#in the present and in the flesh

[aquietjune]

Little Bird: Chapter 15 is out on AO3

and it's been for a day or so but... you know >.>

The next day they left for Fort Salta. The train was scheduled so early in the morning that Annie spent the first hour of the trip dozing lightly against Armin’s shoulder, the kids’ loud voices barely reaching her. She could not fall asleep, however. Her mind went back again to the conversations of the day before. (continue)

[w1lmuttart]

Alright so before I jump on the ln3 bandwagon can I put Mono through the wringer one more time? Okay? Okay 👍

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

D'Arce S Ending: "As soon as I can revive him from the dead, the wedding is BACK ON!"

[bearotonin-international]

Apex predator, my ass. I’m going to pet the dog 🐻🐻‍❄️🐼

perhaps now is a good time for some responsible bear programming to remind everyone that as cute and cuddly as they may seem, bears are lethal apex predators and should absolutely be treated accordingly if ever encountered.

DO

NOT

PET

[alisaint]

SNOWJANUS — PREDATOR x PREY; IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO END THIS WAY.

[1] Sejanus pulled up short. “You never miss a beat, do you? I remember that from school. Watching you watch other people. Pretending you weren’t. And choosing the moments you weighed in so carefully.”

[2] “I don’t have time for explanations. Right now the Plinth brat’s loose in the arena with a pack of wolves. If they see him, they’ll kill him on the spot.”

[3] Sejanus had arrived on the school playground ten years ago, a shy, sensitive boy cautiously surveying the other children with a pair of soulful brown eyes much too large for his strained face.

[4] [Coriolanus] thought of people putting a price on her. With her long, pointed nose and skinny body, Tigris was no great beauty, but she had a sweetness, a vulnerability that invited abuse.

[5] “You could send in some Peacekeepers,” Coriolanus said. “And have [Sejanus] bolt like a rabbit?” she scoffed. “Imagine that for a moment, the Peacekeepers trying to chase him down in the dark. No, we’ll have to lure him out, as uneventfully as possible, so we’ll need people he cares about. He can’t stand his father, no siblings, no other friends. That leaves you and his mother.”

[6] Maude Ivory bent over his ear and whispered, “Don’t let him around Sejanus. He’s sweet, and Billy Taupe feeds on sweet.”

[7] He padded across the dirt, channeling the circus wildcats he had seen here as a boy. Fearless, and powerful, and silent. [Coriolanus] knew he must not spook Sejanus, but he needed to get close enough to converse.

[8] As they passed him, Coriolanus locked eyes with Sejanus, and all he could see was the eight-year-old boy on the playground, the bag of gumdrops clenched in his fist. Only this boy was much, much more frightened. Sejanus’s lips formed his name, Coryo, and his face contorted in pain. But whether it was a plea for help or an accusation of his betrayal he couldn’t tell.

[9] Coriolanus buried his face in his hands. He had killed Sejanus as surely as if he’d bludgeoned him to death like Bobbin or gunned him down like Mayfair. He’d killed the person who considered him his brother. But even as the vileness of the act threatened to drown him, a tiny voice kept asking, What choice did you have? What choice? No choice.

[10] Poor Sejanus. Poor sensitive, foolish, dead Sejanus.

[carfuckerlynch]

finally reading @cryptotheism’s amber skies. first descriptor that pops to mind thus far is “visceral.” i think all of you eroticism of meat and the machine enjoyers should be crawling all over this shit like weavils. god knows i am

[aleksanderscult]

“I think sometimes people want to be told who is good and who is bad. They want it to be very clear, with some definitive line. I believe that the people who are the most dangerous are not the people who enter your life wearing a sign saying “I’m a bad guy”, and they’re not the people who are missing a nose like Voldemort. They’re the people who are charming and manipulative and also probably carrying their own wounds, their own baggage. They can be brooding and beautiful and be monstrous. That’s what I was setting out to show with the Darkling.”

- Leigh Bardugo

Generally, she's not wrong here. In real life that's how the bad guys mostly are and there are even real life examples (like Josef Mengele) who used charm and lies to fulfill their own cruel purposes.

But with the Darkling it fails because he has a selfless goal and was never a self-centred character. She presented a character that has lived for hundreds of years, witnessed first hand a genocide that was still ongoing by the start of the trilogy and is one of the victims of this persecution.

