#for example: [why though]

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[fetidbog]

Obsessive ASOIAF theorizing misses the point of the stories, I think! George's goal is to tell us a sweeping fantasy with heavy romantic elements and really beautiful characterization grappling with themes of redemption, power, agency, identity, love, loss, growth, death, (re)birth, etc etc. He obviously has some big plot points and mysteries, but those serve to reinforce the themes (e.g. Rhaegar and Lyanna are there to talk to us about love and tragedy and cycles and identity). George isn't chucking in a mystery to just have a wild and shocking reveal, he's putting it in to serve a narrative point and when you lose sight of that you are losing the plot, quite literally.

To me, it's much more interesting to see how certain themes develop over time as George sits with them (e.g. Jaime's progression from the outline into his POV character form is a perfect example), historical inspirations (BUT not as a way to crack a code!!!), and literary allusions and references.

[lycandrophile]

at this point i don’t even have any commentary to add to this. i’m just tired.

[whiteboardartstudios]

I SAID I WAS GOING TO DRAW THAT CAR SO HERE WE ARE (I hope you enjoy this is the stupidest thing I've drawn in months /affectionate)

(I put the image descriptions in the Alt text this time because there's so many images. If it doesn't work please tell me and I'll yeet them in the actual post!!)

happy finale of Wild Life everybody! :D

[tinseltownie]

i have a vision.... I don't actually think Lando likes to be casually touched.... someone come discuss with me.....

[mythtakens]

so here's a scenario if a character was, completely random example, shot by a sniper in the street and they had one singular coherent thing they said in between getting hit and waking up in the hospital days later. what do you think is the most absolutely sickening heartwrenching line you could have that character say. like for instance to their closest friend. who is let's say idk covered in the blood that just sprayed out of them straight into said friend's face. a best friend who is actively trying to stop them from continuing to bleed out in that moment because they were just SHOT by a SNIPER and they're DYING. let's chew on this hypothetical situation for a minute or five. what is the most insane yet still fully in character thing a person could use the last of their energy to say in the chaos of everything that's happening before passing out. they're in pain, they're in shock, hell they're not even fully aware at this point right and this is something that could easily easily be the last words they ever speak. what do you think would be the version of those words that would clock me in the face the hardest and why did Eddie Diaz from 9-1-1 say it on network television in 2021

[pseudophan]

they're a little too fixated on gay saunas recently. like do we really need to share this

i think dan's doing that thing he always does where he gets hung up on something really random and keeps bringing it up all the time for seemingly no reason. i don't know if it's the autopilot entertainer brain that just throws out any remotely interesting thing on his mind or what but he does it a lot 😭

[bleue-flora]

Ok, I recently wrote an essay [here] talking about the definition and duties of civil engineering as well as the ethics because of the brain rot @swordfright gave me with calling Dream Sam’s ultimate engineering project. So, because I actually am a civil engineer I took it upon myself to design the title and summary of quantities sheets just like I do at work for roads but with Dream as the project instead. And in honor of angst day sponsored by @sixteenth-day-event, I figured I’d share it because I feel like it kinda works for the prison of the mind prompt.

“Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” he deemed too damaged like a bumpy road or crumbling building that wasn’t worthy of patching and filling in the cracks or reinforcing, that’s too eroded to be fixed and preserved. So, Sam strived to tear him down to the bedrock so he could remake, remold, and reengineer Dream according to his design for the common safety, public health and well-fair.”

{These are very similar to the actual sheets I make day to day, which I shall not share for the sake of doxing my location, but yea pretty much everything has a significance. Some of it doesn’t necessarily make sense but that was because I was more so taking inventory of what we see in lore (so you know I counted ;) lol)}

[pencilofawesomeness]

How Fairy Tail could have had a really cool thematic parallel if they Committed to the Bit:

I often joke about my constant urge to spew essays on characters and topics I have thought too much about, but I refrain because translating all the thoughts in my head to words takes time and effort, and sometimes I am speaking to the void. However. I am spinning in my chair, gnawing at the bars of my enclosure, and frankly thinking way too much right now so I must scream.

