#i'm probably missing more words

[uslostinthememories]

I keep thinking about loml from The tortured poets department and I just want to know what it means!!

Love of my life

Loss of my lover

Loss of my life

Light of my life

Love or my life

Last of my letters

Lie of my life

Last of my lessons

Last of my lines

Luck of my life

Lament? Lust? Litany? Line-break?

Mimesis (as fundamental to human experience, a practice that precedes language but is suppressed or distorted by society)

What if she starts with Love, moves to lie, then to loss and finally to light? Ooor what if it starts with love and ends up with loss?

[utilitycaster]

I enjoy shipping, but I cannot see the appeal in watching shows only for the purpose of shipping; I think it closes you off to so much. I think coming into a work with the expectation that it will only succeed if a particular configuration of people end up happily in a relationship with each other when the curtain closes means you will reject so many unexpected choices altogether. It destroys your ability to appreciate the entire concept of tragedy. Just, imagine refusing to let yourself enjoy "I'm not a gardener" because you are too furious that a different kiss than the one you wanted happened to feel other emotions.

[diseaseriddencube]

Alastor Has NPD Because I Said So: A Shitty Analysis

Grandiose sense of self-importance. Overestimating their capabilities or holding themselves to unreasonably high standards. Bragging or exaggerating their achievements.

It's pretty clear he thinks highly of himself. I like to think that not only does he love radio, but, being The Radio Demon, he believes himself to be heavily associated with it as if it's part of him. So when he gloats about radio being a superior medium of self expression, he's speaking about himself as well.

He was gone for seven years, and it's pretty blatant that he expects everyone else to care about that. Even if he would most certainly not give a true answer had he been acknowledged, he's desperate for that "where have you been" attention, and gets pissed when it's not received. He just naturally assumes he's important enough that other overlords would be concerned about his absence.

Assuming his smile is something he chooses to do (ignoring the stitch mark theories), it's a very visible high standard he holds himself to, and according to Viv, it's something he judges others for as well. Even alone, he refuses to drop his smile.

Frequent fantasies about having or deserving success

The finale song showcases this well, as he outright states that he wants power/control, to be "holding all the strings"

Belief in superiority. Thinking they’re special or unique. Believing they should associate only with those they see as worthy.

This goes pretty hand in hand with what I wrote in point one tbh. It seems evident that he's picky about who he's friends with as well, for example he only associates with Charlie for power.

Need for admiration. Fragile self-esteem. Frequent self-doubt, self-criticism or emptiness. Preoccupation with knowing what others think of them. Fishing for compliments.

This is more of an internal thing, which can be hard to see in a character that hides his emotions so heavily. But you can see hints of it in his reaction when his commercial is criticized, he's proud and asks for feedback, and immediately reacts negatively and gets defensive upon criticism.

He had a breakdown over the thought of his image being tainted for saving his 'friends', he's less worried about his actual injury and rather the humiliation of being defeated over something so uncharacteristic of him.

Entitlement. Inflated sense of self-worth. Expecting favorable treatment (to an unreasonable degree). Anger when people don’t cater to or appease them.

The first point is basically what I already spoke about, I don't think he really expects favorable treatment (perhaps internally, but he doesn't demand it)

That last point can be showcased with how he reacts to Lucifer, who didn't acknowledge him at all and criticized his work. He was obviously pretty openly pissed when Lucifer wasn't sucking up to him and his work.

Willingness to exploit others. Consciously or unconsciously using others. Forming friendships or relationships with people who boost their self-esteem or status. Deliberately taking advantage of others for selfish reasons.

Do I need to say more than Charlie :/ and also like everyone ever that he interacts with 😭

Lack of empathy. Saying things that might hurt others. Seeing the feelings, needs or desires of others as a sign of weakness. Not returning kindness or interest that others show.

Yeah I don't think the guy who hurts people for a living cares too much about hurting others-

And of course back to the smile thing, he sees anyone who doesn't mask as heavily he does as weak, he looks down on those who display their emotions so openly.

Frequent envy. Feeling envious of others, especially when others are successful. Expecting envy from others. Belittling or diminishing the achievements of others.

