#i think it'll be a special one

[warren-keplers-funk-band]

i've had bewitched, bothered and bewildered stuck in my head ever since the episode titles came out... and thinking about this song in relation to buck and buddie is. kind of driving me insane

"men are not a new sensation," in relation to buck's bisexuality?

"i'm wild again, beguiled again/ a simpering, whimpering child again," something something buck retreating to his younger self's habits, naive, reckless, desperate. maybe acknowledging his growth

"lost my heart, but what of it/ he is cold i agree/ he can laugh, but i love it/ although the laugh's on me," tell me this doesn't read like buck being jealous of marisol, feeling his love is unrequited, appreciating eddie and eddie's happiness from afar but not feeling worthy of him

"i'll sing to him, each spring to him/ and long for the day when i'll cling to him," this kind of speaks to me of buck's self-sacrificial nature, how he wants to be needed, wants to be used, how his love language to eddie is acts of service... but then like. also allowing himself to want things

"he's a fool," they're both oblivious soo

"i'm in love and don't i show it," you certainly do, babes. in fact you've done nothing but show it since your second episode together

"i've sinned a lot," this accompanied by the "i can be oversexed again," seems very buck 1.0-specific to me. again maybe he's retreating? or acknowledging his growth? especially since his old player tendencies were literally brought up in 7x01. by himself. which eddie immediately amended by saying that he's not like that anymore. idk, it just feels relevant

"and worship the trousers that cling to him," ok let's be real, not to be a simp on main, but we've all seen ryan guzman's legs. also that man is caked up

"when he talks, he is seeking/ words to get off his chest," now THIS. this means a lot to me. i'm already so crazy insane about eddie slowly opening up and being more vulnerable, especially with buck. and ryan and oliver have both confirmed that buck and eddie going to be a lot more open with each other and lean on each other this season. eddie's not great with words, but he's slowly starting to be able to ask buck for help with chris directly, tells him his problems... and i think buck sees that, and is really proud of him for it

"vexed again, perplexed again," and "burned a lot, but learned a lot," both kind of feel to me like references to buck's (and eddie's honestly) history with dating, how everyone leaves him, dazed and confused, not knowing what he did wrong.. but again! i think we've seen a lot of growth with buck in this respect. like, he's learning not to settle. i got the impression that he broke things off with natalia not the other way around, which is a breakthrough for him honestly.

the song has sort of a bittersweet ending honestly, which i think might mean we'll get some angst. like maybe buck and eddie will. encounter some problems in their relationship, or eddie rejects buck or something. obviously that's wild spec but like let me live??

i want to clarify i'm not delulu i don't think the 100th episode will be super buck-centric despite being called 'buck, bothered and bewildered' considering precedent with 'buck, actually' (even though i personally wouldn't mind that, he's my blorb) i was just listening to the song bc it's on my writing playlist and had many thoughts and feelings. feel free to ignore

[chasing-faith-and-fate]

Moon 9

[feroluce]

When Al Haitham dreams, it's in shades of sandy blonde and red, metallic gold and feather-blue. His nightmares are colored much the same.

Kaveh leisurely strolls ahead of him, shoes leaving deep treads in the soft desert sand. He keeps a careful distance, arms length, and in return Al Haitham keeps an eye on him, the other man's back dead center in his sights.

He curses the sand in his boots and the long line of footprints he steps into, already the exact shape of the soles of his shoes.

They aren't lost. Al Haitham knows where they are. They've been here before. They are still here.

Kaveh doesn't watch their feet. His head is constantly tipped back with his eyes on the stars and their constellations (of which Al Haitham only knows two, Vultur Volans and Paradisaea). He'll walk right into a cactus like that. Al Haitham yells ahead for him to watch where he's going.

Kaveh reaches up to touch the side of his head in a strange motion, but otherwise there's no acknowledgement. They press on into the dark of night.

Something squelches beneath Al Haitham's boot.

It stops him short, pulls his attention like a magnet and as much as he wants to, he can't ignore it. He doesn't want to lose any more ground. But something won't let him move on. Al Haitham watches as red seeps into the golden sand, spills beyond the border of his bootprint until he slides his foot aside.

It's an ear.

It's a human ear, and there's a heavy earring attached, metallic gold, gems red and green, a familiar shape, a familiar shade-

Al Haitham opens his mouth to yell. Chokes. Swallows the lump in his throat as he quickly restarts his pace. Tries again.

"Hey!"

