#is it necessary? absolutely not

[thatrandomblogsays]

I’m so happy for them

[Image Description: Castiel from Supernatural is saying I love you, underneath is an image of Dean Winchester with the caption: “After four months of striking the WGA has a reached a tentative agreement & finalizing the contract. If all goes well writers will get to return to work with better pay and protections. They did it. Go unions”]

(Source)

[isaacathom]

my friend pondered a highschool au for their ttrpg ocs, and then i went 'hmm. interesting. what if my ocs?' and then, well,

[beif0ngs]

alright look, i just wanna know who is the writer that came up with the dumbass idea of replacing the line “Ever since I lost my son, I think of you as my own” with “Lu Ten would have been proud to have you as his father” in this scene for the Netflix live action series???

[egophiliac]

finally got some time to finish these guys up! which is sort of ironic considering I started these because I wanted to draw Malleus with a Dragapult, and then I just didn't for a million years!

Malleus has the aforementioned Dragapult, except it's a super special non-canon color Dragapult (like an anime-only form that you could get in-game exclusively through some limited-time event where you have to show up in-person at a specific location in Japan) (it has some wacky overpowered exclusive move/form and the OT is listed as Malleus) (so like that kind of ridiculous specialness) (Leona is extremely salty about this). also hoards and hoards of Dreepy. Dreepy LOVE Malleus. they take naps on his horns inbetween begging him to throw them across the island at mach speeds.

Lilia has a Drampa and a bunch of Woobat that he hasn't actually caught, they just follow him around in swarms because they sense a kinship with him. (also breaking my own rule again to say that he had a Mawile in the past, because...I just really wanted to give him a Mawile...)

Sebek has Sandile for obvious reasons, and also a Pikachu that bullies him relentlessly. :(

Silver has a shiny Corvisquire; I really went back-and-forth on also giving him an Aegislash, but...hm. those pokedex entries though. he can stick with just one for now.

(I hadn't planned on the shiny for him, but after I'd decided on the Corvisquire line and was looking it up for reference, I realized that shiny Rookidee is gold and then turns silver when it evolves and I lost my entire goddamn mind)

[stuckinapril]

I love Tumblr because nothing matters here truly. There are no influencers. Having followers doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a site where people post their sporadic thoughts and rb pretty pictures. Anyone who thinks any of this matters is woefully missing the point

[lazylittledragon]

i refuse to believe that boycotting is hard. my favourite thing in the world is ordering maccies after a late night at work/a concert/getting drunk. yes i do miss it sometimes. but the other night i ordered from a small place near my house instead and it was the most orgasmic burger i've ever had in my life. i very rarely say this but fucking suck it up people are DEAD

[reds-skull]

Christmas comic in October? It's more likely than you think.

Also I would die for young Kyle and Simon

[stere0typical]

the 9th doctor is so real actually because he got one (1) good leather jacket and never took it off ever.

[the-ocean-is-trans]

bobby nash is ofc the found family dad but athena grant is most certainly not the found family mom. she is a mom to her two kids, but not to the 118. Hen and her are besties, she definitely is involved in the 118 chosen family and clearly loves them, but athena grant is not adopting all of these grown adults with mommy and daddy issues. she tolerates it from buck because she wants to make sure bobby stays alive.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 4: Deranged Bedfellows

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.5)

[bunnieswithknives]

Gore, Violence and Blood under the cut

What a mess

[starcurtain]

Hey! I apologize if this question has been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one, but where do you think the idea of Aventurine being a sex slave came from? Other than the obvious factor of it being something fun for the fandom to mess around with, I mean.

It's something I kind of took for granted as being true before playing his quest, but after finishing it I realized there wasn't really any indication. The only thing I can really think of is his master's comments about him having a good body. Is there anything in his behavior you can think of that would lead to this conclusion if it wasn't a popular fan interpretation already/kind of just an easy conclusion to reach with a slave character?

(also kind of related but what do you think of the idea that he sleeps around/with his clients to make deals? he's obviously willing to sexualize himself with the boob window, but that doesn't necessarily mean he goes further.)

As far as I can tell, the idea that Aventurine was involved in sexual slavery comes from three (maybe four) places:

First, the comment from the master about Aventurine's appearance. People were holding this comment up as refutable proof that Aventurine was used in sexual slavery on top of being tossed into the Hunger Games; however, the response from other players on this interpretation, especially the Chinese side of the fandom, was very mixed, with a lot of people pointing out that the context in the game probably meant the slave master was talking about Aventurine's ability to attract attention from fans watching the literal Sigonian Hunger Games, rather than having a direct sexual-slavery connotation.

