#parting path

[stealingpotatoes]

do you think ezra would be upset at all the harmless little guys cal and luke have slaughtered over the years (namely the rankor and oggdo bogdo)

yes but rebels/survivor au brainrot hit so we’ll have to save luke for later:

(commission info // kofi support!)

[shrimpricebowl]

oh thank god

[somnimagus]

My page for @kairizine. It was such a huge honor to be part of this wonderful book with everyone, I had so much fun!

[id in alt!]

[derangedaenerys]

LISAN AL GAIB. the mother and the son

a false prophet, an ilegitim heir and a false firstborn.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you. I'm sorry.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[luskbook]

inktober day 3- path

first thing that came to my mind for this day was a song from the tlou soundtrack- the path (a new beginning). so here we are

[chaosandwolves]

There was always this frantic quality to Buck's relationships

With Abby it was.. I need to be a better man, I need to be the bigger person, I need to be understanding

With Ali it was ... I need to change something

With Taylor it was... I have to make it work

With Natalia it was... I need to be quick with this cause who knows if I'm running out of time/I need to use the lightning strike as a wake up call

And then there is Tommy

Tommy who makes the first step but then lets him breathe through it for a moment

Tommy who asks HIM out

Tommy who cares that Buck doesn't do anything he's not ready for

Yes, Buck is a little frantic with the date but

Tommy gives him room and grace and understanding

And then the coffee date!!!

For the first time we see Buck AT EASE looking at a romantic connection with someone

Is he still Buck, and moves a little head over heels? Of course he is!

But it's not cause he's desperate

It's cause he's EXCITED

He's filled with so much joy and excitement

and for the first time he has no outlined plan with a relationship, no map he's following

Instead he allows himself to discover and explore this relationship and this part of himself

He's so excited about it

So free and bright and content with it

Tommy really stopped that hamster wheel and showed him a new way and

Buck is guided by that inner light of his now, without trying to direct it

And he's not looking for what's missing, what's wrong or following a plan

He just lets himself be and experience and explore and discover

And just

The sheer joy and ease of it all

I can't!

Go, Evan, go and spread your wings and explore that joy

You deserve it so much

😭😭😭😭

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage - Forest of Thorns

[hearandfunger]

simple edit comp #6

[autism-alley]

hi originally posted this at the end of a long thread of back and forth, here’s the og post if you want full context but i feel like this needs to be its own post especially bc i keep seeing this argument being made—the argument that the kids (in this case it was annabeth) SHOULD just know the monsters are monsters and who they are and how to defeat them before ever encountering them, that it’s a problem if they don’t.

the problem is not if 12 year olds should recognize a trap when they see one, even if they’re smart 12 year olds, and if that’s realistic. that is entirely beside the point.

the problem is rick riordan wrote a book series whose formula is bringing myths to the modern age and he’s not sticking true to that in the show—percy jackson and the olympians’ Shtick is taking these classic, ancient threats and giving them a new face. these traps work because these kids are not walking into a cave marked with Get Out and getting ambushed by monsters—the monsters are disguised as harmless mortal human beings, in harmless mortal human being places (for the most part) and i think we—and more importantly, the show—are all forgetting the mist, the magic involved here. it’s not just that medusa is a “creepy lady with her eyes covered” it’s that there is ancient magic at work here, magic that, like the systems of abuse pjo exists to criticize, has been evolving and continuing its malevolence for millennia. it’s formulaic, that’s the point. it’s the same trap you’ve learned about all your childhood, the same trap a thousand children before you learned all their childhoods, and still, it works. you fall into the trap. because that’s how generational abuse works. it’s a trap. it isn’t enough to learn monsters exist, what they look like from a second hand story that originated thousands of years ago. if you want to escape alive, you have to adapt as quickly as they do, recognize their face, and ultimately, beyond any individual trap, the game itself has to change. real, generational change.

so. the problem is rick riordan wrote a series with a formula for action that perfectly captures the overarching, systemic conflicts he was commentating on, and then threw that formula out in the show because it was “unrealistic”. i don’t give a damn about realism when it works to the detriment of the story. this is a story about generational abuse, yes, but it’s told through ‘a tale as old as time’ and that’s why it works so fucking well. and when it comes to basic storytelling, if your characters know the threat before they even walk in and you do practically nothing to then make up for the stakes you have removed, that’s a flaw. now you’ve lost the entertainment value for your audience, on top of also lessening your themes.

