#omg a new tag omg no way

[proxycrit]

What if I redesigned some horses to fit MY favorite narrative trope: fallen gods and forgotten myths of old? Anyways.

Twilight’s mentor is a strange one. In a world of twilit planes forever shrouded in mystery, the older unicorn Lest and her adopted student Twilight are one in many common travelers, migrating the pitted wastelands and eeking survival within settlements that spring up around the glowing meteor shards. Despite living with Lest for the last four years, Twilight can’t help but seek answers to where her brother has gone— and in the process, perhaps dig a bit too deeply into the complexities of gods far older and dangerous then she can truly fathom.

On the otherhand, Celestia “Lest” Sol is having a terrible millenium. Her sister is no longer her sister, her student teleported herself halfway across the continent, and she got herself kidnapped by an old rival trying to attune with the elements of harmony to overthrow the current ruler of Equestria.

At least she gets a toxic yuri moment.

Meanwhile, Chrysalis is having a great time. She’s got kingdoms to conquer and people to feed and a waning god to taunt.

(The Selene Grace hates the sun monarch they deposed five centuries ago as they stay chained to their post, keeping the lunar and solar bodies from crashing into each other. Luna misses her sister, and the easier world where they haven’t hurt each other beyond reparation. Nightmare Moon misses their monstrosity, trapped in a host who’s grief has poisoned them with empathy.

Things are bound to tip. The celestial bodies are not bodies, but prisons, and the amalgamations we call alicorns the key. And something desperately wants to be freed…)

Anyways:

My mane 6 redesign here!

And my luna and celestia redesigns here!

[royaltea000]

pov that strange boy is back at the border

these models are so lietpol to me

[tratshka]

Girl...Wtf is the mcu doing at this point......

[somethingaboutmint]

Quick ugly doodle of cassidy contemplating her sexuality at some dump somewhere

[bellamyblakru]

…cause my head's a living hell, if i’m honest with myself.

[dj-wayback]

Nwb i think Sep is just... trying too hard to figure out how to get along with you (which makes it 100% more awkward)

Welp……….now it’s definitely awkward. hah

[billdenbrough]

cannot possibly express enough how strange this one is. ok. @naturecalls111 prompted me (technically for microfic monday, but it was quickly determined to be untenable) kevaaron + frogs. there was an additional, informal element to the prompt she wanted that rocketed it from 488w (already egregious) to 1.6k (don't look at me), but i'm already wrestling with my psyche enough abt this one lmao. we'll leave that part to be a surprise so i don't have to think about it anymore HAHA. i guess. anyway. kevaaron + frogs, for mina.

“This is your fault,” Aaron says.

Kevin is affronted. “How could this be my fault!”

“Nobody cares enough about what I do to curse me,” Aaron points out, huffy. As huffy as a frog can be, anyway. “But you? Absolutely. You’re also really annoying.”

Kevin sulks.

“How sure are you?” Neil asks, following Nicky into the room. “I mean. Frogs?”

Nicky gives him an incredulous look, then snatches Kevin off the desk. Kevin makes the world’s most indignant croak, which everyone rudely ignores, except Aaron, who rolls his eyes.

“He has a queen mark,” Nicky exclaims, brandishing Kevin at Neil. “What kind of frog has a tattoo?”

Neil stares at it, then sighs. “Okay. Sure. Why not. So it’s Kevin. How do you know it’s Aaron with him?”

“Kevin wouldn’t leave without him, so it had to be one of us,” Nicky explains. Kevin thinks this is an optimistic reading of his character. “Which already probably meant Aaron, but I’ve confirmed he’s the only one also missing. So.”

“How did this happen?” Neil muses, sitting down on Kevin’s bed. His bed is right there. Kevin strongly considers kicking him. Except he doesn’t have the right feet.

Almost immediately after he has that thought, his mouth opens—without his express permission—and his tongue goes flying, a projectile aimed right at Neil’s face.

Neil barely manages to dodge, throwing up his arms and falling backwards quickly enough that Kevin’s tongue narrowly misses his skin. (Thank God.) 

Nicky squawks, dropping Kevin, who thankfully lands on the desk. Aaron is watching Neil with interest. And Kevin—

Kevin is just pleased his aim and ability to forcibly correct Neil’s behaviour is still intact.

“Oh, gross,” Nicky complains. Neil looks relatively unruffled, though he shoots Kevin a slight glare before moving to his own bed. Thank you.

“Yep, that’s Kevin,” Neil mutters. “I wonder how Aaron got wrapped up in this.”

Nicky cocks his head.