I don't actually see too much of this symptom in him, though I think it's more of an internal thing for the most part.

Arrogance. Patronizing behavior. Behaving in a way that’s snobby or disdainful. Talking down or acting condescendingly.

He seems to act most condescendingly around Vaggie, especially in the pilot, he's downright disrespectful. His interactions with Charlie upon trying to cheer her up comes off as very patronizing too.

[passthroughtime]

yagami, WHY do you have to be such a bitch around kuwana. i'm going to strangle you.

(P.S.: he didn't tell kuwana that tesso said not to feel bad about it. obviously.)

[14dayswithyou]

are you a compsci major :0

✦゜ANSWERED: I wish I had the brains and dedication for that ^^; If anything, Ren would be the compsci major (if he chose to go to university with you)!! As for me though?? I'm currently double majoring in digital media and social working ;v;

[claire-starsword]

Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 4

Translation notes:

This is the last boob joke. We're free at last.

Here's the retranslation of every scene with the Spring of Recollection in the game. Overall, her speech here is fairly close to what she says in Waral in-game, with a few details from her final appearance sprinkled in, like her care for Cain. It does misses a few nuances though, like the Legacy being more than just Dark Dragon.

I don't think I've ever seen art of the Spring, but notably, she gets a portrait in the GBA version, and it looks a lot like the manga design, with the slightly wavy hair and especially the blank eyes.

Obviously, the manga rushes through the plot since it's short, thus a lot of places are skipped. I didn't even feel like pointing them out before. However I will point out Waral not being here this time, because Waral happens to not be in the beta map either, and it has very contradicting lore between the ASCII guide and the World Book, meaning it might have not been well developed. Besides, Chapter 5 is very weirdly structured. You get two ship battles that are basically the same, you get to Waral by accident, you advance the plot by going to Ring Reef for no reason and everyone telling you it's off-limits while letting you waltz in anyway, and hardly anything happens in the shrine besides you hearing about the Manual, which is not even a big deal because you get to Rudo by accident later (two ship accidents!! why repeat this plot point!!) and would go to Dragonia anyway to help Bleu. Basically, I obviously can't prove it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the ocean shrine was initially thought off as only a plot scene, and the battles/town added much later for gameplay reasons.

Perhaps worth mentioning, the GBA version also makes a point to mention that Max got lost in the shrine alone, and everyone was worried about him, which does remind me a lot of the ship scene here.

uh oh. i hit image limit for the first time and i don't wanna remove either of these pics. more notes on a reblog later.

[moongothic]

I need to make a confession

I genuinely do not understand Buggy simps

Like I thought y'all were joking with the whole rooting for Buggy-thing but. No. People are actually seriously rooting for him. And I just don't get it.

Like. I can't tell if I'm missing something or if people are somehow completely misinterpreting his actual character. Like clearly it's meant to be one or the other and I can't tell which and I feel like I'm losing my mind because of it

'Cause the thing is that. Like. Until now, Buggy has been a pure gag character. He's no different from characters like Ceasar Clown and Spandam in that sense, he's just nowhere near as vile a human being as those other gag characters so he's marginally more lovable in what a pathetic fuck he is. But in the end, Buggy's just been there to be a punching bag (quite literally), because it's funny as hell to watch him eat shit And the reason it's funny IS because Buggy is a piece of shit. Again, not nearly as bad as Spamdam and co, but he's still a lying, cowardly, spineless douchebag who uses others for his own benefit and is willing to ditch anyone to save his own skin. Like Buggy was going to ditch his entire crew and flee by himself when the Shichibukai System was taken down and the Marines came for his head. He was going to leave his crew to die by themselves, without participating in the fight at all. Buggy was the one telling them to do the hard lifting while he'd escape, while the crew had no idea their beloved Chairman was going to abandon them. Literally the only reason Buggy failed to do that was because he was too slow and Crocodile got there before he managed to skedaddle.