It would have been so impactful if Fairy Tail emphasized Jellal being brainwashed.

Jellal is my boy, of course, but I’m not even just talking about the impact to his character: I mean the impact of the entire plot. This, of course, if we went the whole mile with the theming. The machination of being controlled, emotionally or magically influenced, or even unable to fulfill a desire due to an insurmountable obstacle, comes up numerous times throughout the plot, to both primary characters, supporting characters, and antagonists. While Fairy Tail is absolutely a series about friendship, it is also about choosing your path, with a large recurring theme of, regardless of connotation, about being selfish, and what that means on both ends of the spectrum. It’s a matter of free will, and the antithesis to this is all manner of external control. So really, it makes sense that this should be a thoroughly explored theme.

I could talk all day about all the different examples and aspects of this but I came here to talk about Jellal. First, the slavery aspect really hits the nail on the head, so we’re off to a great start—this, of course, applicable to multiple characters, which I really enjoy. Things go wild, however, when Jellal effectively chooses to trade himself for Erza in the punishment game and gets the ever-living shit beat out of him at the ripe age of eleven or twelve years old. He is, understandably, not in a good place, and he comes to the stunning conclusion that… he hates the slavers. Yeah. Checks out. Then, he hears the voice of ‘Zeref’ spewing rhetoric about hate, and it overwhelms; this, we know in hindsight especially, to be Ultear casting a mind-fuck spell in order to manipulate him, under the guise of pretending to be a figure young Jellal believed to be a god. 

When I first saw this flashback, watching the anime, I was unbelievably hyped. For all of Fairy Tail’s odd relationship with foreshadowing, I got the gist of it as soon as the magic went into his right eye and overwhelmed him. In Japanese media especially (largely due to the prevailing symbolism of the daruma doll), the right eye is a huge indicator of free will and the future—namely one’s goals. Creepy magic ghost entering the right eye with magic-bind looking things and immediately warping Jellal’s goal? A+ delivery. Of course, at the time Zeref—an unrevealed ‘evil’ entity—seemed a likely culprit, but Ultear being the puppeteer changes little of the result. In fact, it actually creates a super interesting parallel, but more on that later.

First, there are the consequences of Jellal being an antagonist who is not in control of his actions. I see people lament that it “cheapens” the severity of the arc and provides a cop-out redemption for Jellal, and while the execution of the latter certainly could have been different, I don’t think the premise of mind alteration cheapens the overall plot and theme of Fairy Tail at all; on the contrary, it could have been used to further emphasize intra- and inter- character conflict as well as provide a super engaging parallel for the end of the series. The theme of nakama, family, and friendship is huge, so what better way to emphasize that than to show a twisted example of it?

Jellal goes from ride-or-die loyal and ‘good’ to circumstantially loyal to an ideal (and the people attached to it) and ‘evil’ with the flip of a magic switch. Erza gets the immediate short of the stick when she is the first victim (aside from Jellal himself) to this meddling, and the caring friend she had seen days or weeks before is now cruel, insane, and full of threats—threats she takes heed to as she is cast from the island. Now, Erza is also a child, and one full of trauma, so I am not trying to invalidate her fear or blame her for any outcome. This also does not dive into the intricacies of saving friends at cost to oneself, and all of the conflict thereof; if anything, the complication of the matter bolsters the drama and impact. And then, we have the rest of the squad. Sho, Wally, and Milliana buy into the idea without any trouble, and they continue to buy into it as they get older. Beyond morality, it’s a power fantasy, and those are easy for formerly powerless people to latch onto. However, Simon is the only one who realizes that something is fundamentally wrong and twisted with Jellal… and his ultimate goal, developed over the course of roughly seven to eight years, is to wait it out until he finds the opportunity to kill him, or get somebody else to do it. Ultear, even after integrating herself into the group out of nowhere, gets away with her plan, because ultimately nobody questions that Jellal’s sudden change was anything but a result of trauma and his own will—even in a world with magic, where the very first arc revolves around the use and mistreatment of charm magic.

