#point of resonance

[that-angry-noldo]

wait there’s a Beren as death au??? How did I not know about this and can I request a drabble for it pls ❤️❤️ (also congrats on the milestone am very proud to be one of the lucky 204!)

(milestone celebration!)

Don't worry you didn't know about this because i never wrote it, only mentioned it here and there

I doubted whether to start chronologically or to write a random drabble, and random drabble won. It was something I wanted to write a while ago but never got to it... hope you enjoy :)

~

"Were you there?" Elrond asked. "When Elros passed?"

The figure beside him shifted. Elrond noticed once again how bland it looked in comparision to surroundings. A simple black cape covering its shoulders, white hair, calloused hands - it looked like an old man, and, no matter how hard he tried, Elrond couldn't see anything else.

Carefully, Death picked up a duckling and it peeped, frightened. Death's eyes glided over Elrond.

"I reap every mortal soul who comes into this world," Death answered, and Elrond took a breath.

The morning was slowly regaining its right. First sunrays brushed over Death's hair.

"Was he- was he afraid?"

"You were there, Peredhil," Death said softly, caressing the duckling's feathers with his thumb. "You saw him yourself, and he talked to you, too. I don't need to tell you how he felt."

"He-"

Elrond pursed his lips. Death looked at him with tired eyes.

"He always did that," Elrond whispered finally. "Put on a brave face for me. I- I know he was in peace, and I know he made- he made his choice, but- was he- was he afraid? Deep down, did he want to live, did he-"

"He wanted to live," Death said, smiling faintly. "Of course he wanted to live. Everything alive longs to remain so for as long as possible, Peredhil."

Elrond felt a knot tying up in his throat. Death crouched near the pond and lowered the duckling on the water. It was quick to make its way to its distressed mother.

"But he wasn't afraid," Death continued. "He was... excited."

"A new journey," Elrond mumbled. "He was talking about a new journey."

"He was." Death straightened, and looked towards the West - towards the rising sun. Elrond took a deep breath.

"I am not the end, Peredhil," Death said, and smiled at him. "He is happy, if that's what matters to you. And he wishes you to be happy, too."

The duckling quacked, getting out of the pond and making its way back to Death. Elrond couldn't help but smile a bit as Death leaned down patiently and put it back into the water.

Elrond bit his lip, trying to force down his tears. "You really do love animals," he tried to laugh, hiding his sobs. Death shook his head.

"They say you take after Luthien," he grumbled. "And yet, Luthien was much more subtle in conversation changes."

"Ah - you're right. I got this from your side of the family."

Death stared at him, unimpressed, and Elrond felt himself grinning depite it all. Finally, Death rolled his eyes.

"It's an honor to be your ancestor, Peredhil," Death said. "I mean it."

"Well," Elrond smiled, "it's an honor to be your descendant, Erchamion. Though it's a great weight, too."

Death nodded, and the next moment, Elrond was alone, only mist and a distressed duckling reminding him of the past hour.

The sun was slowly rising over Rivendell. Elrond stood there for few more minutes, then turned away and headed to the city.

[platoapproved]

armand & louis playing out echoes of his relationship with marius

[v7n5]

Studies

[keferon]

*clasps your shoulders gently and looks you straight in the eye*

Keferon. Please read Ninth by Kyn on AO3. I think you would love it very much. It has a large chapter count, but don't be intimidated, it's very easy to get into. It is currently unfinished, but is being updated regularly.

You are the seventh person that recommended this fic to me so ahahahaha yeah

I’m doing great Help I hate some parts of it but I love the other parts I’m spinning in the blender

…..I made the moodboard….

[horns-hooves-fur-tail]

Chine Sangfielle and Laios should meet and talk about their humanity and why they want/are willing to leave it behind. The beauty of The Course. How fascinating monsters are.

They should kiss too, if they feel like it, but that's not as important.

[yridenergyridenergy]

Kyo = shenanigans

... or Shinyanigans, at this point?

