#ramblings about ships

[alexiethymia]

mamao>jinshi

‘There’s nothing I can give him back in return.’

with LN vol 12 and vol 13 out in English, I can’t help but once again gush about these two. Because they are honestly one of the healthiest and most frustrating slow burn established relationship ships ever. I seriously love their development, how jinshi has come so far from his unhealthy tendencies towards maomao in the earlier volumes.

sure you can say that’s the least he could do, but it does matter a lot, for a person who’s restrained himself all his life, to get everything at his fingertips except for what he truly wanted, to still continue to restrain himself even when what he wants is already there for the taking if only he’d reach out. it’s an acknowledgment and full understanding of the unequal power dynamic between him and maomao, and giving power, at least as much as he is able, over himself to maomao in a way to make up for that unequal dynamic. it’s maomao who gets to decide now what will happen and how fast it will happen in their relationship moving forward.

which I think is brilliant from a story-telling pov because we can focus on the intriguing developments and politics while still getting small but perfect doses of the development of their relationship. not too much, but not too little either. it also makes for an absolutely hilarious dynamic because it seems like it’s maomao who’s getting frustrated this time around. because she’s also a person who restrains herself. she may be willful when it comes to medicine, but for something like this? I don’t think she learned to ask for what she wants either. she’s not used to it. so she teases instead. it’s fascinating to see that while jinshi has matured, maomao has retained that side of her, the one which unexpectedly likes teasing and triggering jinshi (oh but she better watch out once he snaps, but part of me thinks this is what she wants ultimately). like seriously, it may not be in-character, but the image of an increasingly frustrated maomao who has her attempts at flirtation constantly thwarted by jinshi’s monk-like almost masochistic self-control will never be not funny to me. I don’t discount the possibility that once she’s finally had it up to here, she’d be the one to just smack one on him and/or ravish him once and for all. I mean she was the one to steal a kiss first once she accepted Jinshi’s (and her own) feelings.

so linking it to the anime, there’s no doubt in my mind that maomao truly loves jinshi. like I don’t just mean logically how she could fall in love with him with how he respects her agency, and her knowledge, and her skill, while she respects what he stands for (and though she may not admit it), his kindness. I mean that it’s pretty clear to me that both jinshi and maomao’s love languages are acts of service. And with that thought of maomao’s, her worrying about being unable to give back to jinshi, shows to me that she’s worried about placing jinshi in the same position she was in as a baby. she may be ok now (or more like she repressed it), but maomao may have grown up feeling like never having enough (literally being left alone as a baby to cry for hours on end which isn’t anyone’s fault really but more of a matter of circumstance) until she made herself be ok with it.

and the fact that she sees nothing wrong about it when it comes to herself, but is worried about the same thing happening to jinshi, shows to me that her love isn’t as lukewarm as she thinks it is. bec inasmuch as jinshi goes above and beyond for her, maomao goes above and beyond for him as well, noticeably almost more than for anyone else. like maomao will perform acts of services for almost anyone, but for her to actually reopen the lid on her emotions, which she’s kept locked for a long time, shows to me considerable effort and care. because she recognizes the weakness in herself when it comes to emotions, but she doesn’t want to hurt jinshi by not giving him enough.

even when she prepared everything for what was supposed to be their first night, jinshi viewed it as her artisan’s spirit, but knowing maomao, it’s not something she would have done otherwise if she didn’t really want to do it. she refrained from food and drink, she prepared everything so jinshi wouldn’t have to worry. nothing about her preparations screamed transactional. bec again as much as jinshi wants her to rely on him, to burden him, maomao shows her love in how much she wants him to unburden himself. she wants him to be able to stop holding back without worries to the point that she’s willing to carry that burden for him. sure again you could see it as her being her perfectionist self, but again from what we know of maomao, she does indeed go all out, but only for the things she’s passionate about, for the things that matter to her. remember her failing the court lady exam? somehow, through everything they’ve went through, jinshi has become someone who matters so much to her that she’s willing to put in the work.

that interaction really showed how far the both of them have come, and through maomao becoming more proactive, and jinshi becoming more patient, showing the best way they show that they love the other. doing something difficult that’s not what they’re used to, sacrificing or bearing embarrassment, because despite everything, it’s worth it for the person they’re doing it for. if that’s not love, what is?

[potato-lord-but-not]

Ourthur doodles !!!!! also a redraw of the first sketch that started it all….. I haven’t known peace since ourthur was born… save me

[kaahmbem]

legend has it that the young witch circe and the once beautiful nymph scylla shared a complicated past...