Another squelch under a hurried footstep. He doesn't stop to look. Al Haitham is pretty sure he knows what it is.

"Kaveh, hey!"

The path becomes littered, little slices and small pieces, fingertips and knuckles, Kaveh's arms once held casually behind his back now strewn along the sands. Every time Al Haitham extends his hand to him, reality warps and bends like the twisted image in a broken mirror, lines mismatched and edges jagged. Kaveh flits just beyond his grasp, fleeting fae, no longer able to hear him or to reach out to him. Al Haitham can only grit his teeth and follow.

His right foot marches forward. His left follows. His right again. His left suddenly doesn't follow, and Al Haitham is thrown off balance and pitches forward, swinging his arms outward to land on his palms and keep his face off the ground, because he's been in the desert enough times to know what a foot suddenly being stuck can mean.

Quicksand.

Al Haitham curses and swears in just about every language he knows as he tries to spread his weight as evenly as possible, stay afloat at the top of it because if he sinks, he knows he'll be done for, and shit, Kaveh.

His neck cranes uncomfortably in his search, Kaveh had only been a few feet in front of him, he can't be sunk much further, and he's in the desert much more often than Al Haitham anyway, he'll be familiar with what to do-

Kaveh stands in front of him, empty sleeves fluttering loose. Still just out of his grasp, still watching the stars. The quicksand is already up to his calves.

"Say, Al Haitham..." It's the first he's spoken this whole time. His voice resonates somewhere deeply nostalgic in Al Haitham's chest, produces a ripple that momentarily stuns his heart.

Kaveh is sinking.

Al Haitham stretches out on his belly as far as he's able, it's quickly up to his knees, Kaveh isn't even trying to redistribute his weight or pull himself out, it's at his thighs, Al Haitham sucks in a breath and yells for him, his hips, yells louder, his waist, Al Haitham's trembling fingertips can almost reach, his chest, Kaveh drops level with him, quicksand about his neck like a noose.

Kaveh's head tips back, back, impossibly far back, until it hangs, angle awkward, and he's looking right past Al Haitham with his tired smile and gouged, blinded sockets full of starlight.

"Do you believe in karma?"

The quicksand swallows him entirely and Al Haitham dives, shoves his arms deep and pushes off with the one foot he'd had left on safe ground, because he can't, he can't, it's not the same without Kaveh, not anymore, he needs him, no one else keeps him sharp, no one else challenges him like Kaveh, if he can just grab him, if he can just pull him back up-

Al Haitham thrashes, against the sands, against gravity, against the hardwood of his bedroom floor. Clumsily scrubs the back of his hand across his face to rub the grit of quicksand and sleep out of his eyes.

Sometimes he thinks he preferred it when the Akasha was still harvesting his dreams.

He pops his head out from under his weighted blanket and lays where he'd fallen out of bed for a moment, blinking blearily against the lamplight shining from his desk in the corner. Deep breaths. His consciousness shifts along the blurred line of nightmare and reality, crosses over the slow transition into wakeful awareness.

He's home, Kaveh is home. It's dark out. The house is dead silent.

He's just going to go check, he tells himself as he peels himself out of his sweat-soaked shirt and roots around for a replacement. He's already losing memories of his nightmare, the details spilling away from him like wet ink, but he knows he needs to see Kaveh. It'll feel better to do something, anything, than try to go straight back to sleep.

He's quiet when he slips out of his bedroom door, because they both keep late hours but their bedrooms are right next to each other, and Al Haitham will never hear the end of it if he wakes his roommate up.

Lights off, door shut. Nothing conclusive. He moves out to the main room.

Kaveh sits on one of those ridiculous sofas he'd ordered three of for some reason, back to him as he tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. A mostly-empty wine bottle stands tall on the table, next to the cobbled-together remains of an architectural model that's been picked and fussed over for four days straight now.

"Kaveh? What are you doing?"

This earns him an exaggerated startle, but Kaveh doesn't turn to look at him, preoccupied with whatever new sketch or blueprint he probably has in his hands. "Ohhh, nothing," he slurs cheerfully. "Just working. Just thinking."

Kaveh has always been the world's chattiest drinker. Al Haitham waits for the rest of it.

"Say, I think...I think I asked you this years ago, back then, but you never answered me." Al Haitham feels all the blood drain from his face in ominous familiarity, drip cold down the length of his spine. Kaveh sinks into the couch until he can tip his head over the back of it, looking up at him with a tired smile and exhausted eyes.