(Now, as an aside, I unfortunately have some experience in friends suddenly changing. In real life, it is rarely so sudden and obvious, of course, and the culprit is usually those horrible little signals and hormones within the mind, and nothing so fanciful or external as magic. I had a friend take a nosedive into some truly batshit ideas—cult-starting worthy—and exhibit wild mood swings and displays of unprecedented behavior. It admittedly took me a moment to ascertain it among the known issues, but once the pieces clicked, it clicked. I wished I had noticed sooner, and even though she was more culpable of her choices than a person supernaturally influenced by an outside force, I still can’t hate her for all the harm done. This is all just to say that I have, especially in recent years, a personal perspective on this trope and an appreciation for the painful nuance.) 

Refusing to reveal this mindfuckery in the arc diminishes the severity of it a great deal, I fear. We, along with the characters, spend time believing he died an insane villain… and then when he comes back amnesiac, it softens his character but does nothing to contradict how awful he had been. It’s not until years later, arcs later, that we get this random instance of the long overdue reveal to tell us that the manipulation has been discovered off screen. Not only is this utterly underwhelming, but Jellal is now actively working with Ultear and is fine with it! He’s still (understandably, after all this damn time thinking otherwise) blaming himself and lighting his own pyre to atone for things started by a factor completely outside of his control, and every character lets him. The discussion of autonomy is wasted. So, too, is all the juicy emotional fallout. We don’t see Jellal grapple with the horrifying reality that he has not been himself, that years of his life were wasted as a mental slave instead of a physical one; we don’t see Erza beat herself up (likely unnecessarily) because she could have potentially protected him but she hadn’t out of fear, and then she condemned him unknowingly; we don’t see the others truly come to terms with the fact that Jellal had been stolen from under their noses and they never noticed; we don’t even get more than a glimpse in Ultear’s head, who committed the deed because she thought her means wouldn’t matter and then they did. 

It’s horrifying. It’s tragic. It was, perhaps, preventable—in that the problem was a punchable one, to a degree—except the people involved were just children, just human, and it wasn’t enough. Friendship and flashy magic power could not trump trauma and entrapment, not this time. No matter how I think the series could have and should have handled it (and I have several ideas, of course), Jellal’s story provides a haunting case of failure regarding the themes of friendship/community and freedom that our protagonists embody. 

Which brings me to the perfect opportunity to follow up this occurrence of stripped autonomy and loss of freedom with a culmination of the affected themes, plot points, and more: the books of Zeref. 

Namely, the idea that the etherious—sapient, cognizant, and fully capable of autonomy via every depiction given of them, from Tartaros to even Lullaby to especially Natsu—can be and have been resolutely manipulated and controlled via the books by Zeref. Now Zeref, infamously hands-off up until the finale, barely utilized this. The most we ever see is instilling a directive and supernatural need to kill Zeref in the texts, which serves as an externally imposed goal. (Sound familiar, yet?) Provided Larcade clearly doesn’t have these instincts, it is not a guaranteed addition either, which further adds to the sense of deliberation. Natsu experiences this only in the last arc, in what I assume is supposed to be a very tense and jarring plot of a friend and protagonist suddenly losing himself, but it does not get expounded on for long enough to hammer the point home. The plot point of reclaiming the book becomes about saving his life only, and not his autonomy. Not only could this have been emphasized to be properly horrifying and devastating, but the effect—and the suspense—would be doubled with the prior establishment of Jellal’s arc and the tragedy therein. 

