#he has an interesting view

[shatinn]

Fallout 4 - The Scribe

[mollysunder]

There is a theory that the way children play serves as a means to simulate and prepare them for the tasks they'll take on as adults. So for all the narrative weight both Jinx and the story give the boxing machine at the arcade it would never have prepared her or the kids to take on Piltover.

What are the two things that Piltovans excel at over their Zaunite counterparts to keep the hierarchy? Weapons and technological development.

When you look at the way Piltovans invest in their children, they don't prioritize hand to hand/melee combat training. Piltovans focus on giving their children experiences in handling firearms, a pursuit that is both leisure sport for the wealthy and a key offense against dissenting Zaunites.

And from the show notes even Jayce, whose family occupies the upper middle class, was sent on educational excursions across Runeterra to explore the world and learn what it had to offer. Without Jayce's education abroad he would never have been inspired to pursue the concept hextech.

It's no wonder that the two figures that are set to be Piltover's biggest threats from Zaun are Jinx and Viktor, becasue they engaged in the same kinds of games and activities as their Piltovan counterparts.

Jinx didn't have an entire forest preserved to help her practice her sharpshooting like the high houses of Piltover, but she did excel in the few games at The Rift (the arcade) that built on her talents. She's the only Zaunite thus far who's long distance offensive is a strong counter to Piltover's forces.

Viktor couldn't travel the world like Jayce did, but for better or worse he managed to stumble into an opportunity to get real opportunity in research not offered to his peers through Singed. It was through that experience that Viktor knew to turn to Singed when he was at the end of his rope, and the consequences of that will be fully realized in season 2.

Ironically, the kind of skill the boxing game champions is only good for keeping other Zaunites in line. Vander's days of fighting Piltover were way behind him when we first met him, and Vi spends season 1 primarily fighting other Zaunites. It's no surprise the Zaunites who embody the old ideal of strength in Zaun that the game portrays, Vi and Vander, are largely at the mercy of Piltover and end up collaborating with them to avoid further harm.

Zaun's future as an independent city-state couldn't happen if they stuck to their old ideals. The people who stand a chance against Piltover are the ones that not only succeed but excel at playing Piltover's games against them.

[cruelplatonic]

my personal headcanon is the vees were unremarkable nobodies when they were alive. i just love it as a thematic throughline for them. they love to let the public of hell speculate on them being famed and acclaimed since before death, but the the truth is they were a d-list failed influencer that got by on cheap controversey and scamming, a broke junkie who burned every shaky bridge he ever had, and a worn-out broadcast production assistant with more rejected auditions and tossed out script pitches than he could count. nobody missed them when they were gone, nobody cared who they were until they were dead.

[pepperpixel]

SAID HE LIKES CRAZY GIRLS,

BUT HE HATES WHEN I ACT CRAZY,

IT TAKES TWO TO TOXIC!

FINALLY!!! Finished these pics of jinx I’ve been working on!!!!! HOLY SHIT, these took so long…. But finally… they’re done… pls enjoy this art of my beautiful princess w a disorder. Featuring alternate colors for the big pic and also a closeup! Cuz I rlly like how both the lines and coloring on her face turned out… like the pink gradients w her eye… her deer in headlights expression,, like uve just startled a raccoon digging thru ur trashcan and r two seconds away from getting mauled.. m proud of it!

[lesbians4armand]

once again i really do think armand’s morality and view of his own morality is summed up by “i tried to be good, am i no good?” because he KNOWS he’s not, but he so desperately wants to be good in any way he can be, so that he can be desired. and this in turn means he is deep in denial about any bad he has done other than the deep seated feeling that he is simply “bad” as a vague concept and not the sum of his actions. anyway who’s up thinking normal thoughts about characters.

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[the-sage-libriomancer]

Shigure's relationship with Kyo drives me crazy. he doesn't hate Kyo in the slightest - in fact, he pities Kyo, and not in the condescending "oh you poor little boy, cursed to be a horrible, disgusting monster" sort of way that everyone else does. Shigure pities Kyo for the reason he should be pitied: he's just a kid caught up in a system so inhumane it can't possibly be survived without some seriously unhealthy coping mechanisms.

