#i just think hes fascinating tbh like

[caninecowboy]

i am thinking about chuck taylor again :/ i am also being horny on main about it (again)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.

[paarthursass]

my controversial tdv opinion is that mark seibert's krolock is good, actually. like i get why we clown on mark. i do. i do. but his krolock is actually. he's a bitch. he's a clown. he has the STRONGEST dad energy. he will PERFECTLY play the part of the lovestruck hero for sarah if that's what she wants and then will go and hiss at a bunch of vampires like they're misbehaving kittens.

other krolocks might have more consistent performances, but BECAUSE he switches it up so often it gives his krolock the feeling of being a fucking chameleon. he will lure you in by pretending to be so earnest and sincere and a little bit goofy and then he'll rip your throat out. and then he'll turn and go back to being a little goofy with his son.

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

YOU ARE SO WRONG YOU STUPID TWINK. GET FORESHADOWED IDIOT.

[uncanny-tranny]

I know this is a very unoriginal observation (much like any other), but I'm finally reading The Great Gatsby, and even I wouldn't describe men the way Nick does.

[moeblob]

Demyx (my beloved)

[dudeyuri]

i like thinking about post- (or during-) ep-5 pat being able to make sense of a lot of things about himself now that he knows he's queer and has feelings for pran (why he was jealous that pran sang their song with wai and co., why he was depressingly lonely when pran was at boarding school, it's all making sense now, etc), but it's especially fun to think about him retroactively recognizing the physical attraction for what it was. specifically thinking of ep 4 scene where he calls pran cute three times in, like, just as many seconds. "cute dimples you have there. if i have these dimples, will i be as cute as you? [you want to have dimples?] yes, so I can be cute like you are." narak triple whammy. pre-feelings pre-coming-out pat was just fully like yeah i'm charmed by my not-friend not-enemy's cute face i think i want those dimples for myself and i want to make him blush about it i will not interrogate this because it feels good & right in the moment. now add those realized feelings: he finds pran physically attractive because he's into guys, and he wants to make pran blush about how cute he is because he's into pran specifically, and he does still want those dimples for himself...but in a different way....

[not-poignant]

Sending some questions rom the fic meme, 20, 21 and/or 25 about Palmarosa? Ty

20. What is something you wish more people noticed about this fic?

The tag that says: this is NOT canon compliant. The author's note that says this is isn't canon compliant and adds: "D&D purists enter at your peril." It's always always that I wish the purists would notice that the story is not and is not pretending to be canon compliant.

That. I wish more people noticed that about the fic. The folks who go into FR lore and go 'I bet the author's doing this' and it's like 'I've never heard of that.' Or the folks who are like 'Mephistopheles should be red' and it's like well he has a canonical blue counterpart and also I don't care.

And secondly it's like, I feel like folks set themselves up for disappointment if they miss the tags. I've only ever played one campaign of D&D and it didn't touch Avernus. All I know about vampire spawn and devils comes from BG3 and patchily maintained Wikis. And while I have done a lot of research, I think anyone could say pretty clearly that you can spend a lot of time doing research and still not know a very great deal indeed if you've only ever had limited experience in the world and haven't paid for the canonical materials.

Like I cannot tell you how many people go 'I bet you're doing this because of (X lore I've literally never even heard of)' and it's like anon, I don't even know how to read, I don't go here, blease I beg of you, notice the tags/author's notes.

Folks who expect little cool tricks based off hidden lore in Forbidden Realms canon are going to be extremely disappointed if that's something they're invested in. Like, no. This is a character-driven story where I'm making stuff up that suits the story and the characters. Some stuff is taken from lore, some stuff is invented lore, it's 'whatever works.'

21. What is something you didn't expect people to notice or gravitate towards in this fic?

I didn't actually expect so many people to gravitate towards thinking that Raphael is always jealous when he's punishing or hurting Astarion. That was kind of odd to me, because I don't really think that's how his mind works.

Like I do think he's possessive, but that to me is different. And I think he's possessive because he's Lawful Evil and has a contract with Astarion, so anyone who acts as though they have power over Astarion and the contract, is therefore acting as though they have power over Raphael, which makes him furious. And I do sort of see how people turn that into 'oh he's jealous because Astarion is his' but it's like well, no, it's not really about Astarion as a person at all. It's about the principle of the contract and the threat to his seat of power which is - as we've seen - a threat to his life.

Likewise, he doesn't hurt Astarion or whip Astarion because he's jealous or for any kind of 'relationship' reason, but because he's been lacking in souls, he's weaker than he used to be, he's used to feeding a much broader sadistic appetite, and Astarion was weak and Astarion was there and I suspect he knew and found it very appealing that Astarion would feel betrayed after he'd done a good job and he thought that would lead to better sadistic satisfaction than tormenting someone like Fhaeleb (and he'd be right, as I said in my author's notes, Astarion suffers very prettily).

