#off of tragedies

[afternoonblues]

yin yu! the waning moon officer (& his cursed shackles)....honestly, catching up on tgcf s2 has made me much more excited in re-reading tgcf from the start to finish because i remember the last time i tried re-reading i stopped somewhere in-between before the flashback starts (probably a subconscious decision to not relive the trauma iykyk) my memories have really fogged up & i have unfortunately forgotten some of the backstory details of few characters (like for example, yin yu) so yeah.

baby xie lian was so adorable :(

& he looks just like his mum (who is obviously so GORGEOUS)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Dungeon Meshi crew 'leap' into action!

[wyrmwright]

the love you can't even name

[cracklewink]

Harmony Syndrome Part 5/5

The last chapter of my mlp infection AU! Thank you to everyone who followed along. Some final thoughts on my twitter @cracklewink if anyone's interested : )

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

i may have forgotten some because they were too traumatic, but here is my definitive list as i could think of it this morning. oh, how i've suffered! 😢

[lotus-pear]

i think you guys are onto smth..

i unironically got invested in this HELP

[15-lizards]

Westerosi-sonas are so funny like. I’m gonna input myself into the most crapsack world ever. I’m gonna reform the canon so I can imagine myself as the minor lord of a shitty keep. This is Harlan he got sent to the wall for sodomy and lost all of his toes to frostbite. Here’s Aenon he was murdered like saint Sebastian during the blackfyre rebellions. Wynnafred is a repressed lesbian married into the riverlands ofc and will fall in love with a tomboy daughter of a high lord before dying of Woman in ASOIAF Disease

[rolex-kaard]

throws these like birdseed to the crowd

[boxheadpaint]

jumpy, ft jumpy

[bisexualseraphim]

The fact that neurotypical and able-bodied people can’t comprehend that disabled people usually don’t like consistently being told “BEING DISABLED IS BAD!!! THE WAY YOU ARE IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG!!! YOU NEED TO BE CURED!!!” even in a ‘nice’ or ‘woke’ way shows how little they actually value our agency or even our worth as humans.

No, Stacy, I don’t want people fiddling with eugenics because they’re uncomfortable with me existing, I want you to. You know. Treat me like a person. Have help be there when I need it without treating me like I’m an invalid. Why is that apparently so much more difficult for you than telling me my existence is wrong and spending millions fiddling in a lab for unwanted “cures?” Whatever happened to listening to others and accepting them for who they are? Or do you only see disabled people as the poor, helpless invalids you can “help” cross the street without asking so you can get another Scouts badge?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bare skin, bare feelings.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[quaggyday]

Ace's death is a tragedy because it was both preventable and inevitable

After like a thousand episodes of an impossible goal of rescuing Ace and losing thousands of lives in the process, at the last moment everything goes to shit because if ONLY he had just ran with his family. If only he had just swallowed his feelings and got the hell out of there to live another day

But like

Of COURSE Ace would never run from a fight, something shown time and time again. Of course he would defend Whitebeard, the only Father figure in his life to tell him "You deserve to be here" and showed again and again he loved Ace no matter what. Of course Ace would put his love and pride all out for somebody he loves, its simply who he is

And of course if Luffy, the crying baby brother who told him he needed him around was going to die in just seconds Ace would give up everything for him. His own pride got him in this despairing situation, and he took the consequences by saving his brother for another day because that's what big brothers do

What Akainu did was basically playing Ace's worst weakness, a weakness that came from a government that normalizes hunting and killing kids for just existing with things they can't control. And the fact that Akainu wanted Ace and Luffy dead not because of any of the crimes they did as pirates, but because their Fathers were technical criminals is what honestly makes this more of a gut punch of cruelty

Luffy and Sabo better get the chance to punch avenge their brother eventually

[rawliverandgoronspice]

I think what chronically upsets me about TotK is that. So much of it could have been so good with so little change.

I am into Zelda as a sacrificial, wondrous and silenced creature who must literally carry the blade of the hero as a wound inside her forehead and silently wait to be humanized again --and the injustice of a kingdom built on such a premice doomed to repeat itself, especially if the kingdom was founded on such dubious grounds to begin with. I am into Ganondorf forcing the present to reckon with the past through the most violent clash, forsaking everything that made him a person while sinking down into petty vindictiveness until no connection and no humanity remains, even though independance was what he was trying to protect in the first place. I am into Link as somebody trying to hold onto his most important connection to the world he once knew being used to force him into a conflict that has ultimately nothing to do with him (sure that's SS again but, it could have been explored even further). I am into Rauru as this self-important, self-made king who used his own association to godhood to live out a power fantasy that refuses to ever be acknowledge as such, maybe compounded by the fact he is one of the last of his species and feel, himself, the crushing weight of their fading heritage?

I don't know, the Tears of the Kingdom or something????

But, it all tragically depends on one crucial thing, which is to allow hylians to be wrong sometimes.

