#i've vagued about this one before

[voiddemon]

i loveee aus

[averlym]

ghost story premiere day! check @melliotwrites for more info

[necrotic-nephilim]

i recently remembered DickTim Week 2024 is happening very soon and i looked at the prompts again to see if i could get anything out for it and. the Hades & Persephone AU prompt for day 1 has got me really thinking so here's a vague concept i plan to write.

i've been pretty burnt out on modern Hades & Persephone retellings because of how they always seem to fall into the same generic "innocent wide-eyed girl runs from her evil mean mother into the arms of a dark mysterious man because actually she went willingly and chose to marry him" which has gotten repetitive for my tastes. (for clarity i don't care if this retelling is your cup of tea personally, so long as you're not actively trying to rewrite the original myth and claim untrue things about it, if this is your favorite flavor i sincerely hope you enjoy the buffet i just have little interest in it since it feels overdone for me and exhausted of it's supposed commentary atp)

but? but. biblically accurate Hades & Persephone AU has me all kinds of interested. because wait listen so hear me out right. Hades!Dick and Persephone!Tim, obviously. i feel it'd be more loosely inspired by with themes and imagery (though playing with death and nature powers could be interesting, i haven't decided) rather than explicitly making them gods and all. but. something dark and fucked up where Dick and Bruce are especially estranged. maybe to do with Jason's return, maybe to do with them just clashing and having their usual explosive arguments. and Bruce knows the peace needs to be kept, if he and Dick are at odds then everyone starts to pick sides and things just fracture so he needs a peace offering.

and the peace offering is Tim.

Bruce (the stand-in for Zeus) offers up Tim. agrees to have Tim move to Bludhaven and be Dick's... whatever Dick wants him to be. knowing that with the implication comes the likelihood of Dick grooming Tim. and Tim has no real say and is hesitant to put up a real fight. he doesn't want this, he knows what this is going to imply Dick will do to him, but he also knows if he says no things have the possibility to just... fall apart. so he's the unwilling bride, dragged off to the metaphorical underworld (Bludhaven) with Dick, away from his family, his friends, the life he built.

and on the flip side, i think weirdly enough, your best pick for the Demeter stand-in is *Jason*. just, hear me out on that. not necessarily on the side of it being motherly, but on Jason being just estranged enough from the Batfamily to be the one willing to call it out for being bad and wrong and raising bloody hell to get Tim back. maybe it's because Jason wants Tim for himself, maybe it's truly out of a concern for Tim to have autonomy, i'm toying with the idea of it primarily being Tim's POV and him genuinely not knowing which of these is true. (and the truth possibly ends up being a complicated middle ground) and because i like Helena, i think you can use her as the Hekate stand in, the one who strikes a tentative alliance with Jason and tries to go find Tim and bring him back. Tim stuck with Dick, getting groomed and hyperaware of it, possibly even getting fucked the whole time as well, knowing he can't go back without causing massive issues for Dick and Bruce because well, Bruce did promise him to Dick. so he has to adjust his whole life, try to figure out being a vigilante in this new city with Dick breathing down his neck the whole time.

and then much like the ending of the myth, a sort of compromise is struck that's a shaky deal for everyone involved. Tim is put on an essential timeshare, going back and forth between Gotham, where he has friends and family and a support system, then getting dragged right back to Bludhaven with Dick in this brutal cycle that he slowly gets used to and stockholm'd into even liking it. Dick isn't so bad, once he gets used to the quirks of their unbalanced 'relationship'. the sex is even something he can adjust to as well. not quite a happy ending but one that sits in this realistic grey area that becomes Tim's life.

i will write this, eventually, but i don't know if i'll get to it before DickTim Week ends so by posting the idea i'm essentially putting it out into the world so the peer pressure holds me accountable. i just. really like the potential of making Hades/Persephone AUs as fucked up as they can be simply by adhering to the source material and making it a raw story of being stolen away and forced to like this new home you didn't ask for.

also a less fleshed-out aspect of this idea i have ties into Persephone becoming the Queen of the Underworld when she's taken and how the transition from Kore to Persephone could be reflected in Tim. how he makes the best of the worst situation and becomes something far more dangerous and dark when he's in Bludhaven, possibly takes on a new vigilante name/identity and leans into the worst quirks of his personality he tries to tamper because there's no point in not going full tilt Obsessively Weird if he has no choice anyway and it being one small way he takes back his autonomy, and that inevitably making Dick *more* into him, because he gets to see Tim finally just. let loose.

[pretendthisisaname]

Sure hope this isn't some kind of foreshadowing

[zebratimw]

Spirit animal SQH

[chimerafeathers]

there's an essay jumbled up in my brain about dunmeshi's beginning and how clever and deceptive it is as a sleight-of-hand trick that distracts the audience from the depth and scope of the worldbuilding and foreshadowing that's being set up the entire time by dangling zany characters and wacky dishes and biology fun facts in front of us, and how that serves to catch invested viewers off guard when those elements come to the forefront, but also how it works against it with other viewers wanting "more" and not seeing it because the plot bait isn't laid out up front

how people getting frustrated with the characters "not taking things seriously" is mirrored and refuted in the confrontation between Laios and Shuro. how the characters' attitudes aren't just a result of shallow low-stakes "comedy rules" where nothing matters, but are an extension of their personalities (Laios's nonstandard expression of emotions being offputting even to people he knows) and the world and social environment (adventurers being desensitized to death and injury because resurrection magic is commonplace). the way the party refers to "saving Falin" instead of "retrieving Falin's corpse," indicating that they still see her with full personhood, and how that phrasing leads to some readers/viewers believing that Falin is alive in the dragon's stomach, conscious of being slowly digested while the party carelessly fucks around "wasting time." how the weird tonal dissonance makes sense in-universe and yet is deliberately challenged more and more the deeper the party goes

all the character building and pieces of lore slowly weaving together the shape of the larger world, laying the groundwork for the major themes that will surface later. so much is right there in the "low-stakes" early episodes if you know what you're looking for (or pass the perception checks).

