#maybe even a character death

[starrspice]

Did you decide to change any characters or story beats in the cherub au when you made it into an oc story? And how much of the au was transferred over? Like, is it just about the main three characters (and presumably Eclipse) or are the wider cast like DJ and Chica included? Same with all the story stuff that happens after Y/n (now Clover) becomes a cherub (Vanny and hollows and Michael and all that).

Honestly the stories are gonna be pretty similar and it will include the whole cast but I'll probably change a few lore things here and there and a couple of the character's backstories will probably change too

But by and large the way the cherubs function will remain the same and the major story beats will probably largely stay the same too

But I will say it will have a bit darker of a story later on that i kind of touched on with the original au

[captainhysunstuff]

22 more images (with some saucy shenanigans and immature "seduction" tactics towards the end) below the cut:

Ryuk makes his grand return and is brought up to speed with Light and L's immoral union. The date seems pretty successful~.

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[thankstothe]

[autisticaradiamegido]

thoughts on dave and aradia (<>)?

day 356

BIG fan tbh. in this house we love and respect timerails

truly yall read this log and tell me theyre not cute

[staticrevelations]

can’t get over imogen calling her Saint Laudna can’t stop picturing an undead laudna lovingly rendered in the style of old catholic portraits of saints with a big golden halo around her head

[ceilidho]

i used to skip soap fics bc i was a könig and simon gal… i truly HATED his mohawk and could never understand the scottish accent but now i can’t go to work without reading one good soap smut as soon as i wake up LOL i’m glad he doesn’t exist in my life bc i would need to be euthanised for the way i act around him. pervy!soap definitely takes the cake bc him??? being DISGUSTINGLY obsessed??? with me?? to the point of nonexistent sanity???

every time someone comes to appreciate soap, gaz, or price, an angel gets their wings

[all-about-the-tea-parties]

The show consistently establishing that Ishamael Wants To Die™️:

Some ppl during the finale: umm??? How did rand kill him with just a sword? Why didn’t Ishamael fight back??? That’s so stupid! He’s a Forsaken™️ like, he wants to kill the dragon, Rand should’ve had to use the One Power

The writers: *slams head through wall*

[13eyond13]

love it when a character that's hard to read intuitively for you has like a dedicated fandom interpreter who can just glance at their blank face in a panel and then give you a 3k word essay on their innermost thoughts & desires & fears and neatly tie it back into the themes & whatnot as if it's the most obvious thing in the world

[collieii]

i'm sure it's been said but i do love how trimax handles wolfwoods death. i've seen so many stories that have characters die and they just go away after. i'm really used to stories where the other characters aren't allowed to grieve, the story keeps going and it feels like the other characters aren't really affected or get over it really easily. but in trimax wolfwoods death is so important. we see other characters grieving him. vash protecting the orphanage, expanding his power when he really shouldn't, because it was wolfwood's home, even though wolfwood is already gone. he gets an actual burial. vash and livio eating their way through the grief, which is more comedic but still shows us how important he was to the two of them, sets up how in many ways they're fighting in his memory.

even after he's gone he's still present in the story in such a strong way. we can see how he's affected the other characters, even when they don't explicitly mention him it's obvious that they're thinking about him. what he did when he was alive, and his death itself, are so important to the story even after he's not there. not just in a really abstract "this is someone we lost" way (though there are a lot of times his death and sacrifice motivate vash and livio to fight harder!) he's present in the finale in a material way to livio, who uses his serums to help fight against elendira, which ofc also ties into the way wolfwoods choice to ally with vash and fight against knives gave livio strength to do the same. wolfwood showed him that there are things worth fighting for, things worth protecting. that your body is a weapon, but you can choose what to do with it, use it for something meaningful.

and the way vash kills legato in order to save livio? vash outright says that he did it to protect what wolfwood fought for, sacrificed his life for. it's tied to the ongoing arc between vash and wolfwood, their conflict over the necessity of killing others. wolfwood pushed vash into having an understanding of his views when he was alive, demonstrating the necessity of that violence. simultaneously, vash inspired wolfwood to follow his path, a kinder one. vash remembers what wolfwood said to him, and his death gives those words added poignancy. wolfwood well and truly sacrificed everything to protect what he loved and fight for what he believed in. how can vash let that go to waste? he sacrifices something just as meaningful to himself, and he pulls the trigger. it brings him closer to wolfwood in a way he never was before. he understands now, fundamentally, what motivates people, motivated wolfwood, to act as he did when he took lives. there are so many other ways wolfwood is present in the story after his death i can't talk about all of them but it makes me so crazy

[happytobee]

when brennan lee mulligan created a straight-A high school girl with anger issues character did he know he was targetting me personally because that's what it feels like

[naranjapetrificada]

The first thing I should ever have said about Izzy and the last thing I intend to say until at least October 26th.

