#they've given me severe brain worms

[lavishtine]

I'm already rewatching Queen Charlotte just to watch Brimsley and Reynolds, while I play stardew on my switch. They've begun to eat away at my brain, there is so much research in store, but damnit if I don't write them at this point. I already have the name picked out.

If said writing is physical and not all in my head, well, time will tell.

[tiredassmage]

🖊️ for whoever you’re having the most brainworms about right now :) (-justiceforc3po from main)

Send me a “🖊+an OC“ and I will talk about that OC!

Thank you so much! Going to take this open invitation to be a little unwell about the au for Rhyst that is making the brain worms really dance and jiggle lately.

First, a brief touch on Rhyst as he is in 'canon' - my main Jedi Knight, a Shadow, someone who does not enjoy that the Republic and the Order forge him more and more into a warrior and who quickly finds some strain in seeing so first-hand several of the Republic's failures. The mantle of 'hero' hangs heavy and he never asked for it, never sought such high stakes or praise. He struggles in the end to hold fast to his own advice (to use a few lines from my ever beast under the floorboards Ziost fic that I could not top if I tried to summarize him): "...It won’t be easy. But nothing about this ever was.” He offered her a hand. “We would not be Jedi if we did not continue to try. Will you come with us?”

Rhyst tickles my brain because he struggles far more than I think he ever lets on, or even his story lets on. And part of it is his support network; the very people he relies on, that hold him up, also, unfortunately, play an unintentional hand in some of his burdens. Generally, I list these people in his main story as Kira and Savosta. To be clear, they mean perfectly well. In short, though, a lot of the people Rhyst is close to are also people that share in some level of the idolization of him as the Hero of Tython. They've seen his strengths and it's inspired them, so when they speak of that inspiration, Rhyst tends to listen and offer gentle smiles. He has a very difficult time naming that as part of what worries him and wears on him because he knows of their intentions and he values that it helped them, even if he doesn't necessarily believe as they do that all of his deeds are worthy of such praise as tends to be given to him. He is no model of the Jedi, he thinks, but so many have placed similar accolades upon his shoulders.

[This is already getting really long and there's more specific Knight spoilers I'd like to get into, so throwing in a cut here. Spoilers for mainly the transition between Chapters 2 & 3 of the Knight origin and what follows, essentially.]

Rhyst does keep fighting for the Republic and the Jedi for a very long time; he becomes... a bit resigned to this role as a warrior that isn't exactly what he wanted out of his duties, nor does he feel he is their strongest. But it's what they need him to be, where they say he can help, so he dutifully accepts their pleas for aid and their askance of him to fight among the troops. More and more does he find himself suffocated in the armor of a trooper and less and less in the robes so common among the Order - particularly their scholars, diplomats, and learners.

Which is. already a lot. I do not talk about him enough, but he's such an interesting character to me, actually. There's a lot about him that's hidden that I didn't quite notice on first pass either. I do have to thank @hyrohkaah for a lot of that, hehe, essentially my #1 fanclub member, I say, of Rhyst and Savosta, so I got to actually dig through how they tick when talking about them.

So. The AU. Shorthand SithAU, but more an exploration of like... the conceptual premise that what if the Warrior storyline as what happens to the Knight during Vitiate's control of them in Chapter Two [which, brief side note, I cannot remember for the life of me where I first encountered this idea, if it was another post or if it was trigged by just... a series of posts and discussions etc, or if it just... stumbled out of the woods of my brain one day and now I'm finally doing something with it], and then I got running with myself and it grew sort of into its own beast.

If the original events as they play out more canon to the Knight story is what it looks like when Rhyst can reconnect with and rely, somewhat, on his main support network in his crew, his former Masters Maltaf Orathuse and Satia Lerann, then the ~Sith AU is sort of... what happens when that initial reconnect, even, isn't there. Because not that Rhyst is ever given a whole lot of time to really figure himself out in the wake of everything, considering the war on and the urgency of thwarting Vitiate's plans, but... what if less of that.

Because Rhyst does have a lot of uncertainties about his place in the Order, the direction the Republic is taking given all the weapons projects he watched fail, etc... and that's always a very large part of what Vitiate uses against him there.

So, what if, eventually, Vitiate's control stuck long enough, and the Sith re-training to focus on emotions as a source of power, to moreso feed into them and stew with them rather than sit with them to understand and find new takeaways for learning stuck... And with Scourge absent, what more fun a ploy against the Jedi than to turn one of their poster Knights into his own right hand, perhaps even a new Wrath?

After a bit of a kolto soak and some... repairing of the damage from that ill-fated Strike Team visit to the Fortress, of course.

And that, in short, is the premise which we work off of! As a Sith then, Rhyst settles first as something of a hunting dog, an efficient warrior Vitiate can assign to strike against his enemies, to taunt the Republic in an idle gesture to support the Empire's war - except his latest project is and isn't ever particularly recognized as part of the Empire's forces, given Vitiate's secrecy [and, as we learn later, his interest in other projects]. Ultimately, Rhyst becomes the keeper of Vitiate's secrets - a guardian of artifacts and ritual knowledge as well as an assassin for the Emperor in seclusion.