[neuroticboyfriend]

do you have "treatment resistant depression" or are you just fundamentally living a life that would make anyone depressed?

are you just dealing with abuse, poverty, and oppression? are you just dealing with a lifetime of trauma? do we just live in a society where peoples basic needs are neglected, and the completely understanble response to that is pathologized? on purpose? so that it's just an individual problem and people arent Trying Enough... so nothing about the system has to change?

...do you have "treatment resistant depression," or do you just need real community, support, resources, and protection?

[ingravinoveritas]

Just thinking about these three things together for no particular reason at all...

[mebis-art-dump]

There's a critical lack of maggot Godseeker in the fandom

(unmasked Godseeker speculation woooo)

For reference:

[stagefoureddiediaz]

This quote is so heartbreaking

Newly estranged relationship😭😭😭 is bad enough but then to follow that with there’s no one in Eddie’s life really is soul destroying.

Buck supporting Eddie through this is a given - the very literal visual metaphor of Buck being at Eddie’s back - of having his back as well as being the supporting hand on his shoulder we saw at the end of the season as Chris left. This is the next phase of that and how it looks remains to be seen. The way this is worded suggests that Chris is going to refuse contact with Eddie - at least initially and that is going to really hurt Eddie.

To me it feels like we might see Buck being in contact with Chris and therefore being able to feed back to Eddie to be the one connection to Chris he has. But also then become some sort of mediator for them as things settle and time and distance allows perspective to be gained and anger to settle. This channel of communication between buck and Chris and Eddie is something we’ve seen develop through the seasons - Buck being a safe space for Chris - someone not his father he can talk to and open up to or go to for help, and also someone Eddie can do the same things with.

It feels like it’s very much going to be a continuation of that established dynamic and a way of tightening the bonds between the three of them further in the long run. It truly is very coparent loaded and really a compelling narrative to explore.

The no one in Eddie’s life really quote also is loaded. It gives rise to the concept that his reltionship with his parents is going to deteriorate as well - that they may refuse to give him information on Chris or not take his calls, not involve him in decisions about Chris that really should have his input.

I found Ryan saying Eddie’s going to lean on buck very interesting as well - especially as he also said

Bucks going to lean on Eddie as well. (Also second mentions of the relationship flourishing and being stronger than ever!)

The fact this is in direct opposition to what Tim said - that Eddie is going to end up feeling a bit out in the cold because Buck will be spending more time with Tommy is interesting. Because which one is it?

Obviously Tim likes to spin his words so they never mean what he actually says. So I take all his interviews with a pinch of salt but I do think we will see that distance he spoke about because it’s good for Eddie to have that space for himself.

Well it can actually be that both are true and that is really interesting from a story telling perspective - and not exactly as a point of conflict, but as a way of juxtaposing Eddie and Tommy - it’s the pulling of the triangle that Buck Eddie and Tommy form.

This idea that Buck is going to be dealing with Gerrard and pushing back against a very different authority figure to bobby has a lot of potential for Buck and his journey of self discovery and self love and acceptance that his arc seems to be set up for this season. I don’t want to talk about Buck and BT in a meta about Eddie though!

I’m really interested to see how Eddie let’s buck lean on him and what that support looks like. Because it will be exactly what Buck needs - Eddie understands Buck and how to nudge him in the right direction - it’s a key part of their dynamic and, I’m of the opinion that we’re going to see s8 as a sort of s3 redux so I think this next iteration of buck and Eddie’s relationship - with Eddie also leaning on Buck is going to be the fight club/ lawsuit arc but in juxtaposition. Whereas in s3 they didn’t lean on each other and support one another, this time they will - it will show how much they’ve changed and grown and trust one another since s3 and how much depth there is to them as a unit. (Which will also be a perfect juxtaposition of how little buck and Tommy know and trust one another!)

[k233-0]

who am i without my powers?

