#so....yeah...thats all i have to say

[note-boom]

After reading that Dead Apple Post and all the posts within it, I had commentary and theories and random points to make....but I couldn't really put in into a cohesive post, so instead just have them as bullet points in the form of questions

So, obvious one first. What in the world is up with Atsushi's ability? The thing is. It's him that's described as a guidepost to the Book rather than his ability and when he looks at that blue cube, he calls it himself. And yet his ability is supposedly the one who can guide people to what they most desire, as well as his ability being described as something that can basically devour other abilities

On that note...it's interesting to me that it's been pointed out how Akutagawa's ability can cut through any physical structure (matter) and even space itself (so Akutagawa has a space-matter ability) while Atsushi can cut through and basically unalive any ability (tiger devouring prey imagery anyone?). And then we have Dazai who is able to nullify abilities for a brief period of time, not obliterate them just cancel them out. Which is very interesting to me when we have this whole imagery of Dazai represented by sunset, the ADA represented by twilight, the PM by the night, the Special Division by the day, and Atsushi by the moon. The moon is within the night and it's what sort of...cancels out the power of the night. Meanwhile, twilight (ADA) is the time between sunset (Dazai) and dusk (apparently, it goes like sunset -> twilight -> dusk), and it just sits interestingly to me that the ADA people are framed as those "in between" two great forces (day and night), and Dazai the nullifier as sunset sits in between Atsushi the ability devourer represented by the moon...and perhaps something represented by the sun. And the question culminating out of all that: was Shibusawa (the chaos of "ability" itself) the sun to Atsushi's moon or have we not seen that yet? Or is Akutagawa, also represented with draconic imagery, supposed to be that sun or is he really the night that "backgrounds" Atsushi's moon, as we seen in their fights?

Thirdly, something to be said about shapeshifting abilities. All I can remember off the top of my head right now is Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, Shibusawa's Draconica's final form, Bram's vampire ability, and Atsushi's Beast Beneath the Moonlight. (And from the theory linked in the dead apple post that talks about a possible Fyodor ability being the ability to copy himself makes him a kind of...form-shifter as well?). That said, in all these four, the carrier of that ability doesn't just use their ability, they become their ability. That sort of distinction clearly sets them apart from other ability users, I think...it makes them something....other (it also brings up Tanizaki as a rather interesting point, not as someone who can shapeshift or cause shapeshifting but as someone who can pretend to do so through illusions). And Dazai has all this angst about him not being human, but the real question is how human are those shapeshifters? Lovecraft clearly isn't human, Bram's vampires definitely aren't, and Shibusawa was an ability that survived its user (we've seen some other abilities do that, but none of them are sentient). I definitely think Atsushi's 100% human, and I think his lack of initial control over his ability is a testament to that....but I do wonder if he has the ability to be a little bit other-than-human like the other shapeshifters seem to be.

Continuing the Atsushi thread...we've already established that his ability can reject wounds/regenerate wounds. And while I do think we have evidence that he's recovered from normal gunshot wounds and such things, there's also the thing about him having orphanage scars and how most of the times he regrows limbs etc. etc. it's because an ability wounded him. Do you think that Atsushi might possibly have the ability to recover faster from non-ability based wounds (and thus get scars out of it) but an actual power to "reject" ability-inflicted pain (so no scars)?

Also, the whole thing about singularities is interesting to me, especially considering Chuuya and his...instability. I wonder if there's a difference between curated and manmade singularities like Chuuya's and Oda/Gide's...or if Chuuya's (and Verlaine's) whole singularity experiment was an attempt to recreate something the scientists had already seen...namely, a singularity that could survive within a person without actually harming them. And could Atsushi be one of those people who contain a natural singularity within himself?

[fantasykiri5]

for day 24 of @hermitadaymay it’s ZombieCleo!!

