#this feels like it's going to be grand

[itsjustevil]

I love how the big bad is one of the most confused people in this whole ordeal is the big bad.

Major villains who have complete control over everything and mastermind literally the whole plot are out, and major villains who are absolutely flabbergasted by the heroes and just out of the depths in how fucked everything is going for them are in.

[unicyclingdogs]

sky and wars!!! :)

[clonerightsagenda]

I rag on Maes Hughes for being chill with genocide but to be *entirely* fair upon a reread, it's not like he's loving it, he's just not particularly haunted by it either. Roy rants about how this is a betrayal of how he joined the military to protect people (mistake number one, dude, seriously) and Maes calls him naive. His reason for fighting is to stay alive. While Roy talks about his dreams of a better future, Maes refers to letters from his girlfriend as his brighter future. He's willing to support Roy's ambitions because Roy's his friend, but he thinks they're childish.

The impression I get is that Hughes has decided he can tolerate atrocities as long as he stays alive and can go home to his loving family, so he leans into that loving family really hard. That's his reward. That's what makes it worth it. Which adds a layer to Envy killing him while disguised as his wife. You can't hold those things separate. If you're a collaborator propping up an awful regime, your family (and you) will still eventually become its victims. The rot at the heart of the nation is wearing your loved one's face.

[skitskatdacat63]

2023 Qatar Grand Prix - Sprint - Oscar Piastri

[martianbugsbunny]

My Biggest Opinion on the Ahsoka show (other than the obvious) is that it would have been better as a full season. I'm frankly tired of this six-to-eight episodes nonsense that modern TV does; I remember the delightful old days where you got like fifteen-to-twenty-odd episodes per season of a show and that's so much better. It gives you room to explore the backstory of all the players involved so their motivations make more sense. It gives you room to mess with a longer narrative so the characters get proper growth where you can look at a scene from the beginning and a (perchance mirroring?) scene from the end and say wow, this was really bloody well executed, there's such a difference and it makes sense as to why. We could've had episodes about the Purge of Mandalore and what that did to Sabine. Episodes about how she and Ahsoka started training and how they fell out. Episodes about what Ahsoka's been doing between then and now. Episodes about what Ezra and Thrawn were up to, like how Thrawn came into an alliance with the witches and how Ezra's been evading him over the years. Episodes about Baylan and Shin so we could understand what either of them really wants or feels because I'm still not sure I do. Maybe something about Hera and Sabine's relationship because they feel kind of weird to me. Don't get me wrong, I love the show we got, I think it's very good and it does most of my favorite characters justice, but I also think it probably could have been even better if it had been a longer show and had room to really explore its subject matter in greater detail, from multiple different angles.

[puppyeared]

its so hard to watch time pass when things like careers and assignments exist. what do you mean im supposed to take that seriously

[theendofviolet]

“ashiya douman is evil for the sake of being evil”

yes! but also.....very much no.

(heian-kyo and very mild out of context paper moon spoilers abound below)

i think what i find sometimes among fate/go players is treating ashiya douman As It Says On The Tin; they’re a nuisance, a monstrous soul, a giddy evil jester happy to spread their malice to cause harm to human beings. and yes, as it stands, that’s exactly their role. even nasu states in an interview that douman was created to be a negative force to push the lostbelt kings a little to serve the plans of the foreign god as her Apostle. the man was told “be amusingly evil” and boy, did they live up to the task!

but to stop at just the interpretation of “oh, guy is EVIL that’s all, time to wrap it up and go home boys” completely misses the true complexity lying behind the surface, and whitewashes a key point repeated time and time again in heian-kyo.

douman....or rather, limbo (and the distinction is important!) is an alter ego. limbo is a shadow. limbo is a part of the whole. limbo is an aspect, a silhouette of humanity, a piece, a caricature. xu fu even goes into detail of the nature of alter egos here:

limbo is an alter ego, which means if you take the whole of ashiya douman and write them off as “evil for the sake of doing evil”, you are more than happy to stare at the shadow at the back of the cave without wanting to turn around. heian-kyo is more than unsubtle about this point. for where, does it ask, that resentment come from? where does that malice originate? when guda and the others meet the living douman (even if it is limbo, hiding in plain sight), the man they meet is not a overly hammy evil clown but a mild-mannered, sincerely humble monk. and it is seimei....yes, that seimei, the great nemesis, the one limbo spits at and hates with every fiber of their being, who makes the distinction over and over again that limbo and ashiya douman are distinct.

