#seriously though l

[rentumblsstuff]

Really though, Lautski hadn’t even gone in an official date. They JUST had an argument about how the other won’t admit they have feelings for eachother. But to be outed by GODS and be told “not only are they in love with you, but you’re the thing they cherish most in the entire world, and if you don’t want them to die, you have to die for them…”

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THAT INFORMATION ONCE EVERYTHING IS OKAY?

To know that you were willing to die for someone you’ve only been friends with for less than a month and had never even gone on a date with. To know that you and this person cherish eachother more than anything else in the world… And it’s been three weeks since you’ve officially met. How do you cope with this person becoming so integral to your life in such a short amount of time and not seriously reevaluate EVERYTHING ABOUT EACHOTHER AND YOURSELVES? How do you not think “How is this person is so great and my life so shitty that I am willing to DIE FOR THEM within WEEKS OF OFFICIALLY MEETING?”

Steph and Pete are both so young yet it’s so obvious they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together. Is that terrifying to them? Is it relieving? Do they ever worry that because they became so important to eachother so quickly, that same fire could die out just as fast? What if someone EVEN BETTER comes along and steals them in an instant, because “if I was literally the most important thing in the world within a month, how quickly can they leave me for someone better? How soon will they cherish something else?”

To have GODS definitively tell you that you and the person of your affections are so madly in love that the separation of your love is enough of a sacrifice to save the world… How do you look that person in the face? Without feeling terrified of how well they must know you? Or worse, without feeling terrified of how LITTLE they might know you? Because if THIS is the person you cherish most, and they don’t know all that much about you, how absolutely fucking terrible must every other relationship in your life be???

Peter and Stephanie are two people that are terrified of being seen and known for various reasons. The fact that the other loves them more than their own life… That has got to be the most overwhelming feeling in the universe to them. Even if it’s a good overwhelming, that is still A LOT. And on top of that, they’ve gone through something ONLY THE OTHER PERSON CAN UNDERSTAND (even Grace wouldn’t understand- she wouldn’t have had to take a life for her sacrifice). Theyre the only people that could ever understand eachother at this point. Even if they’re ecstatic they’ve survived and that they’ve finally ended up together, how do they process what they’ve gone through? How do they dance together at homecoming like they’re teens in love and not children that gods have basically dubbed intertwined with eachother for life.

I just have so many thoughts and feelings about NPMD like to the point where I have literally become nauseous listening to the CAITIA Reprise-

[bonefall]

Hi Bones! In light of Everything happening on tumblr (Trans debacle, vaguing about pulling the plug, midjourney), what are the plans for this blog's future? Not even just like immediately, more of a 'if tumblr one day just stopped existing, where should we look' sorta thing?

Head's up: blog is a little slow because I got bowled over by a depressive episode (I'm fine, this is my normal) + studying for some exams.

But I'm watching the fire with my fuzzy pajamas and a cup of coffee, backing up my drafts, downloading an updated archive (you can do this in your blog settings), and if the hammer explodes the car I will go to Cohost.

[the-cactus-taco]

Apparently it’s supposed to snow where I live by tonight so I took that as an excuse to draw the idiot morons being idiot morons <3

Originally image under the cut

[biscuitrule]

No thoughts. Just Lockwood’s grin.

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Has there ever been a favorite thing you've seen someone write with your prompts before?

i genuinely love every single piece of creative work that's ever come out of the prompts. But to ACTUALLY answer your question, this story by @sadoeuphemist really captured me. i go back and find it every once in a while because it just felt so right, like i wrote the prompt so i could read about bathyssian silk.

also, someone once drew a comic i can't find right now about coming up on a ranch in a salt desert, where the ranch in question was a giant bottle of dressing. if this was you i love you.

- L

(It's Ask Day! Ask me anything about anything. Tag to block/follow is L Answers)

[horusmenhosetix]

I am being peak autistic here, I am unsatisfied with all the hair systems out there and need my own personal one. 🫥 I've decided I like liliths remi texutre blend and that the brown I've been using for my defaults is too dark x_x

[fluffy-lovely-clouds]

I would really love some lilo and stitch headcanons or a fic, and i would totally make em myself, but i just don't have the motivation to write rn but if anybody does ummm

[lab-trash]

Hey yall. Go watch Extraordinary on Hulu, please, I am Begging you.