[bluerosefox]

Always Favors You

Another Sibling Danny and Jason idea!!

"Are you Jason Peter Todd?!" demanded a deep and commanding tone from the strange glowing being in front of them.

All the Bats stiffened and tensed, no doubt gearing up for a fight against the being that somehow knew Red Hood's full name.

Jason, Red Hood, decided to put on a brave front despite no doubt cursing in his head and wondering how the heck did this thing know his full freaking name.

"Whose asking." he snarled out, his hands twitching for his gun when the huge glowing knight with purple flames coming out of his helmet and cape, who was riding on a nightmare looking horse while they all had been in the cave going over tonight's patrol.

The Knight didn't seemed bothered by his response nor did he even seem to care or flinch when Batman made his own demand on 'Why was he there and who was he' or when Damian unsheathed his sword and pointed it towards him. Instead the strange glowing Knight reached to it side and pulled out... A glowing scroll? Huh. (Also he completely unnerved everyone in the room when the Knight didn't even react when Batman had tossed a Baterang when he reached for his side)

The Knight opened the scroll and spoke clearly with purpose.

"Jason Peter Todd,

You are hereby invited as a special guest of honor to the crowning of our future King of the Infinite Realms.

Daniel Phantom, once Daniel Jackson Fenton, and once Daniel Austen Todd.

Prince of the Infinite Realms, the Keeper of Balance, The Peacekeeping Halfa, the Defeater of the Tyrant King Pariah Dark, The Great One, Youngest of the Ancients, Ancient of Space, The Bridge between Life and Death.

You, the half-brother of our King, have been given the highest of honors for your past actions and will be given housing and food in the Realms and Phantom's Keep, for the week long event. Personal servants and attendants will be at your disposal and a seamstress will be on hand to tailor make your attire for the Coronation.

Signed: Clockwork. Ancient of Time. Watcher of the Infinite Timeline. Kronos. Mentor and Adviser.

PS: I shall have Fright Knight ("Me" the Knight bluntly said for a second) leave this scroll along with a personal one for you from Daniel to read over and once you make up your mind sign the bottom of the scroll.

I do hope in time you will pick the right choice Jason Todd, we of the Infinite Realms would like to reward you for your actions. After all, if you hadn't gotten young Daniel away from your father that night all those years ago, we would never had gained our Prince nor be free from our once Tyrant King.

Ah, one more thing.

The Infinite Realms will always favor you Jason."

Jason felt like he couldn't breath as Fright Knight? Rolled up the scroll, pulled a letter from his side, and held out the two items for him to take.

[lazylittledragon]

i will never listen to anyone saying that being a child/teenager is the best years of your life because when you're 22 you can just decide you want cookies and then in like 25 minutes you have cookies. could a child do that i think not

[oobbbear]

I want to post this here too because I’ve seen it happen a few times

Please understand that there are cultural differences and language differences, if you see this happening let the person clarify what they meant, that person might just not be familiar with words the western side of the internet use

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

[mordenandmerry]

Broke: devaluing the female love interest because she “gets in the way” of a gay ship

Woke: shipping a gay ship so that the female love interest can be gay with me

[melina-mellow]

Ekko from hit tv show Arcane and hit game League of Legends is a professional yearner.

... bro can't keep the love out of his eyes whenever he sees her.

[teslacoils-and-hubris]

*gore and body parts everywhere, just absolutely drenched in blood* yeah I'm being normal about people misinterpreting a fictional character whom I enjoy a normal amount

[falloutnewnobody]

havent listened to falsettos since 2016 because i was really annoying about it then but "i'm breaking down" autoplayed this morning and oh my god trina really was going through it huh.

in act one alone girl was like. "my husband whom i have a child with lied to me about having an std so we wouldnt have to have sex, then left me for his best friend which has seriously fucked with my ability to see myself as attractive or worthy of affection. systemic misogyny, heteronormativity, and the insane standards women are held to, have kicked me in the teeth at every oppertunity and there's literally nothing i can do but try to hold on for the sake of my son. so yeah doctor i'm like a bad cup of coffee away from killing myself,"

and her psychiatrist just goes

[alexiethymia]

momo and okarun really are complementary and a match made in heaven. they work as a battle couple so well, precisely because momo can be okarun’s hands, while okarun always serves as momo’s feet.