[iam93percentstardust]

one of the things that really bothers me about modern franchises, and in particular over the last 5 years or so, is their refusal to commit. what i mean here when i say this is that it's not uncommon for a major franchise to make a decision, whether about the plot or the characters, that should have had huge, world-changing consequences... and then just never address that again or worse, immediately go back and undo it. and i'm gonna pick on star wars and the mcu here because those are the two big franchises i'm into at the moment (and i think they're kind of the worst at this), but i don't want you to walk away from this thinking that this is solely a disney thing. i've seen this happen with game of thrones and supernatural and plenty of other non-disney franchises. spoilers ahead, you've been warned:

in ant-man & the wasp quantumania, scott and hope make the life-altering decision to stay behind in the quantum realm and defeat kang instead of going through the portal to return to their world. this should have been a huge meta decision for the mcu, and when i first saw it in theaters, my immediate thought was wow, what is this going to mean for the mcu going forward? are we going to get a movie/miniseries about scott and hope helping to rebuild the quantum realm? how are cassie, janet, and hank going to react to the losses of their loved ones (in some cases, for the second time)? is cassie going to become the "first" young avenger because she has to take her father's place among the team lineup (and i only say first because as of this moment, none of the other young avengers introduced to the franchise are official avengers yet)? except nope, because less than 2 minutes later, cassie had fixed the portal that had broken way back at the beginning of the movie and brought scott and hope back.

and it felt like such a cheat. i was so disappointed in that theater, not as someone who was invested in these characters on a personal level (because yay, cassie gets her dad back!), but as someone who has spent years investing themselves in the story of the mcu. what was the point of wasting screentime on scott and hope accepting their new lives in the quantum realm if it was just going to immediately be undone? the entire scene could have been cut to scott and hope making it back bare seconds before the portal closed and it would have had the same emotional impact. there was nothing added by making scott and hope (and us) think that there was no way back only to rip the rug out from under us and go "gotcha! you really thought we were gonna give this movie a sad ending? haha! you're so dumb!"

and this isn't the first time the mcu has done this. one of the biggest complaints about endgame was the decision to set it five years in the future with no consideration for how that would actually change the setting of the mcu. characters were brought back to the exact place they disappeared from with no consideration for how things might have changed in the interim five years (like planes that weren't in the air anymore, buildings no longer standing, even just something as simple as a chair being unoccupied). and then the mcu didn't even really have the courage to address how this would have shaped the world other than a few jokes and making the bad guys in the falcon and the winter soldier people who cared about how the world had screwed them over during the blip.

and things like this happen over and over and over again. the accords are put into place in civil war, but by the time we get to she-hulk, they're gone with no explanation because, as best as i can tell, the writers didn't want to have to deal with the worldbuilding that went into the accords. gamora is killed in infinity war, but heaven forbid quill not have an emotional investment in a film he appears for maybe 10 minutes in so now she's back in endgame. steve got to go live in the past with his ex-girlfriend (which is in itself a refusal to commit after the mcu both gave her a different husband and had the woman herself tell him to move on) but we need to establish that messing with timelines is bad because that's what the entire next phase hinges on so actually his ending was predestined and it's only everyone else who can't change time. whoever took this entire town and also wanda hostage and forced them to live out a sitcom fantasy is bad and needs to be stopped but wait, it's actually wanda and she can't be the bad guy yet, we need her for doctor strange 2, so actually everyone's going to defend her now and say that no one else could ever possibly understand her grief. thor has decided to accept responsibility as king of asgard, but we can't use him for any more movies if he's stuck in asgard, so actually he's decided to pass it on to someone whose entire leadership capability is developed offscreen. i could list more examples but this is making me angry, so let's move on to star wars instead.

