#there was no meaningful connections

[adxmanial]

the death of Twitter has brought me peace tbh

[panstarry]

my final from last semester that i made into a zine. cooked this one up in a couple hours before the critique (the ink was still wet!), so it's very raw and kind of sloppy but the sentiment is there. i love you trans people of color. we are the backbone of this community 🌟

[philyuri]

not to demon post but like. sometimes i think about the "friends" label and the fact that it's a little bit of a haha in-joke but also... i mean. when dan said he didnt have a best friend for the first 18 years of his life he meant it yknow. like i do think that out of all the possible labels he's used, soulmates husbands arch enemies furniture who the fuck knows, best friends is amongst the most meaningful... if you never had a best friend and then met him and he stayed in that spot for fifteen years the fact that he's also the love of your life can maybe be just a bit of a bonus.

[loves2spwge]

they just want to be one...

commissions @jolyonvane did for me where i asked if he could please please please make stan look as desperate and exhausted as he usually does but is being kept together by all his love for his sbf kyle

[metanarrates]

what I find very interesting about the narrator's choice of reward - ie. an eternity of supposed bliss inside the cabin - is that while it seems on its surface just another instance of him projecting his desires onto you, it actually isn't. he himself probably thinks that he would desire an unchanging eternity like the one in the cabin, but...

when he is talking about his reasons for wanting to remove death from the world, his focus is almost entirely on connections to others. he talks about the greater good, having loved ones, wanting better for them. it's those connections that drive him to submit to death in the hope of defeating it. he is definitely selfish, but if he was totally selfish, he wouldn't have been able to do that. he believes his own death is a worthy sacrifice for the continued existence of his world. his vision of an ideal eternity, as he describes to you, is one where connections are endlessly and joyfully rediscovered.

in his ideal ending, you've killed off the only being you could ever meaningfully connect to. and this is one of the main reasons his plan dooms itself. who could bear the weight of an eternity alone? not him, certainly.

[hell0jon]

Started drawing that jonathan sims head archivist of the magnus institute london statement begins guy and then remembered I wasn’t blessed by the gods with the ability to draw hair

This is all you’re getting

[adiradirim]

From right to left: Beya Melamed; Bulgaria, 1890 - Jewish bride after the wedding; Turkey, early 20th century - Torah ark curtain made from a woman’s dress; Izmir, Turkey, 1929 - Wedding dress belonging to a Jewish family from Edirne, Turkey; early 20th century, gifted to museum exhibition in memory of Colombe Papo

Worn in the 19th and 20th century for weddings and other occasions by women across the Balkans and Anatolia, bindallı dresses were typically made of velvet in deep jewel tones. They were decorated with extensive gold embroidery of floral designs, which give this group of dresses their name, meaning thousand branches. This Ottoman-derived yet European-influenced style marked a transitional period between uses of traditional and modern western fashions.

The dresses - adopted from the surrounding culture as a fashionable item without any Jewish specificity - took on unique Jewish meaning through their use in the synagogue, where they became ark curtains, Torah mantles and binders, bimah covers, and the like, frequently with added dedicatory inscription. The donation of dresses and trousseau items by women to the synagogues created a personal bond between the women and the synagogue. The habit of donating these textiles to the synagogue endured long after the original embroidered bedclothes and dresses had gone out of fashion, and the transitional bindallı fashion thus remained alive in Sephardi synagogues long after the passing of the brides who wore the dresses.

[mustbemosstaken]

The Bound SMP cast really saw the popularity of non-canon ships in Fable and said “alright, this time EVERYONE has potential chemistry, go wild” and honestly as they should I wanna see what gets cooked up /hj

[fairycosmos]

i literally do not feel like i am living a life. it's just screens work and sleeping and i can't break out of it because i don't have the energy to take on anything else

[tawaifeddiediaz]

then making this stalker’s motivations being finding a mother and then having eddie rock up with a parallel story of his “ghost of a second chance” shannon/kim, but also the flashbacks to making the decision to bring his son’s mother back into their life? but also paralleling how eddie goes about looking for partners, because he - just like ryan has had before - looks for people that could check off boxes, one of which being chris’s mother…idk. there’s a thought here but this is all i got rn

[commander-gloryforge]

fellow guild wars 2 enjoyers that arent popular and part of the cool kids and have ocs that everyone knows/loves and create banger fanart and post really good fics and all that

fellow guild wars 2 enjoyers that are just kinda there and kinda average

lets band together. and maybe kiss.

[pippuns]

the only thing that could have improved SVSSS is if shen jiu was in the background providing scathing hateful commentary the entire time. i want to see him and shen yuan eat each other alive <3

[nyxi-pixie]

dazais the realest mfer on the planet bc like. i have been obsessed with chuuya for nearly a year and ive never magic girl princess carried him. like dazai thinking abt him every sleeping and waking moment rlly makes sense when u take that into consideration. imagine princess carrying THE nakahara chuuya and then not being insane about him for the next 6 yrs. cldnt be me. cldnt be dazai either. u just gotta let the insanity infect ur mind

[technicalthinker]

Me in 2021 starting episode 1 off Loki: haha wouldnt it be funny if Loki got to kiss Owen Wilson??