"Do you believe in karma?"

[bonetrousledbones]

if i say what it is the experiment won't work because y'all will actively try to achieve it so here is a question for my fellow undertale fans. can you do it? can you do the right thing?

[jackmerrideeznuts]

me and my irls do an every so often presentation night type thing where we all make slideshows and present them to each other....

this time i'm going to be doing a lord of the flies deep dive presentation from everything to the book to the fandom to the misinterpretations of teachers everywhere

So if anybody has any fun info bites i might not already know DROP THEM PLEASE!!!!!! Will add to the presentation 😎

[oifaaa]

1936 now

Back down to 1935 sucker haha this only works if I either don't answer the ask or don't just delete the ask

[daz4i]

how and why is there discourse about whether or not certain queer identities exist/if people should be allowed(???) to use them. why is "people know their own identity better than you ever could, and they're the only one who get a say on what they are" such a tough concept to grasp

i think if you find yourself offended by the label someone uses (especially if they're a stranger) or think it invalidates your own, it's a good idea to look inside yourself and question why that may be. more often than not, it's a result of insecurity or uncertainty of your own identity (or many other things, but i won't make a whole list here). whatever reason it is, until you resolve it, you shouldn't take it out on people for having an identity you don't understand

many have said it before but it's worth saying over and over. infighting only helps our oppressors. conservatives don't care if you're a cis gay or a xenogender aegosexual aplatonic lesbian, they hate all of us either way. trying to fit in by going for people who are easier targets for them isn't gonna help you, it'll just alienate you from your own community, and you're never gonna please them. the momentary rush you get from hearing you're not like "one of /those/ gay people" is not worth it and is gonna do more harm in the long run, i assure you

also, it is important to me to say this, but having some less than nice kneejerk reaction caused by confusion about an identity you don't understand doesn't mean you're a bad person or anything. as long as you aren't mean to that person, and you take a second to think smth along the lines of "wait a minute, this isn't any of my business" after having said reaction, you're good 👍 a lot of reflexive reactions we have to things are ingrained into us simply by. well. living in a society 🤡 and you're not terrible for having those thoughts. it's your actions that matter, and your second thought (the "wait, why did i just think that?") is more defining of your actual character and morals than your reflex. i know that having thoughts like this, even tho they're unwanted, can very easily make one spiral, so it's important to me that whoever needs to hear this knows this doesn't make you a bad person 🙏 you're good, keep taking actions to be good, accept other people even if you don't understand them, and you're on the right track :)

[camellcat]

sometimes I see edits of eleven with rose and wonder who else is going to be absolutely FOOLED by them thinking that maybe MAYBEEE there's a sliver of truth. just. maybe not that, what I'm looking at, is a shot from the show, but maybe—

[filthyjanuary]

feeling sad :(

[magentagalaxies]

in an unexpected turn of events i'm having to edit down the content in my aubrey monologues so that i can actually fit all four of them in my final performance for my standup class and on the one hand it sucks bc i really love some of the jokes i have to cut but on the other hand someday i'll be able to write more monologues and possibly expand upon this cut material so i can get a whole monologue on a topic that would've just been an aside

[welcometogrouchland]

I'll admit- I really wasn't in to the hunter possession thing at first. I thought it was just putting hunter through the ringer AGAIN for no good reason other than to make him cry and as an excuse to merc flapjack. And I couldn't even think of a good reason why they'd do that in the first place.

But, after giving it a second watch (I was watching a very low quality stream when it came out and straight up missed scenes and dialogue) I have begrudgingly come to admit that it works. It's not the direction I would've gone with but it works (LONG thoughts under the cut, but with a TL;DR)

Hunters desire at the beginning of the series was freedom, and now that he actually has that freedom in the human realm he... doesn't know what to do with himself. He seems sort of reluctant to return to the demon realm at all, since Camilla and Luz have become such a stable family unit for him, but gravesfield still isn't his home.

Hunter still misses parts of the EC, namely the person he was as the golden guard- intimating, fearless, self assured, if thoroughly unhappy. He's still trying desperately to define himself in opposition to other things (namely Belos and Caleb) as he slowly discovers his interests. He may be happy but he's just floating through life with no direction at the moment.

