#friends are allowed to be different ages friends are allowed to be different ages FRIENDS ARE ALLOWED TO BE DIFFERENT AGES

[bubblesxo]

for my gotham!bruce de-aging au

bruce casually calling every single rogue by their real name. sometimes their first name, sometimes their last name, sometimes their full government name (he's coming from mid-s5 so he'll probably call the riddler edward nygma while scowling profusely. still depends tho).

the batfam progressively gets more and more confused as to how bruce knows every single rogue in gotham at the age of 18. then when he refers to the joker by jeremiah they just lose it.

"you knew who the joker is the whole time?? how come you never told us??!! you led us to believe it was a big mystery that no one in gotham could ever figure out!!"

bruce's response would just be "well him and his crazier twin brother have been very publicly known multiple times so if you haven't somehow come across this information yourself then i've got reason to doubt you're all *actually* detectives."

jason starts frothing at the mouth in rage. babs and tim knew the whole time (babs because her dad was there?? he was basically the general in a war?? he definitely never told her about it aside from vague advice he never contextualizes but people come up to him sometimes and thank him for various things he's done over the course of the show. tim because that boy was on the streets so much as a kid when he snuck out that he's heard ALL of the stories that people refuse to talk about in polite society for fear of scaring the children/offending sensibilities. and tim loved answers. jason was just trying to survive and stay distinctly out of rogue business when he was on the streets.). dick is a bit offended because he's been with him for over a decade?? but ultimately begrudgingly understands a bit because there is a lot of stuff he hasn't told bruce about and the way he says the name reminds him of himself in his worst moments. damian is angry (and will be even more so when he finds out abt ra's) and just storms off. duke kind of didn't want to know (he has too much joker trauma already). steph is just like ?? but not that bad bcuz she still says that he's "not her dad!!" so how could she feel like he doesn't trust her? (ignore her being lowkey hurt.) cass is on her dad's side 100% (even more so because tim doesn't seem surprised).

basically it's a whole mess and it's not going well but alfred explicitly forbade them from ever mentioning the joker around bruce again so they can't really do anything about it (for now). hehehhe

[lucalicatteart]

A few little sketches of some possible school uniforms for mage schools/learning centers for magic/etc. :0c Though because Nanyevimi is so scattered and disconnected, it'd actually vary much more by region (like not everywhere would have a cultural concept of what a suit jacket or neck tie looks like lol), so it's probably unrealistic for so many of them to follow too many traditional Uniform Conventions from cultures in our world, etc. But, still, fun to mess around with designs, and think about which would be most fun to wear/what school you'd go to just based off the clothing lol~

[metallicabirder]

“It’s one thing to accept that the person I love most is fundamentally unknowable to me; it’s another to accept she doesn’t quite see me either.”

The parallels to that quote that circulated about the mortifying ordeal of being known and the bit of to be loved is to be changed kill me

There is no book I love more than Book Lovers (even if it rips my heart out every time I read it)

[shprka]

Idk if its a controversial opinion but i dont think Billy actually enjoys basketball or being on the team ✌️

[trans-cuchulainn]

i guess the reason so many books featuring trans characters have them able to go stealth and make it so other characters don't know they're trans unless they say something is because that's an escapist fantasy for many trans authors who don't get that and want to imagine what it's like to live in a world where you don't get misgendered on sight every single day, and because they don't want to write about the latter (very fair)

but also when these are YA books it depends on the characters being able to medically transition at like 14 and i have literally never in my life met a single person who was able to do that (partly because I live in the UK where you can't and also I am old enough that for people my age, coming out as a preteen would've been way harder and rarer than it would be for current teen-aged protagonists)

so idk. i would like to read a book with trans characters who feel like real people living in the real world occasionally. it's hard to walk a path when you never get to see other people do it first and never get to witness it safely in fiction before you experience it IRL, and only ever seeing people walk roads that don't even exist in your reality doesn't really help at all tbh

[austnbutlr]

One last comment on the marriage situation before I’m done. It’s always rubbed me the wrong way that people look down upon, judge or laugh at fans who are upset that their favorite is getting married. The whole “he was never going to marry you” line is so condescending and diminishing of peoples very valid feelings. People are allowed to feel what they feel — especially when their favorite is marrying someone 16 years younger than them and who wasn’t legally able to rent a car without an additional fee and/or adult approval until a year ago and this image said celeb cultivated isn’t exactly what it seems to be — and they shouldn’t be made to feel bad about it. I’ve never been in the camp of blindly accepting your favorite celebs choices or that not agreeing/liking it makes you less of a fan.

BUT being upset, sad, whatever is different than actively bullying and harassing his partner, his family and her family.

You can be upset and hurt while not resorting to calling that person names or wishing ill upon them. At the end of the day, he’s a grown ass man and can do whatever he wants, you don’t have to like or respect it and you are allowed to be mad/unhappy with his choices. But at the end of the day it’s his choices and harassing him/her/their loved ones isn’t gonna help.

So mourn and be sad, but don’t be a dick or a lunatic about it. What you feel is valid but that doesn’t give you a pass to express those feelings to these REAL people on their REAL relationship.