I guess I'm always kind of surprised how many people folks try to (in retrospect very understandably) attribute predictable human motives to Raphael's actions. Some of his actions are predictable, especially in the context of him being a sadist. But what I find the most fun about writing him, is that his motives are different by and large to many of us.

His core focus is always attaining more power and more souls, and also feeding via sadism, and he will do other things! We know he enjoys other things in life that seem a lot more 'human' and have very little to do with directly attaining power or torturing people, but I also think he's living his best life when he's kind of doing all of it at the same time, lmao, like watching a pornographic play while debauching Astarion, who is both into it and not into it, which creates a low-key delicious anguish that I think Raphael is very into, on the way to getting even more things that he wants, lol.

He's not falling in love with Astarion, although I do also - on the flipside - think he's a bit more human than some people think he is (since killed and resurrected - I've said he's lost his pit fiend form which means now he really is 50% human again), but that'll be talked about in the next chapter.

But it is really interesting watching people kind of like... try and find ways that Raphael works that aligns with what they know of people they've met. And while there is logic to his actions, it's not 'I'm attracted to Astarion so I'm jealous of anyone else touching him' logic. Possession can look a lot like jealousy, but to me they're two different things!

(It's very interesting watching folks either ascribe wholly human motives to all his actions or alternatively, wholly evil and manipulative motives to all his actions, in a very black and white kind of way. I think we see enough of him in the canon to realise that it's not that simple, for a start he's definitely got his own internal ethical compass, and he's also a horrendously sadistic torturer - enough that it goes against canon to have him not be worse to Astarion, which is where the fic is actually most not canon complaint tbh, and I killed him and resurrected him into a weaker form to justify that lmao - and he's just... Imho, to me he resists 'he's doing this' quantification in that he's doing about 10 different things, and some of those things contradict each other, because he's going through a rough time right now. So anyone who's like 'he's doing this one thing' is like... I mean maybe, but he's got these 9 other things going on. But sometimes he's also just not doing that thing at all. Like Raphael is not jealous of Temter, but he certainly finds Temter and amusing sore spot to keep pressing on to make Astarion twist on the hook).

25. Is there anything you would change now about this fic? Why or why not?

Oh definitely not. So far it's going how I'm wanting it to go (considering it has no plan!) :D Idk I'm enjoying writing it, and I don't like to go back and change things once I've committed to them, so it's rare that I actually even consider thoughts like that? I'm not that kind of writer where I go back and think like 'oh I should have done this' or 'I should have done that.'

I'm writing a serial, if there's stuff I think I should have done, I can usually find a way to introduce it later

~

From this meme!

[phosphorus-noodles]

also! if the entire knuckle wasn’t removed then the claws would grow back, but it would be all messed up and grow like into the flesh iirc? which would be super uncomfortable if not painful. so like if whoever declawed oli didn’t go all the way to the knuckle…

anon please you're making me feel bad for declawing my catboy,

[doctorbrown]

MCFLY JULY ‘24 ⸺ 「 28 / 31 * ON THE RADIO 」

October 8, 1984

How he was convinced to undergo this massive undertaking wasn’t the question. Emmett knows exactly how it happened. Left to his own devices, things had begun piling up and now that their newest side-project was underway, the so-called mega-powered amplifier, they would need to clear away more space before the garage became even more of a tripping hazard than it already was.

The more appropriate question he needs to ask is why he is attempting this in the first place when he knows he will commit to the task for two hours, perhaps slightly longer than that if he’s focused, before his attention is called elsewhere and the task abandoned for the three-hundredth time over the years.

Then the why swings the front door open excitedly, shouts ‘Hey Doc, I’m here!’ and Emmett slides a two-tiered box of two-plus decade-old paperwork to the side of the couch in what has become the designated garbage pile.

“Hey, uh, Doc, you home?”

“Over here, Marty.” Marty follows the sound of his voice over to the couch. “I figured I’d try and clear up some room now that we’re going to be building your amplifier in here over the next few months.”

Marty looks around, noticing the additional layers of paperwork and other seemingly random things strewn across the floor, and frowns slightly. “If it’s too much trouble, we don’t have to do it. You’re working on your other thing, that thing you won’t tell me about a—”

“Marty, I wouldn’t’ve agreed to build it with you in the first place if I didn’t want to. Or if I thought I couldn’t juggle both projects.” After a second, Marty smiles, a visible weight lifting from his shoulders. Emmett stands, passing him a stack of old, yellowed papers that he accepts without question.

“I thought you had a research project you were supposed to be doing.”

“I do. Actually that’s—hey where do you want me to put these?” Emmett gestures to the discard pile and Marty curiously flips through a couple of the documents before dropping the whole pile on top of the box. “That’s why I came. Earlier than I thought I would, anyway. Doc, you ever heard of The War of the Worlds?”