Until Belos rears his ugly head again and hunter FINALLY states the things he wants- to study wild magic and be a normal kid who plays flyer derby and goes to hexside (and has an awesome surrogate family w/ the nocedas). He wants to stop his uncle from hurting anyone anymore- now that he doesn't have to worry about protecting himself, because as Luz said earlier, keeping him safe is her job now, their job.

hunter says earlier that he's "not who he's supposed to be, but he likes who he is". Refuting belos is meant to be him cementing that he's not Caleb, not the golden guard, not a vessel or a toy or a tool, he likes the part of him that wants all these things.

So does possession hunter hit better for me now? A bit yea. Again, I probably spoiled myself with my rampant imagination over the last couple of months- and I really would've liked to see more of Belos on his own terms. But at the end of the day it's not antithetical to hunters arc like I first thought it was. It's not a step backwards, it's closure. He recognised Belos was evil and that he didn't deserve what happened to him, now he knows what he does want and he's got people there to help him get it.

But now that hunter has different desires (and I hate hate hate to say this but...) It kind of makes sense for him to maybe carve a new palismen in place of flapjack that represents this change. Flapjack got him this far and a desire for freedom and love will carry him through the rest of his life as he gains more specific goals and wants.

(Also- tangent, even though Belos name drops Evelyn when killing flapjack, he also shouted "CALEB!" In kings tide when he saw the bird. I think flapjack in general reminds him of what he lost, and Belos naming Evelyn is him saying goodbye to her influence, attempting to twist the knife one last time as he again tries to exert control over his brothers image and their relationship. All this to say, no matter who carved it, flapjack is a symbol for both freedom and the wittebane brothers strife. Hence, it's painful and not 100% necessary but reasonable to want to move on narratively)

There's still all the unresolved threads re: Caleb and the Clawthornes and also WHY DOES BELOS WANT BACK INTO THE DEMON REALM. WHAT DOES HE WANT. Belos felt a bit...directionless in general in this one but again I'm holding out to see how his plotline is resolved since it wasn't resolved in gravesfield like we all suspected.

but like that one early review article said, this episode is just act one of the larger feature-length story that season 3 is gonna tell. A sort of owl house movie. Which is both frustrating since I don't think anyone was expecting that (we all had 3 act structure in mind but not this literally I don't think hsvsjfj) and even though I'm happy the releases are being paced in order to maintain hype and conversation within the fandom, I know things won't feel complete til all 3 episodes air.

That's the biggest flaw of Thanks to Them to me- an episode I otherwise really adore, ESPECIALLY in terms of Camilla and Luz's arcs. It's sort of trying to have its cake and eat it too- it knows it can't just be 44 minutes of set up, but it can't be it's own self contained story either. So it's conflicted and thus starts slacking at the climax for me. But it left me so excited to see where the show picks up next with reunions, lore, arcs concluding and reveals!

uhhh TL;DR: belos!hunter was jarring for me at first but I've come to accept it as part of hunters closure even if it's not in my top favourite ways you could've done that, and even though the episodes ending left me wanting, I'm excited to see what season 3 looks like as a whole!

[bewitched-bullet]

The most unholist of breads made me do it, officer, I swear

[a-earthssprout]

emergency after emergency ... woe after woe ... 😓 it doesn't ever seem to end for me. while I hoped to be moved & back by now, there's just no way for that to happen atm ...

but ( & many thanks to Sammy / @balladccr / @badboysupr / w/e blog you're on rn osndskdk for remembering 🌷 ) ... happy birthday, Ari 🥺🌱

[saucy-mesothelioma]

You are given the chance to pick any piece of media and art (and I mean any) to be buried on the earth as the world's legacy; it can be anything, from audios to images to movies and interactive media. Think of it as the Golden Record, though with the certainty that someone somewhere will discover it again in the future and know how to use it.

What would you choose?

This question took a lot of consideration, but I think I finally have an answer. The M*A*S*H TV series collection.

Although the series does focus primarily on the Vietnam war, it's got a lot of messages that've really stuck with me through the years. It's a perfect mix of humor and tragedy and in my opinion shows so many ranges of human emotion as well as dealing with various conflicts both physically and mentally. It's a series that I feel will have some relatability to whoever would come across it and manage to watch the whole thing. And even if they don't relate to any of the stories, I'm confident that certain episodes like "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" and "The Interview" will definitely leave an impression on them. M*A*S*H is a wonderful combination of funny, serious, and heartbreak and I think it really speaks to the idea of the human spirit in its highs and lows.

[mothheart]

now that i know it's definitely not just a pipe dream and maybe even likely. i desperately need more carlos and kevin interactions

[masonscig]

oh so i didn’t get the memo that we’re in m wayhaven hell again