This is going to be a weird comparison, but I'm going for my lref fandom as the target audience, so stick with me.

Imagine Skylar Storm was born without her powers and never knew any world of normos. And everyone around her has gotten powers, except for her. Now make it British, mature, and angsty.

Does that sound even a little interesting to you? Then go watch Extraordinary, please I'm begging you. There's a bunch of other stuff— a shapeshifter, a ghost summoner, a time traveller, a cat— but that's the main premise.

I need a third season after that S2 finale, and if you watch it, you will know what I mean.

[o-uncle-newt]

I read Possession by AS Byatt after people told me "if you liked Gaudy Night you'll like this" and WELL.

Warning- spoilers for both books abound below!

So it sounded great- as a lapsed academic (though not in the field of literature by any means) there's a part of me that loves reading about academia because it's full of such obsessive people, and this book seemed to be exactly that and so I was excited.

Then I read it, and on the one hand, my first thought was "all these people are dull as heck, the only sane modern-day one is Val, and at the end of the day the historical stuff is just two people having an affair, who cares." My second thought was "there's just enough stuff here that makes me think that maybe the author knows that all of this is stupid, like the fact that Val is obviously one of the few sane ones here." But the ending made me doubt even that. Essentially, and I say this even as that lapsed academic, the author could not convince me to care about the important things at stake here, and as a result couldn't get me to care about the people who only seemed to care about those things.

I didn't care about Ash and LaMotte- they came across as two people high on their own supply who had a tawdry affair. (And each of them is the less interesting person, as a person, than their official partner!) As a result of not caring about them, I couldn't POSSIBLY care about Roland, Maud, and the rest of their crew, because their only functions were to be possessed by, and weirdly possessive of, these two entirely unworthy individuals, whose in-universe historical and literary significance Byatt couldn't convince me of, and to use that possession as a mirror for their own very lame romance. Beyond that they're utterly uninteresting, and there isn't even meant to BE much beyond that so it's not that surprising.

Anyway, I didn't like this book much, but it still made me think a lot. And there's a way in which a certain kind of person might say "well if it made you think then that's surely a sign of some positive quality" and... maybe? I don't know. I didn't hate all of it, and some parts were interesting, and I do have a whole separate list of things about the book that bug me including a breakdown of some of the book's (perceived by me) themes that I particularly disliked lol. Perhaps I'll post it another time. So I guess you can say it spurred me to thought, but loads of things that I don't like do that, and the only positive thing that that draws from me is that they're not downright dull.

The thing is, after finishing the book I was immediately struck by that "if you like Gaudy Night..." element, because it has a situation that felt weirdly similar (if for totally different reasons)- a young scholar stealing a letter from a library/archive. The circumstances are different- in Gaudy Night, the scholar does it to hide its existence so as not to contradict his thesis, and in Possession, the scholar does it so as to explore the document further, though still secretly- but there are still some interesting parallels vis a vis class. Possession goes into the class thing more than Gaudy Night does, but neither book goes much into it- the scholar is lower-class and someone who has scraped their way to their position, and is encumbered by a female partner of lower social and academic standing, and in the end they are juxtaposed against scholars who come from an elevated class and who have more money and opportunity. In Gaudy Night, Arthur Robinson is judged by the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and a college full of women who don't have to do anything but think, teach, write, and grade papers; in Possession, Roland has to convince a bunch of academics of standing and resources to take a chance on him (and while this is more about money than class, he's the main one who's like "maybe it's good if Lady Bailey gets her wheelchair"). Byatt elides over this at the end by having him magically become in demand and on his way to achieving his academic goals, but I think in both books, the class element really could have taken on more significance in the text.

(I'd add as well that Byatt pits the upper-class and moneyed Maud, who of course is doing things for "the right reasons," vs the evil American businessman who clearly... doesn't care about Ash enough? Despite how much he clearly and obviously cares about Ash? The book was way more interesting when he seemed like a valid rival to the British team, who only thought that they deserved the letters more because of their obsession, rather than how it turned out at the end where the American dude is an actual cartoon villain. What made him genuinely less worthy besides having money without class, and of course having the bad taste to be American? What makes one scholar's possession more justified? Sayers was never this unsubtle.)