[Although I am not Her strongest soldier, so who knows if I will stick the landing.]

So to start with, I was a "late" arrival to the show. I knew it existed of course, but I only occasionally saw things that reminded me it existed. The first time I saw a mention of "grumpy/sunshine" it was with a picture of Ed and Stede, so I guess on some level I knew there was shipping going on, but that was literally all I knew. I didn't even know it involved Blackbeard lol.

Which is all to say that I first approached and watched season 1 removed from basically anything anyone had to say about it. I think what actually got me to watch it wasn't anything anyone had to say either, it was from youtube recommendations? Like I think I had watched a couple Taika interviews or something and ofmd stuff started showing up? So after catching a few clips and intentionally spoiling the kiss for myself (life is too short to be queerbaited) I watched it in April/May 2023, and was Changed by it the way so many other people were. It grabbed me so hard I started looking for fics, and when fic grabbed me even harder I became a regular tumblr user for the first time ever in June 2023.

What I didn't do, before the second half of 2023, was care particularly much about Izzy Hands.

I remember describing him as psychologically fascinating to the first IRL friend I talked to about the show, and joking that he just needed a good dom. As much as his decision to call in the navy was a threat to Stede's and Ed's lives, I saw his actions as part of a thing needed for the story, and while I knew he was one of the season's villains there wasn't really any heat behind that assessment.

For me he was there to set things in motion, and to serve the narrative in certain ways, to be a foil, more storytelling tool than man. That doesn't mean I didn't think Con did an excellent job adding layers to him, he absolutely made Izzy take up space and feel more present and textured than he otherwise might have. But when I began to zoom out and consider things on meta level, Izzy existed to do a certain thing or occupy a certain place in relation to the narrative and other characters more than anything else. And that was fine.

Then I started reading meta here, and found myself surrounded by passionate conversations about Izzy from many directions occurring with an intensity that I couldn't wrap my brain around. I saw people tying themselves into knots to justify and excuse the behavior of a textual antagonist, and I was baffled and because I still saw Izzy for what his role in the narrative was, it literally made no sense to see his behavior explained away. In the framework I brought to the fandom when I first arrived, trying to explain away Izzy's behavior would be like looking at a forest fire and trying to explain away processes like combustion and oxidation. Or if you'll allow me to borrow another extended, nature-based metaphor from a fic in an entirely different fandom:

Again, because from where my head was at, it didn't make sense to look at Izzy's morality as a zero sum game because in this metaphor, he was functionally just a brackish body of water. I'm not saying the morality is brackish, I'm saying the morality was literally not the point because like an estuary, an antagonist "must exist" because antagonists exist for specific reasons directly related to storytelling goals.

So there was no real heat behind my feelings about him or his actions, beyond the natural emotional reactions we have to characters and their behaviors before we zoom out. I was of course upset with his treatment of Lucius, which was targeted compared to other members of the crew. I was annoyed with the way he talked to and about Ed. I laughed when his plans had the equal and opposite results of what he intended, which you could argue happened with every single plan he made for the entirety of season 1. And yes, especially as a Black person living in the US, I felt the fear and betrayal that comes from seeing someone call the cops (which given the show and its writers, it does not feel like a stretch to describe calling the navy that). I wondered if there was any coming back from a choice like that, which is a big overriding question for the series as a whole.

I'm not here to debate any of the points in the previous paragraph. I know how I feel and you feel how you feel and there's already been so much said about the morality of it all by people who have explained themselves well, so let them convince you or not. Instead I've been trying to talk about the two sides of my experience before and after getting into the fandom with Izzy.

Before: Izzy Hands, Narratively Useful Antagonist Portrayed Compellingly And Effectively by Con O'Neill.

After: Izzy Hands, Unfortunate Avatar Of The Sadly Common Tendency For Certain Fans To Hyperfocus On A White Antagonist Or Secondary Character When There Already Exists A Protagonist They're A Foil Of (And Also It Looks Bad TO Do That When The Protagonist Is Someone With A Marginalized Identity).

I'm not here to argue the merits of those assessments either, because that's not the point. The point is the vast gulf between them and how the latter does such an incredible disservice to the Izzy we were given and that so many people claim to love. The latter comes from a place where morality is the focus, which I'm sorry y'all, feels like it originates with people who refuse to countenance Izzy's role in the story as well as his characterization.

