#no seriously get a room

[kettlefire]

As Good as Good Gets (DP X DC Snippet)

Richard "Dick" Grayson is the golden child. In the eyes of the public, and in the eyes of the league. Dick is a sweet, caring son, a man who went from being a sidekick to being a hero. The pipeline from Robin to Nightwing had many people applauding his dedication to keeping Gotham safe.

No one knew the full story, not truly. No one but Bruce Wayne himself. And maybe a certain butler. Many don't know that Dick only became Robin to stop him from hunting down and killing the man who killed his parents.

No one really knows about the harsh fights and arguments he has had with Bruce. The times when Dick would find himself cut off from the Wayne name for a week or so. No one knows that the first person Dick warmed up to was Alfred. Having been bribed with cookies.

Things weren't always this good, trusting, happy relationship between Bruce and Dick. It had been a rough ride, a complicated one. But that was okay, because it got better.

Dick stopped being so moody and angsty. He grew up, he learned, and he changed. He became an older brother, found people that needed him. Needed him in a way that the citizens of Gotham didn't need him.

His brothers like to call him annoying. A goody two shoes who Bruce trusted more than everyone else. They couldn't fathom how someone like Dick could be so stupid and bubbly at all times.

All times, except when shit hits the fans. Despite the name calling, despite coining Dick as the stupid Wayne. They all knew better. They knew that when it mattered, Dick Grayson always pulled through. He was a force to be reckoned with when needed.

The whole Wayne family was a force to be reckoned with when called for. It didn't have to be under the guise of costumes and vigilante acts. Whether he was Officer Grayson or Nightwing, Dick was a man with his morals and values.

One night on patrol as Officer Grayson, Dick found someone who needed that force. A force willing to protect and care for the innocent. The hurt. The damaged, yet still good.

It started like any other night. A call of shots fired by an empty warehouse. There was no sighting or knowledge of any rouges being there, so Dick took the call. Told the team he'll contact them if it seems more than just a civilian incident.

The warehouse was dark, reeked of copper and oil. It didn't take long for Dick to find the trail. The liquid he found looked like the person had been dragged before walking. There was a clear struggle, even with the mess and emptiness that was the warehouse.

That wasn't Dick's biggest concern. The concern lay in just how much blood there was. Too much for any normal person to lose and still manage to stumble through the warehouse.

It wasn't just blood. It wasn't that much, but Dick could spot the strangeness in the liquid. The mixed in green that had an eerily similar color and glow as a certain pit.

Without thinking, Dick followed the trail. Barely remembering to make contact with his family. Give them an update on what he found. Words telling him to stay put for backup went in one ear and out the other.

Something in Dick's gut was telling him he couldn't wait. He needed to find the source. Whoever was currently bleeding out in this warehouse. He silenced the comm, moving further through the dimly lit building.

Then Dick found it. Or more so, he found him. It was just a boy. A boy that reminded Dick too much of the youngest Wayne. A boy sat against a wall, looking pale and weak.

Red and green coated the front of the boy's shirt, arms wrapped tightly around his middle. An attempt to stem the bleeding. A puddle had already started to form beneath the boy, and Dick moved without thinking once again.

He quickly found himself kneeling beside the boy, hands carefully reaching out. Before Dick even touched him, the boy flinched. Eyelids suddenly opened, wide and terrified blue eyes landed on Dick's.

In just that one look, Dick knew what he had to do. The haunting, terrified, and pained look in the boy's eyes told Dick everything he needed to know. The boy was in danger. Someone had hurt this kid, and it was clear it wasn't the first time.

The boy struggled weakly against Dick's touch, terrified whimpers, and barely coherent pleas spilled from the kid's lips. It had Dick's heart aching, clear as day the poor kid has been through hell and back.

It took a lot of reassurance, gentle touches, and promises of help before the kid let Dick take a look at the bleeding wound. A promise on Dick's soul had been the final thing that earned him any semblance of trust. A strange promise, but Dick was willing to make it.

That concern turned to pure anger the moment Dick managed to pull the sticky shirt away from the wound. The sight of a Y-incision cut perfectly into the skin, stitches tight on the skin, but blood still leaking heavily from the wound.

It didn't take long for Dick to realize why. Despite the perfect surgical care of the wound, a good couple of stitches had broken. Leaving gaping spots for that red and green liquid to pour out of.

The boy was deathly silent, tears streaking down his cheek as wide blue eyes stayed trained on Dick. In that moment, Dick knew he had to help. Had to get the kid to safety, patch him up, and find out what kind of monster would do this.

It didn't matter if the kid was human or not. It didn't matter if the kid had special abilities or not. No one, absolutely no one, deserved to be vivisected.

The kid was shrouded in mystery, but that mystery only seemed to grow and become clearer when Bruce had entered the scene. The boy had tensed, eyes flashing a bright glowing green.

Lazarus pit green.

It set a pit of dread in Dick's gut. His mind brings forward memories of Jason. Jason, after his revival, after his dip in that cursed pit. The same flash that his brother would get if he got too angry. Too emotional.

As much as Dick wanted to focus on finding who did this, if it had any connection to Ra's al Ghul. He couldn't. Not when the kid tried to get up, to pull away as Bruce and the others made their way closer.

Right now, Dick only cared about making sure the boy was okay. Fixing those stitches, getting him a meal, and a warm bed.

He needed to get this kid someplace where he felt safe and secure. Comfortable and protected. Dick wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the promise he had made, but he wasn't letting anyone get to the kid.

