#choices-and-consequences

[thepersonalwords]

Choices are never right or wrong. Perhaps, the choice you made was the best choice under the given set of circumstances and at a given point of time. However, the rigidity in not moving ahead certainly isn't good. Life is all about learning a few lessons, and then moving on to the next till you find that much desired peace and happiness!

Neelam Saxena Chandra

[quotelr]

I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible.

Abigail Padgett, The Paper Doll Museum

[zillychu]

a normal clan. a very normalclan

[dopplerdora]

So I binge read Dungeon Meshi and I have to say I really love this moment. I hate in fiction when characters get possessed or hurt or have like 99.9% of their life stolen, and they just get better after the immediate problem is solved.

Marcille has been worrying over her hair since the start of the story and it's been plot relevant multiple times. She cared about her hair and the styling alot, and now she can't even remember how she styled it. She can't remember how she did it even if she wanted too. It seems like a light loss at first but her hair was important to her and from what we know of how having a desire eaten works she can't even remember why she cared.

When Chilchuck does her Hair she doesn't care how it looks, just that it's out of the way. She can't even recognize that it's childish, somthing she would have noticed immediately before. She goes straight to cutting it, somthing she only did when Senshi was at risk or dying. Not only that but before she only cut a bit, here she just goes to chopping it all off immediately.

Basically I love that there are consequences that will effect these people for their entire lives. I love Laios being a little hungry forever. I love Falin having weird feathery bits. I love Marcille losing a part of herself. Because when you risk it all and make hard or bad choices... it should matter.

[boinday]

i'm doing grand, lads

[aquaaquila]

I swear y'all, people really be hating on Marinette for making questionable choices as if she wants to do them and isn't dying on the inside because of the guilt of her actions and how she does everything because in every other scenario, everything goes to shit.

[theodysseyofhomer]

penelope didn't bring the suitors to ithaca, she didn't ask for them, she didn't want them, and she isn't forcing them to stay. but she has a hand in shaping the situation on ithaca as it exists when we (as readers) encounter it, and the choice she's made (to preserve the kingdom for herself, odysseus, and/or telemachus, depending on how you read it) is to lead them on for years. this effectively keeps everyone in limbo—including telemachus—for good and for ill. telemachus unsurprisingly has feelings about it. now, myself, i think it's great. wish more women would do it, in fact. but in the world of the poem, if odysseus were dead, she would be wrong to do it, and everyone does believe odysseus is dead, and once the trick is exposed the entire household is at risk. for penelope to remarry would pose different risks. i'm not saying there are good alternative choices, but i am saying that she chooses.

[mothzi]

act 3 verso is so quiet and every time he speaks his voice gets softer and weaker until at the very end in Alicia’s ending he’s whimpering and pleading and I’m

[antianakin]

I'm kind-of genuinely devastated that they decided to cut out the reveal of Perrin having known all along about Mon Mothma's rebel activities and was getting interrogated WEEKLY by the Empire and never cracked even once.

This would've helped answer SO MANY QUESTIONS about Mon and Perrin, and it could've easily helped answer the question of why Mon felt like she could just walk away from her family after making herself public enemy number one.

She goes to finally explain it all to Perrin right before she makes the speech because dammit she might not have trust him or even like him all that much but she doesn't want him DEAD and he deserves the chance to find this out from her and get himself to safety before she turns his life upside down, and he tells her he's known all along and covered for her this whole time and never once cracked or been discovered, even when she framed him for gambling and sold off their daughter to a gangster's son. He lets her know that he doesn't need to go to safety, he's not just going to run now because that'll just make him look like he was involved in it. He can continue to cover for himself when the Empire comes to interrogate him again, and he can do it well enough to ensure Leida doesn't get implicated, either. Mon's priority is the rebellion, her priority is her work and it always has been, even to the detriment of her relationship with her family, and Perrin understood that but it meant that HIS priority had to be protecting and taking care of Leida in the absence of her mother. So Mon has to go, but Perrin has to stay because their daughter needs him now more than ever.