[iamespecter]

Lifeline AU in a nutshell you guys 🫶 God I need sleep

[paradisekore]

severance writers are doing a rare portrayal of a female protagonist who is also her own antagonist, showing she’s capable of horrible, manipulative things because her upbringing repressed all the goodness in her and brought her inner conflict to life, making her have a literal psychic battle of self-loathing and showing the self harm she’ll do to her own self on both sides ….only for people to say “what a bitch she should just shut off her brain and let her other self take over completely, they aren’t even the same person really “ like... WHAT? 😭 does anyone like authentic storytelling and challenging character journeys ????

[sixtharrow]

It’s weird. Way back in the day (like, pre-Voltron Legendary Defender era) the relationship between two unrelated fictional guys being considered “brotherly” would have been quite validating to us slash shippers. It’s like, oh wow, they’re that close, huh. They already consider themselves each other’s family. They’d die for each other. We’d have thought a romantic relationship stemming from that was perfectly logical!

And it’s not like the ship would ever be canon, so having that sort of deep bond was the next best thing. The fanworks would just have to take it from there.

But it’s so different these days. A character says “you’re like a brother to me” and now shipping two unrelated fictional guys is literally incest? Even though this has been a trope in straight romances for forever? Wow, the view has really shifted! Of course, shippers back in the day were much looser regarding canon roles, ages, power dynamics, or hell, even whether or not two characters existed in the same universe in the first place! But this is one argument I’ve just never been a fan of. Like, I used to say my first gf was my sister all the damn time because I didn’t know how else to interpret my feeings for her early on. And the fact that this seems to disproportionately affect m/m ships and f/f ships is telling, too. Also, people’s views of each other can...change? Sure, maybe Character A once saw Character B as his brother, but something is different now, and so he has to go and navigate those feelings. I mean the whole point of fanworks is exploration. For the characters as well as the writer. And just like back in the day, the ships are rarely canonized, which means something is always being changed or expanded. We just didn't have killjoys in our ears telling us we couldn’t ship two unrelated fictional guys because one of them once referred to the other as a brother or whatever. Well, we did, cause homophobes exist, we just didn’t usually hear it from fellow shippers.

[bet-on-me-13]

Wes ruins everything

Wes had finally done it, he had finally realized why nobody ever belived him about Fenton and Phantom! It made so much sense now, he had been looking for an answer for years, thinking he was going crazy because everybody refused to see the Obvious!

He was Cursed!

He literally had an Ancestoral Curse on his Bloodline that made it so that all those born with the gift of Prophecy would be ignored! A Gift of Prophecy that he apparently had.

It was Cassandra's Curse, the one from Greek Myths. Apparently she was his Great×1000 Grandmother and passed down the Gift (and Curse) of Prophecy to him. And he knew how to break it!

All he needed to do was gather the right resources, chant the correct incantations, make sure not to accidentally summon a Demon in the process, and he could just foist the Curse onto some other poor schmuck. Sure it would suck for them, and he would loose his Gift of Prophecy, but Wes had been ignored for Years at this point, he needed validation!

So he did the Ritual, and he didn't mess it up, and he managed to get rid of the Curse.

Now all he had to do was convince everybody that he was right for the first time in his life! This was going to be great!

...

Cass didn't know what was going on.

A while ago, she had started getting these...gut feelings that she couldn't explain.

She would look over the details of a Case her Family was working on, and see a patern that the others were seemingly ignoring. Like when she realized that The Penguin was about to raid the Docks on the East Side, but the others were convinced it was going to be on the West.

But when she had tried to tell them, they had brushed her off. "We've already concluded that he will begin the Raid on the West side, no need to go to the East."

She had gone anyways, and low and behold she had been right. But nobody even acknowledged that she had been right at all, they had just wondered how they had missed the signs, not even questioning how she had known.

It wasn't limited to Cases either. Even small things, like telling her brother's where the TV remote was were brushed off, and hours later they would still be looking, never even having checked where she told them.

It seemed that no matter what, nobody cared about her point of view anymore. They kept brushing her off, telling her she was wrong, actively ignoring her ideas.

And it was getting worse. They were starting to ignore her more and more, forgetting she was in the room, not calling her down for Dinner, even forgetting to check in on her during Patrol.

She knew that there must be something going on, Magical or otherwise, but when she tried bringing it up with her Dad or JLD, they would also Brush her off.

Her Family was forgetting her. And they didn't even realize it.

...

Danny was not okay at the moment.

When he had gone to school a few weeks ago and noticed everybody staring at him, he didn't give it much thought. Maybe Dash or Paulina had spread another Rumor about him again, not too out of the ordinary.