[swamp-cryptids]

to me this line is like, where harry reaches the closest thing to self actualization within the text of the game. he doesn't desire to be a different kind of animal anymore. its such a kind thing to say to himself about a quality that in his line of work could very much be perceived as a flaw. idk i just like it

[beatcroc]

homest[ar/uck] posting. this was meant to be supplementary to the gerome comic as him 'explaining the joke' but i uhhhhhh forgot.

i'm not much for crossovers in the the traditional sense, but it IS one of my favorite character exploration exercises to just go like 'if x media existed in this universe, who would and would not be a fan of it?'. and these ones are pretty notorious and always very fun to mess with for that and so here we are

[oceanwithouthermoon]

arisu knew saiki liked men all along

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

hm. human Sundown....

[todayisafridaynight]

[ganondoodle]

perhaps an unpopular opinion but i really think having no full voice acting (regardless of its quality ..) was a key part in the zelda game vibe for me and i dearly miss it

besides its obvious benefits of being cheaper and easier to do, its just got a specific feel of ... i cant really describe it, but i miss it alot ........ plus its basically impossible to ruin our sour a character through bad or unfitting voice acting ..

[b4kuch1n]

making of a feathered thing

[hecksupremechips]

Come back home when you have some sense

You can throw your life away just not at my expense

You’re not the son I raised

[naturecalls111]

Wish I never had to sleep I wish I could just stay awake all the time and do nothing but draw and had no responsibilities

[levinbolts]

nothing sexier than a skilled, effortlessly lethal man

[ladystoneboobs]

no of fence to jon snow fans who for some reason care about his exact age, but these discussions just annoy me no end. not only bc there's no way any weirwood flashbacks bran has to rhaegar/lyanna will come with time/datestamps, but also bc there's always comments like this:

SEVERAL turns of the moon (ie, months)?! have these people never seen a human baby before or just have no concept of their ages? even if we take into account travel time from the toj to wf, meaning jon was not a newborn too fresh out the oven when catelyn and robb arrived, there's still a difference between a newborn and a 3mo and an even bigger difference between those infants and an older baby 5-7mo. there's very good reasons these lines were cut. whatever birthdates can be worked out internally for jon and robb from when they're first mentioned as 15 and 16 don't matter in the end, bc grrm doesn't care about a consistent timeline and the actual text of catelyn's pov and ned's convo with robert about cheating on her should outweigh any guesstimates about jon's official nameday wrt robb's. catelyn may not have cared for jon, but she would sure as hell have noticed his nameday if it came before robb's and made him ned's firstborn. if jon's birthday canonically came before robb's then either ned's cover story would not involve adultery (not impossible for him to sire a bastard before his wedding), or he'd just give jon a new nameday along with his new name to fit the adultery lie. it makes no sense for him to lie about one and not the other, undermining the big lie with a little public clue of his story not adding up. whatever else she was as a stepmother, cat wasn't stupid and a bastard who was actually the eldest son being raised alongside her trueborn heir could be an even bigger insult than whether he was born of adultery or not.

BUT, the unknowability of jon's true birthday is not the only reason this annoys me, it's bc this is all based on the assumption that jon must be older since rhaegar/lyanna ran off together before ned married cat, as if both boys must have been conceived asap as robb canonically was when his parents consummated their marriage. and that's not how human reproduction works! even if you don't understand how fast babies grow in the first year, you should know that people who get pregnant do so through ovulation cycles and a lucky sperm finding an egg and all that, not just immediately getting knocked up as soon as one has p-in-v sex for the first time. not unless you only know mean girls sex ed where if you have sex you will get pregnant and die. (even tho lyanna did die, there's plenty of canon examples where pregnancy did not lead straight to death. also examples of people who did not get pregnant right away and even some who are/were sexually active and childless without always having moon tea on hand.) we can't know how long lyanna was having sex before that sperm+egg match happened or even how long she was with rhaegar before losing her technical virginity. if they were married, doesn't it make sense to think they didn't consummate their relationship until the wedding night either? that's the only leverage there is to ensure a status as wife rather than just mistress.