[allroseshave-their-pricks]

sometimes it's so fun to casually mention your age and see the eyes of the guys who have flirted with/hooked up widen, as they realize they accidentally chose the youngest person at the table

[littlebirdy0301]

I think the internet has affected my idea of morality because I as a 22 year old in community college should not be having anxiety over becoming friends with an 18 year old also in my community college

[7-oh-ta1]

Thinking abt my Inquitor (Lavellan) & his friendship with Sera is really is what led me to realize why ppl who hate her are usually ppl who love Solas -- and yeah obviously I'm aware that they're opposites but specifically I think people just like what Solas is symbolic of. It's not even that he as a person is fascinating to them its just that they really like the elven lore and that's his whole shtick. Which actually sucks bec Solas as a person, not as a symbol, is interesting. And it also led me to realize that characters like Solas and occasionally Blackwall (who I LOVE btw don't misinterpret) are forgiven for their deceit with little to no repercussions whereas characters like Sera and Vivenne who are completely upfront about who they are and what they want are trashed or at least were for many years until people got bored of them. I'm not exactly sure what I'm trying to say I just feel like there's a correlation. Like maybe they don't like what Vivenne is or Sera is symbolic of so immediately don't try to get to know them any further which is fine they don't have to like everyone, but makes me wonder how many ppl play these games that are crucially character based and just write off any character that doesn't lie to them for intrigue

[mccoyquialisms]

I’m living my best life getting into d&d now but there is a part of me that’s just...so sad younger me didn’t know about it. she would have been thrilled to know that there was a way to continue playing pretend without people getting weird about it

[jellicle-chants]

Unfortunately it hasn’t been isolated on youtube but I am highly recommending y’all go watch the Tecklenburg version of Gus (or watch it again if you’ve seen it before). Leah Delos Santos is the sweetest Jelly ever and I just love her performance 🥲

[bitegore]

GOD i wish it were socially acceptable for kids who didn't want to take care of their hair to get their heads shaved regardless of gender. My brother had his hair cut pretty short because he wouldn't shower and it was gross and greasy. I did the same thing and just got the extremely fun experience of being chased round the house and literally pinned to a chair ao my mom could brush the knots out of my hair like once a week. 1 buzz cut would've fixed that (my hair grew in NEARLY STRAIGHT and VERY SILKY after i buzzed it! It doesn't tangle any more!) but we can't have little girls looking like little boys, right? Right?

I was like, 6-10 in this story, i got my first short haircut at 11 and ~mysteriously~ the godawful tangles went away. I still had hair so full of grease you could've used that shit to polish wood until i got it cut very short though bc i could not be bothered taking care of it

[dirkxcaliborn]

something that just really gets me about ensemble stars is that throughout the series, not only do characters grow and change, but you see that change as it happens and see how it follows through in their daily life as they make genuine efforts to become better versions of themselves

like... as an example there's a character (Izumi) who was super obsessive over another another character (Makoto) to the point that he straight up kidnapped him and held him captive. There was a big moment where Makoto finally made it clear to him that he needed space and Izumi promised to respect that.... but then!!! he still mostly acted the same and there was another moment where Makoto was able to talk to him and be like... dude you promised? but your actions aren't actually changing at all and I'm still really uncomfortable with how you interact with me.... and over time Izumi has gotten a lot better in holding back and actually giving Makoto space and respecting his boundaries.... and it's like. idk not only seeing a character go through an arc to improve upon a character flaw but also seeing that they don't just suddenly and magically change??? that change is difficult and that they struggle with it but ultimately and gradually make progress?????? like dude that is so fucking much

There's another character who has a huge issue with perfectionism and control to the point that he basically destroyed the autonomy of his teammates in a way that one is still struggling to come back from (while the other separated himself and has been able to heal from his interactions in either group) and to see him go from this massive control freak to understanding the harm he caused people and learning to let go???

like if you were to write a blurb about the characters at the beginning and look at them at the end.... rather than falling victim to the common narrative of simplifying all their character traits and exaggerating them to extremes... they were allowed to grow and develop and become better versions of themselves but ones that still made mistakes reminiscint of their initial flaws. They graduated high school and realized that their actions have consequences and they had to take responsibility for that.

And there's been a lot of major events that had lasting impacts on the narrative. Like it's just so nice I think to have a story about characters that isn't afraid to move away from who they were originally introduced as and doesn't feel the need to stick to a simplified version of them that's never allowed to change. They do make lasting decisions about themselves and the world around them that carry through the story. The obsessive characters are less obsessive but they still have a lot of personality and are very clearly the exact same character.

I'll stop now because I'm mostly restating the same thing over and over lol but it's like... idk we get the characters' pasts and their presents.... but there's also a future version of them that doesn't only exist in an epilogue. It's a version of them you actually get to see them working towards and that's just.... not something you often get in my experience

[tatoasting]

Whats this?

(For the anxious link clickers, it is in fact the poetry book I've been telling people they're never allowed to read for the past year. Changed my mind)

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[old-stoneface]

i really want to see if my mom can get me a nice new camera for my birthday this year .. i dont even want anything else i just want a new dslr ..... waughhhh.... theyre so expensive soooo expensive but i just want a nice zoom lens that i can mess with. and if i tell my mom months before my birthday i have a chance of getting it lol