That included his family. As strange as it seemed, Dick put himself between the others and the kid. Shooting them all a glare that they had only ever seen a handful of times.

Dick lifted the poor boy up in his arms, cradling the crying child close as he led the way out of the warehouse. Ignoring the questions or confusion coming from Bruce and the others. As Dick walked, feeling the trembling boy clinging to him, he made a rather obvious realization.

Maybe the eldest son really was more like Bruce than he expected. Just a few short moments the the boy, a boy that Dick didn't know his name, and he was ready to pull out adoption papers. To give the boy a safety he so desperately needs.

Give him the chance that Bruce had given him all those years ago.

[anewp0tat0]

i lied i had like atleast one more weston thought to expell from my brain, before i miss this boat entirely. we're heading to green lands woooo

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Teehee! (Spritesheets your Wangxian)

[s0fter-sin]

i need ghoap frantically making out against a door finally taking the leap on their feelings. need ghost grinding against soap, expecting to find him just as hard as him, only to feel nothing

and in all his wisdom and experience, he concludes soap was tortured and never told him

he’s trying to think of a delicate way to say he understands, that he’s been through it and it doesn’t change anything about how he feels (and who the fuck touched him so he can hunt them down and rend them limb from limb)

meanwhile trans!soap’s just trying to find the best angle to grind his cunt on ghost’s thigh

just it never even entering ghost’s head bc he’s never known a trans person but he has met plenty of people who’ve been tortured - himself included - so of course that’s his logical leap

soap takes off his shirt and he sees his top surgery scars and ghost asks if he wants him to kill the one who did it and soap just hums like, “actually, man did pretty good, they healed real well,” and ghost’s just teary-eyes with awe at how well he’s coping, “looking on the bright side, that’s my johnny.”

imagine he thinks johnny was fully castrated but sees he’s determined to still have a sex life with him so he buys packers and straps to help him bc hell yeah healing and soap’s just like, “holy shit i’ve never had such a thoughtful partner before, such a sweet man, lt.”

[fisheito]

still thinking about those promo pics where they locked the tops and bottoms in separate rooms

[cspcrashing]

☠️ : learning to use your teeth, kurosaki ?

🍓 : only because it shuts you up.

☠️ : if you just let me stick to your disgustingly sweaty body—

🍓 : my body is sweaty because you keep sticking yours to it !

☠️ : so you can't handle the heat ? that's weak.

🍓 : you— !

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[thequeenwechoose]

House of the Dragon 2x08 The Queen who ever was

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

i bet a lot of songs with the word "angel" in the lyrics got banned from the hotel premises by popular vote in the wake of the vaggie revelation.

i bet charlie kept either finding and / or writing new ones to sing anyway

[ryllen]

I want to see more melancholic part of sebek, even tho it might be nonexistent canonly.

What if compared to his brother & sister, sebek is the one who retains most of his father's traits as a human. maybe he was a bit behind than everyone in briar valley maybe some of them made fun of him maybe nobody made fun of him, but he just disliked the feeling of getting left behind maybe he's trying so hard not to curse & shift blame all of his weakness to his father more than he should, because his mother loves him so much maybe one day he did lash out to his father and his father just smiled painfully to him and said sorry to sebek, and sebek promises to himself to never hurt his father the same way again that's why he got to be strong, strong to the point that it never crosses his mind again or anyone's mind that he is, in fact, a half fae.

[atwhughesversion]

quinn hughes: wow, a career year and a norris trophy.

quinn hughes: i should’ve scored more.

[k-martins]

You know, it's a little unfair that we don't have a filler of Yuji and Megumi fighting some random curse while going to meet Hakari.

Seriously, what were they? Nine days together? We would have enough ITFS material to overcome this lack of them currently.

[phantom-shell]

I will forever be amused by season 1 Jon's behavior towards Martin in contrast to his behavior in season 5- This man loves his boyfriend sm 

[kaeyachi]

Kaeyappreciation post!

Kaeya is wonderful in a sense that he:

Has a penmanship described as "Beautiful Handwriting". He for sure worked on that.

Willingly spends his time making sure his outfit looks perfect

Is well-loved by Mondstadt and the Dawn Winery staff

Is described to like a prince, both in looks and in actions

Is shown to be gentle and caring to children and elderly, most seen with Klee and the staff from Dawn Winery

Is a great listener and, therefore, also knows what gifts to buy based off of something someone said in passing

Is predominantly kind- unafraid to help out and defend someone in need. His first reaction is always kindness, and worry about covering up that kindness later on

But Kaeya also has his moments where he:

Says things out of pocket with enough alcohol in his system. Things that usually lead to shame and regret.

Would rather give others the credit for his hard work if he could help it

Intentionally makes himself look suspicious by withholding information and only throwing tidbits that are not of substance

Has sadist tendencies, which affects how he treats both his (cavalry) company and his enemies

Can and will use underhanded tactics to gain the upper hand

Rarely ever says what he truly wants to say

Has a fake smile. Usually lies or only deals with half truths.

He is such a complex character. I really do want people to appreciate him and his intricacies more. The fact that his entire personality and story is done so well and continues to actually grow and expand as the story progresses is something that genuinely makes me want to keep watch of him. I have never, in all my fandoms, stuck to a character as long as I did with Kaeya, and honestly? I know I'm not alone with this.

Look at how well they made our boy!

[raointean]

[autumnalmess]

Enjolras texts in big fucking paragraphs. And signs them off like emails. That's all