#is the dynamic for which I live

[stealingpotatoes]

heres a crappy venn (??) diagram explaining the dynamics in the tl4j time travel au bc it's easier than trying to write a full plot

[numberonejeanshipper]

apprentices

[sodapopper]

Okay. Hmm. I hear you with the “Soda and addiction” headcanons because on a surface level, I get where folks are coming from. He’s an adrenaline junkie, the world is loud and overwhelming, he finds ways to drown it out. I see what’s happening with those headcanons. I sort of get the vision.

But I feel like everything we learn about him in canon directly contradicts the idea of an addictive Soda.

He doesn’t drink. (I know people theorize Ponyboy is wrong about this, but listen, we have to believe the kid sometimes or the entire concept of canon becomes a joke.) He rarely ever smokes. He stays out of fights to protect Darry’s custody. He keeps a steady job. He’s faithful to his girlfriend and has a longterm goal to settle down with her—and canon implies they were having little, if any, sex.

For being flighty and easily distracted, Soda actually seems comparatively responsible, at least when paired against most of the guys in his circle—and if you’re not willing to believe Ponyboy’s narration, I think Darry’s trust in Soda is the biggest proof of this. These guys “know the score” and living recklessly isn’t just a matter of personal lifestyle, it’s something that directly affects their family. Soda is aware of this and the repercussions his actions have on Darry’s custody, and I simply can’t believe he’s out there living the Two-Bit life behind his brothers’ backs.

NOT TO SAY he’s living responsibly, because, well, he’s still Soda. But there’s a measure of awareness and self control that I don’t think we give him credit for having.

Pinning Soda as the addictive brother is ironic to me when PONYBOY MICHAEL CURTIS IS RIGHT THERE. The kid who eats handfuls of aspirin. Who can’t live without pepsi. Who chainsmokes at 14.

One of the Curtis boys has an addictive personality, and it ain’t Soda.

[strialternatives]

I love your postcanon shuake AU where they're just traveling the world and getting into shenanigans LOL ❤️❤️ They seem like they would be the main leads of the funniest and cutest romcom ever

thanks so much, i think about them a lot lol and absolutely! in my head, shuake in general are on each other's (freak) wavelengths about 80% of the time, and it's that other semi-rare 20% where complications arise,

hence them taking like several months to officially get together after they start traveling alone!

(Akechi thought the romantic proposal was implicit in his offer for Akira to come traveling the world with him. It was not.)

[lynzishell]

Prev // Next

Transcript below the cut:

Ash Texting:

Asher: I’m here. Asher: This place is dead. Where are you?

Asher: [laughing] Jesus Christ, Lex. Lex: I missed you. Asher: Me too.

Asher: So, what are we looking for? Lex: Not sure yet. I’ll know it when I see it. Asher: Of course.

Asher: How about a very tall martini? Lex: You laugh, but that would actually look so cute in my apartment. Asher: If you say so.

Lex: I’m pissed at you, by the way. Asher: [scoffs] Get in line. What have I done now? Lex: You told me when you left Rainy Day that we’d still hang out all the time, but I haven’t seen you in five months. FIVE!

Asher: I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy. But we’re getting close. I’ll have more time again soon. Lex: I hope so. When are you moving back to the city? Asher: …

Lex: Ash? When are you moving back to the city? Asher: [nervous] We’re not. Lex: You’re staying in the Bay? I should’ve known.

Asher: No, we’re not staying there. We’ve been looking at San Sequoia. Lex: You can’t be serious. Asher: I know, I was unsure at first, but the more I look at it… I don’t know, I just see it. Lex: See what? Asher: Me and Atlas, settling down and raising our kids and building a life there.

Asher: Where are you going?

Lex: [sniffles] Asher: Lex?

Asher: Hey. Talk to me. Lex: This is it, isn’t it? The end of our friendship. Asher: No, of course not. Why would you say that? Lex: ... Asher: Come on, let’s go sit down.

Lex: Let’s not pretend things aren’t changing. I mean, you live an hour and a half away and we haven’t seen each other since March. And your kids aren’t even born yet! If you think you don’t have time now, just wait.

Asher: That doesn’t mean our friendship is over. We just have to be more intentional about calling each other and staying in touch. And I’ll let you know any time I’m in town. And you can come visit us whenever you want. No matter how much time goes by, we’ll always be friends.

Lex: I suppose. Still, it feels like the end of an era. You’ve been by my side forever. Hell, you were there when I got my braces off. Asher: It’s true. You were there when I adopted Jasper. Lex: We got drunk for the first time together. Asher: [laughs] And high.