and it drives me crazy because - listen, Shigure is the only zodiac member who's emotionally aware enough to see the other zodiac members as exactly what they are. he knows Yuki is a severely traumatized kid who projects all of his self-hatred on a single convenient target. he knows Akito is really a scared little girl with a raging god complex (literally) and no concept of a healthy relationship. and he knows Kyo is a regular-ass human being who doesn't deserve to be locked up for the rest of his life just because some arbitrary system says so. he KNOWS it's stupid. he KNOWS it's ridiculous and unfair. and he has to share a house with Kyo knowing that Kyo is living with a sword over his head, hating himself and hating others in perfect tandem because he has no other way of coping with the insane amounts of negativity he's had to deal with his entire life.

but the thing about Shigure is that he KNOWS all of this, and the same time he doesn't really CARE. he feels sorry for Kyo, but an apathetic sort of pity, a disinterested "this is how it is. such a shame." sort of pity. in some ways he's worse than the other zodiacs because he DOES see Kyo as a person, someone he likes being around even, but he still considers Kyo below his attention because all his focus is on Akito and breaking the curse. and sure, once the curse is broken Kyo will theoretically be set free with the rest of them, but that's more of a coincidental side effect than anything. despite being in a much more dangerous and precarious mental space AND comfortably in Shigure's reach, Kyo is about as much a priority for Shigure as Ritsu or Momiji.

and it drives me CRAZY because i think Shigure does start actively caring about Kyo as the series goes on, but it's hard to tell when that happens and to what extent. when Kazuma told Shigure he planned to reveal Kyo's true form and Shigure said he was going too far - whose sake was it for? was Shigure trying to protect Kyo, who would be hideously traumatized/emotionally scarred by such a cruel betrayal? was he trying to protect Kyo and Tohru's relationship, which was still formulating and might, under such severe testing, ultimately end up damaged beyond repair? was he only trying to protect Tohru, who wasn't ready to be burdened by such a horrible aspect of the curse so soon, or perhaps simply didn't deserve it? or was it all for the sake of himself, trying to protect his still-forming plans of using Tohru's positive effect on the Sohmas to break the curse?

Shigure cares about Kyo, but they're not close and Kyo clearly isn't a priority. he treats Kyo like a person - offering him genuine advice, teasing him like he teases anyone else, even speaking up on his behalf once or twice - and yet he's too entrenched in the long game to spare much active interest in Kyo. for a very long time, he doesn't care about Kyo the way he cares about Yuki or Tohru, and it's never made clear when exactly that changed. and the thing that gets me about this whole situation is that right from the start, Shigure is in a position where he can meet Kyo at his level - as equals, just one human being to another - but he doesn't, because Shigure is a chessmaster, Shigure is someone who observes and calculates, Shigure never steps in unless one of his chess pieces makes a wrong move and he absolutely has to.

it drives me crazy. Shigure drives me crazy. this series drives me so so crazy.

[ashipiko]

BRO I CANNOT WAIT FOR UR BELLWEATHER OC ‼️‼️‼️ I JUST KNOW UR GONNA COOK

well speak of the devil and he shall appear

MEET MARYEN. HE SURE IS A GUY. and i will NOT be disclosing his dorm until his chibi is done soooo <3 feel free to guess

↓ maryen thoughts down below

NRC fanboy LIKE HE HAS SOOOO MUCH SCHOOL SPIRIT BUT AT WHAT COST!!!!! absolute RSA HATER. one of those students that would pummel an RSA kid at the mere sight of em

also a history nerd. he knows like everything about nrc history and he knows the entire map of his school better than his own room. LIKE HELLO? 😭😭

spelldrive club because he likes seeing people think they can pummel him till they can not and they get SWEEPED by the sheep. sheepsweep

also he HAAAAATES LEONA. thinks he’s a waste of space and he should go graduate already to “make more room for the little guys”

THO he would kinda get along w epel i think. smth smth epel thinks it’s kinda cool how maryen is able to throw people off w his looks? ITD BE FUN

likes to act cute to throw people off. has a lot of oversized things and cute little keychains n stuffs…… tho it’s not hard to tell that he’s actually kind of mean!!! he has no ulterior motives w this he just likes to mess w people 😭😭.

kinda a bookworm nerd w the amount of time he spends in the library 😔 he’ll pull up to class w like 5 diff textbooks too. but he prides himself on his smarts so whenever he hears a student struggling you’ll hear a little jingle of a bell and BAM!!! MARYEN APPEARS!!!!!

thinks fear is the best form of control? IS THAT HOW YOU WORD IT? i dunno fam but the fact that he thinks riddle was way better BEFORE he overblotted really says smth. probably best if you don’t let this guy be a dormhead

third year but also under 160cm 😔 join the short king club…….

if you’re wondering what his dynamic w niko is like btw. to say the least a certain fox is being side eyed REAL hard as we speak

[fromtheseventhhell]

Imagine being 9 years old and asking your dad about the things you're interested in doing when you grow up and he's like "No ❤️! But you can get married, have babies, and then maybe your sons can do those things ☺️🫶 "

[thebigolbee]

Was doing some House research and noticed he has two little birthmarks on his right cheek. I mean maybe the devs just gave his mummy some random Old Man textures but idk, these ones seemed prominent.

