#just tell me to die or something

[collophora]

This fic is leaving rent free in my head since a week so go read it: Haunting by @iiidunno : https://archiveofourown.org/works/54832273/chapters/138984958 [Edit] ok I put half a BG 'cause really It was bothering me

[holographic-mars]

(Wip) he was supposed to love me

[bumblydumbly]

i think that if kabru saw that “laios meeting falin for the first time” strip he’d be sobbing uncontrollably

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[hoshiina]

pairing: hoshina soushirou x gn!reader (no prns)

summary: he struggled to fall in love while you struggled to value your life the way you valued others, entire fic is inspired by one line from nandemonaiyo by macaroni empitsu

warnings: not suicidal acts but it is very selfless behaviour from the reader, reader does not exactly fear death, hoshina calls you "darling"

wc: 1500

Hoshina Soushirou struggled to fall in love, to accept that he was in love without feeling so terribly vulnerable, and you knew this. On the other hand, you struggled to value your own life the way you valued others, and he knew this. And surprisingly, or perhaps unfortunately, this combination pieced together your relationship far better than one would expect.

You were a platoon leader in the 3rd division, and you’ve been for quite a while now. You were good at what you did, bringing people together and livening up the mood when times got dark. Still, you were strong enough to not only get the job done, but also to cover for your officers when things got tough. While you enjoyed what you did, and took pride in the position you were given, you weren’t exactly fond of it anymore.

You were sick and tired of seeing your officers die, and the thought of them gone kept you up at night. Not to mention there was nothing could get rid of the guilt you felt when you had to inform their loved ones of their passing. Well, perhaps you didn’t have to inform them personally, but to you, it was the least you could do. But it hurt you so much, no matter the number of times you’ve gone through it through all these years. Even if it was inevitable considering your job, and even if it wasn’t something you had much control over, you just couldn’t get used to it— nor did you really want to. So a few years back, you had sworn that you’d protect your officers, even if it meant you’d lose your life. If risking your life was going to save theirs, there wasn’t even a need to hesitate, you’d do it every single time.

And Hoshina knew this. He knew you would and he also knew there was no stopping you at this point, because he agreed. He was the vice-captain of the 3rd division, he knew exactly how you felt and couldn’t agree more. He also knew that you took these passings to your heart. He knew the thoughts kept you up at night, and he knew just how much they broke your heart. So subconsciously, he tried not to get attached. He had locked up his feelings after a while and so he loved you a little— just a little. He was good at this too, because he naturally struggled to fall in love in the first place. He struggled to accept he was in love.

And as horrible as this sounded, you knew this and you wanted him to, because when it comes down to it, if you were to leave him behind, what you were doing would be no different. And that was the last thing you wanted to do— leave someone who loved you behind.

While this sounded like nothing more than a broken relationship, at the end of the day you were undeniably in love with him and he was as well— there was no doubting that. Although he didn't believe in being with someone while constantly on the brink of death, he still loved you and he still wished to be by your side, the same way you were absolutely in love with him. So this was just the way it was.

It was obvious whenever one of your officers passed, it was always all over your face. As soon as you walked into your shared unit, even if you put on a smile and laughed, he’d see it in your eyes right away. He’d sense it in the way you walked and the way you talked. The way you’d be a little zoned out, and sounded terribly exhausted.

Every time this happened, he made you a warm cup of tea and squeezed your cheeks as he gave you a warm kiss, and you’d realize that he caught on again. Today was one of those days again.

“It’s not your fault, darling,” he said. “You did everything you could, I know this. You know this.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to mope around and ruin your day,” you said, and he shook his head. “I’m just a little tired of myself, for watching my coworkers who followed my lead and trusted my orders to just… die. Also, horribly ashamed to face their family— I could never apologize enough.”

“Yeah, that’s probably the hardest part,” he said.

“I know they don’t blame me, nor do they show how lost they are when they’re in front of me,” you said. “But when they’re alone, at night, they’ll start to think. It’s always harder for those left behind.”

“I won’t ever leave you behind,” he said as he kissed your forehead.

