#second childhood

[anotheruserwithnoname]

They calendar says I'm 54 yet there's a place in Saskatoon, Sask. where one can buy a dozen assorted rubber ducks for $18 Cdn and I'm giving it serious consideration.

[hinamie]

to moving forward

[ehj3]

HAVE OR HAVE NOT

“The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.” ― Saki/Hector Hugh Munro This one is not about the classic movie or the class struggle. It’s about my theory of self-other relationships and how they change over the self’s life. When you are young, it’s all about who you are, when you get old It’s about what you have. In between it’s all…

[royaltea000]

he could not control the class 😔

[homkamiro]

*heavys voice* entire team is BABIES!!!!!

[irishyuri]

these were such fun warmups lmao COWBOY AU (briefly) BACK ONLINE ‼️‼️

[bluerosefox]

Tim, buddy, what do you mean you might had accidentally made a Love Child?!

Danny finds out that

1. He's a clonish 'love child' of two heroes

2. He was accidentally created during one of his donors mental break downs after losing his father and best friends (one of which was his other donor)

3. CW interfered before his creator realized what he made and pulled him out of that dimension because "it would had lead that world to true ruin if he found out at his state of mind. He's better now but it would had been the final straw for him should anything had happened to you in his care and given who he had to partner up with later... I did what I had to."

4. Due to Danny having a bad fall out with his parents after he told them about being Phantom (they didn't attack him... but they did disown him.) Danny is left adrift of what to do. He doesn't wanna bug Jazz, she's in college and dorming. Tuckers place has no room. Sam's parents would never let him stay. Vlad was a definitely a no go. And Dani (Ellie) last check in was near the Amazon rainforest.

5. Danny finds out some of his powers might not be as ghostly as he thought... it does explain the huge power boost some of his powers have compared to other ghosts.

6. He went to Clockwork... who proceeded to tell him the truth, smile his cryptic smile while saying "and now. Have fun this time around. I'll see you again in due time Daniel." Before yeeting him into a portal.

7. Danny woke up in his home dimension.... deaged to being five years old (the age he would be if he stayed and grew by now) (DC timeline is slower than DP in this)

8. He woke up apparently his creator's home city... during a Gala (Danny woke up in a garden, dazed and confused. His memories are fuzzy)... and wandered into the party... and apparently he looked like a perfect mix of his.. dads? Which catches A LOT of peoples attention.

9. Especially with Tim Drake-Wayne and Conner Kent-Luthor just announcing they're dating that very night.

10. Rumors and gossip of a random kid, who looks just like the recent happily announced couple, go flying quickly among the elite... and reaches certain ears before it gets to batfam and supers (I have a feeling they learned how to block out rumors and gossips during these events)

11. Those ears happen to be Lex Luthor and Ra's al Ghul (both who are there at the Gala just to annoy and unnerve the Bats and Supers)

12. By the time the rumors get to Tim and Conner, they find Danny almost getting taken away by one of those two.

[camarilla-arts]

While still fixated on TMNT at large, I am especially not able to stop thinking about Bad End Ninja Turtles, an au comic by @butterfilledpockets. 2003's "Same as it Never Was" Raph may not have ever experienced the Ninja Tribunal arc, AND I don't think Rise movie Leo still has his powers, so maybe this was just as much of a surprise for the both of them as it was for Ronin. at least we know for sursies Don-bot has seen magic shit before.

[happyheidi]

𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 🍃

𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳: 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘦, 𝘩𝘶𝘨 ��� 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦 🌳 𝘭𝘰𝘭 𝘪𝘥𝘬

[nell0-0]

AHHHH! He lost his EYE in the war! AHHHH!

I am perfectly normal about your last comic. I swear. Very normal. Just...not at all sobbing and emotional over it. You should know that. Definitely. ;_;

It's so good and so sad!

Yep ;u;

Glad you liked it tho!

Take the broken mask drawing as symbolism (?). A piece of him is now forever a part of Mask, and there's no taking that back.

There are many protrayals of Fierce Deity out there, but I like to think he ain't necessarily mean (quite the contrary), just a bit out of touch with how hylians work and feel. Fierce Deity deemed some things necessary for Mask's survival and well being, and not necessarily all of them were free of consequences. It was done with good intentions tho. If only he bothered to explain/tell Mask that...

Tormenting Twilight a bit is fun sometimes too ksksks

> Context about the ask HERE

> Twili Twilight looks HERE

> Continuation of this HERE

[parvuls]

no, because - famous person starts dating less famous person and is then gradually overshadowed is a trope. a trope often used to bring external conflict into stories. but jack and bitty are carefully constructed as the opposite of that, and I'm fucking feral over it.

we joke about how jack will eventually be bitty's trophy husband and be thrilled about it, but it definitely has a giant grain of truth in it. it's how they're characterized. bitty is an extrovert; jack is an introvert. bitty reached out and built himself an online audience to deal with his trauma; jack shut himself out and started avoiding the public to deal with his.

bitty finds comfort in being able to talk to others and (as seen in spotlight on eric bittle) considers being a public figure a sort of healing experience: coming out and being a public person (in every manner of speaking, not just sexuality wise) and putting himself in the limelight is such an important part of his journey because he sees it as a way of helping others who were in his situation.

jack grew up in the spotlight as the only son of two prominent figures. he grew up as a child with anxiety with the media's eyes on him as he was compared to his father. he grew up as an overweight teen featuring in trashy gossip columns as he was compared to his mother. he got into rehab in part because of this attention and it only attracted more attention to him. a lot of jack's anxiety stems from the notion of people looking at him and thinking about him and talking about him and judging him, and it's unfortunate because jack's dream is to play hockey, and that comes with even more attention.

but that's the thing: jack and bitty's story is (once again) a demonstration of two people making each other's lives better.

jack's fame thrusts bitty into the spotlight post-cup, and it's a giant push forward in helping him reach a bigger audience and thus grow his independent fame. bitty's growing fame slowly overshadows jack, to the point where ngozi says they'll one day be Eric Bittle and his Athlete Husband. and that means jack gets to play hockey, and win cups, and achieve fame in his own field, but the media's attention slides off him to his husband, and the fans on the street gradually approach bitty more than him, and jack is free to have his success with less of the personal scrutiny.

it's not that jack becomes less important than bitty. it's that bitty gets to stand in front of the direct sun and flourish as a result, while jack gets to stand in the shade bitty creates and flourish as a result. it's symbiosis. it's beautiful.

[blue-mood-blue]

I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.

And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.

What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?

Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.

Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”

They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.

Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.

Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.

It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.

(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)

Death feels very real after that.

The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.

The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.

(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)

Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?

(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)

Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...

…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…

And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.

“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.

Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.

(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you” and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)

“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”

Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”

[ivynightshade]

little girl, you'll grow up, but the malice on your tongue will forever be the words of your father. / every time he opens his mouth, you think it's to shout. it's not. // what are memories of childhood if not quicksand? swallowing you whole.

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘shame is a girl’s second skin.’

[b4kuch1n]

THEE audiodrama disguised as podcast

[egophiliac]

(it probably wasn't actually Idia's fault)

(or was it)

some quick initial reactions to celebrate Diasomnia Day One! it felt like a bit of a short intro, but oh, what a tasting menu of things to come.