#fridge boyfriend

[laurelwen]

Misogyny in Like Minds

[Like Minds Masterpost]

[whoblewboobear]

Jace lets Zara feed on him sometimes bc that’s his best friend and he loves her, Send Tweet

[momotonescreaming]

lowkey obsessed with the domestic college stommy au that lives in my head

[the-pigeolympics]

i ate pocky the other day so i drew nageki eating pocky. i just think he should have some. as a treat.

[jimahalangel]

Gelatin Skeleton

Summary:

Apparently the multiverse doesn't need your permission to Isekai you. It doesn't even have to give you the courtesy of letting you know it happened.

…

Undertale is gone, like it never existed.

…

You would know—you've looked.

…

"Wait- so you're telling me the void ate my universe? I'm living the weirdest 'I survived' book?!! Introducing to scholastic book fairs everywhere: 'I survived the destruction of the universe when the void decided to get all schlorpy schlorpy!?'"

…

"I am unfortunately fully aware of what information your universe had in the way of… fanfiction about my friends and family-"

...

Notes:

Formatting is better on AO3 (italicized font and such)

Update schedule: AO3 will get new chapters earlier (probably about a day) than Tumblr. (Aiming for once a week, on Thursdays or Fridays - not set in stone)

Link to read on AO3:

Chapter 1: Wikipedia, my beloved.

(read chapter 2 here)

Going to sleep in one universe and waking up in another sounds like the kind of thing people would write about in various types of fiction. Because it is . It's such a prevalent trope that it has its own genre: Isekai .

As defined by Wikipedia, "Isekai, ( Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world" or "otherworld") is a genre of speculative fiction—both portal fantasy and science fiction are included. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, virtual world, or parallel universe. Isekai is one of the most popular genres of anime, and Isekai stories share many common tropes…"

You'd think someone would notice being Isekai-d; that you might feel different upon waking up in a world where things are changed in new and mysterious ways—perhaps feel empowered? Surely when one is suddenly transported into another reality, they might remember the day it happened?

Apparently the multiverse doesn't need your permission to Isekai you. It doesn't even have to give you the courtesy of letting you know it happened.

Or, well, you think this is another universe, at least? Because an entire chunk of internet-culture/pop-culture was missing when you went to Google it yesterday.

Is missing.

Still.

Undertale is gone, like it never existed. You would know—you've looked.

It's not like years' worth of memes and fanfiction and fanart pertaining to a game that changed the entire gaming industry could just up and disappear out of nowhere, could it?! But you can't find any sign of it anywhere online or offline—and you definitely had physical evidence.

You'd stayed up all night last night searching for a single trace of the game and fandom you'd spent years of your life looking toward for comfort and entertainment. You’d looked everywhere.

But it's gone.

All of it.

Everything.

It's impossible.

There has to be an explanation.

Which brings you to your current Isekai theory: Maybe it's not gone— you are. You might be somewhere new where it never existed in the first place.

Either that or your brain is really majorly messed up and created an alarmingly huge chunk of false memories.

.... Actually… How long has Undertale been missing for you?

Has this happened before and you just can't remember it?

You check your search history. Nothing about Undertale before yesterday. Which is definitely strange because you'd been on AO3 looking through Undertale tags two weeks ago. And there's no need to delete your search history when you live alone. Your most recent search history from right before your rabbit hole yesterday is still the same Wikipedia article you remember reading.

Strange.

So Undertale being wiped from the face of the Earth must've happened sometime in the past two weeks.

You check the Google search trends for the words, 'Undertale' and 'Meglovania,' among several other words and phrases more unique to the game and fandom than 'Sans,' and 'Papyrus.' You want to get to the bottom of this, but you're pretty sure those character names won't get you any closer to an answer with how common they are to describe non-Undertale related things.

It's somehow not a surprise to you when search trends show that exactly zero people are looking for the answers you are.

Okay, so that kicks the possibility of finding anyone else who remembers Undertale.

You check search trends for 'alternate reality,' 'alternate universe,' and 'alternate dimension,' and you also open up a separate tab to the Wikipedia article for 'Isekai.'

It seems like there's definitely a good amount of search queries related to each term, but upon further inspection, they're mostly about isekai anime and tv shows like Dr Who.

