#subtlety? what's that?

[merlins-strawberriesandroses]

POV you’ve informed the Queen and the Court’s Sorcerer of something and they very clearly know something that they’re not letting on

[goulloynes]

its really interesting how p5 leans heavily on the rivalry between ren and akechi by having them foil each other in every conceivable way possible ie gentleman thief to famous detective, joker's all black outfit vs crow's all white outfit, society shunning ren because he's a criminal vs akechi who needs to be perfect in every way because all eyes are on him, the begrudging respect and playful flirting between the two of them, the chess motif

and then royal breaks it down by showing that they're not so different after all with them both having all black outfits, now it's holmes and watson investigating a mystery rather than sholmes vs arsene, and still the rivalry is there with the red vs blue motif in their outfits, them being more open with each other in their own fucked up way its done really well. and of course, the very subtle gigantic billboard in their showtime that yells out TWO SIDES SAME COIN in bold 500 point font

[lets-go-hurt-someone]

Durge: Hey babe, so this is gonna sound weird, but last night an effete imp who’s obsessed with me gave me this evil murder cape. I’m not sure if you would be comfortable wearing something so vile but if—

Astarion: YES. *poofs*

[sableeira]

“Allow me to introduce you to the original you.”

[quinn-pop]

let’s do some autistic meta knight headcanons!! over explaining my interpretation of meta knight yet again wooooo

this orb has NO idea how to talk to people!!! outside of work anyway. a lot of this is partially due to upbringing (suppressing his emotions all the time) but he does not know how to express emotions, like…at all.

this goes into a few things

1. yeah talking is hard. even after figuring out what he wants to communicate he will struggle. conversation can be so overwhelming, especially under pressure. he will need time lol

2. because of that, forming connections is hard. i really don’t think meta is much for shallow relationships, and certainly not early in the timeline. which also means he has very little experience with friendship. so a lot of the relationships he did have went kinda neglected, and issues that probably could’ve been worked on by talking became…*cough romk* escalated.

3. honestly i wouldn’t be surprised if meta convinced himself he couldn’t feel emotion (anymore) until like. katam-ish. he tried very hard lol

vulnerability is terrifying. (though this gesture here is also just comforting, like his little cape cocoon thing he does.)

unmasking—yeah im taking the mask thing very literally here—is a big deal and a very slow process for mk. i’m sure he has a lot of feelings on that lol. it served as a way to ensure no one could ever, y’know, see him.

i can’t say i think he’d ever fully ditch it—there’s always gonna be some days that are more stressful than others and if having it could help him get through it, it just makes sense. mainly when working.

it really is about vulnerability. granted, i don’t think he has the most expressive face (in my head every astral just tends to stare at things) but i doubt he has much control over it. can’t fake a smile but also can’t hide it. probably blushes easy because yeah, astrals; just look at kirby’s face.

just the idea that someone might be able to read his expression and know what he’s feeling before he’s ready for them to (or even understands it himself…) yeah he doesn’t want that

but emotional turmoil aside, i think his mask also hides a lot of his stims

remember that whole “suppressing your feelings” thing? yeah turns out that ignoring half your instincts isn’t a good idea. so in true meta knight style, he tries to stim as subtly as possible

1. he has the least control over his wings, so they will flick and twitch on their own. they’re usually a good indicator of how he’s feeling, not unlike the body language usually seen in cat ears and tails lol. flapping is also an extension of this of course, though he probably suppresses it more.

2. this also effects when he takes his wings out. pretty much every time he’s excited or nervous it just happens. kinda makes me wonder if his wing cape ordeal might also go into the suppression thing… (i’d say yes, but using a cape is also very comforting so it’s not necessarily a bad thing)

3. going back to the mask thing; he stims a lot underneath it. think like biting or pursing your lips. he bites his tongue and clicks his mouth. that sort of thing. his mask also makes it harder to notice that he is constantly sighing, humming, grumbling…all that

one nice thing about the mask though is that it helps a little bit with lights!!! woo

(look at him and his magically floating glasses)

sensory stuff—i think he’s mostly bothered by light and sound. maybe a bit of texture. he’s pretty sensory avoidant and perfectly happy standing off to the side not touching anything.