Lex: You took me in when my parents kicked me out. Asher: You held my hand while I came out to mine. Lex: You put up with me when I fell in love for the first time. Asher: You put up with me when I got my heart broken for the first time.

Lex: Can I tell you a secret about that? Asher: What? Lex: I was the one who threw a brick through the window at Elias’ studio. Asher: Can I tell you a secret? Lex: What?

Asher: I already knew that. I’m the one that paid to get it fixed. Lex: Why would you do that? Asher: Because, you dimwit, he had cameras. You’re just lucky he called me instead of the cops. Lex: Well shit. Why didn’t you tell me? Asher: [shrugs] Because I kinda loved you for it.

Lex: I’m gonna miss out on so many firsts when you move away. Asher: Like what? Lex: Like the first time your kid pisses on you. Asher: [laughs] I’ll be sure to call you and give you a complete play-by-play. Lex: You better.

Lex: I’m gonna miss you. Asher: Me too. But I’m not gone yet, so how about we go get you that giant martini. Lex: Think we can carry it to my building and up the stairs without breaking it? Asher: Hell yeah. We got this.

[lilmissnatcat24]

ive seen so many different headcanons for this and i love them all so please unleash hell on this post

[fumifooms]

What if we were both magic prodigies and it otherized us in different ways and we devoted ourselves to protecting a family member who has general other goals & priorities. What if we both did self-sacrifical devotion in opposite ways.

What if we were dark mirrors of each other and where I've grown overcontrolling you've grown complacent. What if, bought as a servant into a pretty loving home, ownership and control is what love looks like to me, and to you neglected and lonely growing up, love is gratefully taking any scraps of it you’re lent.

By belonging to someone, even if she comes back injured or fails at finding Delgal, she feels like she belongs and is cherished, by owning someone he feels safe in them not leaving him.

She’s what’s tethering him do you see… And he’s the only thing giving her direction and purpose in her state. She needs a compass and he needs a support.

They’re both so out of it 😭 It’s the weirdly intense and unearned mutual trust and reliance on each other?? They’re each other’s weird little comfort codependent teddy bear. Or at least they were headed towards that before SHE DIED THEN HE DIED THEN THEY BOTH FORGOT ABOUT EACH OTHER AND NEVER MET EVER AGAIN. Though she’s also the guard attack hound keeping him safe… And vice versa he heals her and can rewrite her very being with just one wave of his hand. They’re both so so mentally and physically vulnerable both but they cling onto each other. They can’t perceive things accurately but despite it all someway somehow they stumble into something closer to resembling companionship just before they both die. Falin is just that kind and Thistle is just that lonely. Overworked.

We both haven’t lived for ourselves in a very long time, haven’t we.

They both have a similar devotion to the people they love but again the difference is that Thistle starts overtsepping while Falin is self-effacing. The other difference between them is that people care about Falin <3 People have given up on Thistle long ago, and he has given people reasons to, while people refuse to give up on Falin. Yaad has a mini arc about it dw about it it’s ok he’s not all alone in the end 😭😭 He reached out for Marcille’s hand but they already all wanted to help him, they just had to be given the chance to, Yaad just had to be given the chance to, it’s okay I’m okay

Hey what if we learned to get in touch with our own identity and the world around us and living in the present again through being in the worst codependent situationship ever.

Falin and Thistle sitting in a tree, sucking on flowers together because they’re h-u-n-g-r-y 💕💕💕

I bet he’s only ever thought of flowers as useless ornaments. Weak weeds. But she shows him they’re tasty and useful and good and pretty in their own right too and deserve existing without proving their worth and waaa <33 Thistles…... Did you know thistles taste sweet if you remove the thorns and eat them?

"Even as a chimera, her kind nature remains" you can’t suppress her in the way that matters. You can’t soothe him in the way that matters. It’s doomed. You’re doomed. It’s all doomed. Save me.

[nyxi-pixie]

actually incredibly funny to me that ranpos entire thing centres on how his intelligence is not because of an ability or any other great thing, its just him. hes entirely, completely, inarguably human. and Yet, when it comes to dazai, so many people are Desperate that there just Has to be another explanation. his intelligence cant just be that hes unusual, no it must be a marker of separation, of difference so great it disallows the reality of his humanity.

[pollux-starsz]

the only context you're getting is they all got married to each other

Dca Slasher AU belongs to @wyervan ! Check them out!

When your newfound husbands love each other as much as they love you amirite

as i said many times, her in a suit, them in dresses.

I did this within the span of 20 minutes.