And it just makes the choice that Mon has made so clear, the sacrifice she chose to make for the sake of the rebellion, and she can't back out now, she can't make a different choice because she tells herself she's doing this FOR Leida, to try to make a better world for her daughter to live in, but in order to give Leida that world, she has to leave Leida behind.

But she realizes now that she CAN trust Perrin, she could've trusted him all along, so she chooses to trust him now. She trusts him with their daughter, she trusts that he can take care of himself and Leida in her absence once more.

This helps Mon's arc SO MUCH, and I honestly love it, and as Bissell says it's technically a non-canon thing now because it clearly never even made it into the script really let alone got filmed, but it's pretty easy to slot it into what we DID get to see, so as far as I'm concerned, this is my canon. This fixes so many of the problems I had with the end of this arc for Mon and makes it so much more emotional and almost tragic. Mon made her choices and you can argue that some of them were mistakes if you want, you can argue that it made her a bad mother if you wanted to, but it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that, and I love that this finally makes that so clear. Mon made her choice and her family paid the price a long time ago, long before Mon was willing to acknowledge that she'd made that choice.

[isbergillustration]

Look Deeper

[nhura]

Life is too short.

[ my art ] [ twitter ]

(detail + ratio rambling under the cut >_>)

This is one of those "I need a break between my ten other illustrations, let me do a lil sketchy sketch :D" that got too ambitious etc. etc. I never want to see the color red again" moments. BUT!

I really, really like to explore Ratio's viscerality and what's happening between his brain and his nerves, like... all of this thorough control and discipline and he still has to breathe and react to himself and his surroundings, you know? His accomplishments are insane for "his age"* but he's going to run out of "age" at some point! His ambitions are so far reaching that he's not worried about getting doctorate degree Number Nine! Rather, his efforts are pointed outwards, into the universe, for the universe. As you know.

Speaking of his degrees, I had a half thought a while ago that we've seen him with two types of laurel pins.

One is him in his suuuuuper cute mother goose avatar (three leaves) and the other is the hat he's wearing everywhere else (eight leaves).

The thought was, "Aww, what if they're like commemorative pins counting the number of his degrees or whatever :)". Literally only because there's eight in the current one. This is kind of silly because then you'd HAVE to have an obscene number of degrees even for a normal person for your leaf pin to start looking like a laurel in the first place so scratch that BUT it's cute to think that it's still academic regalia. Something something I work in higher ed myself and it's like... it's like that.

The university goldsmith appreciates the job security.

I REMEMBER WHY I BROUGHT THAT UP. FOLLOWING the fantasy where more leaves = more knowledge!, in summary, even though Ratio seems to be a little beyond trying to get a prize every time he learns something now. But he does want to Keep Going. He can only Keep Going.

So I drew him in a bathtub full of an uncountable amount of gold leaves looking at the camera with an indescribable expression born from a hunger that will never be satiated lol DETAIL SHOT!

*Referenced only vaguely in a comment in the context of astonishment, but it could have easily have been "woah he's accomplished so much for his age (young)" as it could be "woah he looks good for his age (older)". There is no canon age and even then, reconciling standardized system time versus planetary time versus "does his particular breed of lizard human have the same lifespan as tumblr user nhura?" is a losing game for everyone involved! Here's what I think: I think he started going grey in his early twenties, whatever that means in spacefantasygame, and that that's very cute on him.

Do YOU think Ratio would be tempted by immortality???? Or would he MIND HIS BUSINESS

[thepersonalwords]

Preparation is good for success and it is a noble thing to prepare excellently for success, but in reality, our choices, actions and reactions toward things we meet as we journey toward success are the real and true ingredients that determine how unsuccessful or successful we become and the kind of footprints we shall leave in the end!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

[quotelr]

Happiness will never invite you to the party. Happiness simply comes down to a choice to show up each and every day on the world with passion, purpose, place and meaning.

