#sometimes you dont get a choice

[rouge-the-bat]

person not involved in The Discourse: wow both sides on this need to touch grass lol theyre both wackos

side A on The Discourse: i would like to exist in peace

side B on The Discourse: everyone on side A should kill themselves

[slavhew]

i reread this scene and i could just. picture it. so vividly.

[aerknight]

@naffeclipse orcas beach themselves to hunt seals orca!eclipse beaches themself to hunt y/n :)

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I've seen the last '"g-d made you perfect" that I can handle, and it's led me to a realization about how I think of g-d.

I don't think we were made perfect. We were made human. And, if I'm honest, the only perfection in my mind is g-d, and that sense of perfection is what differentiates humans from g-d. If humans were as perfectly-made as g-d, I for one wouldn't see the point in following, believing, trusting, caring for, or loving g-d.

I guess for me, I see the ways in which humans alter the Way We Were Created that I really don't think it's right to speculate as to if there's a limit to altering our abilities or bodies. For instance, as a trans person, I've definitely been inundated with this idea that because g-d made my body "perfect" that I shouldn't alter it ever, but isn't that a dangerous precedent? Is it really so, that our bodies are magically made perfect, as g-d that to even tamper with the idea of change would be the same as cursing g-d? I really don't think that's compelling.

I love thinking about just how much g-d is placed into people, but I don't think it warrants restricting the ability to learn, create, grow, or change. Thank g-d that He created the ability to change!

[skunkes]

"describe your oc and then have them describe themself" is still one of my favorite little drawing/character exercises like this one's pretty blatant vs Showing but it's still so fun in either direction. what you say and how you say it... what you dont say + how much. etc etc

[floralovebot]

i know there are only like five of us but i feel like garth stans really don't talk enough about how left out he feels with the titans. dick and wally are Best Friends. donna and roy are on and off again. dick and donna are too much to explain. on average, roy is close with at least one of dick's siblings. dick donna and wally all go on to be in the new teen titans. garth isn't Close with any other titans but the originals

and it's this thing where,,, it's not his Fault yknow? he's not mean or spiteful or creepy or anything that would warrant them not liking him as much. he joins in on their jokes, he risks his life, he shares his feelings, he does everything that he knows friends do. but just the virtue of him being atlantean and them being land dwellers ruins everything. he Can't spend more time with them, he doesn't understand their culture, he will always choose atlantis.

they'll always be his friends but he can never truly be with them or form deeper bonds. he'll always be the last one to know what's going on, the last one they call, a complete shadow and afterthought.

and sure there's a part of him that knows this, that feels bitter and lonely. but he can't even be that mad at them because he does the same thing. the titans are never his first thought, he never calls them first, he doesn't reach out and ask if they're okay, they're always the last ones to know what happened to him. the titans are such a huge part of his life but they're barely in it.

there's just something so inherently lonely about garth that i feel most dc writers don't understand. they just don't get it. they don't get what it's like for this boy who was all alone, never had parents or a family, suddenly being taken in and having to act like he knows how to be a son, a friend, a partner. meeting kids his own age and wanting to bond with them so bad, having to watch as they all get closer to each other and leave him behind, not being able to do anything about it. never being taken seriously, always the last choice... garth man.....

[newspecies]

"the vast majority of legal persecution against early queers was focused on men" ARE YOU INSANE

[sqlmn]

Lightning, water, and fire! Like forever before the plot starts. By the time the plot starts, the lightning and fire deities have been subjected to punishment by the two gods that picked them.

Oh (the fire deity) is first to be punished. They basically decide that since they're going to live for a long time, gotta set some long time goals! And they opt to be the wrath of the gods since most of the other deities are too 'soft' in their opinion. So Oh just. Smites humans. This isn't really a /good/ thing and in their defense mentally, they do it to help Ymber since he's the softest of them all. So their punishment by the gods is to be split in two, effectively halving the power of one into two. (Now they are in a male and a female body and use both male and female pronouns apart since they together make they but apart it feels weird to be they. But prior to the split they use they/them. Also the split bodies go by the names Ohiwe and Ohime.)