Also bonus: some doodles i did on krita to test it!for context, she's being forced by them both to stay with them. They're attempting to prove they arent that bad (they say as they then slash someone)

in short: she lives with them now by their rules (save her)

[valyrfia]

don't feel like you have to respond to this if you don't want to but....what are your hottest, potentially cancellable takes on grid dynamics in the 2024 grid?

Dear lord I have a few. It's worth saying that @tsarinablogs and I are a hive mind at this point, so most stuff you see on either of our blogs we have communed about (and she's spoken about it a lot more than I have) but with great trepidation and no real desire to elaborate further:

Max and Charles are a lot closer than they let on. Not best friends, but I'm talking probably have drinks once a month, they're too familiar with each other to just be coworkers

Not really grid dynamics, but Charles travels Monaco on a scooter with a nondescript helmet for when he doesn't want to be spotted

Charles and Carlos are the fakest friends you've ever seen but even they get convinced by their own mind games sometimes

Lando likes being friends with a world champion a lot more than he likes being friends with Max

Max likes Lando a lot more than Lando likes Max

Max and Daniel aren't close at all anymore

Carlos and Lando do play it up for the bit but they are genuinely close friends

Pierre and Esteban definitely attempted reciprocal murder at some point in the last year

Charles and Pierre's friendship wouldn't work if Pierre was a better driver

Charles can be traced back to a lot more of the drama than people think

Only drivers that Charles, Lewis, Max truly respect on the grid are each other (Fernando is in a special category that does not permeate our understanding of respect)

George is only tolerable if you let him think he's the smartest person in the room

I have more, but these are the ones off the top of my head.

[otaku553]

More reluctant king sabo au! I realized recently that this au is an excellent excuse for drawing sabo in pretty outfits that he would be absolutely miserable in :)

[quatregats]

Thinking a lot of thoughts about Hornblower's relationships with Barbara and Maria as a metaphor for his larger relationship to social mobility and ambition, and I think there's actually a lot there - not sure if it was intentional, but I do think that whether intentionally or inadvertently, Forester did an interesting job with the parallels.

Quick note beforehand that some of this is based on my constant brief paging through C. Northcote Parkinson's Hornblower "biography", which, while I absolutely abhor his interpretation of Hornblower, gives even more food for thought on this point. I'm also leaning more into his interpretation of Hornblower's background and childhood, as opposed to the TV show's, so it might not work if you're coming from the TV show's perspective.

Parkinson takes Forester's comment that Hornblower was a "doctor's son" to mean that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician like in the show. I'm not a historian of the period, so I would be hard-pressed to actually try to fit Hornblower's father within the 18th-century framework of medical practice, but either way, given his awkwardness around upper-class life and that he seems to have grown up in rural Kent, I think that Parkinson's claim that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician, does have some reasonable foundation, or is at least equally plausible (to me) as the show's.

Hornblower struggles with poverty through most of the series, especially the first half, but even when he is barely scraping by, such as at the start of Lieutenant, this does not seem to be an abnormal state; and when he finally arrives at wealth and success, he constantly wishes to go back to the days when he was a penniless lieutenant, so from this we might also surmise that he did not come from wealth. (I'm also comparing especially to Jack Aubrey, who, while he admittedly makes a hash of coming into large amounts of money, and who also lives perfectly happily on very little, is clearly quite comfortable being the "lord of the manor" by comparison.)

One of the biggest changes in the second half of the series (from The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters onward) is that Hornblower's career comes into fruition; he becomes a decorated Captain, a member of the landed gentry, a Knight of Bath, a Peer, and finally an admiral, and marries into an enormously influential family. He's constantly in conflict about this, until he isn't: he wants to become someone powerful and important, except that he doesn't like the role once he gets it, and constantly wishes about the old days, then feels guilty for wishing for them. Most importantly, he seems to become less and less himself, his mental narrative getting more and more distorted as he tries to mold himself into the person he thinks he wants to be.

I don't think this is a particular novel interpretation, but I think that in light of this, the contrast between his marriage to Maria and his marriage to Barbara is very interesting. If he was an apothecary's son, his and Maria's marriage would make a decent amount of sense - they'd be from similar social backgrounds, and probably a reasonable match, if Hornblower's career had continued as expected. Hornblower feels comfortable around Maria at the start of their friendship and the very beginning of their marriage in a way that mirrors his comfort with the life he's living at that point - which is to say that he clearly knows and understands what's expected of him and how to interact, in clear contrast with later books. But on the other hand, for all that he originally does love Maria, Hornblower comes to find her to be coarse, unrefined, and boring, and feel that she is not good enough for the person he wants to become. It's at the point when he starts to feel that he's moved passed Maria that he begins to take on his new, ambitious, performative persona.

