#it's made of lead obviously

[dukeofriven]

Hey guys I've been working on a cool new AU and

[wilsonsmcgillsweatshirt]

I will never recover from the knowledge that thymoma generally has a very high survival rate, and in most cases that it becomes fatal, the patient has unknowingly lived with the cancer for years. There's a chance that Wilson was sick for half the series and didn't even know it.

[corsairspade]

Halenthir scenario where they get married for tax benefits (in a platonic good friends sort of way) and fall in love long distance via sending each other letters with ideas on how to best leverage their marriage for tax evasion.

[callixton]

i think the thing to understand abt martha jones is that even after she leaves she is five seconds away from dropping everything and traveling with the doctor at any given time. bc that itch to blow everything up and damn her personal duty to hell in search of a higher call never leaves her. but martha is smart. and rational. and has spent a long fucking time needing to keep herself safe. (bc he comes when she calls but never before.) and so she has gotten very good at keeping herself on the right side of those five seconds. but i do think if ten was a different person (if he could acknowledge how much he needed her instead of just how much he liked her) (if he didn’t feel this righteous martyrdom when it comes to being left alone) (if he cared enough about her to beg. if he cared enough about himself.) i think that her answer no would come crumbling down pretty quickly is all.

[tinderbox210]

For science and fic research purposes 😏

[itsalwaysforyou]

jay not asking coach about letting lonnie onto the team bc he doesn’t want to do anything coach might disagree with…….

[vaugarde]

okay so as a gen 5 stan who does adore the story in bw and bw2, and now that gen 5 has experienced both a vicious hatedom that wouldnt hear a single positive thing about the games, and now a super protective fandom that insists they were perfect and had zero flaws... can we admit now that the bw1 story at least was. a little mid.

[bestworstcase]

...you have instilled A Thought in me, do we even know that Tock was sent by Salem? Afaik there's never been any in-text evidence beyond the assumption that Salem wanted to wipe out SEWs, and I'm not aware of any word-of-god that she was an agent of Salem? Like, our only two "data points" on Salem hunting SEWs is Tock, who we only know was working for someone, and the hound-man, who we know literally nothing about.

I'm about as convinced as can be that Salem has, in fact, spent most of her time just chilling in exile, but I struggle to fully square that with hunting SEWs - what if even that is just another thing Ozma blames on her out of paranoia?

we do, per her amity arena card:

Tock was a proud faunus. She was a predator, a born hunter. It wasn't enough to merely have the green scales, she was a CROC. That meant she needed a nasty bite. It was a tad uncomfortable at times, sure, and took a lot more flossing than she liked, but the looks on her victims' faces when suddenly facing her sharpened metal teeth was worth it. every. time. Master Salem did always warn her, though, to finish her prey before her invulnerability wore off. After all, her aura shattering after those heart pounding sixty seconds was a dangerous price to pay. Still, she could never give up playing with her food, as that was the privilege of a predator, and nothing made Tock feel more alive …than dancing with Death.

and in all fairness to ozma: he’s not the one who proposed that salem has been hunting down silver-eyed warriors. maria’s father* believed that… well, “how could such powerful bloodlines be so rare, unless something was actively seeking to destroy them?” and ruby hears that and goes “salem.”

(*who cannot have been ozma, because maria was among the first generation of huntsmen and her father an old soldier who would’ve been a contemporary of the king of vale)

two obvious flaws in that reasoning:

sometimes a trait is just rare. silver eyes seem to originate from ozma when he has children with partners other than salem, and we know of… two. out of all the lives of his that we’ve glimpsed (four in the lost fable, three in the infinite man, the hermit-wizard, the king of vale, ozpin) only one had children. say it’s been four thousand years and ozma reincarnates, on average, once per century: that’s forty lives. if we’re shown a rough approximation of how often this man has reproduced, he’s only had children in four of them. across four thousand years. no shit they’re rare!

silver eyes are a genetically heritable trait that marks people born with them as destined to “lead the life of a warrior,” to live and die fighting grimm. “unless something was actively seeking to destroy them” YOU MEAN LIKE THE MONSTERS? THE MONSTERS THAT SILVER-EYED WARRIORS ARE LEGENDARY FOR HUNTING? again, no shit it’s a rare trait! warriors, famously, are a lot more likely than most to die young.

add in that oz seems happy to recruit silver-eyed warriors and must know there’s a kernel of truth in the stories, but really doesn’t seem to know much of anything useful—man didn’t so much as mention ruby’s eyes once in v5, he was more concerned with getting her proficient in hand-to-hand combat—and it what it really looks like is that the myths appeal to him as symbols. silver warriors are pure, incorruptible, destined heroes… smaller, more honest souls… et cetera.

it’s the actual silver-eyed warriors going “i can do WHAT NOW with my eyes!? how can this power be so rare, so obscure?”

anyway. our data points are:

maria, a legendary silver-eyed huntress whom salem definitively sent tock to assassinate something like 40-50 years ago

hound guy (??????????)

hazel saying of silver-eyed warriors “we’ve dealt with their kind before,” which might be in reference to hound guy.

summer rose, who joined salem.

not a data point strictly speaking, but worth taking into account: silver eyes are said over and over again to be very rare, so salem logically can’t be offing them by the score, nor keeping dozens locked up in a laboratory somewhere. there just aren’t enough of them!

also not strictly a data point: two empty seats at salem’s table, one of them accounted for by summer rose. if summer is working for salem of her own volition, then salem isn’t averse to working alongside silver-eyes; ergo, her problem with them must be with what most of them do, which is kill grimm.