with star wars, i look at first the oft-quoted meme, "somehow palpatine has returned." yeah, i shouldn't really need to go into detail on how that counts as a refusal to commit but. the last jedi was a study in how johnson refused to commit to anything that abrams had laid down in the force awakens, but rise of skywalker was almost like abrams had looked at the franchise and said "screw you for taking it away from me, i'm going to come up with the most bullshit stuff just to spite you for doing that in the first place. and i'm going to start by undoing the most important plot point of the first trilogy: the emperor dies." and yeah, disney's kind of tried to salvage this by dropping hints into the bad batch and the mandalorian about cloning, but that only really works if you're watching the franchise chronologically and not considering that both of those series came out after rise of skywalker.

and then there's the mandalorian, my sweet summer child, who is, in my opinion, the worst at backtracking their plot points. i'm not entirely convinced that any of the higher ups for this show really knew what they were doing when they started working on it and i'm not convinced that they know what they're doing now. yeah, there's the tie-in to the last season of clone wars, but the mandalorian has managed to walk back pretty much every single major plot point it's had. din is this legendary warrior who can't be beat, but no one will watch this show if he defeats everyone too early, so he's constantly getting beat up (tbf, sometimes some of the fights he loses makes sense like the krayt dragon and the mudhorn, but a lot of them don't. at all). moff gideon is dead, no wait no he's not, now he's imprisoned, no wait no he's not, now he's definitely dead, you can totally believe us this time guys. grogu can use the force and must be placed with the jedi, but wait, the only person still actively teaching the way of the jedi is luke and all of his students will be brutally murdered ten years from now, and we can't have that, everyone will be mad at us for killing off such a cute character and no one will buy baby yoda dolls (and also we have to set up luke's character degradation from hopeful, believes-in-love cinnamon roll to "i'm going to kill my nephew") so in between seasons let's have grogu decide to go back to din (and don't even get me started on how frustrating it is that a casual mandalorian watcher also had to watch book of boba fett to understand why grogu is back). din has the darksaber now which makes him king of mandalore, that's totally going to be important and what the entire series has been building up to, right? wrong! he might have spent the first two seasons making connections, learning about the world outside his sheltered upbringing, and demonstrating the various qualities that would make for a good leader, but the entire third season will be about din realizing that actually he's super unworthy and the darksaber should actually go to someone who... saw an animal in the water.

and it's really, really frustrating as a viewer! because how am i supposed to get invested in any of these plot decisions when they almost always get reversed? why should i care that mj and ned have forgotten peter when ant-man 3 has shown me that they'll remember him the next time they're all on screen together? why should i care that tech is dead when half of the last season of clone wars was about how echo was actually alive? if none of these decisions have any permanence, then where are the emotional stakes? why should i watch your movie if all you're going to tell me is that nothing matters?

[fumifooms]

Hijoushoku to Gochisou / A Feast of Emergency Rations

Mayonaka no Waltz / Midnight Waltz

Nagabe

[daemon-is-perfectly-unhinged]

Rhaegar: We can't come.

Viserys: Why not?

Rhaegar: . . .I'll be washing my hair.

Jon: Holding the towel.

Aemond: Running the water.

Aegon: And I'll be in my chambers trying to get over the fact that nobody invited me to the big hair washing party.

[blenselche]

i lied!!!! here's pt one of the next set

set before Gumbaldia

"No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't." - The Stand, Stephen King.

[muffinlance]

I really do love your writing and Salvage gets me through when I am sad or depressed. However, I was wondering, how do you cope when someone who wrote a review didn’t like your writing? If you’ve had this before… I had one today and I am dejected. I’m working through my perfectionism and I keep telling myself, “my writing isn’t for everyone and it’s okay.” Any advice?

If it was unsolicited, especially on a fanfic? Delete it, block the person if you feel like, then go do your rage activity of choice before forgetting about it forever. That person is rude and doesn't deserve your time anymore than someone bumping into you on the street.

I've also found it useful to actively think of my fanfic as writing practice, and not even my brain expects perfection from writing practice. It also frees you do Try Cool Things.

Now take this digital blanket and cup of hot chocolate and go reread your nice comments.