#did this book kill me? absolutely

[taxinealkaloids]

kill your darling, it's just that easy!

[lezalla]

I just read Phantom of the Opera today (By Gaston Leroux) and I feel really weird trying to engage with the online content because the book is my only reference for the story but I know the phantom is changed to be a proper romantic option in the musical/movie while in the book he is literally the toxic asshole to say he is going to kill himself if you break up with him. Except he is also gonna blow up an opera house and kill everyone else too.

So keep being taken aback by seeing so many people be like "Christine should have chosen the Phantom" "The Phantom was so romantic" because i am just here like "YOU MEAN THE DERANGED ABUSIVE MURDERER MAN?!?!" "WHAT ARE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT?!?!?"

[crazynerdandproud]

Finally watched season one of Wheel of Time. I love it. Like, they actually did right by Allana and stuff! I just, yeah, WoT written by someone not a total misogynist is actually way better than the books. I hadn’t considered that going in, but without all Robert Jordan’s absurd ideas about gender and stuff it’s like, much more enjoyable. I hadn’t realized just how one dimensional so many of the secondary women characters were until now.

[damnation-if]

on today's episode of Hashing Out Concepts Theatre, i spent a while today while waiting for my new fridge/freezer to be installed after my previous one died and i lost all my food hashing out a bunch of concepts for another game idea i have. (rest assured i'm not actually working on it as a game yet i just like to bash out a framework for things every now and then to make my brain do happy chemicals lmao)

putting all of this stuff under a cut since it's a bunch of images and also in case people aren't interested XD

i am regrettably a huge fan of comic books (mostly DC) and i've seen a couple of comic book inspired IFs popping up lately, though when it comes to my own interest, i'm definitely more into a straight interpretation of a comic book universe than a more. the boys-style universe - i'm into the camp lol, not so much the grim and gritty stuff. (though that's just my own personal preference)

anyway the idea behind That's Just Super is something that i really like about certain comics - giving the villains more of a purpose and rounded existence than just existing to be in somebody's rogue's gallery. the joker's angry defence of the batfamily from various other DC evil forces, lex luthor's furious resistance against brainiac alongside superman because it's His planet, damn it, DOOM throwing in with the heroes in every second marvel event comic... i really like stories where villains and evil characters don't always make the Most Evil choice just Because, but have clear and explainable motivations that sometimes bring them into what we'd consider a 'good' alignment because unlike in d&d, there's no real such thing as a concrete moral alignment.

(this is my banner design for it)

the basic idea is that an inexplicable cosmic event removes all of the superheroes from the planet, leaving it vulnerable to attack by evil mindflayer style aliens - unless the supervillains who remain are able to band together despite their more unpredictable, less cooperative natures and save the planet in the heroes' absence. after all... if aliens take over the earth, the villains can't take it over themselves.

here's my fun little UI design idea lmao...

the other major thing about That's Just Super that i've been hashing out is the pc. the basic idea is that you pick your villain identity from a list but you get to customise their like. birth name and secret identity, while the villain identity comes with its own name, costume, and set history (including occasionally past romantic encounters). i like playing around with the way that IF works with the idea of mcs and customisable mcs so i just thought it'd be a fun twist... it also allows me to create nice drama by having set occurrences in the past lol.

so i did some profiles for the nine villain options - three each of the DC triad of tech/metahuman/magic origin. they're all based on a specific kind of villain archetype, and i really tried to limit myself to ones where i could definitely pin down more than one specific influence so it didn't end up like me just making too many analogues haha... even if some of the influences are probably pretty obvious.

weirdly i haven't even Thought about ROs yet since i've been so focussed on the pc... maybe i'll play around with the partially set background idea even more and only have 1 possible RO for each villain choice or something. maybe a couple that you can romance as anybody... not sure. (talionis could definitely have a messy broken romance with his superhero for example)

apologies that readability isn't great but these are mostly just made for me lmao

[riddlerosehearts]

OKAY LOOK i knew this update was going to be very shroud brothers-focused and fuck me up in some way but i didn't expect it to be such a personal attack, hello?! 😭 even during the times when we recently saw silver cry they didn't ACTUALLY ANIMATE THE TEARS STREAMING DOWN HIS FACE.... they went out of their way to do that for idia specifically. what the fuck. (edit: someone reminded me that they did also make a detailed crying animation for lilia and i just forgot. still though. this animation they did for idia destroyed me.)