it can be so satisfying to see new viewers/readers pick up on the clues even in the earliest "simple" episodes, or notice new things and make connections yourself....and it can also be frustrating to see people dismiss oddities and dissonance as shallow or bad writing because they don't expect a "cooking anime" to have depth like that. why try to question and understand and peel back the layers when you don't expect there to be any layers?

why can't laios take things seriously for once?

[umbrace-rambles]

My OPOC crew is finally finished WOOOOOO that took like. a week. but I am incredibly happy with them, they're finally real <3

Hope y'all like the blorbos, the start of their story is set around the current animanga situation. Post-Wano if you will. It gets kickstarted by the fall of Kaido and Big Mom and the consequences that brings to their territories and the world. They're going to have an extremely bad time starting out in the middle of the current world situation👍

They're mostly independent cause I don't enjoy canon and OC interactions all that much beyond using it as setup or for character development. That said, I do have an idea for one drawing/comic that is incredibly stupid and will likely do for the memes.

I don't know if I will end up sharing more of them than this but feel free to ask about them if you want to? Individual info cards of each of them below:

[moongothic]

Also Lu feld ( the underworld emperor that funded MADS) looks veryyy similar to Crocodile, maybe there is a relationship between them both?

So Oda does have certain design tropes he likes to use, and so all his characters that fit into the "mob boss" archetype, including Capone Bege, all have similar design elements; a large coat over their shoulders (not exclusive to the mafia characters mind you), fine suits, cigars, expensive looking jewelry; they look very formal and they all even style their hair the same way (slicked back). So the similarities could be easily chacked up to Oda using the same design tropes for characters that fit into the same trope. If you look past those elements, the differences become more obvious

Like the facial anatomy etc between them all is quite different (Crocodile having Oda's default attractive male facial anatomy, compared to Lu Feld's bulbous, round shapes, while Bege has these triangular shapes to his face) along with body build etc etc

Reason I wanted to point this out is because I'm preeeetty sure I've seen people on Reddit speculate that Crocodile could be related to Lu Feld by blood, even be his son? And to be fair, this is One Piece, the characters don't need to look one-bit similar to one-another to be blood relatives, not by a long shot. And since we don't know how old Lu Feld is, theoretically sure, that could be possible.

But when all we're going off of is "they're both mafia bosses and dress kinda similar", I feel that theory is a bit weak, and more importantly, I'm not sure there's much of a point in it. As in, what would these two being related add to their characters? Like you could totally write an interesting story about them that could impact them both, but it's not like the two other famous theories (that Croc could be the son of WB or Xebec) where you almost immidiately understand the emotional baggage between the two (former Croc would have unknown beef with his bio-dad possibly related to him adopting so many sons while he's just there, the latter having once again questionable implications for Xebec's character but could immidiately shed light on Croc's beef with WB and his general trust issues).

Considdering Lu Feld is an Emperor of the Underworld though I would not be surprised if our beloved Mr Zero had purchased his Dance Powder from Lu Feld, maaaybe been involved with the underworld in other ways, who knows. But I personally don't believe Crocodile has deep ties to Lu Feld, I just think it's Oda giving a less important, borderline-background character a design with a few too many similarities to more important characters and not enough unique features--- but Lu Feld isn't that important, it's not like he needed a super unique design to communicate who and what he's supposed to be in the story

[energeticpoltergeist]

i have yet again drawn something Fire Emblem related

still kinda sucky at drawing FE characters, but im slowly figuring it out and seeing as i have plans(which i'll hopefully be able to act upon sooner then later, no promises though) im going to be getting a lot of practice in my future anyways yeah, Chrom time

[gwahren]

that "am i full of myself or am i actually being copied" moment

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Okay, so, life update in the tags

[snickerdoodlles]

there's a lot of things people blame for why fandoms feel like ghost towns these days, but no one's really talked about the way discord's contributing to it

[xuxudio]

"You are beautiful."

[1mnobodywhoareyou]

Questions that bother me:

Where is your hometown?

Where did you grow up?

[paranorahjones]

you know it's bad when you start journaling about him

[coquelicoq]

i just saw someone say that "the vast majority of the userbase is complaining" about tumblr's recent layout change. i see this a lot after a change: people complaining about it (sometimes without saying what about it is bad, making it sound like either it's self-evident (it usually is not) or just that it's bad because it's change and change is always bad) and saying that everyone else is complaining about it too. i don't know how to tell you this but a) you don't follow every user on tumblr so how can you possibly know what "everyone" or "the majority of users" thinks about anything and b) ONLY THE PEOPLE WHO FEEL VERY STRONGLY ARE TALKING ABOUT IT!! people who are not bothered are not spending time posting about how unbothered they are! please look up "selection bias" and stop making me read this nonsense with my own eyeballs.