution. He knew them more than he knew most things and he was a scientist even if no one called him that anymore and a scientist knows many things.

That's to say: fear was the common denominator. There were no beings of hope or love or happiness or … community.   Fear was the primordial thing. And it made less sense than he wanted but it was how the world operated, it had always been, that meant that the Voice had to be about fear somehow. That if it was even a thing.

But Carlos was a scientist once. Was a scientist still deep down. Before and after everything. And a scientist cannot simply disregard evidence to fit his previously well established theories. He knew the Voice was real. He had proof. And now he needed to test all hypotheses, and had already called Nilanjana and Mark to try to figure this out. 

The Voice was new and it was real.

It was new and real and strong enough to have its own avatar.

And they needed to figure out what fear it represented soon, before it got stronger, before it was too late (and preferentially before Carlos was completely and foolishly in love with one fresh new avatar called Cecil Palmer that asked too many questions and was too sincere with his answers even without any eye powers involved and had the cutest smile ever) and to do that Carlos needed to shut down the small voice in his head saying this wasn’t about fear.

Community. 

As if. 

[laurapalmersdiary]

hedonism, that feverish lie

[unblinkingvoid]

what i love about cecil palmer being crowned as tumblr sexyman is that nobody really knows what he actually looks like. there is one episode in which he goes on to describe his appearance then it cuts to static and brown noise. its magnificent. the tumblr sexyman is whatever you want him to be

[mississpissi]

i’m sorry to the carlos truthers out there but. i don’t want him to save the day this time.

i can’t stop thinking about how he reacted to the phantom ocean, how he shut down because it reminded him of his own phantom ocean. how the reminder of what he was hiding from cecil stopped him from doing what he loves the most- science (and. cecil i’m so sorry).

i can’t stop thinking that seeing lubelle again has to be a similar reminder. a reminder of all that he left behind when he came to night vale- of all that cecil still doesn’t know about him. yes, carlos tried to warn cecil about janet, about how ruthless she can be. but we haven’t heard from him since.

last we heard, carlos told cecil he was doing a dangerous experiment in his lab, which cecil said he didn’t believe- he said he was pretty sure carlos was just trying to go viral on tiktok. when the phantom ocean came, carlos said he was super busy with science and cecil heard him watching sitcoms. hm.

when someone wrote into the show and asked why carlos wasn’t doing anything about the uowii, cecil didn’t say anything. janet did hint that carlos was spreading “harmful misinformation” about what a scientist does, but that could just be a dig at their past, or at what she’s heard about carlos and who he has become.

it feels like cecil is trying to protect carlos- from the town, from lubelle, i’m not sure. we don’t know. but normally carlos is there, researching, trying to find an answer. and when he is, you bet your burger cecil is gonna brag about it.

maybe carlos is working on something and cecil doesn’t want lubelle to know about it.

but maybe carlos is paralyzed by fear and worry for his family and for his town. maybe he knows exactly what lubelle is capable of and it terrifies him- terrifies him to the point that he can’t do anything about it at all. non-confrontational carlos being confronted by his past in the form of a woman he knows is ruthless and smart- i can see him feeling stuck and trapped and not know what to do, so he does nothing.

he doesn’t save the day. maybe cecil gets hurt. maybe that spurs him to action, or maybe someone else has to step up. i don’t know what will happen and i’m very excited to find out, but i kind of don’t want carlos to save the day. for the drama, and definitely not bc i like seeing him suffer!!

anyways, here’s how steve carlsburg can still win-

[ihaveapodcastproblem]

I would unironically die for Esteban

[imgibbon]

A "Brief" History of Shade, the Changing Man & Woman

In the beginning, ie 1978, there was Ditko, and he gave us Shade, the Changing Man, and it was good.

Rac Shade was a Bond-type agent of an advanced society on a world called Meta - not an alien planet, but the Earth-analog of another layer of reality, and journeying between them meant crossing "The Zero Zone" and trying not to run afoul of its Area of Madness.