He is essentially Usopp if Usopp wasn't willing to get beaten to death to protect his friends and their honor. Even fucking Luffy thinks Buggy is a pathetic idiot, and Luffy is the biggest indicator in the whole series on how to tell whether or not the readers should like a character or not. Not to mention, all the in-universe Buggy simps have been portrayed as (precious) idiots who can't see through Buggy's bullshit. Like every step of the story Oda has been trying to tell us that Buggy is an absolute loser.

So when people are like "Mihawk and Crocodile are going to see Buggy's ambition and become full Buggy supporters themselves!" I just

Are we reading the same comic???? HELLO????

Like I'll give you this, it would be objectively the funniest fucking outcome imaginable, which would be on-brand for Buggy and his trend of falling upwards.

But between Mihawk respecting people who are willing to abandon their honor to protect someone dear to them, and Crocodile's deep trust issues (possibly rooted in being betrayed in the past), I can not fucking fathom the two ever genuinely siding with Buggy the "I will leave you to die by yourself to save myself" Clown. Not when the two (and most other characters, including fucking Galdino and Daz) have been able to judge Buggy's character accurately (like how Crocodile was like "I thought you'd have ran away by now" when he arrived at Emptee Bluffs, and Buggy was like "yeah no shit")

Not unless Buggy grows enough of a spine that he'd be willing to sacrifice himself for someone (or at least get hurt on someone else's behalf to protect them), more specifically Mihawk and Crocodile. And let's be real, right now, Buggy probably wants nothing more than to run away from the two before they do actually kill him.

I just

Buggy simps. I do not understand you. I don't understand how you've reached your reading of the character.

[alastor-simp-page]

WIP Wednesday

*The writing process in a nutshell for this month*

I feel like I'm jumping around way too much. And I've gone back to only writing 500 words per night. I banged out a 4,000 word radioapple fic in a night like two months ago. WHAT IS HAPPENING

WIPS

Til Murder Do Us Part

Odd and beloved requests that are halfway done

50 ideas written out in gibberish

that one super toxic fanfic that will stay in the doc forever

Published & Ongoing

Soulmate Curse

The cursed ass Charbill fanfic

[thepunkpanther]

“Chicago” 

Canada painted on the side of a building in Mountie on the Bounty — 3.12

Stokes storefront in Seeing is Believing — 3.05 

The now defunct D’Allaird’s and Le Chateau in Seeing is Believing — 3.05 

Cineplex Odeon in Say Amen —  4.10

What is clearly a box of Smarties in Eclipse — 3.02

[deadrlngers]

i was tagged by @shadowglens and @risingsh0t to make some ocs in this picrew. thank you so much besties, i loved this picrew so much!! <3

vesper moxley (cp2077) • victoria gray (cp2077) joelle knight (fo4) • nina bower (fo4) selene (oblivion) • hiraeth (skyrim)

tagging: @uldwynsovs @arklay @devilbrakers @nuclearstorms @morvaris @girlbosselrond @indorilnerevarine @moiragf @cultistbase @faarkas @steelport @nokstella @reaperkiller @malefiicarum @brujah @calenhads @lightwardens @aelyosos and whoever else wants to do this or that i missed bc i'm terribly forgetful sorry!!

[antisocialxconstruct]

Just kinda... putting this out into the universe for right now, but I've been thinking really hard about getting my old enamel pin collections back in circulation, as well as maybe releasing them as stickers as well (for a budget option and also for things you can't put enamel pins on). I had to throw out basically all my remaining stock when I moved (which... oouugh it still hurts), so I might essentially run a "reboot" kickstarter to get another batch of Dire Hounds made and then try again to get the full Grimalkins set funded. A few things this would let me do:

update the templates for slightly cleaner manufacturing, and update the backer cards with accurate artist info because man that was really bothering me

like I said, hopefully get the second half of the Grimalkins produced so they're a proper six-pin collection like the first one

network! Now that I'm in a big city I think I honestly might have better luck with consignment stores and craft fairs than I ever did with only an online shop, and more visibility can only mean good things.

I'm also still definitely planning to make idog merch, and beyond that I'd potentially love to lean even further into the cyberpunk and y2k aesthetics to really hone my Brand™, but obviously that requires original thought and creative effort while getting the dogs and cats remade just requires pulling the old AI files off my poor aging iMac.

