#saving for… personal reasons

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

finally at that age where i'm thinking i should get a tattoo. not bc i feel strongly about it, just seems like a waste not to. i've got so much skin i'm not using

[summerlinenss]

here’s the thing.

if you’re one of the people celebrating our flag means death’s cancellation for whatever reason right now, i need you to realize that this is just a sign that whatever you love is next.

and i’m not saying that out of spite. having your favourite show cancelled is awful, i wouldn’t wish it on anyone. but if our little-gay-pirate-show-that-could can’t get its third and final season, the future of queer media is extremely grim.

ofmd was the definition of a sleeper hit. hbo max had no faith in it when the first season came out. it gained popularity purely through word-of-mouth. but it became one of max’s biggest shows, and it’s since been marketed as their flagship series.

it was the #1 most in-demand series in the world for 8 weeks (7 of those weeks consecutively). it’s currently in the 99.7th percentile of the comedy genre, meaning it’s in higher demand than 99.7% of all comedy series in the u.s. it has a 94% audience and critics score on rotten tomatoes. it’s the most in-demand hbo original series even above euphoria, succession, and the last of us.

it was nominated for 16 awards for the first season alone, including a GLAAD award and a peabody award. the second season was just nominated for an art directors guild award, which it was previously nominated for and won in the same category for season one.

besides awards, ofmd is critically-acclaimed and praised for its representation (including a cast of majority queer, bipoc, and disabled characters) and themes of anti-colonialism, challenging gender norms/toxic masculinity, and self-discovery/acceptance. it also has a diverse team of directors and writers consisting of several bipoc, women, and queer/trans/non-binary people.

on top of all of this, the plan for the show all along was only ever for three seasons. david jenkins only wanted three seasons for the full romcom structure to tell ed and stede’s story. that’s it. nothing more.

this isn’t an attempt to make you care about the show. but ofmd’s cancellation isn’t just a loss for the fanbase and the cast/crew. it’s a sign that it does not matter how successful or profitable shows highlighting lgbtq+ (or otherwise inclusive) narratives are or how many big names are involved. ofmd would not have been cancelled if it were a straight romcom. they would’ve magically found the budget. but corporate greed doesn’t care about us. they have no respect for queer people or queer media. and in the age of streaming, it’s only a matter of time until we lose all of it.

[mintjeru]

rough day?

open for better quality | no reposts

[fellow-fandom-fruitifier]

Edwin is way too fucking kind. Like, picture this. You JUST got dragged down into a pit that took you 70 years prior to escape and, while down there, you run into the very boy that SENT you there. Yes, it was supposed to be a “prank”. But it was never EVER a good one, even if it did turn out to be fake. You were dragged out of your bed, tied up and gagged like a pig, and held down. That “prank”, since it’s inception, wasn't funny or harmless. (Not even getting into how bad it would be to be labeled a homosexual in the 19-fucking-hundreds.)

Then you get dragged into The Pit™️ for 7 decades and tortured beyond comprehension. Now you're finding out its cause the boy ASSSUMED you were like him then ASSUMED he assumed wrong. All that because the boy couldn't handle you not being what he assumed you were, you didn't even know he assumed that! You didn't even know HE was that!

Edwin had every right to berate Simon and leave but he DIDN’T. He offered him a hand — all but begged Simon to join him — and promised a salvation no one had offered him before. (Before Charles I mean.) He’s just so kind it breaks my heart. Like, yes, he’s a petty bitch; but he read to a dying boy to comfort him in the same year he escaped Hell. He upended his entire afterlife to go save Becky Aspen despite his protests. He offered his killer a helping hand.

Someone get this jerk a break oh my GOD he deserves one.

[inamindfarfaraway]

I love how Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse said “Anyone can be Spider-Man”. I love how it inspired everyone to imagine their own Spider-People, saving the day in their own universes, with all kinds of cool, interesting personalities and aesthetics and mutations and life stories and relationships. We all put pieces of our soul into these homemade heroes. We had fun. We found community. And then Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse said, “Wow, great job! You’ve really taken our message to heart. Well, get ready for even more of everything you liked from the first movie and a new message to complement the first. Anyone can be Spider-Man… and anyone can be pulled into a cult.”

So now we all have to contemplate whether our lovingly crafted heroes would ever be on Team Mandatory Trauma Because Martyr Complex or not and why.

[royalarchivist]

Jaiden: Cucurucho, you have a lot of power, right?

Cucurucho: ...I don't know. Maybe.