Second, the comment from Sparkle about stripping naked and getting on his knees for Sunday. This one has way more implication in English than I think it might for an Eastern audience, actually. In English, this pretty much sounds like Sparkle saying Aventurine trades sexual favors for success in his gambles. However, I suspect the original intention in Chinese was more about humiliation. Western audiences don't have as much history with honor-based prostration, i.e. accepting corporal humiliation as a form of reconciliation that Eastern audiences might be more familiar with. And in any case, Sparkle is Sparkle. She probably just went for the lowest blow she could think of here.

Third, the general assumption that if Sigonian slaves were being chained, branded, beaten, sent to death matches, etc., it seems logical that they would also be taken advantage of in other ways. I honestly think this is probably the fairest take--many, many real slaves around the world faced (and still face!) sexual abuse, so if slaves from Sigonia were treated so poorly you could make them fight to the death for entertainment, it stands to reason they were probably also not safe from other forms of assault. We also have no idea what happened to Kakavasha in any of the years between his being a tiny child fleeing the massacre and then being purchased as a slave as a late-teens-early-twenties person. That's a very long time for a child to have to survive on their own on an extremely hostile planet and not face risks of all kinds or end up needing to do unspeakable things to survive. So I think this is at least not that far-fetched, although it's important to say there's nothing in the game that directly confirms this.

And fourth: I read a tweet semi-recently that stated that one of the Chinese (or maybe it was Japanese) names for a quest Aventurine was involved in was actually a reference to a book about a teenage sexual assault survivor. However, when I tried to verify this myself, I couldn't find any quest Aventurine was in that was based on a book about sexual assault in either English, Chinese, or Japanese. It's possible I just missed something, but I'm taking this one with a bit of a grain of salt currently, since I can't confirm it personally.

Regarding your other question, about whether I think Aventurine sleeps around to make deals...

I definitely think he does not, for one major reason.

First, I will admit that Aventurine is definitely willing to use his appearance to his advantage. This is pretty obvious. He wears incredibly flashy clothes, baths himself in cologne, overloads on glittering golden jewels, and absolutely calls attention to his appearance when working with clients.

We see him actively doing this in his Moment Among the Stars video, where he is clearly using his looks as an equal tool (to his wealth), to daze his target.

It's not an accident that he says things like "Use me as you wish," with all the explicit connotations preserved. The implication is there. However, unless he was absolutely backed into a corner, I think that implication is all it will ever be.

The reason I think this is that the devs go out of their way to give Aventurine three fairly noticeable physical behaviors in his in-game scenes:

For one, he has some of the most closed off body language of any character in the game.

Aventurine's default conversation pose is arms crossed directly and tightly in front of himself. This is like "Defensive Body Language 101." By crossing your arms, you put a symbolic barrier between yourself and the person you're speaking to, and also ensure that your hands are up and available in case you actually need to physically defend yourself.

Virtually all of Aventurine's conversations take place from this stance, no matter who he is speaking to (from the Trailblazer all the way to Topaz). He deliberately closes his pose off and tightens up his silhouette, which just sends a glaring "Don't touch me" message.

This closing off is also blatantly apparent when you compare it to the deliberately open poses he strikes while trying to make himself seem accessible to others (like tempting clients) or seem powerful (to intimidate):

Complementing this habit of closing himself off is a second noticeable aspect of his body language: He frequently avoids eye contact to the point that he even holds conversations while entirely facing away from the person he's speaking to.

I might be a bit lenient and say maybe he's doing this to on purpose to be mysterious, whoo~~ But... in all honestly, he just does this with everyone, even with Ratio while trying to talk about an actual important issue (wanting to look into Acheron's real identity). Hell, even the fake Aventurine does it to himself!

We can even say that wearing the rose-tinted glasses in the first place is another intentional barrier, one Aventurine deliberately removes in specific moments to give people the (false) impression that he's "letting them in" to his circle:

Now, this might be a bit more complicated in Aventurine's case, because eye contact has a whole extra meaning when eyes are the defining trait of your species and come with particularly challenging racial stereotypes. So it may be that Aventurine is simply used to conducting conversation while looking away to minimize racial prejudice against his eyes' unique appearance.

However, I'd also argue that the devs deliberately turned his entire model away in cutscene after cutscene to create a clear sense of being inaccessible, unapproachable, and unwilling to engage in the physical intimacy of standing closely, directly facing, and staring at his conversation partners.

While he faces away, he controls both the figurative and the literal direction of conversation, forcing people to keep their eyes on him while he is free to move as he pleases. Over and over again, it just says "I want to be the one in control. I'm not afraid to show my back to you, but you are not welcome to come near me."