“The book or the radio adaptation?”

“Both, I guess. But mostly the radio adaptation. It was a book first?”

“It was. Written by H.G. Wells. Do you remember me telling you about his other book The Time Machine?”

Marty presses his lips together. “Mmm, yeah, kind of. This guy turns a sled into a time machine and then goes to the future, right? And a lot of things aren’t great there. Didn’t you say they stole his time machine?”

“That’s a quick explanation of it, but essentially, yes. He wrote a lot of plausible science regarding the time-travel into his novel, which I quite liked, and the idea of his time machine—” Emmett stops, waving a hand to get himself back on-track. “Anyway, you were asking me about War of the Worlds. What do you want to know about it?”

Marty flops onto the couch and starts digging through his backpack, producing a crinkled, horribly yellowed newspaper. The tagline reads ‘WAR’ ON THE AIRWAVES: RADIO PLAY STIRS TERROR ACROSS NATION and Marty grins up at Emmett from behind the page. Emmett’s brows fly up as he accepts the proffered paper, unfolding it to read the rest of the front-page news article.

Halloween hoax turns deadly!

Thousands of radio listeners were seized by panic during a dramatization of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air between 8:15 and 9:30 o’clock last night, believing Martian invaders had come down to attack the Earth.

Households all across the country were disrupted, radio waves jammed due to volume, mass hysteria caused people to flee their homes en masse to escape—

“I was going to write my paper about the invention of radio and how it changed our lives, so I went to the library. Mom and Dad, well, they weren’t so helpful and this is before they were born anyway.” October 31, 1938—Emmett hums. No, his parents were likely just born around that time, far too young to remember it.  

“Almost everything I’ve found about this radio play just talks about how Orson Welles caused so much chaos and panic on Halloween back in ’38. To the point where he had to publicly apologise for freaking people out. Any chance you remember that, Doc? That you were listening to it? I’d kinda like to hear it from someone I trust.”

The memories have adopted that fuzzy quality that time often brings to them, their integrity broken down at the edges to where they are still recognisable, but the smaller details have since faded, been sacrificed to time.

Emmett remembers being eighteen, lounging in the most comfortable chair he had, tuned into CBS, eagerly awaiting the radio adaptation of Wells’ novel. He remembers hanging on their every word, devouring the reports as if they were the real deal, scientific papers published by one of his heroes.

For an hour, he had suspended his disbelief, allowed himself to be dragged into the reimagined world created by Welles and his troupe, and thought about fondly once it had ended, to the point where he’d pulled out the novel to reread.

“I was a little older than you when that broadcast happened and yes, as a matter of fact, I was tuned in.” Marty’s eyes light up and he leans in, eagerly awaiting the story. “This was forty-six years ago so I don’t remember every single detail about the broadcast, but I remember being impressed by the effort put into it. Welles and his troupe did a great job of making it sound very realistic despite the outlandish material he was working with.”

“How’d he do that?”

“He performed it like it was a news bulletin happening in real-time. So he had fake accounts from scientists, from government officials, from ordinary people at Grovers Mill—the novel happens largely in London, but for the play, they moved the invasion here, focusing on New Jersey and New York instead—who were watching the Martians come down, witnessing the destruction, talking like everyday people. In that manner, it was very convincing. I remember being glued to my radio, even appreciating all the changes they had made.”

Marty’s expression turns thoughtful. He can see the gears turning in the boy's head, but what he could possibly be thinking in the moment is a mystery. “So you weren’t afraid at all?”

Emmett chuckles. “No. And not just because I’d been listening the entire time and knew it was just a play. These newspaper articles”—he holds up the one Marty passed to him, indicating the clearly polarising title—“aren’t indicative of what actually happened.”

Marty pinches his brows together and Emmett continues. “For one, nobody, at least not that I saw in California, ever ran out of their houses screaming. It was only ever in the newspapers that that happened. I doubt most people even tuned into the radio show—back then, science fiction wasn’t widely popular amongst people yet, not like it is nowadays—and one look outside would have told people immediately that this was not real. Besides, the Mercury Theatre was scheduled to be performing War of the Worlds at that time; it wasn’t a secret.”

Marty’s expression falls slightly and Emmett finds himself wishing the reality of it could have been far more interesting to match up with the stories perpetuated in the news. He passes the paper back to Marty.

“Then where’d all these stories come from? Do you think he expected this to happen?”

“I think that’s the million-dollar-question, isn’t it? Orson Welles was a very talented man of the theatre; I think he had a vision in mind with that play and he knew exactly what he was doing. However, I believe he didn’t expect the media to use his performance as a stepping-stone the way they did.” Or, maybe, he expected exactly that.

They may never know the truth.