“Oh, don’t say that now,” you said. “When I’m gone you better not mope around. You're going to go find someone who won’t go dying on you any moment. You better not miss me.”

“Oh, don’t you say that. We’re not trying to jinx anything over here,” he said, flicking you on the forehead, which you quickly put your hand over. “Besides I’ll be fine. You know this.”

You did, and it made you smile. While even you thought it’d break your heart to hear the man you loved say he’d be fine without you, it was still a bit of a relief to you. This was okay.

“But really, you’d better not leave me behind,” you said.

“I would never,” he said.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

He’d be lying if he said this didn’t break his heart a little, but he did find strange comfort in it. Or he used to at the very least. He had always been this way, it had always scared him to fall in love, to find someone important to him, and become someone important to someone. So being in a relationship came with a large sense of guilt for him, because he was never able to let go of himself and love, and he feared how unfair this was. But now, he could just love you a little, and detach himself from the rest. It was easier for him to do so.

It was supposedly, exactly what he wanted.

Yet, every time there was a mission he thought about you. He thought about whether you’d do something reckless today, or whether you’d come home injured. He prayed that none of your officers would be in danger, because he knew you’d be fine alone. He wished that you’d come home that night and scold him again for staying up too late or drinking coffee at 3 in the morning. He hoped that you’d laugh if he were to crack the stupid joke he came up with just now, and you’d make him laugh in the morning over some silly mistake you'd complain about.

He hoped that you wouldn’t leave him behind.

“Oh,” he said.

“What is it, Hoshina?” Okonogi asked.

“Sorry, nothing,” he said. “I’ll stop spacing out.”

“Rather unlike you, to be,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I fear it is.”

It truly was rather unlike him to be hopelessly in love, and to know that he was. He was hopelessly in love with you.

This just wasn’t the right time to realize, because he had a horrifying number of kaiju to deal with in front of him. Each one of them separately would not have been a problem for him, but there were just so many— not to mention they were working together. He’d be fine though, because he promised he wouldn’t leave you behind, and who was he to be breaking a promise with you?

Soon after, Okonogi had made the decision to call people over to support him, and immediately you rushed over. You knew you had your platoon to be watching over and you weren’t the closest to him, but none of that mattered. If he was gone, you’d truly be nothing, even if that wasn’t the same for him with you.

Yet, by the time you had made it he had already neutralized every last kaiju.

“Soushirou!” you yelled, rushing over to him. He was so beaten up as he lay on the ground, absolutely still, it took everything in you to not think about the worst. Until he raised his arm to give you a weak thumbs up. “You absolute asshole. You promised you wouldn’t leave me behind.”

He smiled as you reached his side.

“You’ll be okay,” you said, sounding more like you were trying to convince yourself. “The ambulance is coming.”

“You know, I was thinking,” he said, and immediately you shot him a glare as if to warn him that this better be good if he’s wasting his breath on it.

But it was.

“Darling, I’d die if you left me behind.”

[justaz]

like i’ve said time and time again, i haven’t watched bbc merlin in years but i was just wondering when the first time merlin called arthur by his name to his face and im scrolling thru the transcripts on the fandom wiki (supposedly it was s1ep4 btw) and im skimming the script for all these episodes and getting angrier and angrier. gaius was wrong for all that. morgana deserved so much better. edwin muirden was valid as hell (for targeting uther AND gaius. yeah. i said it.). also kilgharrah ate with that one lil line “then turn a blind eye. that is, after all, your talent” okay lizard brain pop offff.

