#i really REALLY hope you like it

[mynonah]

My @gleeful-holiday-art-swap gift for @theywerebothgirls :)

I had planned to post this yesterday, but... life happens. Still, Happy Holidays! :)

I swear, I'm still a Klaine blog, but hey, it's Christmas... :)

[themirokai]

It is with very mixed emotions that I present to you

Grave

The final story in the Matthew the Emotional Support Raven series.

Matthew visits his own grave and finds himself in need of some emotional support.

Thanks to @quillsorceress for giving this a read and @aquilathefighter and @kulapti for being my go-to bird experts and answering a totally necessary and vital question about raven anatomy.

Inspiration from this picture. If you follow me you've seen a bunch of @raven-photos 's raven photos under my corvid posting tag, but you should follow them too because they post tons of lovely stuff.

You can read the whole story below the cut or over on AO3. The AO3 version includes a mushy authors note about this being the end of the series, which I won't duplicate here, but I may put some additional thoughts in a reblog later.

~~~

Matthew felt the air pressure in the cemetery change. He hung his head with a sigh. 

“Did you need something, Boss?”

“I need only to know that my Raven is well,” Lord Morpheus said from behind him. 

“Yeah, you know me,” Matthew said. “Ball of corvid sunshine.” 

“Matthew.”

“I haven’t even been gone that long,” Matthew groused. 

No response to that. Matthew sighed again and looked around at the gray headstones and dewy grass, sparkling in the morning light. 

“How did you find me? You’re not in my head.” He thought for a moment. “Lucienne ratted me out, didn’t she?” 

“Lucienne informed me that you had asked for your book. She was concerned for your mental state.” 

Matthew huffed. “Do dreams have ‘mental states’?” 

“Yes,” Lord Morpheus said simply. 

Matthew hung his head again and took a deep breath, then reflected that he wasn’t alive and probably didn’t need to breathe. Which was what had brought him to this cemetery in the first place. He gestured to the headstone in front of him with his wing. “Well, there it is. In all its glory. My grave.”

There was, in fact, no glory. It was a completely unremarkable gray headstone with a curved top. His name and the dates of his birth and death were carved on it, nothing else.

“Why have you come here, Matthew?” Lord Morpheus asked quietly. 

“You don’t know? You can’t just read my mind?” 

“Not while we are in the Waking.” 

“Inconvenient,” Matthew muttered. He ground his beak. Matthew knew that none of this was the boss’s fault. He had made perfectly clear when Matthew first met him that he hadn’t been the one to turn Matthew into a Raven. Matthew shook his head. “I died a year ago.” He turned to face Lord Morpheus. The boss was standing ramrod straight, hands shoved into the pockets of a black pea coat. 

“This is not the anniversary of your death, Matthew.”

Matthew flapped his wings. “I know that. I just… started thinking about it. And then I realized that for all the times I’ve come to the Waking, I never saw what my grave looked like.” 

“Now you see it.” 

“Yeah, and I’m dead in there!” He turned to stare at the ground in front of the headstone. “Like my body - my body that I had my whole life - is just down there. Dead and rotting.” He shivered. “It’s not like I ever took particularly good care of it, but it’s still weird! And that’s before you even get to the fact that I’m a fucking bird.” 

“I thought you enjoyed being a Raven.” 

“I do!” Matthew said quickly. “This isn’t about that. It’s just… look, one minute I’m an alive human and the next minute I’m a fucking bird and  Lucienne is telling me to go follow you and then I’m trying to get you to not throw me out on my ear and then we’re dealing with Constantine and then we’re going to Hell and then you’re fighting the asshole who had your ruby and then I’m spying on Rose and then I’m running errands and delivering messages and meeting all sorts of weird people and- and beings and then…” Matthew breathed out in a rush. “I don’t know. I guess I never really stopped to think about the fact that I’m dead. Like really properly dead. With my body rotting in the ground.” 

“Do you feel ‘really properly dead��?”

“No! I don’t feel properly anything! That’s the problem!” 

Lord Morpheus kind of folded himself up so that he was sitting cross-legged on the ground, facing Matthew. “You were not expecting to die? When you were human.” 

Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head. “I wasn’t that old. And I didn’t exactly have the greatest lifestyle… certainly not what would be considered ‘clean living’ by any stretch. I guess that’s why I had a heart attack… but no. I wasn’t sick or anything. I wasn’t expecting to die.” 

Lord Morpheus nodded solemnly. “Most of my past Ravens had been ill or injured or old when they died. Their deaths were much less surprising than yours. And they joined me during… much less chaotic times, when I… shaped the process of them becoming dreams myself.” 

Matthew snorted. “Yeah, I know. I’m the unwanted Raven. You don’t have to remind me.” 

“You mistake me, Matthew.” Lord Morpheus frowned. “Deliberately, I think.” 