the one exception to this is physical affection, which is, despite all of this, most of how he shows affection. it’s a lot easier to hug someone than to try to explain your feelings for them, after all.

i think he would like pressure though. so that’s probably part of it. and i’m pretty sure there’s some connection in here to fighting (dang, is that the only way he knows how to get his energy out?)

anyway, pretty much all of this is in contrast to kirby, who i would gladly nominate as the champion of Doing Whatever He Wants. he might pick up a few bad habits, but he will never mask the way meta knight does. he might not understand how he feels, but he’s in tune enough to express it…usually.

this is a very good thing for meta because it helps him to do the same thing. kirby’s so energetic, it’s hard to not want to stim with him. it reminds meta to be kinder to himself and explore his own emotions. he can also help kirby understand themselves, so this connection is very important.

yeah, at the end of the day, everything kinda just boils down to kirby and mk as parallels

this is the conclusion i promise

to me, meta’s arc is about growing stronger by growing kinder, and this is mostly by learning to be kind to himself. letting himself be a person again, loving and understanding other people, and eventually, letting go of all the expectations placed on him and doing the things he’s always wanted to do…

autism headcanons are fun for me because it’s cathartic to write, but at the same time, it just makes sense in this sort of narrative. meta is, to me, inseparable from these things. and so is kirby! that’s a dynamic that’s a lot of fun to play with, and it’s at the heart of my kirby interpretation.

if you actually read all this WOW thank you

[perrybearwaks]

[emry-stars-art]

I have an ask that prompted me to finally draw out this exchange that I’ve been thinking about for like a week now lmao so I’ll be back to link it when it’s answered

Abram has no idea how most (see: not sadistic) royals treat their personal servants/assistants/etc and since Andrew has so few of them he also doesn’t realize his case is Not The Norm. He may be oblivious but this time it’s only like half his own fault 🫡

Anyway here’s more info on how andreil pans out in this au

[thegoldenappleofdiscord]

will solace can NOT flirt and i love him for it because his terrible tactics actually worked

[citrus-cactus]

Watching Awakening Parts 4 & 5 is mostly just me waiting for my favorite failwoman to have a bazooka-assisted meltdown on national TV

[isabellaofparma]

i'm a rhaenicent girlie through and through but i think the showrunners should stop talking about them being the love of each other's life and referring to them as a couple until they put their money where their mouth is and have alicent and rhaenyra have angry sex on the iron throne in s3. or something. if i'm honest

[gofancyninjaworld]

No one is born knowing how to communicate

A: And that's okay...

Dr Kuseno made it look so easy. He just swanned into Saitama's apartment, proferred him a gift of beef and the hero's hostility melted away.

Fubuki felt positively foolish, and yet encouraged.

Since then, however, she's found that the only thing meat bribes pull in are dogs. Literal dogs:

And even dogs need more than meat to be loyal.

What gives? Well, it's obvious that Fubuki mistook Dr Kuseno's gift for a bribe: more on that later. Probably. And yeah, it's funny, but it's more interesting than that.

Learning how to communicate is complex. There are a ludicrous number of unspoken conventions and rules in every human society, so much so that we don't fully learn how to smile socially until we're in our forties. Dr Kuseno carefully judged his gift: he had a legitimate reason to offer Saitama a gift in the first place, out of gratitude for Saitama going out of his way to mentor Genos. Then he chose a gift Saitama would be sure to appreciate and presented it at a time when Saitama would be thinking about dinner. The worst that could have happened is that Saitama took the gift but insisted on the doctor going home (and taking Genos with him) -- it would still have left the desired positive impression. And things went really well. Kuseno made it look effortless.

Fubuki is only in her early twenties and her experience to date has been far from typical. She's learned that either she can intimidate people or she can flatter them into doing what she wants. With Saitama (and later Bang, Bomb, and Kuseno), she has to learn how to talk to more powerful people whom she cannot overpower, over whom she has no leverage, and who are unimpressed by her looks, simpering, or flattery.

Fortunately, Fubuki is nothing if not astute. She's worked out that she needs to develop complementary skills if she's to make herself useful to the S-Class heroes she wants to hang with. How to talk to them to get the help and cooperation she desires? Ah, that's a work in progress.

B: ...Unless it's not

Let's move onto another miscommunication.