[meloartist]

Yeah, I also want to see 2 season, especially Destiny and my favorite Delirium, but I'm also curius who will play Remiel and Duma.

[i think this ask was pre-s2 announcement bc 2022 but YEAH]

i'm a HUUUUUUUUUGE duma stan you dont even KNOW

[humanmorph]

i never really understood the appeal of podfics but if i'm being real wire guy is like. yes i would like to have it read to me

[deusetco]

Happy Pride to those who aren't really proud. Maybe in time and love we'll find that pride inside ourselves, maybe not. Regardless, we're alive, and that is worth fighting for, and that is something to celebrate

[kyouka-supremacy]

Btw today is a month since this blog was shadowbanned 🥳🥳

[sethnakht]

everyone wants darth vader dead in greg pak and raffaele ienco's darth vader, it seems, seemingly including darth vader. no sooner has luke slipped his grasp does it strike into public awareness like a firework set off in a crowd -- vader's power, too, is slipping. the weight of that collective scrutiny -- from officers, bounty hunters, and assassins to the paper-pushers of the Imperial court and the former handmaidens of Queen Amidala -- manifests in a hunger to dismantle him physically, to wrench and tear off the armor, to see him gorged upon by giant monsters, to freeze him and puppet him, to seize control over the "softbody" and flay him of his life support. nor is vader left unaffected by this hostile focus on his physical limits -- as he slouches, limps, stumbles, crawls -- and pauses, exhaustedly, though there is no way to catch his breath -- his way through the comic, the gleaming armor is hacked, punctured, electrocuted, torn open, shattered, and burned, while his thoughts dwell on weakness, grief, and fear. such abjection, however short lived, sets this comic run far apart from marvel's previous two darth vader runs, both of which traced an upward trajectory: vader's rise to the height of his power in esb (gillen/larroca), and his journey to becoming a committed sith after rots (soule/camuncoli). the trajectory here is to the grave.

Darth Vader (2020-) #5, Pak/Ienco/et al - observing that vader is walking right into a major barrage of fire - not for the first time - the forensic droid accompanying him hints that he might have a death wish.

vader himself refuses to admit weakness, of course - at least consciously - but his arguments bear all the weakness of bad political discourse. "there is no conflict", he says, making one think of conflict; "my son is weak", he says, making one think of the father. when you tell someone not to think of an elephant, even in negation, you invoke the elephant. darth vader is very good at conjuring the elephant, and making one peer very closely into the bold and marked outlines of its supposed non-existence.

Darth Vader (2020-) #1, Pak, Ienco, et al - unable to handle that he has been rejected by his son, Vader transfers the failure to Luke, calling him "weak" for choosing to flee him, for choosing potential death over Vader's offer of power, even as he stands empty-handed before a gravesite, his own desire to punish the dead thwarted by his having made them so. The comic doesn't leave it at ironic framing - Vader too is aware of what he is invoking, and the associations brought up as he stands at the site of his mother's grave show that Vader cannot entirely suppress his own sense of failure - his own memories of his own perceived weakness.

vader's private thoughts -- rendered in the comic in startling little red boxes that, like mummy coffins, nest in larger black boxes, nearly always isolated from physical imagery, from contact with the visual world -- are as tiring and repetitive as an unwelcome pigeon on the window sill. the stunner is not what he thinks or even what he invokes, but that his thoughts are not actually private at all. there is no room to admit weakness because, as it turns out, vader's master can pick up on his thoughts from the other side of the galaxy. vader's master can croon into his black boxes, scoop out the words and spit them back out like trite poetry learned from heart in grade school. watching him from afar, vader's master reads into his actions and mocks what is unexpressed. if there's a space free from his influence -- an influence that is similar to the reader's influence, an influence that explains why we can see his thoughts at all, because we too are complicit and voyeurs -- it might only be the gutters, those gaps between panels where the mind completes the temporal and spatial relationships between the images. in the page from the first issue shown above, for example, note how the speech balloon for the remembered "I won't fail again" nearly connects with vader's head in the panel below it, linking anakin's grief-filled promise to become stronger with vader's helmeted head, all while lingering on padmé's face - his next inevitable failure. even if he cannot think it.

the humiliation is public, we're part of the frenzied mob, swiping at the armor for scraps of cursed fabric -- transgressing boundaries both mental and physical, eating up that transgression like the intimate, play-by-play accounts of a famous suicide. vader's armor is repeatedly hacked, a gag that bluntly serves to hammer and hammer and hammer home for you that shame of being mocked before the class that specially belongs to darth vader, dark lord of the sith.