Roier: Ah... Yes, you know, don't act like a dumbass, you have it. You have it, man. Eh?

Jaiden: Is there a way for us to protect all the Eggs? Do you know? I don't want anything to happen to the Eggs that happened to Bobby.

Cucurucho: Ha ha ha

Roier: WHAT? [Smacks Cucurucho]

Jaiden: [Bops him] Headpats.

Cucurucho: Maybe.

Jaiden: [Continues to bop him] Headpats. C'mon, I can get it out of you! Headpats! Chin scratches! Belly rubs!

Roier: [Joins Jaiden in bopping Cucurucho, chuckling and laughs]

Jaiden: Yeah? He's comin' around!

[Jaiden and Roier both laugh]

[damianbugs]

it's just a little interesting that people love genuinely kind and good hearted characters but somehow batmans unwavering belief that people can be better and people can be changed is not enough? even characters within the same media are praised and respected for being the bigger hero and choosing to save rather than to hurt and yet bruce's no-kill rule is often a point of ridicule for his character.

what is so wrong with having a immensely complicated character have slightly less complicated morals about empathy? for a character who loves and hurts and loses why is this something so unbelievably unrealistic for a hero to believe in. what is outlandish about people being people before they are a product of their misfortunes?

of course it isn't a perfect mindset, it isn't even a healthy one in a lot of cases — but it is something that has stayed true to its mission and so i think it deserves a little more thinking before being dragged around as lazy writing.

[introspectivememories]

nah cause like you dont get it!!!! the sully kids and spider are a unit!!! they're puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. the very definition of "the gang is what i trust"!!! they're together their whole lives and then spider gets taken and all of a sudden the puzzle is in disarray. kiri's so spacey cause she doesn't have spider to bring her back down to pandora. lo'ak's acting out cause he doesn't have his usual partner-in-crime/fellow outcast to make light mischief with. neteyam is like two seconds away from a heart attack/stroke the whole movie because the other kid he used to parent his siblings with for the past like decade is gone!!! and spider on the other hand? is completely alone. at least the other four have each other. all spider has is his alien racist, genocidal, imperialist dad dragging him on the world's worst war crime road trip. there's no kiri to get him out of his head. there's no lo'ak to to be outcasts with. there's no neteyam to have a quiet reassurance that they're in this together with. there's just him and his stupid, fucking mind. and then they blend his brain at bridgehead and it's over for him.

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[the-kipsabian]

HAPPY 32ND BIRTHDAY KIP SABIAN

MAY 19, 1992

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 232

Once more thinkin of These Series of AU/Prompts, where the Class pulls a Tiamat. Becomes Giant Hydra Dragon. But with some inspiration from @radiance1's Blob King AUs. Specifically also the dragon ones.

Now, the nine of them are admittedly far older than they once were. Far older than most of the people outside the cage they were tricked into all those years before, exhaustion seeping into their bones as their ectoplasm was siphoned away.

Yet no matter how much the GIW drains away- if they're even called as such anymore- they never run out. If anything, at least from what they've noticed, unable to do much of anything else in this pit, this tank of green and red, they seem to be making more.

Their recollection of being separate, of having separate bodies have long since slipped away in exchange for keeping memories of their families and friends long gone now. Perhaps they're in the zone, as ghosts, but perhaps not.

Days feel like both seconds and years, words falling away as their Core hums as one. Sometimes a Blob ghost manages to find its way inside- the trap designed not to stop things from getting in, but to prevent them from leaving.

They always disappear whenever the ecto is taken away, not having enough to continue holding on to a physical form. But... the blobs don't stay gone. Their own ecto brings them back, tiny forms almost mimicking their own.

It's something to distract them, something to actually do besides growl at the figures beyond the barriers around them. The blobs don't speak, don't make more than squeaks, but it's something. Almost like dozens of toddlers floating around, becoming more and more draconic in shape with every siphon.

Do their captors realize, they wonder, how they've made them all stronger than they were even before? Do they realize what they've done, creating this loop of ever-growing power?

No, Star giggled, pink and gold scales shimmering as she bobbed her head in amusement, Paulina's darker purples following.

They don't know, Wes agreed, dark amusement echoed by both Sam and Dash, fangs flashing amidst the liquid. The trap would not be able to contain them for much longer, they all knew. They could feel it, how the siphon stuttered with every run.

It wouldn't be long now. They had waited three hundred years for the chance to escape- they could wait for a few days more.

...

Though they won't complain about an early prison break if those alarms are anything to go by.