Fulj is the second to be punished. She falls in love with a mortal woman and that is a crime according to the gods. Mortals and immortals are not to be together and it will only bring suffering to both sides. So her punishment is her memories of the woman are stripped and her body basically broken to the point she can't remain physical all the time.

Ymber, unfortunately, is the one who blames himself for the discoveries and punishments. If he had only tried to restrain Oh more then maybe they would have chilled out and stopped before being punished. If he had only tried to persuade Fulj to not continue seeing the mortal woman so often perhaps she wouldn't have been punished. So he's just increasing the guilt on his shoulders every day that he remains unpunished since the elder gods have both laid down to rest. They can't enforce their laws anymore and none of the deities are keen on harming one another at this point. They just want to continue existing in peace.

[faaun]

i feel rly sad and conflicted abt one of my best friends on earth but idk who to ask for advice bc i usually would have consulted her in this situation lmao

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

real nonbinary experience tbh

[the-holy-ghosted]

forcing yourself out of harmful habits feels like pulling teeth but i guess i want to get better. for those i love and for those who love me. or whatever

[lord-squiggletits]

Something else that makes me sympathetic to Pharma's situation is like. Idk if there's an actual term for this or if someone smarter and more academic wrote it about some real life context that actually matters.

But, so we've already established among Pharma stans that the circumstances at Delphi were blackmail/torture with no real way out that wouldn't involve Pharma being responsible for people getting killed (either killing patients for the deal or having everyone die bc he failed his end of the deal).

And I feel like while "he's still in the wrong because he killed people" is part of it, another sort of implicit part is the idea that Pharma should've been willing to take more personal risk, maybe even risk dying? I mean, Ratchet does ask "why didn't you just detonate it near the DJD" (to which Pharma responds that he did try to get Sonic and Boom to do it, but they refused) so like

Idk I feel like we do have this social notion of martyrs as a very romantic ideal, people you can praise for being so brave and strong and righteous that they ended their own lives for their cause, while you can also coo about how sad and tragic it is that dying is what it took for them to do the right thing. But at the same time I feel like in reality, having an expectation that people become martyrs is kind of a toxic social norm bc like. It's very easy to demand that others sacrifice their lives for some Ultimate Moral Good when you yourself aren't experiencing the same hardships as they are. And ultimately it is kind of fucked up to tell someone "the moral thing you should've done was risk your life/kill yourself" because asking someone to pay their life to do the right thing is no small request. And sure, the typical response would be to call them a "coward" for caring more about saving their own skin instead of doing the right thing... but again, death is a really scary thing and self-preservation is a really strong instinct, so it kind of feels like having this binary view of "you're either a Brave Hero who sacrifices your life for everyone else or a Dirty Coward who's too scared of dying to do what's right" is kind of fucked up?

I guess the best way to describe it is that if someone willingly gives up their life as a sacrifice to others, it can be a noble thing because it's a choice they made willingly, but if it becomes a Moral Standard that in order to be a Good Person you have to be unafraid of throwing your life away and if you aren't willing to die you're a Cowardly Bad Person, that's when it becomes toxic.

Idk, I guess how this ties back to Pharma is that he was never in a position where he expected to make these kinds of moral decisions/ultimatums. He's a doctor who doesn't even get into combat, his job is to heal and not to kill, he's behind the front lines in a hospital that's supposed to be a safe, neutral place for him to heal people. So in the face of suddenly having a "murder people on behalf of me, or I murder everyone you swore to protect" ultimatum thrust upon him, I understand why Pharma wasn't """"""""""brave enough"""""""""" to "do the right thing" (whatever that would've been in the case of Delphi). You could argue that maybe a frontliner soldier accepted the burden of possibly dying for their cause and they've become used to it as someone who lives that reality every single day, but I feel like for Pharma, who's a doctor and a protected non-combatant (from what we can tell), that sort of risking of his life/living with the fact his life could be snuffed out any day isn't something he would've been prepared for at all.