Shade had been framed for treason and the crippling of his fellow agent and fiancé Mellu Loran's parents, high-ranking government officials. Escaping from prison and heading to Earth and making use of a bit of contraband experimental technology that was being held at his hideout for Earth operations prior to his frame-up, the "M-Vest", he tracks down escaped Metan criminals while also seeking to find the one who framed him, who has been hiding out on Earth by integrating into its mafia underworld.

The M-Vest allowed Shade a range of powers. With it he could manipulate gravity, employ enhanced strength, fire off energy blasts, and gave him an odd force-field that mitigated harm, but was also sensitive to the psyche of those around Shade, contorting to look like a weird image of their fears, as well as reflecting Shade's unconscious thoughts. He was a "changing man" as, to others, he was a constantly mutable and unnerving entity.

Across the 8 published issues (we got issue #9 later, and Ditko purportedly had up through issue #15 plotted out), Shade convinces his superiors of his innocence, returns to Meta, makes up with Mellu, and starts to make his way back to earth to deal with the criminal mastermind behind his framing infiltrating and taking over the Earth observation outpost that Shade's organization had been working out of.

And then the series was cancelled on short notice due to DC being in financially dire straits at the time.

A decade later, in 1988, Shade was rescued from the void of the Zero Zone by The Suicide Squad, joining their ranks in return for helping him liberate his org's outpost as if it were the next issue and he hadn't been absent from pages for a decade since we last visited that plotline. The mastermind is killed during the scuffle, and with him any chances of Shade being able to go home and formally clear his name. Waller and co offer to help him out while he figures out another way home in the meantime.

He ran with the Squad for a good twenty issues, taking part in the giant Janus Directive crossover, and even journeying to Apokolips and fighting the New Gods with them. During that arc, he is talked into making a bad call that betrays the team, though he helps them get out of the resulting mess. In the end, when everyone is zapped home by Darkseid's eyebeams, while the rest of the Squad is blipped to Earth, Shade is finally returned to Meta.

Six months later, mid 1990, Peter Milligan's first issue of the new Shade, the Changing Man hit news stands. And it was... different.

Milligan expanded on Shade's backstory, revealing that Shade had been an aspiring poet prior to being recruited into the agency that trained it out of him, and delving more into Metan culture, while also using Shade as a vehicle for exploring the weirdness of being in a familiar yet alien society he felt as a British man newly moved to America.

After returning to Meta and before he'd had time to reunite with Mellu, Shade's superiors had tasked him with going back to Earth to pick up an assignment that another agent had been on but failed at: figuring out where the Madness in America was stemming from, and stop it from leaking out into the Area of Madness and influencing Meta. Shade had to journey deep into the Area of Madness to get a bead on it, and ended up on Earth by possessing the body of a freshly executed serial killer, unknowingly leaving his original body an empty lifeless husk floating in the void.

He started travelling the States with Kathy George, whose parents were the serial killer's final victims, and the two eventually are joined by Lenny Shapiro, and sarcastic and witty woman in her own right. The three end up in what would today be called a polyamorous trouple, and eventually confront the living embodiment madness of America, which had infected the other agent, driven him insane, and transformed him into what manifested to others as the giant twisted skeleton of Uncle Sam known as The American Scream.

Shade's M-Vest has grown in power, and possibly is just a part of him now, vastly increasing his abilities to raw reality-warping levels. He can more or less just do whatever the story needs him to do now, basically.

Once the Scream had been dealt with, Shade died. Not that that really slowed him down at all. He wasn't even really aware that it had happened. His at this point powerful madness-riddled psyche was keeping him around as a ghost of sorts, and Kathy & Lenny found a recent corpse to posses, as someone had just driven their car into the lake near where they were staying.

They only discovered after the fact that it was a woman.