So that made me think more about Possession vs Gaudy Night, and the thing is, there are actual living people in Gaudy Night! Say what you will about the unworldliness of the academics at Shrewsbury, but you get a very keen view of their personalities by the end, even as they are (by necessity given the rules of their world) subsumed by academia, or subsume themselves in it. And the people who do fall in love are REALLY in love, and you understand why...

And somehow a book from 1935 feels far more interrogative of the possession (or lack thereof) found in love and romance, and just about the place of women in academia and relationships overall, than one from the late 80s. In Gaudy Night, Harriet accepts Peter once she has determined that despite their power differential (brought on by class, money, history, and to a degree gender) he will not threaten her personhood, because he has proven himself to her. In Possession, Maud accepts Roland because she has the power (money, class, position, even height) and so Roland actually cannot threaten her- and yet still that final scene is about her being taken by him, basically to prove some kind of a point. In contrast, in Busman's Honeymoon, the euphemistic sex scenes are about Peter trying to please Harriet.

When I say it's to prove a point, I'm paraphrasing Byatt, incidentally- who said: "And in the case of Maud I had made it very inhibiting. She was a woman inhibited both by beauty (which actually isn't very good for very beautiful women because they feel it isn't really them people love) and she was also inhibited by Feminism, because she had all sorts of theories that perhaps she would be a more noble kind of woman if she was a lesbian. And so she was a bit stuck. And Roland was timid because I am naturally good at timid men. It's the kind of men I happen to like. He's a timid thinking man, so of course it took him the whole book." I mean... yikes, but also that explains a lot. Maud can only bring herself to be with a man who is weak/effeminate (?) enough to justify whatever weird psyche Byatt has imagined up for her, but still she needs to get over her inhibitions and under him because... reasons. I don't know.

(Height is also interesting here as a point of contrast- Byatt makes Maud taller than Roland to make a point about how on the one hand she retains the power but on the other hand there is now even more of her that has to surrender. Peter and Harriet are the same medium height and wear the same size gown.)

I think the thing that most stuns me is how regressive Possession feels when it comes to gender politics on relationships than Gaudy Night does. I'd need a whole other post to talk about this, but the theme of Possession seems to me to be "relationships that produce things (whether art or children) are worth more than ones that don't." Roland is better with Maud than with Val because Val is a second rate scholar who drags him down (while supporting him financially) and Ash is better with LaMotte than with Ellen because LaMotte didn't only inspire his writing (Ellen's contributions are described only in the negative "didn't impede"), she gave him the child that Ellen refused to. Incidentally, in both cases it's the man pursuing a relationship that will give HIM something... But, to paraphrase Peter in Busman's Honeymoon, one wouldn't want to regard relationships in that agricultural light. Gaudy Night is about how two people can produce great things without each other but choose to be with each other for their own, and each other's, happiness. They aren't each less apart, and as I noted in a prior post, they don't need to solve cases together or conjoin their work in order for their relationship to be worth something. It is worth it for them to be together because it encourages some kind of inner balance within them and between them, as people. They enjoy collaborating but that is by no means the basis of their love (and, incidentally, I think that a lot of, if not most, detective series romances fail this basic test of "would they have fallen in love if they were accountants who met on a dating app." Peter and Harriet definitely would have- would, say, Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton have? I do NOT think so).

And here's the thing- another reason why Byatt's quote above is so off-putting is that it makes it clear that not only in the text but on a meta level, the purpose of the relationships is to prove a Point. I found Roland and Maud to have zero chemistry, and honestly I was expecting them to get together 3/4 of the way through and split up at the end when it turned out they had nothing in common- it seemed like that kind of book. I was kind of stunned when they only got together at the end in an "it's meant to be" way because nothing about it seemed meant to be. They were stuck together by that one thing and they each apparently needed the relationship for some kind of self-actualization or historical rhyming or other. (Whatever I say about Ash and LaMotte... at least they seemed to like each other!)

Peter and Harriet... they get together because they love each other. Do they change over the course of Gaudy Night, and over the course of the other books they share together? Of course they do. But if it makes sense, I'll put it this way- Harriet doesn't accept Peter's proposal as proof that she got over her hangups, Harriet gets over her hangups so that she can accept Peter's proposal. Her hangups only matter because they were keeping her from this particular kind of happiness- she was a fully actualized person even with them. She is a person who does things for human reasons so that she can build a mutually happy life with the person she loves, not a little plot mannequin being moved around in order to tell the author's desired Message. People can say what they want about Gaudy Night and its flaws, but despite the intricacies of its construction, nobody can call the characters' actions and motivations anything but brutally human.