Viewers who were willing to see Izzy as an antagonist, who don't view the word "antagonist" as a value judgement in and of itself, who don't think that finding an antagonist charismatic or compelling means anything about their own morality, those people can look at the show we were given and take it for what it was made to be. I'm not saying that it's only the Izzy stans (not enjoyers, not jar people) who start fights or that people who understand that Izzy is an antagonist don't also have deep morality related feelings about him and his actions in the first season. What I am saying is that sanding off Izzy's rough edges and trying to make him into something he isn't poisons even the possibility of having a discussion about him because people enter the conversation with two completely different understandings of reality. If you cannot accept the job that season 1 Izzy was given to do to move the story along, well you might as well have watched a completely different show for how much that fanon Izzy has anything to do with the canon one.

This show deserves better than that. The writers deserve better than that. Con O'Neill deserves better than that. Israel Basilica Hands deserves better than that. We all do.

[finncakes]

really hope they come back.

(emotional ramblings and the original drawing i did of them under the cut)

for the life of me i couldn't figure out why hearing orym and fearne died was affecting me so badly (i'm still on ep 32 lol). i didn't sleep, i was crying almost every few hours, no appetite and i was so confused as to why. i didn't react like this with molly! then i realized it's cause fearne and orym are part of exu and exu pulled me out of a bad place.

i remember when i decided to listen to exu. i was in one of the worst places mentally i have been in years and choosing to listen to it was dicey for many personal reasons. but i took the risk and i listened to exu and fell in love with the crown keepers (fearne, orym and opal in particular). and after that i slowly but surely pulled myself out of that hole. hearing two of my favorite members of the crown keepers were in campaign 3 was the greatest news ever for me. i know they'll never see this but just in case they do: thanks liam and ashley (and all the crown keepers as well as aabria) for making the characters and fun story that saved me. i hope they come back, but if not i'm glad they came into my life and they will always hold a special spot in my heart.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i love dead characters. i love characters who were always dead, who die halfway through, who die in the end - characters who die and come back but in a way they're still dead bc their first life died with them & nothing will ever be the same & their coming back is a bandaid over a gaping wound & their own death haunts them-

[darkfire359]

Edward Teach and the Myth of the Perfect Victim

After writing my previous post, I realized that a bunch of the stuff I said applies to Ed too.

In particular, I saw a lot of takes (before many of the S2 spoilers started coming out) that said things like "Ed is not going to be uncontrollably angry and violent in the way some fans have theorized about" or "the theory that Ed will go off the rails and Izzy will be terrified of him is racist." I saw other takes that insisted on things like "Ed knows his limits (for drinking) and can handle the consequences of his actions." Basically, a lot of other Ed fans seemed to insist that S2 Ed would be behaving fairly reasonably, without being crazily violent and unhinged and self-destructive.

And I was kind of worried about these Ed fans. Because to me, it seemed like we totally were going to get a very off-the-rails Ed in S2... which, given the clip today and the reviews that got released, seems extremely likely. And if some of these people were insisting that portrayals of Ed like that were awful and unsupportable by them...

Well, the reality is that sometimes, your fav turns out to be the bad guy, at least situationally. And this is okay! Characters don't need to be morally pure for you to love them. They can have messy trauma responses and unhealthy habits, and they can just overall set a bad example for everyone. You can like them without endorsing their actions.

Ed is still traumatized by his childhood and crumbling under the expectations of people around him. He's still heartbroken, devastated, and low-key (or maybe high-key) suicidal. We'll probably still see him cry, and we'll certainly still see him feeling like an unlovable monster.

He still deserves sympathy for all that. Ed is clearly going to end up hurting Izzy and probably many other members of his crew, and that suffering is real and painful—but so is Ed's. You don't have to excuse Ed's actions to acknowledge that and feel for him. As someone who has previously celebrated Ed's moral grayness, I say that Edward Teach still deserves a hug!

[juregim]

the eternity of Aki Hayakawa’s childhood

Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley // 11/11 - Girls Rituals // Checkers - John Marsden // Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente // Camden - Gracie Abrams // The Godfather - Mario Puzo // A Hymn to Childhood - Li-Young Lee // A Breath of Life - Clarice Lispector // Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men // God’s Silence - Franz Wright //

[bisaster-energy]

people who hc cas as this just. guy that helps dean with his issues and trauma. why are you living that "no one cares that you're broken cas" life. why are you not caring about him.