[tinkerelle]

idk why it took me so long to realise this very simple and in your face fact that daisy jones is a manic pixie dream girl. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but in a “she’s this complex incredibly broken character who’s only ever seen as a fun time, manic girl who’s different and cool and has no other purpose but to make men better” to everyone else and no one actually stopped and looked at her except for simone and billy.

it makes sense why she’d be blind to all the hurt she’s causing to be with him, because he’s one of the few people to truly see her. her struggles and aches and pains and accept her as she is and that’s why I could never hate book!daisy because she’s sick and she’s been objectified and ignored and here comes this man who actually truly knows her and the heartbreaking thing was that billy ( in my opinion ) saw her as his downfall.

he didn’t see her as someone he could realistically be with and be held down and supported and soft with like he did with camila. daisy was fire to him , but fire eventually either ends up burning you or burning out unlike camila who is always the person that he would choose without a shadow of a doubt. not because they have children, but because he’s love for camila is a choice and one that keeps him grounded and able to truly be himself and love. he wants daisy but he needs camila, he chooses camila and not to spiral into chaos but to truly be content even if it takes an internal war just to get there. that’s why he stammers when he says maybe camila wasn’t the person he loved the most at the time but she was the person he loved the most.

and I think daisy realised that too because she didn’t want to be broken with him, she wanted to truly BE with him like he was with camila and she knew that she’d never be that for him. the minute she got with him he’d use her as an excuse to do drugs and neglect his children and responsibilities and turn into what he promised himself he’d never be again. so she leaves. she leaves and never looks back even though every thought is telling her to fight for the man who sees her even if its not in a good light.

it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and honestly fuck yall for making a very complex story into a shipwar, because y’all lack nuance and want to live in dalulu land.

[unohanadaydreams]

Also saw Poor Things and absolutely loved it. Bella reminds me so much of Hazel Green from Made for Love (the book not the show) and she deserves to make as many abominations as she wants for the rest of her second life, amen.

[youmustfixyourheartt]

whatever i think we need to talk about simon fairchild's, nikola orsinov's, gerry keay's/and or mary keay, and elias bouchard's commitment to their various bits going

[halos-little-freak]

I am not doing okay

[stareyedsheeple]

finished reading the haunting of hill house and im so. ive been gritting my teeth reading through stuff about it so hard i feel nauseous. as u can see i am normal about this piece of media and can be trusted to be normal about pieces of media involving haunted houses and mothers and isolation. of course . of course (biting biting biting)

[bejeweledmp3]

JUST FINISHED GOOD OMENS 2. CHEWING GLASS HELLO?

[lovebecomeshim]

percy’s narration: I love my mom I love my girl friend I hate myself WHAT did you just say to me I have no idea what I’m doing this is all going surprisingly well THIS IS GOING TERRIBLY WRONG how did I just DO THAT I’ll fight you I don’t care who you are… annabeth says I can’t fight y—ANNABETH WHY ARE YOU PICKING A FIGHT I love my girl friend I love my mom can I go home yet

[andromedasummer]

having a bit of a shit day. going to read dnd books abt it.

[ace-trainer-risu]

I'm listening to this hard(ish) sci fi novel on audiobook and its not, like, the greatest thing I've ever read, but it's more or less fine and I was basically enjoying it, and then like 85% of the way through there's this completely random, illogical, unexplained, out of the blue deus ex machina. and it's so completely random and absurd that I can't even pay attention to the plot anymore, I'm just like ??????

[rackartyg]

for pretty much anything anyone from the union says i’m just like. actually, fair enough. i get it. at first i was like ‘unga bunga is called union must be good’ and then i talked to evrart for the first time and was like. hm. but i get it now. fair enough evrart.

[idsb]

I am here to recommend the song “The Great Molasses Disaster” by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. It’s very weird.

(I am the mystical weird song rec anon 🪄)

Omfg is it about the giant molasses spill / flood in Boston in the early 1900’s!?? Bc fun story the worst book literally ever is written about that (it’s called The Dark Tide) and sophomore year at my high school it was a requirement for the whole school to read it. I literally paid my dad to write it for me (to this day I don’t know why he agreed to that, 0/10 parenting there but thank god) and he, a college professor, then hated the book so much he pawned it off to a random guy in a band he took me to see that he met backstage who liked history a lot. I let my friend loosely copy it who let her friend loosely copy it, and next thing I knew the literal ENTIRE school. I am not exaggerating the ENTIRE school without one single exception turned in “my” essay and half the details weren’t even right like a fucked up game of telephone except my original essay didn’t even have half the facts right, and they were gonna give the entire school detention for it but they didn’t have enough busses to accommodate that so no one faced a single consequence; they didn’t even grade them bc there was no point in failing the entire school. And after 40 years of everyone having to read that book as a right of passage there, a sophomore year requirement since the school opened, they never required it again after my year dfshdjsjs