Not really all that helpful, but maybe when you're not dealing with the real-world issues of dimensional travel you can take a break and watch the ones that seem interesting.

You bookmark a few articles that seem to be about actual science and not sci-fi media, but besides scientific papers and articles misquoting those same scientific papers, you've hit a dead end. You turn your attention towards finding discussion posts or forums on the topic —Maybe something on Reddit?

…..

Okay, nope.

You're not going to have much luck bringing in other people to help you with this unless you're looking to end up institutionalized. Not that there's any shame in that, but you don't think it'd help you much in this particular situation.

Man, you are really hoping for your Isekai theory to ring true. Otherwise, you're SOL with no way of finding out what's going on here. You feel like that guy who had to rewrite all the Beatles songs from memory in that one movie. What was it called? Yesterday?

Not that you think you could reproduce any of the content you remember about Undertale.

No, you definitely couldn't, especially not the game itself. You aren't a one-man game dev team, and the idea of trying to profit off someone else's ideas like that makes you feel slimy. Even if you're in an alternate dimension or if your brain actually came up with everything and created false memories, you couldn't bring yourself to claim what you feel is someone else's intellectual property. You'll just have to quietly remember on your own and create fan-content privately from now on. That thought makes you feel kind of alone…

You push that down and bottle it up for future you to deal with. Right now you need to determine how and why this happened through some gentle research. No need to end up on any government watchlists.

[trollprince420]

I was watching the voices and got a idea for a AU

Morgan belongs to @unimo

Extra I made Kiki and Tom the dog and cat Tom got my favorite kind of dog because I love that stinker Tom’s no.1 fan

[thealogie]

That infamous tweet that’s like “people calling 20 year olds milfs…if you saw the moms I want to fuck you’d hurl” but it’s like…..if the blood/gore/cannibalism lovers on this website saw the psychosexual mind games the normie characters I’m into play, they’d hurl

[recurring-polynya]

oh my god i am watching the episode where rukia almost dies in Hueco Mundo and I am screaming at her dying breath memory of Renji:

Like, girl, is this the last picture of him you had in your camera roll? Or maybe she just really loves his swaggy cape and shit-eating grin??

The funny thing is that everyone else is making a normal serious face, probably because they used the panels from the manga or something close, but they felt the need to replace "I will definitely rescue you, Rukia" Renji face from the Soul Society Arc with Renji who sits behind you in study hall and throws spitballs at Ishida.

also a minute later they replace the image that goes with "...the joy of being rescued by a friend" from one of rukia and renji to one of ichigo this show is so unserious

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[stepfordgoth]

Idk if you can tell but I'm literally eating cheese right now. Specifically that hay cheese I posted about a couple posts ago. It's actually so fucking good

[ashanimus]

Owl House Face Reveals and Why They Work

I'm so behind on my Huntlow week contribution but I have to exorcise these bees from my brain.

One thing I have noticed that The Owl House does really well are face reveals. Each time we've had them they have been genuinely unexpected and interesting. Now, face reveals are nothing new in media, and in many genres within the speculative fiction box they kind of have their own language and preset expectations depending on the assumed archetype of a character.

Growing up in the 90's, this was quite consistent (particularly with anime). When a Cool, Masked Character or Villain shows up, there's usually an instant of the mask getting revealed in a moment of vulnerability that shows us what the character looks like--but in a wide variety of these reveals...the conclusion is often along the lines of:

Protag: Oh. They're a lot cuter than I was expecting!

There's often a little romantic subtext here too, but not always.

And for all the benefits (and true banes) of anime-type character design, it was/is very common for the resultant revealed face to be conventionally attractive (or drawn to be perceived that way). I know that this is a sort of gentle pushback to the historical VILLAIN=UGLY trope that is nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be, but after thirty years of prettyface mask reveals, it ended up paving the way for strong, sleeping expectation of mask=pretty underneath instead.

And as a result, we're not taking away much more information that what was already expected (re: masked character not so bad) when the character showed up masked to begin with.

Now, this isn't always bad. But in the case of a face reveal, it's supposed to be a moment that establishes really important visual information quickly--and if it's doubled with the "masked character is unconscious/injured" there's a good chance they wouldn't normally let our hero get that close to begin with. The point is, the scene has heavy lifting to do!

Which brings me to our first big face reveal in Owl House, Hunter.