After a brief detour where Shade transitioned back into being a man (transmasc baybeeeee), he went back to Meta, finally reconnecting with Mellu after what was now some years, only to learn that the agency had told her that he was dead, and she'd met and wed someone else. She has a mental breakdown, asking in tears why he hadn't come home sooner. Taking this in, Shade returned to Kathy and Lenny, to let them know that he was dying again, said his goodbyes, and allowed himself to be killed by the same FBI/Meta duel operative who'd done him in before.

This is where the Vertigo imprint spun up. The next issue, under the Vertigo banner, picks up after a bit of a timeskip, where Kathy and Lenny are informed by the ghost of Kathy's dead ex that angels in heaven have plans for Shade, and they're sending him back, having prepared for him a body to use in the form of a adult man who's been basically braindead since birth and kept in a medical institution. But the angels have kept a bit of Shade's soul so they can exert some power over him, and it's made him a bit less hinged than he used to be.

Shade, Kathy, and Lenny, per the angels' direction, set up shop as managers of a hotel, helping the weird visitors who come to stay there. During their time there, Shade manages to get Kathy pregnant, and Lenny reunites with the daughter Lily that she had in her teens before running away from home.

But as Kathy comes to term and approaches the time to give birth, she is brutally assaulted. She dies, though they manage to save the baby. Shade, however, is not in his right mind, and rejects the child, walking out of the hospital to wander, while Lenny leaves with her daughter.

This, purportedly, was where Milligan intended to end the series. But for whatever reason it didn't, so it kept going, and the status quo was obviously massively different than what it used to be.

After another not-too-lengthy timeskip Shade decides to kill himself, not seeing the point in continuing, though the literal devil sends him back to posses yet another body. Shade, in an attempt to find meaning, sets up shop in a dimensionally transcendental crack in the pavement in NYC, spends some time existing as the floor in a dance studio, and finally goes to check up on his son, George. Who, it turns out, is aging extremely rapidly, due to not being fully human.

Reunitings with Lenny are had, George ages to death over the course of six months, his soul merges with Lenny's daughter Lily, Shade picks up a few more strays in the form of Angela and Sinita, the latter of which he starts a new relationship with, before everything goes tits up again and he decides the solution is to build a time machine so he can fix all of his (and his friends') problems. He prevents Kathy's parents from being murdered, prevents his younger self from joining the agency, helps Lenny out in her youth, etc.

The series ends with Shade and his now-daughter Lily visiting this new revised timeline's version of Kathy to see if they can strike up a relationship with her.

Things apparently didn't go well.

The next time we see Shade outside of cameos is a story arc in Milligan's run on John Constantine, Hellblazer, in 2010. Constantine summons Shade to help with some Madness-related issues he and his fiancé Epiphany are experiencing, and Shade, unable to get together with the new Kathy and Lily nowhere in sight, becomes obsessed with turning Constantine's bride-to-be into an idealized version of Kathy. It doesn't work, and Constantine is able to properly wed Epiphany, but Shade is shown to be crazy and depressed and have basically the powers of a god. In the middle of all of that we also met back up with Lenny, who has cleaned herself up and is now a school teacher, go figure.

The very next year, DC would cancel the Vertigo line, and everything else, and reboot their universe with the Flashpoint event. During it, in a miniseries from Milligan, Shade is forcibly taken back to Meta, where they reveal that A) the vest has grown to be a part of him, and can no longer be removed in a way that matters, and, B) because of this he is, to an extent, immune to all these reality rewrites. Or at least less affected by them. Shade is put in charge of a team, the Secret Seven, but the madness overtakes him (with a bit of help from some double agents for an enemy faction) and he winds up back in the Area of Madness

Afterwards, in the New 52, we see him trying to forcibly manifest a new Kathy with his godlike powers, but apparently not godlike enough, as she just melts when he's not around. He's interrupted by Madame Xanadu, putting together a team, the Justice League Dark, largely comprised of many of the members of the Secret Seven, and tasks Shade in a leading role to help her save the world from some threats she has foreseen.