On the other hand, Hornblower feels stiff and uncomfortable around Barbara from the beginning of their relationship, notably for reasons of class, and even in later books, consistently sounds intimidated by her poise and upper-class untouchability. With Maria he doesn't feel enough for her; with Barbara he feels too much, an almost uncouth sentimentality. He craves Barbara's status like a man drowning, but can't hold up under the weight of what it would mean. They have very strong intellectual chemistry, but socially they are a disaster of a couple, and yet nonetheless, Hornblower continues with the marriage because it feels to him like the thing he ought to do, just as he ought to become squire of Smallbridge. He's so viscerally uncomfortable with his position in the later books in a way he wasn't even at the height of his earlier miseries, but he refuses to let himself admit that his ambitions might have led him astray.

I think it's also interesting that the relationship which Hornblower arguably finds the most fulfilling (or rather, it was written very poorly if Forester wanted to make it feel fulfilling for the reader, but nonetheless it was clearly meant to be the most fulfilling for Hornblower) is his relationship with Marie, who sits at a similar odd juncture to him. In the text, Forester says outright that Marie fulfills Hornblower's interest in upper-class women (ambition) while not intimidating him, yet still being a satisfying intellectual partner. Nonetheless, just as Marie and Hornblower can never actually end up together, Hornblower can never actually be comfortable with his position, and no matter how many times he tries to find solace in her, he is eventually forced to continue down the path that he began, making up with Barbara and fully taking up the mantle of Admiral and Peer of the Realm.

In short, I think that watching the way in which Hornblower's relationship with Maria evolves over the course of the early books and the way in which his relationship with Barbara takes up after that ends up being a very neat parallel to his own ambitions and class identity. With Maria he is at home, but bored and restless; with Barbara he gets everything that he wants, but feels like a fish out of water. I think that particular parallel is part of the particular tragedy of Hornblower - he can't ever be satisfied with the person he was, or the person he's become. But I think that adding in aspects of extreme class difference - even more class difference than the general trends of social mobility during this period - also helps to elucidate the fundamental tension which drives Hornblower forward as a character. The world he came from was too small for him; the world in which he moves now is far too big; but there's no in-between option. He has to choose what he wants to be, and sacrifice some part of himself in order to do that, and in light of this reading of him, I think that there's a lot of interesting dilemmas to be raised.

[byemambo]

KIM NU RIM AS DOHOE

Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo (2024) | 1.01

Ready to get my heart crushed by another Hwang Da Seul production </3

[verathena14]

the siblings everrrrrrr

[transingthoseformers]

i once dreamed of a trailer for a tarn solo movie. he was stranded on earth with nothing but dumb little organics for company and he was waiting for megatron (his gay was showing)

YAY TRANSFORMER DREAM

Situations where we're focusing on just one bot on Earth are always interesting, especially in a decepticon context (especially one as specific and specialized as Tarn)

can you imagine him getting attached and then finding out it's his Lord's plan to kill off humanity, giving him a choice to make

[peliginspeaks]

Yeah I'm not done Veilsposting actually. Woops. Anyways, the longer I think about it, the more its bounty has a very clear class implication that goes along with Veils' desire to not so much have a rival, as have a victim who draws out the killing. 4 billion Echoes. Think about who would go for that. A bounty like that, a share big enough to fund your life many times over and ridiculous enough to be a warning in itself, is going to pull out the overconfident, the overly curious, and the desperate. The type of people baited into hunting Veils would end up being: 1. Rich hunters armed to the teeth looking for glory, 2. The odd curious Neathy newcomer who's about to get way in over their head, and 3. Anyone too desperate to turn down a chance at the money, even if they know the chance is low if anything.

The first kind it could be flashy about dismantling, and prideful in its ability to overcome a well-funded arsenal. The last two kinds of people will be afraid. Openly, miserably, viscerally afraid. It enjoys that. There's a reason it takes its good sweet time actually showing up to try and kill the PC in the late stages of BaL, even though it can travel through Parabola and definitely has the resources to just have them assassinated at a distance if it really came down to it. It wanted desperate people to come to it, and it wanted them to jump through the ridiculous side-quest hoops the Scarred Naturalist set out, and it wanted them to show up and be afraid, for its own entertainment. For a chance at prize money they never had a shot at getting.

What I'm saying is modern-day Veils would fund those humiliating game shows.