Whether within their universes or on a meta level, the books have SUCH different things to say about the value and nature of love, the place of and purpose of sex, the place of art and intellectual accomplishment in relationships, all of the above in the context of femininity… and I can't help but feel that each time, Gaudy Night wins the contest. It's possible I'm missing something major about Possession, and maybe sometime I'll post the rest of my notes about the things I disliked and people can tell me what I'm wrong about- but if nothing else it made me appreciate Gaudy Night even more, so for that I'm grateful.

[just-a-mod]

The very second this game lets me beat The Fox to d e a t h

I'm going to have a new fox-fur-fleece.

ya'll seemed real fond of my protective Ratau piece, so if this gets a similar amount of attention, i might just draw said fox-fur-fleece

[darthenderson]

Just came here to say Hunter B-15 is so underrated, and I love her

[deus-ex-mona]

we’re really in it now mona-chan

[pumpkin-patch-cat]

61 bond cause Zayne signed up for this and can't take it back. Bro you're stuck.

[asthe-crow-flies]

Hospital Bed - Lolina: Origins

i am obsessed with this concept album its on bandcamp please go listen to it i need to not be the only person who cares about this

[id: a digital comic consisting of three pages, in grayscale and red.

the first page is four panels, each the width of the page. the first is all black. four beeps go diagonally down across the panel. the second panel is mostly black, with a somewhat fuzzy light in the middle left of the panel. it reads "what is this pain? what is this place?" in the third panel, the fuzzy image of a person is visible, the edges of the panel are still dark. it reads "am i alive? am i awake? what are these scars across my face?" in the fourth panel, a woman in a lab coat and a mask, the doctor, leans in. the right side of the panel is still dark. a speech bubble from the woman says "you are home". the narration interjects with "they say". the woman continues "you are safe."

the second page is three panels, the first one taking up most of the page, with the other two next to each other under it. the first panel is a birds-eye view of a room in a hospital. in the center is Lolina, a woman laying on a hospital bed. she has black hair, a bandage wrapped over her eye, and a red cut down the side of her face. the doctor stands next to the bed. sideways, in large letters, it reads "hospital bed, I'm back on mars." the second panel is a close-up of the upper half of Lolina's face, focusing on her left eye, which is red, and the bandage covering her other one. it reads "but i am wounded." the third panel is a close up of the lower half of her face, focusing on the cut on her cheek held together with butterfly bandages, and the large bandage on her other cheek. it reads "I feel the scars."

the third page is a drawing of the doctor standing by the bed, from Lolina's point of view. across it is dialogue interspersed with small panels. the doctor says "we can regrow your cells," and next to it is a small panel showing cells dividing. then she says "we can restore," and next to it is a panel showing the right half of Lolina's face, with her eye and cheek healed. then she says "you will go back," and next to it is a panel reading "Sandy's Place" in glowing red letters. the narration interjects with "they say." the doctor continues "to the life you had before." under it is a panel divided diagonally into four sections, the first showing red lips, the second showing black hair swishing, the third showing a pair of legs wearing red high heels, and the fourth showing a body from neck to hips, wearing a strapless red dress. under that the narration reads "to the life i had before". end id.]

(I've never written an id for a comic before and there was some visual stuff that was really tricky to describe so if I've messed something up or if something should be clearer please tell me and I'll try to fix it)

[arthrobug]

Rewatching Dr. Stone for the third time and I gotta say:

Although Senku is ten billion percent aroace,

He and Taiju have such an insane amount of homoerotic lines and low-key gay thoughts about each other

"I waited for you for 3'700 years, what's a few more months?" Sir you two will never kiss but in your hearts you two have minecraft beds that are so close together they can be considered one giant bed

[afflictedminds]

Friday is usually my busiest days at my shop but it seems that no one is needing any last minute trinkets. I’m not complaining by any means since I’m the only one who works here, but it’s unusual to say the least.

Means more time for me to read more and just clean up around a bit, maybe experiment on a potion or two even.