Me now:

[paint-it-dead]

i would say that denji and casca should open a survivors club, but then again im pretty sure if you put them in the same room together they'd sit on opposite ends like cornered animals growling at each other...

[starcurtain]

Some Speculation on Kaveh’s Father

I actually started this post right after the Parade of Providence event last year, but never got around to finishing it. However, in light of Kaveh still not appearing on a banner, I decided to dust this one off and get it finished, so that I’d have at least a little Kaveh content in my life after being so cruelly denied by Hoyo.

So, without further ado, some stuff about Kaveh’s father I did not see discussed elsewhere but which I think is especially interesting.

1) Kaveh’s father likely first became depressed/disillusioned with humanity after witnessing (or possibly being the victim of) a murder attempt.

Without knowing the full situation and reading all the additional text from the Parade of Providence event, I feel like this might have been easily missed, but the entire “Kaveh’s dad became disillusioned and depressed and retreated to the desert to help people” seems--at first--like it came out of nowhere. He had a lovely family, was the pride of his darshan, and was eager and excited to win the crown to bring it home to his son. Yet theoretically, he did not win the crown (and, in fact, the crown was stolen before the last event and may not have been there during the Avidya Forest fight, so when, as the non-winner, would Kaveh’s father have come into contact with it to encounter Sachin through it in the first place?) Why would Kaveh’s father’s personality take such a massive turn all the sudden? What would drive an excited, happy person to suddenly withdraw from everything he loved and everyone who loved him, if he didn’t actually win the diadem to be influenced by it in the first place?

The event implies there was a trigger:

Huvishka’s friend (who is described as “honest and kind but vulnerable and sensitive”--obviously Kaveh’s father) went into the Avidya Forest with the other contestants, where no one was watching, and we’re not told what happened except that the Akademiya responded to whatever occurred by shutting down the entire competition and banning any sort of events in the future that cause contestants to become so desperate they would “fight to the death.” 

This is a pretty obvious implication that Kaveh’s father either witnessed two other contestants attempt to kill each other or was the victim of an attempted murder himself, which prevented him from winning the competition even though he was the favorite to win by a long-shot. This feat of betrayal, demonstrating the depths to which humanity would sink, likely shook the idealistic world views of a sensitive person such as Kaveh’s father. This brush with death and with humanity’s capacity for evil in the forest would have been the exact trigger needed to make Kaveh’s father particularly vulnerable to Sachin’s message of nihility and despair, leading to the downward spiral that sent Kaveh’s father into the desert.

- 

2) Sachin may have way more culpability for Kaveh’s father’s death than Kaveh realizes. 

For a while after the event, I was under the impression that Kaveh’s father must have met Sachin’s consciousness through the diadem and that’s where he got the idea to go into the desert. However, something was always a bit odd about the timeline, because...

Sachin was still alive when he gave the Akademiya his estate. This is why no one actually knew/believed he was fully dead, even to the present--because he willed the Akademiya the estate while he was alive and told them he was going to be personally watching over the contestants to award his estate to them if he deemed them worthy successors to himself. 

So did Kaveh’s father run into a fragment of Sachin’s consciousness... or did he run into Sachin himself? The game doesn’t really clarify:

The fact that Sachin’s recording recognized Kaveh’s appearance as familiar makes me think it is much more likely that the consciousness preserved in the diadem already had knowledge of Kaveh’s father at the time it was preserved. Aka, Sachin actually met Kaveh’s father in person. This also makes sense of why, even though the diadem was stolen away during the last event and Kaveh’s father did not win it, he would still know about Sachin and Sachin’s research. (However, as a counterpoint, I guess we could say that the Diadem!Sachin had enough sentience to maybe have its own memory, separate from the real Sachin? And reached out to Kaveh’s father mentally even though he didn’t win the diadem? Maybe?)

Still, there’s one really notable aspect of the timeline that I think is important: Right after the Interdarshan Competition twenty years ago, the one which Kaveh’s father competed in, we know that Sachin went back out to the desert. 

Who else went out to the desert exactly 20 years ago? Kaveh’s father, obviously.

This overlap in the timelines makes it seem very likely that Kaveh’s father, who failed to win the competition because of a murder attempt (and therefore never got the diadem), was nevertheless reached out to by the real Sachin, who saw in Kaveh’s father the kindred disillusioned idealist he was looking for to pass his research torch onto. From this connection, Kaveh’s father was driven to either directly accompany or at least pursue the still living Sachin into the desert. (This works even if we say it was only Sachin’s consciousness he was contacted by--in either case, he would have been driven go to out to the desert to meet the real, temporarily still living Sachin to join his quest to help the desert people.)