Darth Vader (2020-) #13, Pak, Ienco, et al - Vader is made a puppet more than once over the course of the comic, frozen and trapped both in his mind and body.

to be honest, I was originally a little annoyed by the number of hacking attempts -- everyone gets to take their shot at controlling vader, from hutts and droids to the handmaidens to a psychic squid who puppets him with its tentacles -- because of the frequency and similarity of the attempts, because while vader does address some vulnerabilities, he still gets scanned and sliced, meaning he's overlooking weaknesses or choosing not to address them; because he doesn't seem greatly affected by the threat to his bodily autonomy, and because of the friction with gillen's run (where being hacked sends vader into a high-stakes psychosis and is a major and unusual event that he takes measures to prevent from happening again in the aphra comics). then I remembered this scene:

Darth Vader (2020), #12 (Pak, Vilanova, et al) - After losing all but one limb, being set on fire, tracking through lava on mismatched ancient droid parts, being chased and attacked by assassins, droid scrappers, an Imperial Star Destroyer, and a wall of Sith acolytes, then nearly ripped apart mentally and physically by a psychotic giant squid and a screaming kyber crystal, Vader is "repaired" on Coruscant - i.e. sawed open - before a hostile, chattering audience, the Emperor laughingly dismissing him as a threat.

which. is. absolutely. fucked. up!! and to top it off, there's this sly little sequence --

Darth Vader (2020-) #14 (Pak, Ienco, et al) - Vader's armor specifications appear to be tracked with each repair and are openly accessible to the Imperial court

-- which shows that even if vader updates his armor, that knowledge will be recorded the next time he comes in for a repair (if it's not always being transmitted automatically). anyone with sufficient credentials in the imperial machine, including the demoted sub-administrator sly moore, can access his repair logs, analyze them for untested weaknesses, and saunter off with an suit override stick. (to be sure, sly moore isn't supposed to be looking at his records and is chastised when she's found; she also tries to use the same kill stick twice, failing to account for the updates vader does make after the first slicing attempt, perhaps because she hasn't checked or been able to access the records for updates. the point here though is that vader's suit is a matter of government record, treated like imperial property; you can imagine all sorts of fun scenarios here, such as that his private upgrades are wiped each time he comes into the repair center, or that new vulnerabilities are built in each time, etc.)

even the dead contribute to this panopticon effect. in the latest issue of the comic, the skakoan jul tambor reveals that he's been collecting dismembered droids -- each of them individually sliced apart by darth vader over the years (notably, however, most of them are separatist droids, hinting at tambor's blind spot: he hasn't collected the droid corpses anakin left littered on battlefields). drawing on their recorded logs of their own demise, tambor observes vader precisely when he might feel the least concern about it -- in the act of killing, of eradicating the viewer. the now-repaired droids possess a kind of moving simulacrum of vader's battle tactics. perhaps because he too relies on a pressure suit and breathing device to survive in the same atmosphere as most humans, tambor doesn't need static blueprints of the suit -- he has no intention of shutting down vader's life support. the difference in method is only a subtle one, however: he too is targeting vader's dependency on his armor. in lieu of a direct attack, he means to target the suit's limitations indirectly, to swarm vader with the very droids he once demolished and have them target his limited mobility, his repetitious set of moves within the suit's confines. with his reliance on surveillance technology, tambor is only the latest in a long line to act on the premise that vader's demise is a given because he has no secrets left.