[introspectivememories]

sorry but do you ever think about the fact that the bernard we have today is a direct amalgamation of everything that happened in his past and i know that sound like such an obvious statement to say but it actually kills me to know that you can draw a direct line from who he is today all the way back to that sixteen year old boy who watched his best friend bleed out. like it is the defining moment in his life. it fundamentally shaped who he is and the person he's become. he is the bernard we know and love not despite the grieves shooting but because of it. because the gangs all got together and shot up his school. because tim walked out of that room with nothing but a baseball bat. because his darla got shot. because he watched her gasp and cry as she died. because he watched the blood coagulate around the wound. because he sat there and held her hand as her life drained out of her. because he walked into school that day with a joke he knew would make her laugh and her nose would scrunch up and she'd snort a little and tim would roll his eyes at him and call him ridiculous and instead he walked out with a bloody white shirt, blood under his fingernails, and two friends less. because, even now, almost half a decade out from the shooting, he thinks that if he closes his eyes, he will always be that stupid, scared little sixteen year old, holding the cooling body of dead best friend.

[anneapocalypse]

Tired of the false dichotomy between "you should create for yourself without desiring any form of connection" and "feedback is everything and without it there's no reason to create." Neither of these things are wholly true, and it's frustrating to me that people have taken "create for yourself" to mean "you shouldn't want feedback or enjoy it, you should create in a vacuum with no hope of human connection" and are lashing back against what they think it's saying rather than what it's actually saying. I love comments and feedback and connecting with my readers as much as anyone and would never discount the value of that experience and I try to be the kind of engaged reader I would want to have because I know how much it means. I especially know how much it means to a niche creator because I've been that creator myself and I so treasure the readers who took a chance, gave my stuff a try, and stopped to say something supportive about it.

But that's also exactly the thing: the things I want to write are often things that do not in any way guarantee me an audience, but they're what I enjoy, and creating for myself is what gets me through those long first drafts where I know there is no guarantee of an audience because the reality is I'm choosing to write this thing and nobody owes me a readership. Internal motivation matters because there are parts of the creative process where internal motivation is all you have. I've seen people give up or nearly give up on projects that probably would have found an audience, if a niche one, because they convinced themselves that nobody would care and then couldn't motivate themselves to care. Or they decided that a small audience wasn't good enough; they need their work to be Popular or it was worth nothing.

And if someone doesn't want to invest themselves in creating something that might have a small audience, well, that's their choice. But creativity is inherently an act of risk, and a lot of amazing art would never be made if the creator wasn't willing to risk silence, rejection, loneliness. Yeah, those things suck. I'm not saying they don't, that's why it's a risk. But art isn't always about safety. Sometimes it's about creating because you simply have to get this thing out of your head, and you hope someone will connect with it, but you don't know until you try. So everything can't be external motivation. It just can't be. It's too limiting, it's too stifling. I can't live that way, personally.

[suja-janee]

I love Lucy Maclean, she’s such a sweetheart

[transmechanicus]

The news has reached me that there are canon female custodes, and that the reactions have been mmm well, mixed. I don’t play custodes on tabletop but i do love the faction, and i think it’s an interesting and harmless little addition to the setting. Somewhere in the mists of time some custodes put his genhanced transhuman mind to work and asked himself “What if instead of just taking boy babies for the Full Genome Restructuring Into An Exalted Demigod…what if we took all the babies.” Now we have the Golden Roughly Twenty Thousand, double the protection for the Emperor😌

[repmet]

You don't have to sacrifice yourself.

[fandomunsexyman]

SVSSS is a novel with a fandom.

[ID: A Scum Villain edit of the "missing the point" meme. A bullet arcs from velinxi art of child Shen Jiu kneeling while furiously glaring. The bullet says, "People are not entirely one thing or the other and holding them to these extremes ignores the complexities that come with their humanity." It arcs over the head of a person across from it, who ignores the bullet and exclaims: "Wow!! Shen Jiu's only crime was being mean and was wrongly hated!" End ID]

[ideologyofone]

Alright time for me to start my nonsense

(Possible) reasons why Jinx has cut her hair in s2

She doesn’t want to be a symbol for Zaun and all the art people have made of her feature her braids prominently so she chops them off

She doesn’t know how to braid her hair, Silco did it for her

Someone ELSE cuts it off her Flynn Rider style, why idk

Someone grabs her by her hair and she cuts it to escape

She cuts it off to let Jinx go and put her in the past (like letting go of Powder) after Ekko tells her moving forward means leaving things behind