It's very easy to judge with your finger while sitting at the comfort of your house but when you are being hunted for powers that you are born with, when they cut you to pieces like a guinea pig, when they burn you alive to pyres and when there is no safe place on Earth to stay, rest easy and live then the terms "good deeds" and "bad deeds" feel unimportant in the face of survival.

And the Darkling felt responsible to try and save thousands of them. He felt that with his near immortality and power he could do something to shift things on a large scale.

And how can things like that change?

With big decisions.

But, alas, these same decisions needed to be cruel and therefore condemned him to be seen as evil and a monster.

So even though her view is not wrong, she tried to present it with the wrong character whose goal was sympathetic and incredibly difficult to fulfill since he was surrounded by people that didn't want him and hated his guts.

[felikatze]

i think the reason i love silent protags a lot because the limitation of this staple necessitates indirect storytelling. yes it's primarily a device to allow player inserts and roleplaying, but a character's inability to state or directly show how they feel forces one to analyze much more.

when speech is filtered out, you need to reverse engineer what they could've said by how other characters reacted. Multiple choice dialogue options become concurrent thoughts in the character's mind, different facets leading to indecision, with the player only truly deciding which thought comes to the forefront.

definition comes through body language, idle animations, emotive portraits and noises of exertion. if a choice is railroaded, was the protagonist forced into it, or did they decide without player input? what do the available gameplay styles say about the character you've created? what does it mean to accept every single sidequest?

like, well and truly, making a nothing character is impossible, even in video games, because saying "yes" when asked to save the world, that's already a decision, isn't it? there is already an implication, a shadow of belief and value, in the act of playing.

[estrellium]

Modern au shenanigans: college edition 🔥

You guys cannot tell me Eiden wouldn't be a wingman for his friends. He thinks of dumb shit like this and it Works. (After this, Edmond and Yakumo rack up the courage to sneak out of their dorms to have nightly dates) (Eiden is really fucking happy when he finds out)

[ask-itager]

A bit dark, but uh, what would happen if one of you died? How would the other react?

im not really the type to want to protect anyone but now if germany was in danger i would absolutely make sure he would survive instead of accidentally saving him with the pictonians. since if he dies that means hes leaving me!!!!!!!!!! D:

germanys honest reaction would be the blog banner lawl

[broken-clover]

It's eternally a little funny whenever I see someone say something along the lines of 'everyone in Strive is so happy now! Everyone's stories are getting resolved! It'll be hard to make a new game when everyone's retired and living peacefully and resolved their problems' and then there's a haunted semi-sentient mecha corpse in the corner constantly screaming from being trapped in limbo

[undemolitioned-lovers]

transphobia makes no fucking sense to me. we're only here on this planet with our incredibly temporary suits of flesh and blood for a short amount of time, and being told you have to look, act, or be a certain way to fit what parts of your body dictated when you were born is fucking stupid. everyone has their own body that's not going to be here for very long, and you should be able to customize it as you choose. being told that you can't, that you have to be called certain things, that you have to keep certain things, that you have to be something or someone that you're not is taking away people's free fucking will. which is the #1 guarantee of humanity. and being told that you aren't something because of organs in your body makes no sense. so you should be able to mess around with what you look like, and choose how you want to be seen, because if you spend your life trying to conform to a set standard that doesn't mean anything, and that you don't feel like yourself in, you're wasting it. make your body look like you want it to look. fuck conformity. fuck standards. do what you want. we're all just brains or souls or whatever you want to call it underneath our skin, so you should be able to change how you're seen to reflect how you are. we're only here for a little while.

[arsenicflame]

well, now seems like a perfect time to re-engage with the bellhands side of the fandom because we never did care about canon over there anyway

[tomaturtles]

Kawoshin Week Day 6: 2928/Post 3.0+1.0 + Meeting for the first time in years!

I just think that. Shinji growing up to be taller than Kaworu and hitting him with the realization of time moving forward and them not being doomed teenagers anymore

[gertritude-art]

Do we ever get to see Mordred’s mom or is she only ever mentioned?

probably not in this game!

[xiaoming56]

This is the comic equivalent of a crack fic