So at this point, the Golden Guard has made his debut--he's been set up as a "genius teen prodigy". This is loaded language that anyone who grew up watching anime instantly understands. Even if you don't though, the way Lilith talks about him sets him up for this expectation well. In this scene, he shows up as a cocky little asshole with a lot of bravado but also, importantly, some key visual indicactors of power. He's got a staff in his right hand, a cage in the other, and is wearing heavy armor and of course the mask. He shows up in a fifty foot fist made of boiling salt water.

Without showing us his face, the show has already laid a pretty strong, unconscious foundation for what the audience is going to see under there! So when we get our classic moment:

This scene moves so much VERY quickly.

First, the Golden Guard's face doesn't resemble the archetypal expectation the audience might have had based on what had been set up. If anything, we're getting a lot of traits all at once we're not used to on a sympathetically portrayed character (more on this in a second). They also wisely destroy any possible interpretation of romantic subtext by giving us a sibling slapfight immediately. But the biggest takeaway from this quick scene visually is the fact the Golden Guard here very young, about Luz's age, maybe a little older--a detail highlighted by our hero herself--and VERY vulnerable. Very murderable. See how his torso (heart) is twisted up, head is tipped back and the eyebrows are scrunched up? Makes him quite a bit "smaller" looking even though he's quite tall compared to the other kids.

But what does this do for visual understanding of a scene? When expectations are subverted, the viewer in a way is able to absorb the visual information with new eyes. When a mask reveal shows us something actually surprising, it actually allows us to absorb the visual details without sorting them into an archetype. So what do we see? Who is the Golden Guard without his mask, his armor, or the trappings of his power?

Well...he has a lot of traits classically associated with unsympathetic characters, to start! He has dark heavy brows, reddish eyes in an ashy face, an aquiline nose and a big ol' gap in his teeth. He's got a ragged ear. Now lately, eye bags and facial scars have come into vogue for heroes, but not usually in combination with all of those other traits (if it was just the scar or even the ear, it wouldn't have told us much). And even here, they're startling because no other character in the show displays eye bags or prominent scarring--not even the mercenaries or adults. He's also fabulously expressive and earnest regardless of emotion, which takes the edge off any potential ability to intimidate (and we know he's about as intimidating as a kale salad as shown when he tries to order the Coven Scouts around at the precinct).

At this point, now that whatever preconceived vision of the mysterious Golden Guard has been blown out of the water, we're able to absorb what each individual character design choice is actually telling us.

This is one busted-ass teenager.

The eyebags show he's exhausted/stressed. The facial scar is a brutal fucking injury and the kind of thing that you get when someone is deliberately trying to hurt you (in combat or...well. what's implied to later be the actual reason). The ripped ear highlights the idea he's seen a lot of combat. The gap teeth highlight the childish imperfection and youth.

One of the things that struck me most about watching this for the first time and watching other reaction videos (a lot of them of different ages and demographics to get a decent sample size) was the incredible consistency of the response to all this visual information! Almost every single one of them were some variant or combination of these two thoughts: "Oh no, he's so young, poor thing! Is he okay?" And even better--the audience understands the answer to that question the minute they ask it, even before the conclusion of the episode. No, he is certainly not! This brainwashed child is in a lot of physical and emotional danger!

Which is GREAT! That's clearly what the intent was. An given how much of a little shithead he was in his first appearances, it was really amazing to see how thoroughly he was able to go from that to instantly sympathetic--as well as visually very interesting.

The Owl House demonstrates a lot of mastery over animation and writing techniques/tropes. You could fill a book on the topic (please oh please let there be an art book at the end please please please). But I REALLY loved how they handled face reveals especially, and to date this one in particular is probably my favorite.

[innytoes]

Chaotic Polycurve moodboard, in which they are all Very Mature Adults living together and being great at this Adulting thing.

[questionably-audhd-oracle]

Sometimes I’m just standing in one spot, zoning out, and the only thought in my head is “we are SO back” and I think that sums up my college experience as a whole

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

Shout out to Jimmy for being a bland nothing character whose only purpose was to be a love interest to a more important character and then die 💖 gotta be one of the only male TWD characters to have done that

[lwieserce]

well personally i think my roommate is messed up in the head

[rubensmuse]

can't sleep thinking about felix my best friend felix