“Assuming turning people into frogs is a real thing—which, okay, yeah—then I have to assume it doesn’t happen randomly,” Neil says. “And as annoying as Aaron can be—” Aaron rolls his eyes. Again. “—It’s gotta be Kevin, right? The reason?”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” Nicky says immediately. Which is so rude.

“Maybe they were together?” Neil muses aloud.

“Or it’s like a fairytale,” Nicky says. At Neil’s confused—and slightly judgemental—look, he elaborates, “You know, like, The Frog Prince! Or The Frog Princess! Or—that movie coming out, the Princess and the Frog!”

“This is too many frogs,” Neil mutters, but looks attentive. “So what’s the common theme? Other than frogs.”

“You know, normal fairytale stuff,” Nicky says, waving his hands through the air. On the desk beside Kevin, Aaron has gone still. It’s weird that Kevin can tell—it’s not like Aaron was especially mobile in the moments prior, after all—but paying attention to Aaron isn’t that big of a surprise, these days. “True love’s kiss, all that.”

Neil goes still too.

Aaron is looking at Kevin, gaze watchful, eyes intent.

Kevin looks away. Unfortunately, this means he’s looking at Neil, who is observing him with a calculating expression. At least Neil can’t expect a response, Kevin thinks. Small victories.

“Well,” Neil says. Kevin assumes he’s talking to Nicky—as strange as Neil is, conversing with a frog is probably out of even his realm of behaviour—but he’s still looking at Kevin. Ugh. “That might explain it.”

“Huh?” Nicky asks.

Kevin cannot look at Neil anymore.

Aaron is still looking at him.

“Neil frequently has bad ideas,” Kevin says, a pre-emptive defence.

“I don’t disagree,” Aaron says. It’s fucking weird. He’s a frog. Green and disproportionate legs—maybe he should try keep those when they get back to normal, Kevin thinks, suddenly daydreaming of a genuinely tall defence line; and then his thoughts shift a little to the left, Aaron’s knobbly knees but now they’re green and his calves are endless, pressing against Kevin, and wow, okay, Kevin is shelving that one before he gets too anatomically-confused, what the fuck—but still so Aaron. It still feels the same, him looking at Kevin, and now there’s something in Kevin’s throat to swallow past. He’s not even sure if he still has a throat, technically.

Neil and Nicky are still talking in the background, a buzzing noise that Kevin can’t focus on.

“Fairytales aren’t real,” Kevin says.

“We are frogs,” Aaron enunciates. Which is a reasonable counterpoint.

“This is ridiculous,” Kevin mutters.

“Kevin,” Aaron says. This is going to do something insane to Kevin’s dreams, he thinks, dismayed. Aaron croaking his name, and it being completely understandable. Life is so hard.

“Ugh,” Kevin says. His tongue goes flying past, apparently the frog equivalent of throwing one’s arms up in exasperation.

Aaron watches it go past, then looks at Kevin. If they were normal, he thinks Aaron’s eyebrow would be raised, or face tilted to the side, or something to that effect. People don’t think of either twin as especially expressive, but Kevin knows Aaron’s face, has mapped all its mountains and shifting planes. He misses it, suddenly, fiercely. More than the consistent pulse of exasperation and disbelief at their situation, the underlying desire to get back to normal. It’s an active, immediate thing: he wants to see Aaron’s face again, a deep-seated ache.

“Careful,” Aaron says. “If you keep throwing that tongue around, I won’t let you put it in my mouth.”

Kevin chokes. His tongue tangles itself on the way back into his mouth, his eyes bulge, and he makes a sputtering noise. Neil and Nicky don’t even pause their discussion.

If there’s a way for a frog to look calm in the wake of their friend (?)—also a frog—almost dying in response to an implication of flirtation, Aaron does.

“Aaron,” Kevin wheezes, once he’s got his tongue safely back inside his mouth and has reminded himself how to be a person.

“Kevin,” Aaron returns. He sounds so calm. So sure. And Kevin still knows him, down to his bones, but in this body, he can’t figure out his tells as easily. He can’t watch the movement of his knee, the furrow of his brows, the curling of his fingers into a fist. There’s no jaw to tighten, no hair to run his hands through, and while he still has eyes, they’re not ones that Kevin has memorised the way they soften.

“Is that a joke?” Kevin asks.

“We’re frogs,” Aaron reminds him. “We’re already the joke.” Before Kevin can decide how he feels about that, Aaron says, “Kissing you? Sure. Why not. Worth a shot.”

“Why not,” Kevin echoes. “Worth a shot.”

Aaron looks at him again. Kevin thinks maybe this is what it looks like for a frog’s eyes to soften, but who knows? Maybe he’s just looking for what he wants to see.