Kira takes over the hunt for the rest of the Jedi Strike Team and a way to stop Vitiate's plans with Lord Scourge in the meantime, but, eventually, the one to strike at Vitiate is still Rhyst - with Caolan!!! Who is. a whole other ramble, blorbo from friend's brain, etc etc belonging to enabler @hyrohkaah again and simply I'm in love w/Caolan but. but. that's liable to get me off topic. But, in an attempt to keep it short, Caolan has similar 'Vitiate's project a little off the leash and slightly to the left' syndrome and they become 'do not separate' about it.

The interlude years then are spent with Caolan on the hunt for lingering specters of Vitiate's influence in the galaxy. Rhyst is... unclaimed by either major power in the aftermath. While his style is not entirely Sith, it definitely more heavily and openly relies upon dark side tendencies somewhat informed by his previous Jedi training. He'd self-identify as a Dark Side user, but not particularly affiliated with the Sith. He's still too much of an ex-Jedi to be claimed by the Empire and, of course, the suspicion that he struck at their former Emperor does little to win him potential favor (not that he seeks it) on that side of the metaphorical galactic fence.

And then his reasons for avoiding return to the Jedi Order are somewhat two-fold; Rhyst is still driven deeply by a sense of duty. Vitiate became so certain of his control over him - and, eventually, Rhyst's genuine give to servitude to this master - that he's one of the few in the galaxy to know some of the former Emperor's trickier secrets. He knows just enough to be dangerous - even if only as a nuisance in the grand scheme of matters (to speak to the retreat to Wild Space and Zakuul), enough to make Vitiate seek his other avenues as Valkorian. That sense of duty drives him to act on this knowledge. Returning to the Jedi would delay this, he thinks. They would offer something like redemption and Rhyst has... again, essentially, resigned himself to his fate, his new purpose, this new flavor of his life. He is not exactly happy with what he has become, but it is... serviceable. And eventually accepting that with Caolan, helping each other through their own struggles with Vitiate's mark upon their lives, is... its own kind of freedom. It's their truth. It's honest to who they are and who they aim to be. It... accepts what was outside of their control and is permission to continue to be - that survival has no inherent moral value. And Rhyst will not tolerate either of them to be chained to dispassionate leaders again - not Vitiate as a manipulator and crafter of tools, and not the Jedi Council and Republic Senate as even well-meaning commanders of change and bickering definitions of "justice." He cannot abide by handing them over to shackles - literal or figurative - when they have a duty to stop Vitiate in his entirety to complete.

So, in a way... he comes to a lot more of an honest conclusion of self in this whole ordeal. In fighting alongside Caolan for their own directives, without that constant need to perform to a mold or an image that weighs upon them in the Jedi, Rhyst has a far easier time determining what's important to him and carving out those boundaries of what he is and isn't fighting for, what's important to him.

Which, of course, I can't leave well enough alone, so... naturally, when Lana Beniko and Theron Shan team up to investigate the Revanites and turn to investigating Imperial and Republic ghost stories alike about potentially a fallen Jedi or rogue Sith agents when they're short on allies among their own people... the narrative just has to catch back up to them and wrest away some of that little sliver of control over their own lives, and Rhyst may just have to reckon with both sides' expectations of him again after all. :3

[sequestering]

Helloooo💙 for the fic ask:

✈

💀(take it as a compliment - because i went to a local game and the refs were hot and i thought of you)

👀

💋

thank you 💕 these are such fun ones!

💀 if you had to write an alternate ending to [take it as a compliment] how would you end it?

refs are so underrated!! the angry tension, the enemies to lovers, the forbidden romance of it all. so glad to have infected you with ref brain worms <3

so 'take it as a compliment' was only ever going to end one way, i.e. with some variation on a very sappy happy ending. that said, i did consider ending it on a kind of outside pov epilogue. i decided against it in the end, but i do still have several thousand words of tk trying to figure out why sid no longer refs their games while claude trolls him relentlessly. i might post it as a follow-up some day but for now a small section--

Travis begins with Google because where else.

They've got a red-eye back to Philadelphia, and he's still banned from the card table for "cheating" so it's not like he's got anything better to do. He pays the extortionate $20 for in-flight wi-fi and settles in for some research.

Sidney Crosby is still alive and still an active NHL officiator, which means Travis can rule out a few of his more wild theories. He didn't actually think Claude would hire an assassin or something, but if there was anyone who would, G's got the exact right kind of don't-give-a-shit energy.

Travis isn't wrong, though. A bit of time on the NHLOA website shows that Crosby hasn't officiated a Flyers game since the previous season. Given that he's based in Pittsburgh, it's unusual.

Reddit agrees with him. Or at least, a few Redditors in a random thread from last month have made the same observation. Weird, they call it. Travis reads through a few of their explanations with mild interest.

It's Gritty. suggests an account named JD1812, which Travis thinks is unlikely. It had taken him a few years of snooping, but he did once catch sight of the guy in the Gritty suit taking a smoke break. He's definitely just a balding dude, not, like, some eldritch monster.

Possibly a personal conflict of interest. If he started dating a player's sister or something they wouldn't let him ref those games, suggests another account. It's such a hilariously bizarre idea that TK has to laugh. He can't even begin to imagine anyone dating humourless, sour-faced Sidney Crosby.

There are a few more proposals. Reddit user TrueNorthStrong69 thinks that Crosby was taken off for bias, but that's also laughable; the NHL's never taken a ref off for being biased in its whole hundred-year history, it's not going to start by taking pity on the Flyers.

Travis reaches the end of the thread none the wiser. Really though, it's not like fucking Reddit was going to have the answer.

He closes the tab and shuts off his phone. Further up the plane, he can see the top of Claude's ginger head over one of the headrests. Travis narrows his eyes and glares. Fuck Claude and his secrets, he's going to figure this one out.

👀 what’s a fic written by someone else that you REALLY wish you wrote yourself?

hmmm i don't tend to think of fic as something i wish i wrote because if i did write it, it'd probably be very different. let's see...

i stumbled across confidence man by blaahaj recently which completely blew me away. i have a long fawning comment in my drafts that i need to actually post - the author has such a knack for nuanced, interesting but still very hockey-bro characterisation; it's gorgeously written; and the romantic italian (lmao) setting is catnip to me. the reason i mention it though is that the premise is genius, and as someone who's been playing around forever with a million different variations on a sports media guy/player au, i was very struck by how perfectly the author slotted the lead (in this case m tkachuk) into his sports media au role. it's hard to get aus right like that, but when you do mwah it can make for such a fab twist on the established character dynamic.

really though there are so many fics and authors i could mention here. this is such a fantastically talented fandom and i so often read a fic and come away thinking 'oh wow the writer did x so well, i really want to try that out myself.'

💋do you have any guilty pleasure ships that you really want to write for but are scared to?

not really! i don't think i've ever felt particularly guilty about liking a ship. there are a ton of ships i'd like to write for at some point in the future, but really the main hindrance to my writing is just time 😭

(✈ i will leave for the next ask....)

[artsbysakurachan]

Yet Another Crazy Kuro Theory (This one's a real doozy!)

Sebastian's obsessed with cats because he's an alien...

QUIT YER BITCHING DEMON! DON'T MAKE ME PUT YOU IN THE BASEMENT AGAIN!! *muffled outraged demon noises* Sorry about that... Sebastian's an alien. No, really. What is an alien lifeform? It's a lifeform that is not indigenous to planet Earth. Demons aren't indigenous to Earth, they're (presumably) indigenous to the Hell Dimension which makes them, technically, aliens. So now that we've cleared that up, what does that have to do with Sebastian's cat obsession? Strap in cos we about to do some science! Do you own a cat? If so, look at your cat right now. Look at your cat and realise that this adorable little carpet shark is using manipulation and mind-control on you and that cats have doing this to humans for thousands of years. This is actual scientific fact.

A vast majority of cats carry a parasite called toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that makes mice really brave. Instead of being afraid of cats because of the whole apex predator thing, rodents infected with toxoplasma gondii will absolutely step to a cat. They'll get eaten but they'll go down fighting because the parasite controlling their tiny mice brains is telling them that they want to go out like they're in a Die Hard movie. #ThugLife When a cat eats an infected rodent, it too becomes a host to the toxoplasma parasite which it can then pass on to humans. In humans this parasite behaves a little differently, so don't worry it won't make you want to challenge a lion to a death match because it looked at you disrepectfully. However, it will make you less risk averse in general and it will make you like cats more than you did prior to infection. Not all humans are infected with the cat-loving brain worm however, which is why we still have dog-people even though dogs are clearly the inferior species >_> Like I said, cats have been doing this to humans for thousands of years. Of all the animals that humans have domesticated, the cat is the only one that serves no real purpose that wasn't already being taken care of by other domesticated species. We don't eat cats, we don't use them to hunt, we do use them for pest control (rats, mice, etc) but dogs can do the same job just as well if not better because they can eliminate larger pests that cats won't touch. We didn't domesticate cats, they domesticated US! And they've spent the last several thousand years convincing us that we're happy about it while treating us like dirt most of the time.

No shade though, I have three cats and I am happy with my life of mind-controlled servitude and my cats are not forcing me to type this sentence under duress. Also I do not have an angry demon locked in my basement so he can think about his attitude problem.

So, cats are our overlords and evolution has given them the perfect tool with which to continue their fluffy reign of terror. But, not every human is infected with this parasite and not every human is susceptible to it. Evolution likes to have an exit strategy in case of biological dumpster fires so there's always some kind of immunity floating around out there and even humans that aren't immune can still build up a tolerance for biological shenaniganary. But Sebastian's not human so he presumably has no such tolerance. Sidenote: This is probably why actual aliens don't come here, because our germs would kill them. And also because humans are terrible, just sayin' Because Sebastian's an alien with no tolerance to the cat-loving brain trojan, he probably became infected the first time he ever saw one of these fuzzy terminators running fades on the local bird population and now he's...a little obsessed. Not to mention that his "alien" physiology might cause the parasite to behave differently, turning him into the crazy cat-demon we all know and love.