And the worst most HEINOUS possibility I will fight the arcane writers for, SOMETHING happens to the mini Jinx and she cuts it off so her hair looks more like hers (I really hate this theory)

[brucie-baby]

imagine you have such intense control issues that you plan for every scenario you possibly can in order to prevent feeling as helpless as you did at eight years old. imagine feeling like you need to create backup plans upon backup plans regarding both friend and foe alike because you can never be sure what the future will hold but you need to be prepared for it (not for your sake, but for theirs, and for the world's. you will not let them hurt people that do not deserve it. you will not let them experience that guilt, that grief. you will not let anybody else become that child staring at his parents' unblinking eyes).

imagine coming up with a plan that sits at the back of your mind in which you completely rewire someone's brain as a last resort, only to be used on the worst of the worst because you would never take away someone's autonomy unless you felt it absolutely necessary (you hope it will never be necessary because you believe in second third fourth chances. you believe that everybody can change for the better. you need to believe that everybody can change for the better. you hope it will never be necessary because to change someone so drastically is to kill who they once were).

imagine your mind is taken over by the worst version of yourself. imagine believing that you are in control of your every action but knowing that you are different somehow. imagine being convinced by the voice in your head that you are doing the right thing; that this will save him; that you can stop him from dying an awful, tragic death once again. imagine finally waking up, finally being free, and finding that not only had you brainwashed yourself, but you had brainwashed your son. that you had taken that lastresort-worstoftheworst-pleaseneverdothis plan and used it on your child, someone that you love more than you thought yourself capable.

imagine that all you wanted was to protect yourself and the ones you love and yet somehow you have made things worse than they have ever been.

you wanted control over the unpredictable. it was a flawed plan from the start. where do you go from here?

[aroaceleovaldez]

the “canon” fatal flaw that bugs me the most is that Nico’s is allegedly supposed to be “holding grudges” but LITERALLY EVERYTHING HE DOES SAYS OTHERWISE

the only instances we get of Nico even remotely doing anything with a “grudge” is him spontaneously, randomly, on rare occasion referencing being grumpy at something - THAT HE IS ENTIRELY VALID TO BE UPSET AT - and then does nothing with that. other than maybe continue to be vaguely grumpy about it and then drop it. In fact, Nico is consistently EXTREMELY forgiving to people despite him having perfectly valid reasons to not forgive them. Percy literally choked Nico and ditched him in the Underworld and Nico STILL brought Percy to the River Styx and faced off against Hades to bring THREE gods and an army of the undead to Percy’s aid, despite Hades actively suggesting alternatives to Nico and encouraging Nico to not do that.

Nico’s fatal flaw is so clearly either that he does not let go of things (not the same as holding grudges) OR that he’s far too willing to put others before himself, often directly putting himself at risk instead. He’s too self-sacrificial. He was explicitly willing to trade HIMSELF for Bianca and extremely resistant to letting go of her. He put himself on the line facing against Hades to help Percy MULTIPLE TIMES. He risked getting in trouble with the Underworld to bring back Hazel. He WILLING WENT INTO TARTARUS to try to close the Doors of Death himself. He offered to shadow-travel the Athena Parthenos for Reyna despite knowing it would most likely kill him. Etc. etc. The closest Nico has ever gotten to “holding a grudge” was being mad at Leo for faking his own death, and even then he was only Mildly Annoyed and got over it pretty quickly after Leo returned.

Nico “holding grudges” is a load of bull. Percy’s loyalty? Annabeth’s hubris? Absolutely true. Percy’s loyalty to Annabeth and Annabeth’s hubris are what got them pulled into Tartarus (also, interestingly - Percy’s hubris in TLO and Annabeth’s loyalty taking a knife for him is what nearly got them killed then). Nico, though? Nico’s willingness to put himself on the line for the sake of others is what nearly got him killed in BoTL and TLO and HoO and brought him to Tartarus multiple times, now! “Holding grudges,” yeah, right.

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

Put a bullet in his brain and we'll take Maxwell off your plate.