To back up for a moment, this parallel is further accentuated by the fact that Ultear and Zeref are clear mirrors of each other. Ultear was afflicted by a magic condition outside of her control and she was enslaved as a lab rat for it. When she broke free, she perceived her mother to have abandoned her, so Ultear, in her unresolved anger and grief, aims her entire goal to rectifying it, which culminated in planning to undo the entire timeline in order to make the one she wanted all along. Any casualties, any cruelties—including the mental enslavement of a slave child—are means to an end, and will ultimately be forgotten. Zeref lost his entire family to tragedy, and in his grief, he refused to forfeit the idea of regaining what was lost, namely his brother. He became afflicted with a curse—a magic condition outside of his control—and experienced cognitive dissonance for it. Ultimately, this miserable existence culminated in the idea of erasing the timeline entirely and forging his own. Any casualties, any cruelties—including subjecting his creations to the same lack of complete cognitive control—are means to an end, and will not matter. 

I mentioned that selfishness is also a recurring theme and this is a prime example of the dark side of it. For Lucy, claiming her independence and following her own path against the wishes of her estate, it is a wondrous thing. Freedom cannot be achieved without some selfishness, and this is a wonderfully handled theme in Fairy Tail, where our protagonists unabashedly put their friends above concrete morals and follow a creed to live their life to the fullest—the eternal adventure. For characters like Ultear and Zeref, their personal desires—born of horrible tragedy and frankly understandable things to want—come at the cost of the autonomy of everyone else, especially the pawns they use to further their goal. This, in true fictional hyperbole, begs the question of where the line in the sand is to be drawn, of what is acceptable on a moral standard and what is not. It is, of course, colored by the protagonist’s point of view as clear antagonism, but as a viewer of the media it provides to us to question when protecting one’s ideal becomes irrevocably an attack on the sanctity of others. 

Which brings us back to the matter of the books. The intended horror of Natsu losing control of himself, I think, could have been really emphasized in order to highlight these aforementioned themes. Imagine if, instead of a complete menagerie of new characters as the final invading force, Zeref’s key piece of his invasion was Natsu. With the intended goal of undoing time, having Natsu kill him is no longer necessary, so it would be more pragmatic to use Natsu instead as a weapon of mass destruction for his goal. Not only is he inside of Fairy Tail, but Zeref is, theoretically, doing this for Natsu too, and he won’t remember this upon success—nevermind that the Natsu we know, that presently exists, that we have watched develop over the entirety of the series, would be forever erased regardless. 

Armed with the knowledge of what happened to Jellal, and how he ultimately had no one to intervene for him, this increases the urgency within the characters and will likely expedite their discovery of why Natsu turned against them out of nowhere. This time, a resistance is launched, and characters have the chance to intervene on the behalf of a friend. Gray couldn’t save Ur, Lucy spent years ensnared by the will of a family member, Erza didn’t recognize Jellal’s plight until it was too late, but they can save Natsu, and save him quickly. Fairy Tail, Team Natsu especially, can rewrite the book of E.N.D. solely for the great cause of freeing their friend and handing him back his free will, and in the process, Fairy Tail saves their own future as well. This doesn’t preclude the ability to free Zeref from his curse, but with or without that we have a beautiful culmination of fighting for the sake of a friend, for the individual and for the whole group. This time, friendship wins. 

I just think it could have been really cool.

[rawliverandcigarettes]

honestly, re: my last reblog, but it's so funny to me how unbearably annoying humans in mass effect are, like you guys!!!!! calm down!!! you JUST arrived!!! maybe take in your surroundings for 5 seconds before declaring you should be treated like the most special princesses of all and have all the advantages ever without any drawback and be recognized as the supreme leaders who have all the clarity and drive and righteousness to solve everything and be the victims of everyone's envy and meanness and the ultimate heroes who will save everyone in spite of themselves...... 😔😔😔

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Veilguard vaguing:

It's not automatically a good thing, actually, that the game de-emphasizes or even outright removes racism against elves, and bigotry against other groups, from the story

[pinkfey]

remember how in dao there were always like multiple flirty options u could just spring on ur love interest and it wasn't something that was brushed past it would stop a conversation dead in its tracks to have a cute secondary flirty offshoot with small variations dependent on the flirty option u initially chose with a unique course correction to get back on topic after...... yeah.