And, in fact, that's a third aspect of his character's body language that I am sure the devs did not include accidentally: More so than other characters, many of Aventurine's conversations are conducted from weirdly far distances. Like, half the time he's talking, he's standing all the way on the opposite side of the room!

This habit of speaking from a-larger-than-normal distance is apparent in the first scene with Himeko...

And then in just about every other conversation too:

The bubble is twenty feet in every direction.

Like yes, he does approach and have conversations like a normal person... sometimes... But it is significantly more noticeable with Aventurine than with other characters that he often conducts whole conversations--even with his allies--from a distance. Just genuinely weirdly far apart.

Leaving space for Gaiathra, I guess.

And it's because these significant decisions were made with Aventurine's in-game body language that, when he deliberately alters his own behavior, it is instantaneously noticeable.

In 2.0, he closes the distance, the glasses come off, and he gets directly up in the Trailblazer's face.

It's uncomfortable not just because the player is suddenly being loomed over, but because this behavior has already been subconsciously established for the player as out of character for Aventurine.

The barriers the character himself was putting up are deliberately stripped away so that he can use physicality and demanding eye contact to intimidate his target. He has to reverse his own normal body language in order to come across as domineering (and, I guess if you're into that, appealing in a domineering manner).

And ummmm, just a tiny aside here because I can't resist:

This does mean that when the game goes out of its way to demonstrate Aventurine altering his own normal habit of distant and defensive body language, it is absolutely intentional.

Yes, this is a Ratiorine post in disguise. There literally isn't any other character in the game that Aventurine is shown being comfortable standing so close to and interacting with in this manner. This doesn't occur in every one of their scenes, but Ratio is the only character that this happens with repeatedly. It's not an accident that the devs literally added "They were walking side-by-side" as flavor text.

But look, I'll be fair: There's a great example of this in Aventurine's scene with Acheron too, where he closes the distance and attempts to make eye contact with her--seeking her guidance and closeness--and she is actually the one stepping away, speaking with her back turned, demonstrating her power and control (and issues with connection!) in that scene.

Anyway, this was a whole longggg tangent into analyzing Aventurine's body language, but my point is that, overall, the devs deliberately adjusted his model's actions in-game to give the impression of a person who clearly wants to be in control of every interaction he has with other people, who insists on distance over intimacy, and whose stances and habits suggest that he is significantly less accessible and open than his "Use me as you wish" motto might suggest.

Long story longer, I think that there is almost zero chance Aventurine is willingly ceding control over himself or the actions expected of him to anyone he isn't 100% comfortable with, and I think that using physical intimacy of any kind would be an absolute last resort for him. Frankly, he comes across as more likely to shoot himself in the foot than let someone he doesn't trust lay hands on him.

To me, he reads very much as "You may look, but you may not touch."

[starflungwaddledee]

I love how you draw galacta knight so elegant. He's graceful, angelic, but overpowering. The duality of the justice he was meant to serve and uninhibited, raw violence i love it sm

ahh yes thank you, you get it!

i think it's specifically important that he is so insanely elegant and pretty and also deadly haha. there's a line in one of my fics where bandee identifies some jungle plants as "far too beautiful to be anything but carnivores", and i think that really sums it up

[turtleblogatlast]

Mentioned this before but as much as I adore the medic Leo headcanon, my favorite type of it is when it’s basically just Leo knowing the most surface level of stuff and carrying around a super basic first-aid kit in his pack. So he knows how to use gauze, and he’s got a ton of Jupiter Jim branded bandaids, and if you really needed it then he can hit you up with some ibuprofen but other than that? Nothing.

But. I love the idea that that changes post-invasion.

They’re pretty sturdy, all of them, so they can take more than one beating and really only need a bandaid for the fun of it. But the invasion hit harder than ice packs and “lots of rest” would help with, and I can bet that a post being beaten to a pulp Leo would have a lot of time on his hands to reflect and, maybe, learn a thing or two as he waits to get better.

It’s nothing excessive, not at first, but he watches veterinary videos, and live surgeries, and other videos in that same realm (because the books are, uh, a bit too jargon-y for him) multiple times over. Just so he knows. Just in case he needs to know.

In his pack, there’s a first-aid kit. With the use of a mini portal for extra space, the kit has grown to include everything from scalpels to butterfly stitches to sutures to even fiberglass patches.

And obviously the Jupiter Jim brand bandaids stay too.

[cosmicdreamgrl]

𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘫𝘬 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴: (82/?)

+ 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘶𝘴:

[sleepycentric]

cant get them out of my head

they make me ill (in the best way)

boat boys were such a major highlight in double life absolutely one of the most iconic duos in the series!!! RAHHH