Something that I hadn't before was that, unlike the webcomic version where Saitama only thinks to himself that Genos seems depressed, in the manga, Saitama out and out asks him if this is the case. He wants to know.

It mirrors King asking Saitama that very same question and getting Saitama to open up and be vulnerable for the first time (ever, in any version of the story). So it is very appropriate to see Saitama trying to do the same for Genos, particularly as he is openly fond of the guy.

However, it goes wrong. Saitama feels himself under pressure to say something wise to make it better. So he puts on his best 'confident' face and inadvertently makes everything much worse. Oh dear. What makes this particularly painful in the manga is that Saitama is much more invested in trying to reach Genos, and it's made Genos think that Saitama saying that he doesn't see what he's doing must mean that earlier times when he's praised him must have been just Saitama being nice. For sure, Genos could have pushed back and made Saitama clarify what he meant, but he's even worse at communicating: and Saitama's glib remark about being bright struck him square in the insecurities.

I'm going to come to something that I only realised once I started typing this up. Even though I've pointed out their abilities to communicate, neither King nor Kuseno have the perfect words to say. Kuseno started out by first committing a faux pas in bringing his great big outside boots into Saitama's flat, then nearly boring Saitama to death with a long-winded explanation. King started out by trying to guess what was bothering Saitama. Both, however, did the most important thing about effective communication: they picked up on their going wrong and changed tack.

It's not about saying the right thing: it's about responding to the person you're talking to.

The thing that King did that Saitama was trying to do for Genos was to ask Saitama open questions, and shut up in the interim, letting Saitama talk to fill in the silence. He'd only speak to ask more open questions when Saitama ran out of things to say, and through that, gently started to challenge Saitama's thinking.

But doing so means being comfortable with several seconds of silence. And that is excruciating. It is almost irresistible to jump in and say something, anything. And it would have been a longish wait, for Genos to slowly sit down and decide to start speaking, which might well have started being about something only tangentially related to his worry. King did that for Saitama: Saitama started out talking about what was bothering him on the surface -- being too strong -- before eventually coming to what was really bothering him, feeling lonely and profoundly isolated from everyone around him. Saitama does not yet know how to wait a person out.

It's a problem in this case because it's introduced a big barrier between those two, not an insurmountable one for sure, but one that could easily compound later.

Ah well, no one is born a communicator. We just have to wait and see if they work out a way to open up and be honest with each other. So it goes! There's more ways to introduce conflicts than to have a monster trample Tokyo, after all!

And so help me, the struggle to learn how to communicate is 1000% worthwhile.

[poorlittleyaoyao]

entire jianghu FLOORED by the concept of mashups

[marisatomay]

tom cruise as a filmmaker is so funny because he’s absolutely one of our best living actors and producers (don’t argue with me it’s true) and with ease he could be doing more of what most people think of as Capital “A” Acting but instead he’s like “well i could focus on winning an oscar or i could fly planes and ride off cliffs while i’m still physically able and only one of these options will let me micro-manage the united states navy and be the first movie production to film inside westminster abbey”

[hotvintagepoll]

I saw your reblog of the Marquand poll saying Gregory Peck wasn't right for it in the tags and so out of genuine curiosity I wanted to ask, why include actors you think aren't suited for the roll on the poll? Also how many of the actors "cast" do you think are miscasts? (If you don't wanna name names that's fine, I'm just curious about the numbers)

uhhh that one was just a mistake tbh, I made the last batch of polls really quickly and I threw Greg in there just because I was like, eh, he's played a lawyer, this will be funny. In general with the polls I do try to show a wide variety of potential (and legitimate) takes on each character that all still feel plausible to an element of the character we see in the book, even if I don't agree on prioritizing that element, so everyone can vote for their version of Dracula.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

sometimes doing art is a random person coming by u and winking at u and u absolutely do not know what they're doing that about at all. and sometimes they tell u and ur like that's so beautiful that u've found that in my art but I didnt put it in there

[karmathehalflander]

I just need everyone to be aware

That when I first introduced BMC to my dad the FIRST question he asked was “does Michael have a crush on Jeremy?” And then I said “well that’s the thing- this lead to me explaining shipping. And he was like “well Michael definitely has a crush on Jeremy.”