[rui-drawsbox]

I like to remember my first stardew save whenever I can, so I kinda remade my farmer for my first playthrough of Coral Island kajdhjsk

[symphonyofsilence]

Gotta love how Megumi apparently knows about who Geto is and his relationship with Gojo. (Obviously, he'd know, since Gojo takes any opportunity to randomly info dump about Geto to any unsuspecting listener). Because otherwise, his reaction would have been "Who's Geto and what in the Luo Binghe has the moron in question exactly done to his corpse?!"

[the-cryptographer]

i ran low motorics for my first pt of de and imbetween all my save spamming i came to a really weird place coming into the tribunal. like, i really wanted titus and as many of his friends as possible to survive, and i was looking at a near impossible hand/eye coordination skill-check. and up until that point i had been super careful to avoid having harry do drugs anywhere where kim could see him and judge him for it, but i was falling far short of the save and the obvious thing was to snort up some speed to give myself the edge, so i did. and i felt like that was in a way the truest moment of the game.

like, i’m playing an addict. i’m going through withdrawal. my hand is shaking. my hand is shaking and i need it steady. ruining my physical and metal health in the longterm don’t matter rn, bc it’s my job to run into an impossible and impossibly violent situation and save as many people as i can, and if i can’t do that, what am i here for at all? more people are going to die unless i make this shot, and i can’t if my hand is shaking, and it’s not going to stop shaking until i get my drugs, and so the only reasonable choice to make is to take the drugs, and oh- that’s why he can’t quit! beyond all the difficulties and pain and emotional trauma of the withdrawal itself, there’s no way to keep doing this job (with an abnormally large case load according to kim) and to walk into life and death situations and not botch them, while under the strain of trying to quit. and, sure, because you won’t quit you’ll have breakdowns and go on benders and give yourself brain damage and crash your car, and they’ll dress you down and publicly humiliate you for it. but no matter how much they humiliate you, they’re also not going to give you proper medical care or lessen your case load or stop throwing you in life or death situations that require you keep using, so you can’t quit.

idk, just like... it’s very strange to me bc i keep seeing people throw out the idea that it’s a moral responsibility that Harry go sober (and beyond that a moral responsibility as the player to keep him sober) but this was honestly probably the best and most thought provoking moment in the game for me, and i feel like people are really cheating themselves out of it by getting so caught up in their personal feelings about addiction that they refuse to engage it.

[kacievvbbbb]

I don't know which is more devasting. The idea that Mihawk and Shanks didn't see each other for a decade after thier breakuptm (which giving that they dueled almos daily for years someone had to have drastically changed their habits to avoid seeing the other)

or even despite all that and not for a lack of trying they just keep running into each other. That their fates are so horrribly enterwined, their yin and yang so bound to the other that despite their best efforts to the contrary it always brings them together again. On the same island in the same know nothing town pretending the other doesn't exist. Because Shanks is a captain on the come up he has a whole crew a burgeoning fleet and territories he can't just drop everything to chase after a petulant swordsman. And if Mihawk can't fight shanks then he can't see Shanks.

And god the tragedy of that of knowing that they are there on the other side of this island because you've known from the moment they arrived. But knowing better/refusing to do anything about it.

On the other hand I do also love the idea that whenever they do run into each other they get into these intense arguments and Mihawk and Shanks have always been prone to fighting but not like this. Because at the end of the day Mihawk and Shanks are both very immature people Shanks is prone to deflecting and distracting to avoid the problem while Mihawk is prone to just completely shutting down when any strong emotions are involved or when he feels like he is not being understood, until he just bursts out in a flurry of rage filled meanness and wrath with a body trail a mile long. And so they just go at each other and the situation is too delicate to thorn filled for Beckman to mediate and so he separates them at least to preserve the integrity of the island they are all presently on.

And then Mihawk goes off and takes his anger out on a marine base cause the pirates have all learned to steer clear of him.

I just think it brings new meaning to Shanks posturing when Mihawk first pulls up on him a decade later. That "you come here for a fight" is a real question and not just playful banter because obviously Shanks doesn't like fighting with Mihawk but why else would he be here? It's why mihawk's little comment doesn't diffuse the tension until he mentions luffy's poster. He is literally and figuratively extending an Olive branch and Shanks couldn't be happier to take it

[abyssal-ilk]

i have mixed feelings overall about the dialogue between vivienne and cole, mainly because cole's prodding at her (and all of the other companions, really) feels so invasive and there is nothing we can do to get him to actually stop, BUT.

i cannot get over this piece of banter. it's forever living in my head