Milligan wrote this series for the first 8 issues, and when he left, so did Shade (as well as Milligan's other OCs he'd brought to the table), but it served as a nice little coda to his era of The Changing Man that had begun some twenty odd years earlier.

It would then be another half-decade or so before we'd see hide or hair of Shade again. In late 2016, DC started up the Young Animal line, a young adult-aimed successor to the Vertigo imprint, with many of the same faces headlining its titles. And among them was Shade.

Sort of.

The new Shade, the Changing Girl, from writer Cecil Castellucci, starred young adult bird alien Loma Shade, who was raised on Meta and had adopted Rac's last name after becoming enamored with his poetry and counter-culture views while he was acting as a guest lecture at her university before disappearing form Metan society again.

Loma steals what is purportedly Rac's vest, which has been sitting in a museum, and uses it to transfer her consciousness to Earth, wanting to follow in Rac's footsteps, taking over the body of a comatose high school girl named Megan. And leaving her now empty bird alien body behind on Meta for her boyfriend to deal with, oops.

Living as "Megan", she learns about our culture, experiences dysphoria being in a body she doesn't identify with, and explores sexuality, hormones, and learns how to be a better person than she used to be (and than Megan used to be as well). Meanwhile back on Meta, we learn that Mellu, now getting up there in years, is the head of the agency that used to employ her and Shade, and becomes obsessed when learning that someone has stolen Rac's vest and managed to use it, thinking she'll finally be able to reunite with Shade again after all these years.

Eventually, Loma runs away from home, learns never to meet her heroes, has to deal with Megan wanting her body back, and Mellu wanting Rac's coat back. Her original body dies without her soul in it, and Megan's body dies in the process of Megan trying to get back in it. Shade ends up possessing the body of her favorite black & white sitcom star, Honey Rich, who happened to look a lot like Megan in her younger years, and returns it to youthfulness to attend Megan's funeral.

Mellu also gets the coat back and uses it to reunite with Shade, who had left behind the vest for Mellu and was waiting for her in the Area of Madness where time has no meaning.

It was at this point that Loma got caught up in a really bizarre crossover event that involved all the titles in the Young Animal line called Milk Wars, which was largely Doom Patrol focused, but saw Loma splitting in five, each color-coded and embodying one of her emotions Inside Out style, and serving as Wonder Woman's personal helpers in a world overtaken by a weird 1920s aesthetic organization called Retcon. It was very weird lol.

The series then returned with under the new branding Shade, the Changing Woman. We are subjected to a five year timeskip, during which Loma has grown and slipped into old habits, sleeping around with men and women, indulging in food, drugs, and other things to fill the void in her heart. Her friends have all graduated, gone on to higher education, and gotten jobs in their fields. And she still doesn't really know what her place in the world is. So she's been couch-surfing with Rac in the Area of Madness while she figures out what to do with her life.

And in the midst of all that, the giant interdimensional crayfish that destroyed her birth planet, causing her to be a refuge child on Meta in the first place, begin to attack the Earth.

By the end of the final issue in late 2018, Loma and Rac had become one person, Kathy, Lenny, and Lily had put in an appearance, Mellu got some closure, Megan had come back in a male body and tried to hijack Loma's again, Loma's old boyfriend had become a green lantern, and Loma ended up possessing the body of her dying black non-binary friend River.

And that's where the series ended.

And we haven't seen Shade, in any iteration, since then.

[bearsbeetstextposts]

Falsettos AU of Invincible where Debbie is Trina, Nolan is Marvin, Cecil is Mendel, and Mark is Jason. Is this anything?

[genevieveskingdom]

Why I switched from Choices to Romance Club 📖

I started playing Choices in 2019 and I was always so delighted when they veröffentlicht published a new story. I really loved playing that game, but last year I discovered a girl on YouTube who was posting some let's plays from Theodora and I immediately wanted to try this game.

~ The graphic is waaay better and more realistic.