When his name had been called over the Intercom, he hadn't thought much of that either. His grades were falling even more than usual, so he assumed his Guidance Counselor wanted to have another talk with him.

When he walked into the Principals Office to see both of his Parents and some GIW Agents, that's when he realized something big must have happened.

He didn't have much of a chance to react when the Shields went up, but he did react when the first Ecto-Blast scorched the wall behind him. His Parents began to scream at him as they fired their Blasters, something about replacing somebody? He didn't know, he was pretty preoccupied at the moment.

It took more effort than he cared to admit to escape the Room, but a stray shot to the hidden Shield Projector under the Principals Desk proved to be his saving grace. Unfortunately the moment he escaped the Office, he was met with a veritable Army of GIW Agents, all armed to the Teeth with Weapons he had never even seen before.

He managed to get away for a moment, hiding in the Bathroom as the Agents chasing him passed it by. That's when he met Wes.

He obviously hadn't been expecting him, but the moment he saw him Wes put on a smug look. "Oh hi Fenton, trying to get away from the other students?"

Danny had replied with confusion, "What the hell are you talking about?!"

"I finally managed to convince everybody about you, now everyone knows that you're Phantom! I'll bet you're hiding from all of the other Students hounding you for questions right?"

"...it was you?"

"Yeah, so? I finally get to be right!"

"...You absolute MORON-"

That was the last Danny got to say to Wes before an Ecto-Blast launched him through a Wall, seeing his face morph into a look of Shock just before the dust cloud covered it up.

Since that day, Danny had been on the Run. Nowhere was safe anymore now that the GIW knew both his Human and Ghost's faces, but he had to keep running. He crossed state Lines already, and was on his way to the next Ecto-Rich City he could sense, somewhere in New Jersey.

He cursed his Fenton Luck every day. Why had everybody believed Wes this time?! Nobody had ever belived him before, nobody even seemed to acknowledge his existence after a while! What had changed?

Danny just wanted to rest already.

...

Cass had taken to Patrolling alone recently. She had taken to doing a lot of things alone, actually.

After the first month, it seemed that nobody could remember that she was in the room with them, even if she was within their eyeline, she just faded into the background. By the 2 Month Mark they had stopped talking to her entirely, although occasionally she would get a Text or two from her dad. By the 3 month Mark she was completely invisible, and By the 5th she had been forced to get used to it.

She didn't know what was going on, was it a Meta Ability? Magic? Alien Tech? She had no idea.

She had begun to cook for herself after the first time Alfred forgot to set her Plate at the Table. The same with Washing her own Clothes, Cleaning her Room, and Paying her Phone Bills. At the very least the Automated Allowance Payments to her Account had kept up, or she wouldn't have been able to go to her favorite Cafe anymore.

It was bittersweet for her. She used to go to that Cafe every week with Alfred, but he didn't even come on his own anymore. Had he only come for her? Did she really mean that much to them? It hurt, she finally had a family that cared for her and suddenly she didn't exist to them.

She sat alone at a Table, ignored by everyone in the Cafe as usual, when a new face walked in. He looked about her age, a little roughed up, walking with a sort of cautious gaint, as if he was scared of something. His Body Language seemed to agree with her assessment, as his body practically screamed "Worry" in its movements.

Cass stopped watching at that point. Just another Gotham Teen, probably worried over something like getting not having enough money or getting mugged on the way home. It was a Common sight in Gotham.

She attention was pricked again for a moment when she heard a voice speak up. "Uh, can I sit here?"

She ignored it, he wasn't talking to her.

"Um, excuse me? Miss? Could I sit here?" He repeated.

She ignored him again, he wasn't talking to her. Nobody talked to her.

"Hello? Do you have Earbuds in?" He said, and he waved his hand in front of her face.

Her face. He waved his hand. In front of Her Face.

He was talking to her.

She looked up at him sharply, seeming to startle him for a moment before he asked, "So, is that a no?"

"You can see me?" She asked.

He looked a bit bewildered, but replied "Uh, yeah? Why would I not? Are you...a Ghost?". That last part sounded a bit suspicious.

"No. Not a Ghost. But nobody sees me. Ever. Nobody remembers me." She replied. She had never spoken this much to anybody outside of her Family, but in the past few weeks she had been starved for interaction.

He seemed slightly interested, and sat down at her table. He looked her in the eyes, and said "Do you...talk about it?"

She smiled. He could see her.