[high-voltage-rat]

Tog morphological biology really is weird. Their mouth, which resembles a crocodilian's, has teeth that imply carnivorous diets. However, where their head is so elongated, their bodies are extremely short and tall in comparison to a crocodilian, which to me suggests that they would have to dedicate significantly more power to holding their head up. Their eyes are positioned in a way that's really only suited to being a prey animal, horse style, unless you're an aquatic hunter. However, togs have the stumpy feet I associate with elephantids or other plains-based ungulates- or hippopotamids. They seem to be perissodactyls in this sense, bearing weight on the front 3 toes. But their shorter bodies paired with these feet would make balancing their heads quite difficult, as they have very little tail to offer a counterbalance, and their feet are stumpy enough to offer very little leverage. On top of that, they're known to be reptilian, but they also exist in cold snowy areas, with adapted colouration even, which suggests they're not cold-blooded. They're overall smooth-skinned (or possibly fuzzy? The striations seem to imply a fuzzy texture but the rest of them doesn't. I hesitate to use the fluffy tog or entagled tog as examples given they're meant to be mutants, but all other entagled creatures' mutations were mostly just exaggerations of pre-exisying traits, so short fuzz -> fluffy isn't that hard to imagine.) but they also seem to have the capacity to grow plated spines, which are modified osseoderms, so they do possess the genetics to grow scales like crocodilians- they just only use it for stegosaurus-style plates on the head and tail. Functionally speaking, these add little value and strike me as either residual anatomy or an in-progress developing adaptation. I lean towards the latter since the plates are a more terrestrial-suited feature.

Basically, lots about their morphology suggests they'd be best suited to aquatic or semiacquatic hunter lifestyles, including the fact that their balance issues wouldn't be as present in the water- except that we only ever see them on land, and their feet would be a nightmare for paddling in water (hippos, who have similar feet and webbing between their toes, are still poor swimmers and just walk along the bottom of water bodies- it's believed the webbing is more for stabilization in bottom walking). So the best explanation is that they were shallow-water hunters who wade, but at some point they became totally land-based, lost some reptilian and aquatic features, started developing spines, and began menacing Lore.

They're just such stupid creatures with stupid nonsense biology. I know this is a land of magic and I have an amulet that channels the power of my love to make my dragon grow gigantic à la Clifford the big red dog, but I draw the line at togs.

[shadelorde]

"But c.ai is fun for roleplaying with and I'm too shy to talk to other people :((( you should feel bad for m-" DOWNLOAD MIITOPIA AND FUCKING PLAY IT YOU COMPLETE CLOWN

[box-dwelling]

With all love in the world to fic writers, and this isn't a set criticism just a trend, being a British person and seeing what colloquialism people have Wyll use will absolutely take me out of a fic at points. Like this is difficult and I'm not gonna hold it against any writer who does this but I very much do notice it. I don't even have advice because so much of it is a weird feel thing of the type of age of the people who use certain slang.

Wyll talks with pretty archaic British slang. It's not too ancient. It's still like stuff you might hear an older guy say, but it gives a certain feel to him speech of it being kinda old fashioned.

But sometimes people either don't get this or, honestly more common in what I see because most of the fics I read are from people who do understand him, people who, fairly because they aren't from here so wouldn't know, use slang that feels a little too modern and it just reads like Astarion just called someone bro.

But I don't know how to explain that lad singular is a word he does use in canon and makes sense, but lads plural feels so fundamentally wrong.

[bluebellwren]

I’m genuinely so terrible at being a human being. Like physically