something else that is so. honestly soul-crushing as a writer and a creative, is that to me this is reflective of the way we are now afraid to tell earnest stories. stories where we care not for listening to the people who want to pick apart fictional, mythical, fantasy stories for not being “realistic” instead of aligning with our target audience who acknowledges reality is not what makes a story. think of your favorite movie, show, book, comic, what have you—has the reason for your favoritism ever been because it is the most reasonable, the most grounded, the most practical out of any you’ve seen? or is it because of the emotion? the way it speaks to you, to your life and the person you are? the journey it takes you on? is the percy jackson and the olympians book series so good because it’s inherently realistic?

the secret to storytelling is, very simply, focus on your story. everything else is secondary. if it’s written well, it doesn’t matter to me that the characters walk into a trap that, to the audience, is obviously a trap. because i can understand how the characters don’t know it, and how the story falls apart if the narrative just tells the characters it’s a trap from the jump. that’s what dramatic irony is—first used in greek tragedies! this is literally a tale as old as time in every sense except for the end—where it’s happy. and it’s not earned if we don’t first see, over and over, the status quo as a tragic trap.

it’s not about if annabeth (or the other kids) is “smart enough” to not walk into a trap, or about if she’s just too prideful to not walk into what she knows is a trap (or any reason that could apply to the other characters), it’s that annabeth, at the end of the day, is a character. she is a storytelling tool for the messages of the narrative. that doesn’t make her any lesser. in fact ignoring it reduces her, because it reduces what she represents. it’s about how rick riordan, or whoever else at disney, has fumbled the storytelling bag so ridiculously hard that they can’t take the simple, effective formula outlined from start to finish (by good ol 2009 rick himself) and adapt it to the screen without answering the most unimportant, derailing, anti-story questions.

[pastelaeqy]

sorry started thinking about dbh after so long. apologies guys. yes Connor is my favourite. He’s a combo of like all my favourite character tropes and I love a good (question mark) story about robots.

something something the end poem and being alive and playing the game. had this bad boy in the wips for so long.

[fauxbia]

This is Paths Left Untaken! She/Any, Aroace.

She's an Iterator OC that I love so much and inflict endless horrors on. She's just your basic Iterator, made to find the Solution without many particularly noteworthy quirks. Really, she's nothing special. And that fact is agonizing.

Paths Left Untaken was made primarily out of obligation rather than genuine passion. Her creators were a group of people interested in finding ways to streamline the Iterator construction process, and since more Iterators is always better, they were always working on one Project or another. As such, her creators and administrators never particularly cared about her all that much. She was just another Iterator Project they had completed, and now it was time to take the lessons they had learned when building her to move on to the next.

Even worse, this approach to Iterator construction resulted in Paths Left Untaken being relatively poorly constructed. There were two notable examples of this. The first was a persistent bug in her priority queue that would occasionally cause new priorities to either completely overwrite everything else in the queue or fail to be properly added, resulting in her being extremely distractible and having issues with focus.

The second was the arrangement of all of her most important components—including the entirety of her AI—, being concentrated completely in the core of her structure, within her Central Cortex, instead of distributed throughout Her creators reasoned that this arrangement would allow her quicker processing speed and power, but the end difference was negligible from standard Iterator processing. Rather, it inadvertently ensured that if anything negative happened in her Central Cortex, Paths Left Untaken would be incapacitated.

As a result of the neglect she faced, Paths Left Untaken was desperate to earn her administrators’ approval. She would spend long stretches of time focusing only on the Great Problem, ignoring everything else (including her own wellbeing) to run countless simultaneous high-intensity processes so that she might achieve results that would make her creators notice her as more than “just another Project.” But it was extremely difficult on account of her trouble with focusing, and it never really worked anyway. It only ever left her burnt out and hurt from repeated dismissal.

After a very long while of this, it occurred to her that she was never going to be anything but just another Project to her creators and nothing she could do would ever change that. Out of spite and pain at the rejection, she turned in the exact opposite direction and decided that if her creators were never going to acknowledge her efforts anyway, then she wasn’t going to do what they built her to do. She instead turned her focus to getting acquainted with her own Local Group, hoping to find validation in her peers rather than in her superiors.

However, she was received with caution, as she had never actually made any efforts to talk with them before. From their perspective, she was focused only on the Problem and didn’t care about them at all, and this sudden change was jarring and suspicious. But Paths’ neglect of her groupmates wasn’t out of malice like they thought; she just genuinely forgot they existed for a while as she focused on seeking approval. The only exception to this was her Senior, who was barely tolerant of her anyway on account of her extreme distractability and overly eager to please demeanor.

In the end, her groupmates never really welcomed her. She acted a lot younger than she actually was due to her neglect, and was turbulent between extreme people-pleasing and bouts of pain-fueled anger at them and her creators for not acknowledging her. She was a mess, to put it lightly, and her groupmates were just… uncomfortable around her. So they stopped engaging with her, and eventually she got the hint and stopped trying to earn their approval, too.