No reused faces nor characters. I am always amazed about every new book and its characters. Even the so-called "unimportant" side characters have their own design and are not reused which cannot be said about Choices unfortunately. 😔

~ Better character development. Your choices really matter and have different outcome for the MC.

The way you interact with each of the characters has its consequences. The LI's also interact like real people and if you date someone and then decide to switch to an other LI, their romance path is closed. You really have to choose wisely for whom you decide to be with.

~ Quality over quantity

I don't really remember how many books are currently published (ended and ongoing) in RC, but it's definitely not as much as in the Choices app. I HATE the VIP books and that fact that you have to wait thousand years for it to get widely released! 😵 And when you open the first chapter you see that it's just another single love interest book with some three macho guys you are not attracted to (I respect everyone who's into the standard "sexy" type of men, of course, it's just not me 😇) and three girls from whom you choose the kleinste smallest evil.

~ More accessible diamonds and teas

I LOVE Diamond Rush, Tea Parties and so on 😍 It's sooo player-friendly and so worth it! Even the access to diamonds and teas is more suited for wide audience and honestly - when RC is so generous and want to give you so much for free, then you want to buy some diamond/tea pack from them even more, because you know they value their players. 🙏

~ No single love interest books!

Oh my gosh, I have been so annoyed that most of the books Choices release lately is meant for single romance. The problem is not with faithfulness, but with the fact that everyone has their own definition of attraction and beauty. And most of the main LIs in single love interest books are written stereotypically (Bad Boy, guy nextdoor, rebellious girl...) I miss the plasticity of their personalities, of their appearances. Not everyone who matches today's beauty standards is actually beautiful. There should be diversity in LIs. Some of them should be curvier, more slender, with glasses, with bigger nose, with disability, with albinism... Just go on the street and look at the classic human beauty seen every day in public transport! Stop giving us some plain definition of beauty which lacks its own charm.

The only thing I would improve in RC would be the option to choose if we want to play as a male, female, non-binary...etc. As far as I know, only Gladiator's Chronicles have a male MC.

Now I have some personal highlights about Choices I'd like to get rid of because it's been in me for so long 🙉

First thing's first, The Princess Swap was such a good book. I loved the idea. Still, I've got a certain love-hate relationship with this book. First of all, biology and genetics does not make sense in this standalone. Secondly, lord Cecil was not as bad as everyone thinks. He and the king were my most favourite characters, actually. 🤭 Third, I was so annoyed by the prince/ss of Ismar. We were forced to marry them, we could not even say no.🤦

I loved BOLAS N° 1. I replayed the story twice. I was in love with Tyril Starfury. Even though I loved Kaya Duskraven more. She was sooo gorgeous! When they introduced the sequel to us I was naively hoping that we might get Kaya back. That we would find some magical artefact, for example, and bring her back to life, so that she can join the party and be our new love interest. I would definitely switch to her. Instead, we got Valax... I am a little bit disappointed by the sequel, to be honest. They were promising us so many mesmerizing things and I was just expecting a little more from the three years waiting episode. Not only did I not understand why Cherta and Willow joined our party and then they left afterwards... I was like: okay, new love interests apparently. And then whoosh, they vanished. And we ended up trapped with the Valax-drama until the last chapters... I respect everyone who likes the sequel, it is just not me. Unfortunately. I will stick to the good old first book, which I love. 🩷

[waterloggedsoliloquy]

guy who gets targeted ads for ptsd checklists and sketchy therapy services

[nonesuchrecords]

Cécile McLorin Salvant performs "D'un feu secret," from her new album, Mélusine, accompanied by Sullivan Fortner on harpsichord and lutist Dušan Balarin, in the Unicorn Tapestries Room at The Met Cloisters in this new video as part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's performance series, MetLiveArts. It’s the second of three performances she filmed there of songs from the album, following last week's title track.

[deducemyheart]

"We've been married over two years and every day, I fall more in love."

- Cecil Palmer

[worm-disco-jpg]

The Secret History phone wallpaper but its vaporwave instead of dark academia