God, this whole thing is fucking ridiculous, but maybe the most unsettling part has been realising how much he misses seeing Aaron’s face. He’s gone longer without seeing it, obviously, it’s just—he’s never had to look at Aaron without it being Aaron. He can’t explain it better than that.

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind,” Aaron says suddenly, “if it were a fairytale.”

Kevin blinks. (Oh, that was weird.) He thinks that over.

“Oh,” he says, then smiles. He thinks he smiles. He’s not really sure what his mouth is doing. It’s unnervingly large in relation to the rest of his body.

“Oh,” Aaron echoes, but he hops closer. One hop. Two. His legs are very strong, Kevin notes, but then he stops thinking about it, because Aaron is really close.

Kevin cannot believe he’s maybe—probably—almost certainly—about to kiss Aaron for the first time. And they’re fucking frogs.

Kevin hops that last step, moving in closer.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Aaron says, rolling his eyes again. Kevin has never seen a frog do that before, though jury’s out as to whether that’s because normal frogs can’t, or because Aaron Minyard brings a level of exasperation previously unknown amongst the species.

Kevin leans in, and kisses him. It’s the weirdest sensation he’s ever had—their bodies are approximately 30% mouth right now, which is a lot to deal with—but then Aaron’s mouth is open a little, and Kevin’s weird, powerful tongue darts in and tangles with Aaron’s.

This is fucking insane, Kevin thinks, and then there’s a sudden whoosh of air through the room, and suddenly the desk crashes and he and Aaron are sprawled across each other on the floor.

Human.

And naked.

“Oh my god,” Nicky says. “You’re back!” And then, tilting his head at Kevin, “And naked.”

“We’re leaving,” Neil announces, grabbing Nicky by the elbow and tugging him out of the room. His expression is dismayed. “I don’t want to see you today,” he says over his shoulder, which Kevin would like to apply to Aaron, but probably mostly means him.

Aaron is beneath Kevin, which luckily means his modesty is protected, given his usual hangups (Aaron and Neil often tell Kevin that it’s not that everyone else has hangups, but that Kevin is entirely too open with nudity; Kevin largely ignores this); unfortunately, it does mean Kevin landed on him, and now he’s groaning.

Kevin gets off him, then looks at him. At his face. God. He missed that face.

“Why are you staring at me?” Aaron grumbles.

“After everything that just happened, that’s your question?” Kevin asks, incredulous. Fucking fond, because of course it is.

“Everything else has a root cause of you being annoying,” Aaron says. “This—”

Kevin leans in, cupping Aaron’s jaw with one hand.

Aaron shuts up.

“Take a guess,” Kevin says. His voice is – soft. Too soft to hide behind.

There’s so much going on Aaron’s face, eyes quick, expressive, roving all over Kevin’s, taking him in, figuring him out. Then his expression clears.

“You’re so annoying,” Aaron says, and then he surges up and kisses Kevin.

It’s much better, Kevin thinks, getting to do this as them.

[cookkoo]

#shumakoxmas23 Day 3: Last Night Together

"You make every moment special"

[hella1975]

so there's a reason my new job got back to me so quickly about my application and that's bc it's an absolute fucking shambles like actually perfect timing for me to decide to rewatch the bear bc i have never more felt like ive been thrown into a broke on-its-knees establishment trying to crawl its way up the ladder where i am somehow a godsend to them. my old job was crazy and shambolic in the sense that the industry is just Like That but this one?????? insanity. every 5 mins i am questioning what im doing with my life. ive already had a walk-in fridge moment

[dazedpainter]

the perspective's goofy but that's okay

turned red cross and deadloop from @in1-nutshell 's blog!! they finally reunited and i felt like celebrating

expect some more from me 🤕 they consume my thoughts chronically

[hauntingblue]

Gear 5 luffy's laugh is so contagious I just hear the drums and go insane how does this work. What did he do to me

[resident-gay-bitch]

little rich boy sirius who gets disowned and can barely survive without his expensive brands and the basic human need to eat at least once a day meeting the entirely too generous james potter who just falls for the vanity and sincerity of the reformed rich boy and decides that once sirius stops caring about brands and status and rich boy things and just cares about what matters in life he decides to spoil his boyfriend to pieces because he’s secretly sitting on a fucking fortune

[aheathen-conceivably]

Is this an Antoine aging gracefully post or a sim style evolution appreciation moment? Both? Both is good 😌

[supergraphicultramoderngirl]

hm no ACTUALLY i love being asexual

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[nordicbananas]

alexis I blame you for this (pt. 2)