And it's wild to me how all of this incredible potential to comment on the series' history and the characters' role in it is just. Flattened into nothing, because Good must be Good and Evil must be Evil, and Hyrule must be righteous at literally every cost --even if it means nervously rewriting their own history through convoluted logic that rejects conflict and depth and vulnerability at every turn.

[bonefall]

Maybe I'll make a post on this at some point but like, something deeply fucked up about TNP and Po3 that people have totally forgotten about is how badly they try to whine that "Tigerstar Had Good Traits :("

Firestar does it, Brambleclaw does it, and they keep doing this after it becomes this GRAND irony that Firestar almost gets Tiger'd to death in a fox trap because he was too trusting. Bramble gets his pity award of keeping deputyship and then cries to his son about how No One Saw The Good In Tigerstar :(

And it's wiiiiild that no one else in this fandom has done anything with the fact that Leopardstar broke the Warrior Code to appoint Hawkfrost, who had no apprentice, an extremely aggressive and warmongering Tigerclone who says things like "Tigerstar wasn't the worst cat to look up to." ONLY qualifying trait was being kinda like Tigerstar.

And she practically did that the SECOND Mistyfoot went missing. And then Leopardstar continued to be one of the most violent and xenophobic leaders through Po3, joining with WindClan to attack ThunderClan.

What I'm getting at is that like, a few years ago, with books like "Blackfoot's Reckoning" and "Shadow in RiverClan" it's like they suddenly decided to retcon in a bunch of "redemption arcs" in hindsight. They just pretended like there was this grand high reckoning with TigerClan, when there literally wasn't, and if anything that caused SERIOUS problems for the cast that the authors didn't fully acknowledge as such.

And now ppl haven't actually read the main series and are just working with their recent memory of all these retcon books.

But TNP and PO3 are still there, and you can go and see the ACTUAL timeline where Leopardstar is really not apologetic at all, and Blackstar is a useful stooge for the very next wannabe dictator that strolls in, in spite of the new side content that COMPLETELY mischaracterized them for their plots to work.

[chimaerakitten]

I’ve been thinking today about off ramps in long running stories, especially book series.

By that I mean like, places where a person could stop reading and have a satisfying ending even if they’re not yet at the actual ending. (Someone tell me if there’s an established Tvtropes name for this I’m missing.)

Now, a lot of book series will have an off ramp at the end of book 1, because many first books are written without promise of a sequel. Like sure, there might be a sequel hook, but the actual second book is still up to publisher whims in most cases. So you can read All Systems Red or The Thief or A Madness of Angels and have a perfectly satisfying ambiguous-end sci-fi story or middle grade fantasy romp or inverted murder mystery revenge quest without ever picking up book 2. This is definitely an off ramp but it’s not necessarily the interesting or revealing kind because again. Whims of the publisher.

There’s also stories that have an off ramp after every installment. Leverage is famous for this—they had a philosophy of having every season be a satisfying ending, which says a lot both about the writers and about the story they were trying to tell.

But I think the most interesting ramps are the ones where by design or by circumstance, there’s a single off-ramp somewhere in the middle. One spot where unless someone tells you there’s more, you’d never be unsatisfied with leaving halfway through.

Sometimes these will be signaled in some way, where there’s a big timeskip after the off-ramp, or the series changes names or has a spin-off, or the POV changes, or after book 3 the author publishes a short story collection before hopping back in to novels, or the series suddenly jumps from being only novellas to a chunky 120k novel. (The Raksura books, Percy Jackson/HoE, Matthew Swift/Magicals Anonymous, and Murderbot all do one or more of these)

But sometimes off ramps aren’t visible in series order or marketing. Sometimes they’re organic to where a story happens to leave off at the end of an installment.

The queen’s thief has one of these after King Of Attolia. I know this was a satisfying ending because for seven years I thought it was the end. My local library didn’t have A Conspiracy of Kings, so I thought it was a trilogy. And you really can leave it there! KoA ends with Gen back in his element and recognized as king, the main internal threat to Irene neutralized, and peace on the peninsula. The Mede aren’t yet the immediate threat they are in the back half of the series, since up through KoA they’re mainly represented by the magus’s vague warnings and Nahuseresh, whom Irene thinks circles around. There’s no real reason to assume the Mede are a threat within the scope of the series. Now I absolutely prefer getting the whole story, but KoA is a damn solid off-ramp for anyone who feels like exiting there.

And that’s one kind of off ramp where the end you get is pretty similar in tone (mostly happy) to the one you get if you go on to the rest of the series. I’ve also read books where you can off ramp successfully right at the lowest point in the series and get a tragedy out of a series that ultimately ends happy, or leave at a high point and get a happier end than the main one, or exit at an ambiguous point and continue on with ambiguity. The Giver sequels make it pretty clear what happened to Jonas and Gabe at the end of the book. but you don’t have to read them or have that question answered if you want to.

I don’t have a really solid conclusion to draw here except that I think the positioning of off ramps says a lot about authors and stories, and choosing whether or not to take an off ramp says a lot about readers.

[lazycranberrydoodles]

COME ON GUYS DON'T LET DIANXIA DOWN