Lisa Cypers Kamen, Are We Happy Yet?: Eight Keys to Unlocking a Joyful Life

[biceratops7]

*bracing myself on my knees and trying to breath, nursing a cramp*

I got here as fast as I can. I just wanted to point out that THIS…

Is one of the gayest fucking lines of television I’ve heard in my life.

Even if the presence of the song itself somehow wasn’t a flashing spotlight enough, the literal voice of God directly draws attention to it. Telling us that in universe, a nightingale really is in fact singing in Barkley square, and to know its music is sweet regardless of if we can hear it. Just like there are really in fact angels (one fallen but we’ll let it slide) dining at the ritz, and they’ve been falling in love regardless of if they’ve been allowed to openly pursue that feeling.

And hell, maybe it’s BECAUSE of the traffic that the nightingale finally sings. Perhaps it wasn’t ready until it was sure no one else could listen.

[domiiomii]

It is interesting how shimmer came to be as an effort to bridge the gap in literal bodily strength/power against piltover especially seeing how so much of the population of the undercity is disabled and shimmer is used as a physical enhancer by them (eg. sevika, silco, viktor) to close that gap. The negative association of shimmer as being a way to "unnaturally" overcome disabilities is also worth looking at, for example, Silco using it on his eye is one of the first actions we see of him and it is meant to create a negative/villainous association to shimmer, later on that same negative view is passed down onto Viktor as his use of it marks the beginning of his "downfall".

Silco's push to produce and use shimmer is based on the idea of Zaun finally having enough power to defend from the oppression of piltover, however just like Viktor's use of the hextech on himself, this is is seen as a negative because he is striving to destroy the status quo and therefore it is bad.

Despite the fact that shimmer is also shown to be literally life saving, in the case of both Jinx and Viktor, even then it has a negative portrayal as it is heavily emphasized that it permanently alters the person, in the case of Viktor he "loses his humanity" while for Jinx her mental state deteriorates heavily and she becomes even more paranoid. Even with Salo's more limited use of shimmer for medical/soothing purposes it is shown as something he has to hide and be ashamed of, as did Viktor when he began using it.

We can also see the difference in characterization when it comes to Sevika vs. Vi, there is this almost animalistic reaction in Sevika when she uses shimmer, her eyes glow, she growls, her whole body shakes, her body is being altered. By contrast Vi's hextech gloves, despite also being an enhancer are not portrayed as damaging to her because she is not disabled. In hand with this goes the fact that Vi's enhanced power comes from piltover and it is being put in service of defending it/the status quo. So in the same way that hextech is good as long as it only benefits piltover; enhancers are also good as long as they don't permanently alter the "natural" body and it is not disabled people using them to "unnaturally" overcome that disability and/or threaten said status. Sevika's "bad unnatural strength" losing against Vi's "natural good strength".

Much of the writing, in S2 particularly, has this heavy emphasis against anything that is "unnatural" no matter how beneficial it may be and how many people it may help. This negative association with the "unnatural" overcoming of disabilities is perfectly exemplified by Viktor becoming an "inhuman" being as a result of it alongside with the portrayal of the commune being unnerving because everyone is "unnaturally perfect". Meanwhile Mel's magic is never questioned as bad, because hers is natural, so there are no negative consequences to her using it unlike Viktor who literally "loses himself and his humanity".

This very reactionary writing culminates when the plot insist that "Viktor needs to accept himself" = not heal himself through "unnatural" means = accepting he has to die due to his lower social status either as a disabled person or as a person of the under city, however you read that, the plot leads to the conclusion that the "noble and moral" thing for Viktor to have done was just accept that the status quo can't be altered and he was wrong for trying to go against it.

[rat-spit-village]

the ppl saying veilguard doesn't deserve a bafta nomination for best narrative game... it's a complex story with a compelling cast of characters and a cohesive theme of the power of enduring hope in the face of adversity. the game came out like four months ago and already there are thousands of fics about it, relatively minor characters have huge fan communities. it's a story that has inspired huge swaths of people to take up art and hobbies again after years of hiatus. it's worthy of the nomination regardless of whether or not rook says 'ok' a lot or whatever it is that you're mad about