Only for Kaveh’s father to meet his end there while trying to aid a caravan that had fallen into trouble. What a tragic coincidence, a completely unpredictable twist of fate.

Or... was it?

How odd, in the same quest that Kaveh’s father’s connection to Sachin is discussed, that we’re given an account of a caravan that appears to have been deliberately sabotaged, where money was taken (from Sachin) and somehow sparked a betrayal, a “trial of human nature” that caused many people to die, with the takeaway being the exact belief Sachin wants to pass on and reinforce in others, that humans are horrific creatures who can only make the world a worse and worse place. 

We know that Sachin’s “research” specifically consisted of doing this exact thing, manipulating situations to test humans’ moral character, conducting trials/experiments on “human nature” to reinforce his belief that humans were fundamentally selfish beings.

(It’s no accident the merchant ledger we receive uses the exact same words as Sachin does, “trial of human nature” and “experiments on human nature.” We’re supposed to assume what happened to the caravan in the note was deliberate sabotage on Sachin’s part, to create a scenario where he could observe the cruelties of humanity.)

Why would the game go out of its way to give us an account of a caravan being deliberately sabotaged and used as an experiment if there was no connection at all between what happened with this caravan and what happened to Kaveh’s father, who was also killed helping a floundering caravan?

It’s just too much of a coincidence to accidental. I think the implications of the ledger Dori gave us and the similarities in the language on that ledger to Sachin’s ideas was supposed to lead the audience to wonder:

Could Kaveh’s father have died in one of Sachin’s final “human nature experiments”? 

Was the caravan Kaveh’s father tried to help one that Sachin deliberately sabotaged, expecting to observe humanity’s selfish, self-preserving nature?

I think there’s enough evidence in the story to suggest that we players are at least supposed to consider this a possibility. (There’s no reason to give us the ledger about the manipulated caravan otherwise.) And if you consider this a possibility, it would mean that Sachin didn’t just indirectly cause Kaveh’s father’s death--he would be the direct cause of Kaveh’s father’s death, an actual murder brought about by Sachin’s beliefs that humanity’s self-centered nature made everyone beyond saving.

This idea transforms Kaveh’s father’s sacrifice into the ultimate rejection of Sachin’s beliefs. This would mean that, even in a situation manipulated to bring out the worst in human beings on purpose, Kaveh’s father gave everything to protect the lives of others, for no gain at all of his own, doing everything he could just to desperately try to make the situation (the world) better.

SO yeah. I’m not saying we have hard evidence here, but I think the quest was trying to lead players to speculate very, very hard on the possibility that Kaveh’s father’s death was no accident.

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3) Finally, a cuter piece of speculation to brighten things up after that despair bomb I just dropped: it’s highly likely that Kaveh’s father had more than one Aranara buddy!

During the Parade of Providence, we hear about an Aranara who learned to read from Kaveh’s father:

However, this is a bit confusing, because later in the event, we hear someone else say that Kaveh’s father taught an Aranara to write specifically when he was a child:

While of course it is possible that Kaveh’s father taught the first Aranara, Arakasyapa, to both read and write, I think there’s also another possible answer here about why Kaveh’s father would separately mention teaching an Aranara to write:

Because there is an entirely different Aranara in the story which was taught to write by a “good Nara” who was a child--Arashakun, from the quest “Courage is the Heart.”

In this sweet little world quest, the Traveler discovers a flower talisman that has been snatched by some hilichurls, and seeks to return it to its rightful owner, a timid and shy Aranara named Arashakun. 

We learn that Arashakun once had a kind-hearted “good Nara” companion who taught him to write (sound familiar?), and who, in order to encourage the poor Aranara, gave him a single flower dubbed “courage.” In describing this child companion, Arashakun specifically states that his companion was no strong warrior like the Traveler’s twin, but instead a gentle, comforting presence who never teased the Aranara.

All of these descriptions line up particularly well with Kaveh’s father, who the game repeatedly describes as vulnerable, kind-hearted, and giving to others.

To drive home the possible connections to Kaveh’s family even further, this quest takes place very, very near to the Palace of Alkazarzaray. 

Although we don’t have any guarantee, I think it is strongly implied that the “good Nara” mentioned by Arashakun is indeed Kaveh’s father, and the “courage of the heart” that he extended to Arashakun as a child is the very same courage, kindness, and generosity that drove him to reach out to the people of the desert, hoping to make a difference in their lives--even at the cost of his own.

The takeaway? Kaveh’s father was a truly good person who aided everyone he came across, from timid Aranara to people whose very lives were in danger. He never meant to leave his family, and especially not his son, but repeatedly fell afoul of the worst humanity had to offer and was driven into a situation in which all he could do was offer his very life to uphold the altruism that was central to his idealism--the same idealism and goodness that Kaveh carries as “courage” in his own heart.