I'm gonna draw them on him from now on… I like it :)c

[likearolloftape]

Sure, but what's that mean for me? I'm just supposed to go down by myself?

[immediatebreakfast]

Well, the consequences for Jonathan's disobedience were quite terrifying, on top of destroying an aspect of Jonathan's beliefs as a character.

We already have seen plus noticed how Jonathan identifies with what femininity, and women represented in the 19th century. He is a male character that expresses so much love for the ideas of safety, and comfort that the feminine entails without the narrative trying to paint this in a derogative light anywhere.

So, it's not wonder that the visit from the Weird Sisters (a.k.a. the speculated brides, and housemates of Dracula) left him totally traumatized. Nothing that Dracula has done so far has gained such huge reaction from Jonathan.

Great God! merciful God! Let me be calm, for out of that way lies madness indeed.  ... for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.

In his journey as a gothic heroine as he is trapped in the castle, Jonathan has been surviving by employing the same ideas used by fictional heroines he admires and looks up to in dire times, and he has comforted himself with Mina's memory, and his undefying love for her. Everything that Dracula represents regarding masculinity means danger for Jonathan, he is scared how the power that the Count holds over him; not as a man towards another man, but as a man towards a conceptual woman within Jonathan's mind that is part of his being.

All of this concludes in Jonathan taking a nap in the ladies' chamber room, away from Dracula's aggresive masculinity in his tainted designated room, and inside what he now deems a safe space because women lived there.

Then the Weird Sisters appear in their ethereal, beautiful glory, and as Jonathan recalls the incident in his diary, the feeling of angry loosing sanity is written with an underline tone of pure defeated betrayal. It feels as if Jonathan keeps asking himself "why did they do that to me? Aren't they in the same position as me?"

The feeling of what Jonathan calls repulsion cut through the sexually charged scene like a knife. All of the soft adjectives to describe the Sisters' appearance, Jonathan's attraction to them as he shames himself for thinking like that because of Mina, the emphasis of voluptuos charm laced with danger, all of it gets cut when Jonathan realizes what the Weird Sisters are planning to do.

There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal.

The ladies that he thought were a dream at first are there to use him the same way that Dracula has been doing... the only difference is that the vampire ladies made very clear that they will kill him. So out it goes the kind language to describe women, and what enters is the language that Jonathan uses to describe the Count.

The femininity that Jonathan felt comfort in to shield himself from the horrors he has seen is now fractured to incorporate the monsterhood of the Weird Sisters. It's a realization that shatters him, not all women are soft, and kind, these women would have killed him if not the Count arriving, and if Jonathan cannot go to the Weird Sisters for safety against Dracula, then it means that the only being who stands between his death and life is the Count himself.

The man who is keeping Jonathan as a prisoner in everything but name is who he has to run to if Jonathan wants to keep living... What a nightmare indeed.

[thefirstlioveyou]

i think of every asshole moment mike's had the past 2 seasons but then i remember the reasons beneath it all

[rickybaby]

Genuine question as I am curious — I know it’s pretty obvious with his expressions/ body language that Daniel seemed shy/insecure(?) about having his braces, but has he ever outright said anything about feeling that way with them? Just out of curiosity as I am new around here!

“I feel very different in terms of looks. Fortunately, experience also bought me better looks. I’m not really too fond of showing people photos of me when I was younger”

[quietwingsinthesky]

i really do think the desire to paint ten as unambiguously The Worst™️ when it comes to his relationship with martha is out of this desire to uncomplicate their relationship. to decouple them as friends and people who profoundly impacted each other’s lives. it’s just an easier narrative to swallow: that ten was Awful to her and then martha kicked him to the curb when she realized she was too good for him. easier, maybe, then dealing with the troubles of unrequited affection don’t have to be anyone’s fault, or that ten shut martha out in a lot of ways but let her in in others that he wouldn’t let any other companion near, or that they were still friends, they still wanted to see each other and be around each other, even though it was messy and sometimes hurt. you know?

[viiinz]

autism be damned my boy can do calligraphy and knows a lot about capital punishment