salem is grimm. the grimm have been her only real companions for thousands of years. it is also fairly obvious at this point that grimm are not mindless soulless killing machines, because they keep behaving like emotional beings with a high degree of social organization and far more individuality than they’re given credit for. salem—

—cares about them. it tracks that she’d assassinate silver-eyed warriors who gained the kind of prominence maria did. i think it’s probably worth noting that the one absolute certainty it-is-what-it-looks-like data point in regard to salem killing silver-eyed warriors is… a legendary huntress who had nothing to do with ozpin or his conspiracy but went around calling herself the grimm reaper.

ignoring ozma’s imaginary shadow war whilst living in exile doesn’t necessarily mean salem wasn’t doing anything bad at all; just that whatever she got up to didn’t have anything to do with him.

that she targeted maria rather than anyone affiliated with oz in and of itself is an implication that she wasn’t paying much attention to him at the time; conversely, there hasn’t been so much as a hint that salem ever sent anyone to assassinate summer, ozpin’s token silver-eyed warrior, in the years before summer found her. and then hound guy is just a pile of question marks punctuated by an empty chair and me squinting at the lovecraft story very hard; if nothing else, the sixth empty seat at her table and the implied timeline of cinder being the impetus for that experiment gives me pause.

[lollytea]

I do love the netflix avatar in my own way because it provides me with enrichment in the same way brain puzzles do for chimps. Like something is WRONG here and it's your very special job to figure out why! And then you will get juice reward!!

[batsplat]

i don’t know too much about motogp in depth enough to send specific asks but please know that i am ALWAYS seated for your class! i really enjoy reading your takes + essays

man this is so so kind, I am always a little lost for stuff to say when I just get like. people being lovely in my inbox - trust I do read and appreciate it, just get very hung up on the responding bit

anyway, this ask I think was sent the day after this long post about the similarities between casey and valentino was dropped, which has kinda been where this blog has been living for the past month,, so. in my head. I'm choosing to believe this was specifically about that essay. and I just wanted to quickly toss in one more thing - y'know the bit about sachsenring 2010, right, where valentino shows up way way ahead of schedule from the whole broken leg situation and also jorge and casey have kinda been engaging in a teensy bit of trash talk in his absence and the vibes are. off

so then casey and valentino had a very tight very cool battle for the last podium position, 10/10 would recommend, low key one of the top 3-4 races that season. valentino's fighting his demons (leg recently broken), casey's fighting his demons (bike sucks), you can tell how badly they want to beat each other... and casey manages to take the shine off valentino's return by snatching the final podium place in what you just like. know. was extremely satisfying to him. you just know it!! he won't say it because he's so hung up on the 'ooh I don't get obsessed with my rivals' shtick (lol) but it's very obvious how badly he wants to beat valentino! and then after the race when they're talking to the press, casey's like,, valentino's comeback is really not that serious, the leg's fine he's just lost a bit of muscle mass,, idk why everyone's making such a big deal,, and then valentino starts throwing jibes in his direction about how CASEY would have complained if VALENTINO had ridden like CASEY had, but of course VALENTINO would never do such a thing,,, and in the timeline of the rivalry this is very much when we start descending to kindergarten level

anyway given the tone of the on-track battle and how much shit they talk about each other in the immediate aftermath, you simply have to be deeply endeared by how they behave post-race when they're actually on the bike. classic hand grab and thumbs up situation, valentino recognising casey's performance in all its viciousness:

but then what really prompted this whole thing was. this photo..? where valentino has managed to straight up reach into casey's helmet:

like is he trying to poke casey's eyes out what's happening here. looks like he's doing finger guns in his face. why's he getting so close. isn't this a lovely quirky little photo... casey's doing an insincere thumbs up at him and valentino's attempting to stroke his cheek. fascinating. they're about to say some out of pocket shit about each other to the press btw

[jakeperalta]

I wish taylor still did pre-release lead singles. I know she doesn't need to but I just like them

[aroacettorney]

au where bretus kindom took marias selmore as hostage to blackmail casey and have her track down heathcliff van bretus for them

[oifaaa]

it’s not that serious but i guess my issue with the kinda newish (not really) wave of people who engage or create batfam content without reading the comics is that while, yeah, they may claim “it’s fandom it’s supposed to be fun!” but i think it’s also fair for people who actually read comics to say “it’s kinda bad that the fandom for COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS has become controlled and dominated by people who don’t read comics” like i’m not even really into batman comics, im more of a vertigo person myself, but like the idea of joining a fandom because you like and enjoy the source material, and you want to find a community of people who feel the same, but the fandom is full of people who barely know the story, characters, and arcs but act as though they do. and they do this while spreading misinformation about the source material so widely that the actual source material begins to reflect the fanon version of it…… like that’s just such a wild chain of events and tbh no wonder batman fans who read comics get so mad about it

Yeah like I'm not the type of person who wants to police how people have fun I think that's bullshit but it kinda makes it really difficult for people who do just want to read fics or find character analysis of the actual canon characters when half the people making this content haven't read the comics and are working off at this point ocs with the same names

I think it also creates issues when you're trying to have a conversation with someone about comics and it becomes this almost minefield as you try to figure out if this person has actually read the comic or if all their information is from second hand sources bc it's not unreasonable for people to read the source material and then not remember every detail later on or have their own fanon takes or just their own opinions and having a conversation with someone who hasn't read the original comics but acts like they have makes that conversation a wee bit harder and less fun for everyone involved

[lokh]

me, approximately two decades too late: waow.... decode really DOES go hard

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh