Recently, Clockwork started treating dimensional events like a TV show. He could be time itself but he wasn't going to take care of all the dimensions; considering the number of times they destroyed themselves it really didn't make sense.
Danny accompanied him, it was quite funny, and there was a dimension that he liked to observe, Clockwork called him "How to die a thousand times" but the halfa only called it "Detective Comics" or "DC" for short. Everything about it reminded him of a comic if he was being honest.
It was a messy dimension, it had been reset so many times it was worrying and had several alternate line screens that ended very badly. Danny winced at the DC Zombies screen combining with another, that dimension worked in weird ways.
Both he and Clocky prepared for the season finale, a reveal about a hero named "Batman", when he saw Clockwork throw his popcorn at Alfred's death. His mentor was devastated, he used to avoid using his future vision to not "spoil" the ending, but it was obvious that Alfred was his favorite character.
When all of it ended horribly for the original dimension, Danny and Clockwork looked at each other. That ending was very unsatisfying, so they decided to...change it. They had some time to waste after all.
They disguised themselves as a couple of normal civilians, went back to the start of the problems, and started changing all the bad endings they could find (without interfering with some things, even if Danny wanted to save Jason, Red Hood had to happen).
Spoiler alert: Those heroes die a lot, and apparently they're determined to die!
they're both winged pretty boys, so, do you think they'd be friends...?
.... probably not.
( ; w ; i just really liked @livvylubug's lunanardo design and wanted to draw them together... at least luna's donnie and swannie's leo could maybe bond...?)
that scene in season 1 where teruki hanazawa exorcises ekubo mid-sentence... and shigeo's eyes widen in shock?
i really want to talk about it, specifically the explosion meter accompanying it.
normally, when the teenager's emotions aren't obvious to the audience, that meter relays to us a sense of what he is actually feeling. but we cannot trust the meter here. we see it jump up a few points at teru's 'psycho wave' sending the sleazy ghost to the shadow realms, and remain steady at 50% upon shigeo's recollections of the spirit's unsavory nature. the boy outright tells teru that he isn't bothered. and it's funny!
but shigeo isn't being honest with himself here either.
his face briefly gives his feelings away before resettling into its normal flat affect. (to be fair, what he's really feeling isn't teru's business. this kid is trying to provoke a fight out of him, after all.) after he's basically tortured into exploding, shigeo spends three hours in the pouring rain, searching everywhere for ekubo.
three. hours.
these are not the actions of someone who isn't bothered. letting himself get drenched to the point of sickness,
even though he literally holds the power to shield himself from it,
reads to me like unconscious self-punishment for allowing all this to happen.
after a large chunk of his short life spent denying and fearing them for good reason, shigeo's first impulse is often not to use his psychic powers -- even after his integration at the story's end. i wish this was discussed more, because many watchers cannot fathom why this boy with world-breaking psychic abilities would ever refuse to use them.
also: the explosion meter lying to us / representing shigeo's detachment from his own emotions alexithymia may occur elsewhere in the series as well, especially when he's not close to an explosion; i'm reminded of the tiny dent ritsu's provocation of him makes in it a few episodes later.
australia just confirmed that anything indeed can happen. i thought lewis moved to ferrari was the maximum of it but apparently not.
today we started with 19 cars (bc williams withdrew logan's to give his car to alex) and finished with 16 cars across the line. ferrari finished 1-2, max dnf, mclaren in top 5, checo only finished p5, britcedes dnf, haas double points, and yuki & lance got points. ferrari have a better car than last year, you can clearly see it from carlos' & charles' smiles, they seem confident that they can close the gap with rbr and it's showing this early in the season (hopefully they can only get closer). same thing with mclaren, they definitely have a much better car than last year, lando and oscar deserve that.
but rest assured that silly season will only get sillier!!! 21 more races plus 6 sprint races (which im not so excited about), 13 unclaimed seats, moving rumors left & right (be it drivers or staff), and other drama. drivers market is going to be chaotic interesting. this is f1 ig.
I think what might actually help the families of trans loved ones is to actually engage with where the trans person is at - especially if the family isn't quite understanding yet. When I came out, I was completely alone in figuring out my manhood. I had peers and I had exposed myself to so many trans people who explored gender, and while it was amazing, it isn't quite the same at times. I grieve quietly, sometimes, about all the missed opportunities that might have just made it easier for my family to have seen how utterly happy I was. It took them a very long time to actually notice that I was happy, especially once I got on testosterone. I'm lucky that they saw that happiness eventually, and slowly accepted it. My manhood is completely detached from their influence, both to my relief and chagrin. It's sad to me that I learned to shave from a kind online stranger, somebody who didn't even have a father and yet, I do. I have a father. I grieve at the loss of a potential shared experience. I grieve about the pain I went through when I was in that stage of transition, especially because it was raw and vulnerable. I grieve that many trans people today are traversing the path I had to, because it's sometimes lonely (even when you do have other forms of support).
It's hard to know that I will never have gotten my sense of being from my family. In many ways, it has severed a lot of connection with them because there were so many times that I was begging them to see happiness when they were focused on the idea that I was almost in a state of purgatory - flesh which felt warm but held no familiarity to them. I don't harbor ill-will toward them, I hope I don't leave the impression that I despise them. I understand what they felt, even if I can't conceptualize it myself. However, it's a raw wound in my heart, and I don't want to leave anybody else feeling that way, either.
“You’re welcome to cut me open to find out. Knife’s on my left hip if you forgot yours.”
“Oh, I intend to.”
spent most of my Sunday on @figuwhump day 12, which dovetailed really nicely with a couple of MoE thumbnails I was saving. ‘this looks like consensual kink, is this actually whump,’ you might be asking, and to that i say, with Kujen & Jedao it can be both
love it when a character that's hard to read intuitively for you has like a dedicated fandom interpreter who can just glance at their blank face in a panel and then give you a 3k word essay on their innermost thoughts & desires & fears and neatly tie it back into the themes & whatnot as if it's the most obvious thing in the world
Something about Lex being so certain she was going to die in Toy Zone and her dying wish being that her sister never needed her the way that she had needed her, that Hannah would be strong enough to escape the mall and still make it out of Hatchetfield to California even if she had no one by her side when she got there
MC forces Barbs to watch the entirty of Ratatouille with them.
That's it
I just wanna know how MC is going to manage that-
I can’t imagine Barbatos sitting through Ratatouille even if MC tried to tie him down or something it’s not gonna work jsjsjsj
The split second a rat shows up on screen he’s gone- and then MC is getting a whole lecture later, on how ratatouille could be classified as a horror movie.
Not to mention all the genuine health concerns about rats cooking- Barbatos has a whole PowerPoint on the subject helsphsksj
hi! your blog is one of my favourites and i absolutely adore reading your thoughts. my grandfather recently passed away and it feels like i lost myself with him. how do i continue living after this? there is this constant weight on my chest and it feels like an emptiness has made a home inside of me. how do i go on when it feels like the world crashed on my shoulders?
hello, love! this is so very sweet and kind of you, and i hope you're treating yourself gently and kindly right now - there aren't words for a loss like this. that heaviness is difficult, and hard, and painful. it's okay if things don't feel okay, right now, or even soon - i think that's something that a lot of the people i know that have gone through similar grief feel: like they should be able to get back to a relative 'normal' in a [insert far too short period of time].
but it's okay if it hurts. that's where i'd like to start. you're allowed to feel that emptiness, that world-crashed feeling that goes beyond words, beyond time. don't feel like you have to rush this to feel some sort of better. things get easier with time, i promise you this, but sometimes painful feelings are important to feel, too. cry, scream, feel your emotions. they're a part of you. grieve.
it's perhaps a little silly, but when i think about death i always think about a couple of space songs: mainly drops of jupiter by train and saturn by sleeping at last. there are perhaps others that speak to the emotions better, but these two have always hit something a little deeper for me, and are popular for a wide-reaching reason.
and while personally i don't know much about grief like this, i do know a lot about love; and i think they're a lot of the same thing.
the people we love are a part of us, and this is why it takes from us so deeply when we lose them, because it does feel like we've lost a part of ourselves in the wake of it. but it's because they were so central to our experiences of living - our lives, that the separation introduces a hollowness - a place where they used to be. a home that now goes unlived in.
an emptiness, like you said.
but just because they're not here physically, doesn't mean he's not still there, in your heart, in your life, your memory. you can hold him close in smaller ways, as well: steal a sweater, or cologne/scent for something a little more physical and long lasting for remembering. hold onto the memories you cherish, the things that made you laugh, the ease of slow mornings and gentle nights. write them all down, slide a few photographs in there, go through it and add more when you miss him. keep them all close, keep them in your heart.
you're not alone, in this. he's still there, with you, it's just - in the little things.
he's with you in the way you see and go about your daily life, in doing what he liked to do, in the ways he interacted with the world that you shared with him. the memories you recall fondly when the night is late or the moment is right and something calls it into you like a melody, an old bell, laughter you'd recognize anywhere.
but i think, perhaps most importantly above all others - talk about him. with your family, your friends, his friends, strangers; stories are how we keep the people we love alive. the connections they've made, the legacies and experiences they've left behind, and so, so many stories.
how lucky, we are - to love so much it takes a piece of us when they go. grief is the other side of the coin, but it does not mean our love goes away. it lives in you. it lives in everyone who knew him, in the smallest pieces of our lives.
the people we love never really leave us, like this: they're in how we cook and the way we fold our newspapers, our laundry, in the radio stations we tune in to and the way we decorate our walls, our photo albums. they're in the way we store our mail, organize our closets, the scribbled notes in the indexes of our books. the meals we love and the drinks we mix, the way we spend time with one another. they've been passed down for generations, for longer than history - and we are all the luckier for it.
think about what you shared with him, and do it intentionally. bring him into your life, like this, again. whether it's crosswords or poetry or sports or anything else. if one doesn't help, try another. something might click.
i hope things feel a little easier for you, as they tend to do only with time. i hope you find joy in your grief, even if it is small and hard to grasp at first. know that your hurt stems from so much love that there isn't a place to put it properly, and that it is something so meaningful and hurting poets and storytellers have been struggling to put it into words and sounds that feel like the fit right for eons, and that it is also just simply yours. sometimes things don't have to make sense. sometimes they just are - unable to be put into words or neat little sentiments, as unfair and tragic as they come.
but i promise it will not feel like this forever. your love is real. and perhaps, on where to begin on from here - i think it's less on finding where to begin and just beginning. and you've already started. you've taken the most important and crucial step: the first one.
wherever you go, after that, from here? you'll figure it out. you always have, and you always do. it'll come, as things always do. love leads us, as does light - and you're never alone in your hurt. in your grief, your missing something dear to you. i think if you talk about it with others, you'll find they have ways of helping you cope as well - and they have so much love of their own to spare, too.
as an aside, here is the song (northern star by dom fera) i was listening to when i wrote this, for no other reason more than it makes me think of connections, and love, and how we hold onto the people we love and how they change us, wonderfully and intrinsically. it's a little more joyous than the others i've mentioned, and plays like a story, and it made me think of what is at the core of this, love and stories and i am here with you, and maybe it'll bring you some joy, if you'd like it. wishing you all my love and ease 💛