“No, I just… you know what I mean.” Matthew looked away from him. 

“As I stated,” Lord Morpheus said a bit huffily, “in the Waking I cannot see your thoughts.” They were both quiet for a moment before Lord Morpheus continued. “My intent in bringing up other Ravens was to comfort you with the notion that the… discomfort you are experiencing is understandable, since your transformation to Raven occurred under less than ideal circumstances.” 

Matthew tipped his head to the side, looking up at him. “How did I become a Raven if you didn’t make me one?” 

A tiny smile on Lord Morpheus’s lips. “Another indication of the frenetic pace of your first year is that we have never talked of this.” He shifted into what Matthew considered to be his ‘storyteller voice’. It was a little deeper, more hypnotic. “I confess that I do not know for sure, though I have my suspicions.” 

Matthew would have liked to stay silent but felt an inexorable pressure to ask, “What suspicions?” Must have been the force of the narrative or something. 

He was rewarded with another tiny smile. 

“It is my suspicion that my sister, Death, selected you… for me.” 

Matthew would have frowned if he had lips. “How were your other Ravens selected?” 

“The souls of those who die in their sleep linger in the Dreaming until my sister collects them and passes them to whatever afterlife awaits them. When the time comes for me to select a new Raven, I select a soul that… feels right, and begin the transformation process.”

“What if the person doesn’t want to be a Raven?” 

It was Lord Morpheus’s turn to frown. “Do you not wish to be a Raven, Matthew?” 

Matthew clicked his tongue. “Now who’s mistaking who?” 

Lord Morpheus inclined his head. “If the person does not wish to be a Raven, then it will not last. They will move on to whatever is next for them and I will select a new Raven.” 

Matthew considered that, but quickly decided that he didn’t want to think too much about whatever was next. “So Death picked me.” 

“Yes, I believe so. It is possible that once I had returned to the Dreaming it… automatically selected a random soul and performed the process without my guidance…” 

Matthew knew there was more to that sentence. “But?” 

Lord Morpheus looked at the headstone. “But. You are too well-chosen to have been a chance selection… and.” 

“And?” 

“Even if the pain of Jessamy’s murder had not convinced me that I did not want another Raven, I think it unlikely that I would have chosen you.” 

Matthew glared at him. “I know that the next thing out of your mouth is going to make that a less shitty thing to hear.” 

Lord Morpheus rolled his eyes. “You are well aware how this story ends, Matthew. I would not have chosen you but sometimes my sister knows me better than I know myself. She collected you when I was preoccupied with the Hecate and saw what I would not have seen: that you… were exactly who I needed as my Raven. And then I suspect that she gave the Dreaming a very strong suggestion to perform your transformation.” 

Matthew had Death to thank for his current gig. Just add that to the pile of things he didn’t know how to feel about. But. There was the rest of what the boss had said. 

Matthew dragged a talon through the grass. “So… you don’t wish you had a different Raven? Someone… I dunno. Dignified or clever or something.” 

Lord Morpheus drew himself up and his eyes blackened from their normal Waking world blue to the night sky. “I am Dream of the Endless. I am older than this universe. I suspect I possess enough dignity for us both.” 

Matthew was not entirely sure that age and dignity were that closely related but kept quiet as Lord Morpheus continued. 

“As far as cleverness… you are perhaps not familiar with great works of poetry or philosophy, but I have never had a Raven who was more skilled at putting others at their ease, or soothing wounded feelings. Anything you lack in courtly manners is more than made up for in kindness and sincerity.” Lord Morpheus sighed and shook his head. “I would not have chosen you, Matthew, but I would have been a fool. You are exactly who I need as my Raven, especially after my imprisonment. My sister saw that, and I am immensely grateful to her.” He held out his hand. Matthew stepped on and was brought into his embrace. “I am sorry that your death was unexpected and jarring for you, Matthew. And I am sorry that the beginning of your tenure as my Raven has been so chaotic. But I cannot bring myself to be sorry that you died when you did, because that timing brought you to me.”

“Oh, Boss,” Matthew sighed.  

“So yes, your human body is moldering in that grave. And yes, you are a ‘fucking bird’. But I very much hope that you will remain a ‘fucking bird’ for a very long time to come.” 

Ravens, Matthew learned, were not capable of crying. He pressed his head against Lord Morpheus’s chest as Lord Morpheus began stroking his feathers. “Yeah. That sounds good.” 

[imjustavenuxwithaboomerang]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATEO

@cottonheartsxmateo 🎉🎉🎉🎉

[loquaciousquark]

[Fic] A Midwinter's Carol; in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Baldur's Gate [1/1]