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak, Ross, et al

if it seems a blind spot that tambor hasn't collected archival footage of anakin on a droid rampage, he's nonetheless managed to address it thanks to a chance encounter. when padmé's former body double -- sabé, vader's double in the comic, a shadow of the shadow -- arrives on vader's orders to kill tambor, then tries to convince him to abandon a plan that she fears will only get hundreds killed, he captures her. tambor rightly recognizes that sabé is more to vader than an agent skilled in deception and lies: she represents his weakness, he believes, a reading that vader himself may even share.

sabé is the bright note in this story of decline, the one character who cares enough and dares enough to consider vader's "weakness" a possible strength. like the reconstituted droids, she is in her own way a dead woman brought back to life, a ghost -- padmé back from the grave to haunt him, as she tells vader upon their first meeting. like any good ghost, she wants revenge for padmé's death and to enact her final, unfulfilled wish; as it happens, killing vader to save anakin would neatly accomplish both. (as it happens, she and vader have both seen recorded footage of padmé's last moments; tambor's recordings of vader from the perspective of dying droids is both a parallel and a contrast to padmé, shown dying from wounds inflicted by an absent vader, whispering of the good still in him.) when sabé freely enters his service, claiming she wants to help, vader is troubled -- does this make him weak? -- and yet also quite smug. here is finally someone who has chosen him of their own free will; here is someone who has accepted his offer of power; here is someone who looks and talks just like the dead wife he's convinced himself would have stood with him and espoused his cause ("order"). (indeed, she wields real power -- jealous and fearful, the assassin ochi effectively portrays her as a tiger handler who unleashes her pet when she wants someone dead.) it's a fantasy come to life.

yet sabé is not dead, present as she may as ghost or shadow or fantasy -- sabé is herself haunted: haunted by padmé, whom she could not save, and by anakin, whose mother she could not free. sabé is herself a killer whose guilt and loyalty and poisoned grief have moved her to try and execute vader "for padmé and anakin", and who gets a real chance -- closer than anyone but palpatine -- to put vader to death. sabé's attempts to kill vader have evolved with time -- a first attempt, imaginative but unrefined, made when she unequivocally thought him anakin and padmé's murderer, involved luring vader into an underwater lair, provoking him into claiming he killed anakin and padmé, and feeding him to a massive sea monster. a second, disastrous attempt led to the pointless slaughter of her ground and aerial troops, though vader left her and padmé's remaining former handmaidens alive. (unbeknownst to her, the emperor nearly killed vader for that choice, leaving him deprived of all but his arm and core suit functionality on the burning banks of mustafar, to relive obi-wan's abandonment and crawl his way through the corpses of murdered separatists, into and out of death.) she comes closest to actually killing him, however, only after she's had such an effect on him that she's moved him to confront his great nemesis (sand) to save her life and bring himself to the brink of death on behalf of a refugee camp composed of freed tatooine slaves. having fried his suit -- through the bounceback of his own hubris, ultimately -- vader lies incapacitated on the ground when sabé finds him and reveals her own fantasy involves killing him. her ghosts hold her back; padmé stays her hand.

of the humiliations heaped upon him since luke's escape, including the routine of hanging head-down and mostly naked in a bacta tank flanked by observing guards, only this -- this grave insistence from padmé there is good in him -- manages to shake vader.

Darth Vader (2020-) #28, Pak/Ienco/et al -- Vader conjures the elephant of his diminishing power as he dangles hulkingly in his bacta tank in full sight of two guards. Subsequently, he shatters the bacta tank in rage.

unlike the attacks riffed from public records, the private knowledge padmé possessed as she died is one that no one else can see. even sabé admits she can't understand why she chooses to trust it. as for vader's master, we never see him overhearing the padmé recording, he never cites it directly (though he does mock vader for "listening ... to your heart", perhaps a way of dismissing its importance). as in the panopticon the prisoners never know when they are observed, so too does the emperor presumably turn his eye away from time to time, all too certain the name "anakin" has lost all "power" over vader. as in the prison of andor "no one is listening", there is still the quality of a secret in what vader and sabé know about padmé. even if, in his fear of weakness, all vader can see in that secret is death.