“But if I had to guess, it was the newspapers' way of trying to stay relevant. Around that time, most people owned radios and it became the primary source of news and entertainment. Newspapers were starting to become a medium of the past. Not unlike now, how video is replacing radio as the prime source of media entertainment.”

“Video killed the radio star!” Suddenly, Marty stuffs the paper back into his bag and hops off the couch, startling Emmett. “Not gonna lie, Doc, I was hoping you’d have some crazy story to tell about the panic, but I think you’ve given me exactly what I was looking for!”

In his haste, Marty nearly trips over the couch as he tries to vault it, searching for the quickest way to the door.

“Oh, Doc! Do you mind if I use you as one of my sources for this paper?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

[doctorwhoisadhd]

okay im thinking about midnight burger <--> doctor who now.

[ourhouseishaunted]

my brain for the past like 2 weeks

[thewritingpossum]

Also reading her household book does confirm that Isabella of France directly corresponded with Hugh le Despenser the elder during the 1310's...Much to think about...

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

baddddddd. he's giving pomme first pick of their dungeon loot rn. he's so NICE. not just to the eggs but in general (i am always thinking of those elegant letters). but the eggs are the only ones who he will quickly and easily show vulnerability to. with everyone else it's like there's a layer there, a wall of silliness he keeps up on purpose, but it just. isn't there with the eggs.

there's something about the way that he cares that I can't put into words. like he cares so much. so fucking intensely. look at dapper. look how kitted out that egg is. look at how much time bbh has spent with the eggs, and look at how much time and effort he puts into figuring out how to keep them safe. he goes HAM when it comes to caring for the eggs, but it comes so naturally to him. it feels like caring for people with his whole entire soul is his default, but he doesn't want it to be. or, maybe want play a part in it- maybe it's too dangerous to care so much so quickly. maybe that puts other people he loves at risk. maybe it scares people. but that wall between him and other people is one that he built, and it's bbh, so he built it strong, so even when he's surrounded by people who have proven over and over that they care for him (that they care for the eggs, that they will not hurt them), he can't fully believe it.

im just. bad knows foolish so well. he knows that man wouldnt on purpose kill any eggs. but pomme killed foolish and bbh, dying of laughter, having the time of his life, told her to "put your armour on. just in case."

[romaritimeharbor]

i know this probably isn't something to think too deeply about, buuuut i can't help but wonder about the specific harbingers that attended arle's trial for killing the previous knave? scaramouche, signora, and capitano. why them specifically. they have NOTHINGGGG in common--no closeness in rank (unless capitano is 10th but we don't know for sure what rank he is yet) and like... they probably don't even like each other thay much. we know that's true for signora and scara, anyway. So like. why those three ❓️❗️❓️❗️

[tcfactory]

What do you think about the whole rapist Bingqiu situation? You made a comment about it under one of your posts.

Okay, this is going to be a bit long. The tl;dr. is: I really don't care either way tbh.

On the comment I kinda jumped the gun a bit, because I recently got my hands on the books (finally, they were supposed to get here in December) and I read the extras first, because I haven't read them before and was too curious about them. And I really quite dislike the Wedding extra, but I dislike it because I don't enjoy how MXTX writes sex scenes in general, not because of anything it's about. Is the scene rape? Eh no, on second read Shen Qingqiu never withdraws his consent, despite having a shit time. Having a bad first time w/ shit communication is not a crime, especially between these two idiots.

Would Binghe have stopped if he did withdraw his consent and outright told him to stop? I don't really think so, no. Like, you can say all you want about Shen Qingqiu never being direct with what he wants and playing hard to get and wanting to be coaxed along with this gay shit, but that's something we, the readers, know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember it ever being established as something that Binghe knows for sure - and with how hot and cold Shen Qingqiu was to him all this time, how he still hides behind his masks even at the end, I don't think "I just assumed you were playing hard to get" is good enough. So the possibility of him hurting Shen Qingqiu despite not meaning to is still very much there. Ignoring the withdrawal of consent is still rape regardless of Binghe's intentions - and we all know how deep Shen Qingqiu can get in his own head when he thinks about denying Binghe something he feels that 'the protagonist deserves' now that he regards himself as the harem stand-in, he would not fight him off if Binghe seems adamant to have him even if he says no.

And honestly that's fine. It's one of those things they need to work on post-canon. You could write a pretty neat hurt-comfort fic around it imo, of Binghe getting so jealous one day that he falls in that pitfall, and the reparations and open direct communication they need to do afterwards. Or just ignore it altogether, let Binghe's protagonist halo prevent any serious misunderstanding in the future. These are characters, not real people. Their dynamic is weird enough that you can just as easily write them a happy post-canon relationship or a situation where their respective habits of hiding their true selves from each other and Shen Qingqiu unintentionally encouraging the worst in Binghe culminates in something awful down the line. Nobody actually gets hurt one way or the other.