Rating: G Characters/Pairings: Astarion/Tav, various cameos Word Count: 10k Notes: Thanks from the very southernmost reaches of my heart must go to @eponymous-rose, who suggested the idea and then gave me Christmas Past and Present; and to @jadesabre301, who sacrificed most of her afternoon to this beta.

--

Cazador was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Astarion had plunged a very beautiful knife a dozen times or more into his gut and left him in tattered shreds upon his ritually carven floor. The compulsion which had haunted the farthest reaches of his memory had vanished like mist with his master’s death.

Mind! It cannot be implied that there is a particular similarity between a vampire lord, who is un-dead, and a dead vampire, despite the mimicking shape of those descriptors. Neither bears real facility of life, true, with a beating heart and a cheek which might yet blush, but the one may wield an un-life never again to be possessed by the other, who will do little more than lie still and rot away into new earth. Cazador was a corpse, mouldering beneath the ground. In all ways he had been flung across that lofty river into the mundanity of real and final death. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous.

--

Links: FF.net, AO3

[christadeguchi]

(✿◕‿◕) die (ꈍ ꒳ ꈍ✿)

[gotchibam]

Chandelure ko-fi doodle for solar!

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[divorcedwife]

chess inspired fashion

[sergle]

the threshold has been crossed, it is now springtime!!

[emberglowfox]

Keeper -- a short comic about an angel meeting a robotic lighthouse keeper that doesn't know the world has already ended. Made in about 18 hours for a 24-hour 24-page* black and white comic challenge (that I arrived late to, ha.)

*the actual submission does not include the cover, which was created after the fact for this post.

This was a really great learning experience as someone who's... never really made a completed comic. I ended up really attached to the story by the end of the project (possibly due to all-nighter deliriousness lol) and ultimately am very proud of what I made.There are some things I'd still like to change, particularly text placement, but in keeping with the spirit of the challenge I've elected to leave it as is.

[ato-dato]

Aziraphale please! He’s been through enough!!!

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy 1 year anniversary to FNAF ruin!!

[reasonsforhope]

Sometimes you just have one of those moments where the progress we've made as a culture get thrown into stark relief. You look at something and go "Holy shit, that would never have happened when I was a kid."

Today, I had one of those moments when I realized that the teenage boys I'm working with are just. genuinely, openly enthusiastic about going to Build-a-Bear for their outing.

These are sixteen and seventeen year old boys! They just had a whole conversation about what to name their "cute", mostly new squishmallows! They're genuinely excited that they're going to Build-a-Bear this weekend and asking other kids to pick up specific accessories for them!!

Holy shit, that never would've happened when I was 16. None of the boys would have dared to be visibly interested - and neither would most of the girls! There would have been a million gay jokes and "Haha, you're a girl" jokes and "What are you, a baby?" jokes. Teenagers weren't even supposed to care about anything back then!

Less than 15 years later, and I'm watching three 17 year old boys treat all that as not even worthy of comment.

So let's call that a reason for hope. Even when the kids aren't alright, in some ways apparently they are alright. Go Gen Z, honestly. It's so lovely to watch you guys just openly doing and saying stuff that, when I was a teen, would've been a social death sentence.

[egophiliac]

doylist explanation for why Gidel is only in Fellow's non-idle lesson animations: probably something about space constraints and making sure two sprites in one seat aren't covering anyone else when they're not in focus

watsonian explanation for why Gidel is only in Fellow's non-idle lesson animations: he snuck in and is hiding from the teachers, don't give him away 🤫

(I've reached my limit of unsuccessful attempts at pulling them before I need to save keys for Halloween, so I've been living vicariously through youtube videos...but the fact that Gidel just pops up from under the desk to wave his arms around happily is really testing my resolve. D: I'm gonna die when they finally get to do alchemy...)

[ochiody]

preparations

based off this post by @letsplaythermalnuclearwar :)

[garbean]

I love dunmeshi for the like.. built in horror of consumption. Like they eat to survive, they eat to honor their prey, they eat to possibly mourn someone. Laios eats monsters because he wants to learn more about the things he loves, Senshi eats monsters to feel included in the ecosystem because he didn't fit in with the outside and with most creatures in general, Chilchuck DOESN'T eat as much as he could because eating too much could kill all the party members, Marcille eats monsters and hates it but she still does it because she'll die before she could save Falin.