and while i just said grrm doesn't care about exact timelines and a lot is still foggy surrounding the rebellion and esp rhaegar, there is one timemarker wrt robert's rebellion he voluntarily threw in, time and time again: that stannis was besieged at storm's end for almost a whole year. that siege, which mind you, did not match the duration of the entire war. it only started after robert won his battles at gulltown and summerhall, returned to storm's end, and then went out and lost the battle of ashford, leaving his homeland open to the reachermen. the same siege which only ended when ned made a detour there after the sack of king's landing, before going to the toj. even if lyanna may not have given birth that exact day ned found her, she could only be waiting in that bloody bed for weeks at the most, not months. so if rhaegar knocked her up the very same night he carried her off and jon was still a newborn when ned found her after the siege of storm's end had ended, wouldn't that mean lyanna was pregnant for well over a year? that's not how human pregnancy works either! so, maybe that's proof that jon and robb, whichever order they were actually born in, were actually very close in age as babies, much closer than if they were both conceived asap.

and really, jon's actual birthdate does not matter imho, when he was raised not just as the bastard to robb's trueborn heir, but with robb also known by catelyn and the world as ned's firstborn (which he was, in any case, as jon was ned's nephew by birth). what difference could a birthdate before robb's make (even were there some means of discovery) after ned, cat, and robb are all dead? if one is looking only at his birth parents then he's only a firstborn child on lyanna's side, but definitely a second son on rhaegar's side. maybe he was always meant to be a second son with a not much older half-brother! even if the aegon fka young griff is not in fact rhaegar's son, he'll still be known as aegon vi targaryen, meaning jon will never be known as any father's elder son. if i may reference mean girls again, it's not going to happen.

[sunnys-side-upside-down]

Blorbo's Eepiest Soldier

Thank you everyone for your kind words, I'm doing better and am back to it <3

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

hes so silly and tortured. i hope he gets violent

[no-light-left-on]

considering the historical influences in the fashion of Dishonored (and the extent of nsfw fanfiction this fandom has) I’ve been thinking about the layers that would be, realistically, part of the daily dress

which means: dishonored seems to honour the importance of a vest in a properly dressed gentleman’s or lady’s wardrobe

vests were, and I cannot stress this enough, a mandatory part of an outfit, to the point of men wearing only vests if they could not afford a fully tailored suit (trousers + vest + jacket) and a new shirt and opting to only wear a fake collar under the vest for the illusion of a full outfit

shirts were underwear, so to speak. there were no occasions in ‘polite society‘ where one could only wear a shirt without a vest on top.

this is something we see mirrored in both dishonored games, though the style of the vests and clothing have somewhat changed, they still follow the same rules of vests worn with every outfit, as far as we can tell. (we could argue that Jessamine is not wearing one, or that some higher class women aren’t wearing vests under their buttoned up jackets, but since we don’t really see underneath we can’t judge.)

we see the vests be worn even by the Whalers in the first game (which in itself brings up many questions. are whalers, the actual whalers that capture and kill whales, held in high enough regard by the society that they made a vest part of their uniform? or is it merely something that is worn by all? something that every citizen of sound mind would don, were they to leave their house?)

there are a few exceptions to this, of course, but this whole thing came to be by asking a simple question

does the Outsider wear a vest under his leather jacket?

now, in the first game, his jacket is unbuttoned just enough for us to get a good enough peek at what lies beneath. which is to say: there is no hint of a vest underneath. judging by the vests in the first game, the fashion was that the vest would go up high, often covering collarbones or even having a standing collar. what we see on the Outsider is just... an unbuttoned shirt

it’s much the same in the second game, even if we examine his final concept art, his outfit consists of a shirt (more or less underwear) with most of the top buttons unbuttoned, and a jacket on top. no hint of a vest underneath

what I’m trying to say is that the Outsider is a slut