#processing disappointment

[random-cockroach]

Have been reading Dratchrod fics, got disappointed, drew dratchrod

[ruushes]

companions re-classed pt 2 - wyll 🗡️💘🐉

with thanks to @thedragonagelesbian and everyone who suggested drakewarden, i think the change made it a much better piece! 💛

karlach

[jagadishbirajdar]

It's Easy Sometimes to Plan a Sweet Spot | Embrace Our Judas

[astrhae]

"I'm very good at forgiveness. It's one of my favorite things."

[eneabastianini]

It's been almost a year since my last post but I can't not talk about this.

F1 is trying to make a big deal about being more progressive, making a safe place for women. And how do they do that? By grossly mishandling a potential sexual assault case at the start of the season. Allowing Patrick Mahomes to buy shares of Alpine after repeatedly defending his brother's sexual battery case. Allowing James Charles into the paddock, someone with multiple allegations involving underage boys.

AND INVITING DONALD TRUMP.

edit to add: Camila Cabello is a racist and so is Jake Paul who are also at this race

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[lightgamble]

DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN | 1.01

I refuse to believe that a tragedy had to destroy everything. But it did.

[zylphiacrowley]

memento vivere

<previous - next>

[joyousjoyfuljoyness]

This is "Disappoint," painting number 14 in the Close Encounters Collection!

[nylloth]

read Amanda's new interview. It's insane and it explains the thrash going on in season two. They listened to the “animators' vision” and then wrote the script to fit the scenes they already had. So they literally shifted responsibility for the script to people who generally can't write. It's just not their profession. No wonder s2 has no dialog at all or it's completely dumb. Of course the animators thought "well we can convey that emotion through Caitlyn's 0.5 sec micro gaze".

You shouldn't have been thinking “what the animators wanted to see” at all, YOU SHOULD have been thinking about how to continue the plot of the FIRST SEASON. Jesus Christ, don't they have any brains?

You can 100% say that Arcane s2 didn't get any writing awards because there was no writing.

[simonsezsewart]

My last two brain cells <3

(Timelapse + alt versions below)

Song: Long Long Long Journey - Bill Wurtz

Bruh I struggled for over two hours on WW’s sketch, meanwhile the entire Vash drawing took two hours total… whoops 💀

But hey! Look at all the colors in their hair! It’s like little rainbows… ;w;

(Sketches so yall can see what I’m talking about in the tags 💀)

[aingeal98]

I love the preview of what we're getting in batgirls already because Shiva saying she never wanted a daughter could easily be true or a lie. Maybe Sandra once wanted a child, who knows, doesn't really matter now that she's Shiva. Meanwhile Cass "mother issues" Wayne responding with oh you think I wanted a mom? Like Cass honey... The answer to that is an obvious yes you're not fooling anyone 😭

[ziyechs]

joe'marr bengals reunion — a (somewhat) comprehensive timeline

1 — “have you spoken to the cincinnati bengals and what would it mean to reunite with joe burrow there?” — “i have talked to the bengals. i don’t know how many times i’ve talked to them though. but, me and joe, you know, i wouldn’t mind going back with joe. if we go back together we’re trying to do nothing but get back our chemistry and have some more fun.”

2 — “i'm really excited for this draft. i don't really know what's coming but, you know, if me and joe could get back to it... i’d love to have some fun with him again.”

3 — “i assume you'd be okay with a potential reunion in cincinnati if that were to happen?" — "yeah, i wouldn’t mind.”

4 — “me and joe talked about [a reunion] maybe like three, four times actually. we talked about it a good bit of times. he texted me this morning, just letting me know: ‘get your bags packed’, so i guess that meant that was gonna be the pick. i don’t know if that was a hint or what. so, he sent me that little text this morning, i was like ‘okay… i'm ready, bro’.”

5 — “what was your reaction like when he was lowkey recruiting you?” — “i actually was believing him sometimes, sometimes i was like ‘stop playing with me’ and sometimes i was just like ‘okay bro, i gotcha, i'm ready now’ so. i believed him this morning when he told me, you know, pack my bags. so that's when i finally was like: ‘yeah he might really be calling this’ so that's when i took his word.”

6 – “jimmy burrow, did joe tell you—he’s always been kind of coy about what he said to the bengals—did joe tell you that he wanted the bengals to select ja’marr?” — “yes, i think we figured that… and eventually… yes, he pretty much told us that he wanted ja’marr.”

7 — “it was like a week before the draft, ja'marr said: ‘dad, joe texted me.’ […] he didn't say what he said, you know. but he said: ‘joe just texted me’, [...] so he had talked to joe like... or texted with joe once or twice that week. and then he told me, he said: ‘dad, if i get with joe, we're gonna kill’ [...] so he was all excited about getting with joe.”

8 — “what was the first thing joe texted you when you got drafted by the bengals?” — “make sure your bag's packed and ready. yeah, that was what he told me.”

9 — “the cincinnati bengals are on the clock now. earlier that morning, i had got a text from joe. he said: hope your bags are packed. i know it's me, at the moment, that's what i'm saying to myself. i can't wait to be a part of it.”

10 — articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

[spirkbitch]

i’ve been attempting to understand for a while why i hate so much that a video of the january 6th insurrection was used in star trek, and aside from how much it confuses the timeline (eugenics wars in the 90s, nuclear winter in the early 21st century, but somehow all sorted out by 2016 and trump was elected president?), i think i’ve found part of my problem with it.

it just seems like an easy cop out to get ‘progressive points’, a quick way for the writers to show you where they stand, without even an attempt to fit it into the timeline in a way that makes sense.

my main issue is that star trek has, of course, always dealt with complicated issues, but it used to be so much more thought out. there used to be metaphors, allegories, explanations that actually made sense (though sometimes it wasn’t spelled out for you) . The Cloud Minders, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (tos) and The High Ground (tng) are just a few episodes off the top of my head, that deal with similar, difficult, situations. Even episodes like A Private Little War, which clearly hasn’t aged well, was very obviously an allegory for proxy wars, a very real and pertinent issue at the time it came out.

but the thing is, you have to think between the lines to understand them, none of them are so heavy handed as to just directly show a video of a historical event just to say “hey guys this is bad”, like it was only put there to prove the point that the show runners don’t support that.

one issue this brings up for me is, while trying to find others that agree with me on this i just keep coming across the sentiment “politics shouldn’t be in star trek”. if you’ve managed to miss the politics this whole time then i regret to inform you that your skull may be made of lead.

it’s hard to discuss real opinions on a show when so much of the criticism is flooded with “it’s too woke!! why is there politics in star trek!!!”

star trek has always been an overwhelmingly progressive show, (accounting for the fact that it started in the 60s of course) but unfortunately a lot of people have managed to miss that, a lot of the progressive points have ‘aged out’ of the show, and no longer make the point they used to as clearly as they would have had you watched them when they came out. now it seems that writers are overcompensating to drive home the point that it’s a progressive show.

to people who missed how progressive it already was, this makes it look unnecessarily ‘woke’ and like it came out of nowhere, for the rest of us who were paying attention, it seems very heavy handed and like they’re trying too hard to achieve something that old trek did effortlessly.

[captainsavre]

- I had to go help Warren deliver a baby in the wildfire. - What? Are you okay? Maya and Carina || Station 19 - 7.10 “One Last Time”

[beesyjimwax]

Medic gaming. He’s out for blood!!!