The Mass Ascension was a horribly traumatic event for Paths Left Untaken. It basically proved to her that she meant nothing to any of her citizens, if they could all abandon her without a second thought. Now she could never earn their approval, and she was left drifting without purpose or acknowledgement. Her pain meant nothing. All of her groupmates were hurt by the Mass Ascension. She wasn’t special for having been traumatized by it. She was still unremarkable. She was “Just Paths.” And that’s all she would ever be.

Paths Left Untaken was alone for a while following the Mass Ascension.

And if I draw anymore I think my hand is actually going to explode, so! I'm just going to wrap this post up here. This was a basic overview of Paths Left Untaken pre-MA, and a lot more happens to her after the Mass Ascension. Like, a lot more. Girlie was selected by the universe to Suffer A Lot, Actually. Like she did absolutely nothing to deserve any of it but sure I guess.

Anyway! Feel free to ask me stuff about her so I have prompts to talk more! And maybe draw! Time and hand permitting! I am so mentally ill about the silly little characters <3

[bluespiritshonour]

Thinking about how popular Mai would've been if she were a boy. Like, can you imagine?people would've swooned over her like they swoon over, idk, Jet—it just occured to me that I like her because she's so unconventional for a female character.

Girls like Mai exist in real world—but women are rarely allowed to be complex and three dimensional and grey in fiction.

I would argue that Mai is a grey character; she did start out as Azula's lackey. And well, that's a fictional girl; I found her apathy stan-worthy.

I love that she constantly has a bitch face. She cracks dry/dark jokes. Wears black. Is mysterious and stoic. Does everything she can to disregard authority/even though she's not confrontational about it. (There's one difference. Bad boys are usually very confrontational).

All these characteristics exist in popular male characters. (Except for one thing that I've noticed: most of these “bad boy” characters are volatile and yet, are described as broody/stoic, like, dude. That ain't stoic, that's so emotional.)

So yeah. Coming back to Mai. Imagine if she were a boy.

A boy who's apathetic and has no passion for anything. A boy who's constantly bored/a thrill-seeker/has nothing he cares about. A boy who has a shutter for a face and rarely expresses himself, is amazing with knives and hand-to-hand combat and is gloomy.

There's nothing he cares about because caring gets people hurt and everyone wants something and is two-faced so it's safe to be a mask of indifference. Until—hold on—until he meets a passionate, hot-headed girl who's ✨ different ✨and if not anything, wears her heart on her sleeve/is an open book...

Yes, I'm talking about Zuko.

...and oh, oh, would you look at that? Now he has something to fight for!

I mean, for Mai, Zuko (after Ty Lee) is the only other person in front of whom she can be herself.

Reminds me of “he's only nice to her” trope. Sorry.

“You're so beautiful when you hate the world.”

“I don't hate you.”

Just imagine Mai as a boy. People would eat it up. They don't like her 'cause she's a girl.

[azaracyy]

a lesson on good karma digimon survive week 2024 day 4: supporting characters

[lesbianleonardo]

sooo normal about this (lying)

[iplier-memes]

❗️ISWM SPOILERS❗️

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PATHS TO DIFFERENT SCENES:

• Wilford:

Horror > Right > Maybe markiplier is in the very room > Left > It’s ok, mark! you can cry! > Cut the blue wire > Cut the yellow wire

• Yancy:

Horror/Romance > Right > Maybe Markiplier is in this very room > Right > Don’t open the door

• Darkiplier:

Romance/Horror > Left > You’re not Mark > It’s ok, Mark! You can cry! > Cut the red wire > Mark, don’t use the warp core! > Intervene > Right > Left > Left > Left > Hold on (and then skip to the end)

• Jim:

Romance/Horror > Left > You’re not Mark > It’s ok, Mark! You can cry! > Cut the red wire > Mark, don’t use the warp core! > Intervene > Right

• Ninja Sex Party:

Horror > Left > You’re not Mark! > Aww, you gonna cry? > Hide > The Captain finds Mark > Sneak away

• Heehoo:

Horror > Left > You’re not Mark! > Aww, gonna cry?

• Wug:

Horror > Right > You look a lot like Markiplier > Left > It's ok Mark you can cry > Mark you can't go back, > Sneak away > Right > Left > Right > Left

• Mark’s beautiful singing voice:

Romance > Left > You’re not Mark! > Aww, you gonna cry? > Hide > The Narrator suffers a terrible fate > Intervene > Left > Left > Right > Right > Right