And for me personally, from an outsider's perspective, it strikes me as kind of unethical to go "oh well he should've just detonated the bomb himself even if it killed him" bc again, there's a difference between witnessing a moral conundrum as a bystander versus being the person living with it and being under time pressure where it's do-or-die. Just as part of my personal standards, I feel like death is such a huge consequence/burden of someone's actions (literally you are no longer alive, any potential you had left is cut short, you cease to exist on this plane) that it feels rather callous to go "Well you should've just been willing to die for your beliefs if you really cared that much!!!"

[deus-and-the-machina]

noah and mio are great because mio turns out to be the kid of previous protags, probably the beloved niece by proxy of the entire cast of 2, maybe royalty (I personally hc Nia's queen position as more of a politically elected one Ala Star Wars prequels so YMMV) and then Noah is just. some kiddo. and they become inexplicably intertwined for a thousand years in the time loop

[july-19th-club]

nooooo not your first two reasons for staying in the city you are legally trapped in instead of absconding forever with billions of dollars worth of stolen art being the married couple who have slowly but surely absorbed you into their relationship and welcomed you into their life. a guy who has never had a place he wasn't obligated to leave feeling at first trapped by his circumstances but then coming to enjoy the idea of a permanent home and unwilling to be pressured away from it . surely no further events will transpire that might cause him to lose faith in this ideal and, feeling it necessary, strike out once again into the lonely world as a traveling thief with no port of call and no living name

[existencebringsonlypain]

Are you. Aware. If this???

yeah no that's by choice

[tennessoui]

For the ask game, 5, 18, and 30??

(from this ask game)

ahh thank you for sending these in!!

5. first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP

ok so i have 7 tabs open and all of them are either new chapters or unpublished wips but here is the first sentence of the first tab - and a second sentence for a little bit more context lol:

'Watto has wings, a set that isn’t much to look at but that he’s rather proud of showing off anyway. And because Watto has wings, little Ani cannot, lest he grow up and get ideas.'

(that's wing fic au which i have been meaning to finish and post for forever)

18. If you keep them, share a deleted sentence or paragraph from a published fic

ok so i don't keep my deleted sentences or paragraphs - they are gone with the wind as soon as i don't like them lol BUT i can definitely talk about one of my first draft ideas for a fic that i didn't end up writing which i've definitely talked about before. in foolproof foolhardy, when i started writing what would become the last 2 chapters and the final arc of the story, i was totally sold on the idea that when they're in the ship on the way to their mission they would end up fucking ('to get it out of their system') as a one-time thing and afterwards they can just pretend they don't care about each other at all and the sex would be very angry and bitter except for the moments where they couldn't help but betray their real feelings (aka master skywalker caresses obi-wan's face, obi-wan kisses his pulse, etc etc)

and then during the mission the prince of the planet would be interested in obi-wan in a way that would prove to be Perilous (because obi-wan tries to pretend he can just go back to having fun and sleeping around and so he courts the prince's attention, but it turns out that actually he doesn't want to do that anymore because now he knows how anakin would hold him)

and anakin would do something very dramatic like start a full on war with the planet and or threaten assassination of the prince because hes a jealous lil guy and will use obi-wan's discomfort as cover for his actions without examining the root of the emotions which is in fact love (but twisted)

and then they fuck AGAIN and finally actually talk it all out (but it was already such a long story and that whole mission arc seemed needlessly dramatic when tensions were already high, so they just talked it out the first time they fucked on the ship, which i'm happy with)

30. share a fic you’re especially proud of

ooo interesting question! i definitely feel various amounts of proud of all my fics because of who i was and what i was trying out when i was writing each of them, but i think i'm especially proud of let my love be the knife that implicates me aka the rots compliant fic where obi-wan raises luke on tatooine alone and does as good of a job as he knows how. i just really like the concept of it - where obi-wan deals with his grief by talking about the agony and joy of loving anakin, luke's father, while also still so fresh off of mustafar and the fall of the Jedi, knowing he can only talk about this now because when luke is old enough to remember he shouldn't bear the weight of his secrets....only for luke to remember not the words themselves (about the empire, about sidious, about anakin's betrayal) but the emotion behind them, which was almost always love.

it's a sad fic but it's not so sad that i think it's unreadable and i really am so proud of a lot of the phrases and the pacing of it! mostly because i almost always avoid anything even resembling 'canon compliant' and so this was a really big moment for me lol