“but living douman also wanted to do evil for the sake of evil!” are you sure? this is a man who we see in a brief moment want to end his own life with no real hesitation because he was deeply appalled by the nature of his own evil in the form of limbo.

and then, if we really want to go down to brass tacks, even if we make a distinction between limbo and douman, with writing off limbo as the monstrous form of a human’s resentment and evil, is LIMBO really evil for the sake of evil? time and time again, we see limbo do things that seem so contrary as to be suspect. douman finds and fixes danzou up, claiming that they are doing so as to make her suffer more by giving her memories of her son, but without limbo, danzou would’ve continued to be a cold unfeeling broken machine with no recollection of what mattered to her most. in nagiko’s interlude, guda even calls limbo out for acting as a nuisance to actually help her and raikou resolve their differences. is that “evil for the sake of being evil”?

this isn’t to say that limbo isn’t evil at all. this isn’t even to say douman, as tragic as they are, isn’t evil in his own way, either. but the truth is more complicated. in the end, limbo and douman are just....human. flawed and horribly human, even if one is an aspect of a person. to write them off as some grand evil with nothing more to it is to make the same mistake that history did. douman was the nemesis of seimei, so he had to be evil. of course he’s evil. there’s nothing more. ignore the man crying at the edge of a cliff for all his sins and vices and flaws, hm? there’s nothing more. there’s nothing more. there’s nothing more-

Fufu. Even if I am in the guise of a Heroic Spirit, I am still the shadow monk of humanity. But I suppose that's no different than what it means to be human.

[stuckinapril]

honestly the things people do for people they like are craaaaazy. just think of what u were willing to do for someone u had a major crush on. if they’re not going out of their way they’re just not that into u i fear

[occupyvenus]

Guess who's started to watch the Atla liveaction remake, only to be swept away by a massive wave of nostalgia for the original, stopped watching the remake half-way-through and decided to do her first proper OG Atla rewatch since before TLoK aired instead?

Yes, me. It's me.

Get ready, cause I'm gonna blog about Atla the way I would have back in 2000-fucking-8 if I had had access to a functioning internet connection.

Blacklast #zutara and #anti-bryke RIGHT NOW if you don't want daily updates on why Zutara should have been canon.

Welcome to the twisted mind of 15-year-old me.

PS I just reached The Storm and I AM NOT OKAY

[r4mifications]

one of the things i love most about quackity's lore is that he has such a good grasp and understanding of cquackity. his story is cohesive and consistent. no abrupt plot twists purely for the shock factor. you can follow his motivations and fears and desires throughout and it's just wonderful to see such a beautifully well crafted story. not to mention how painfully human cq is o7 quackity you'll always be famous

[pastelhooman]

tip him generously

I changed his initial face btw i think it helps him kill me faster 💖💖💖💖

[fatherforgivethem]

The image of Criston and Alicent helping Aegon and Helaena with the twins because they won’t stop crying

Aegon and Helaena freaking out because they’re not sure how to get them to go to sleep and they’ve done everything

Alicent and Criston being there for them and taking the babies in their arms, rocking them to sleep. Watching as their own babies (Aeg and Hel) have fallen asleep as well because they are exhausted

[questforgalas]

I cannot wait for the reaction of this fandom when live action Thrawn utters “Perhaps” for the first time

[kcciny]

Overturned German festival music is playing in the background, the benches are breaking, people are standing on the table, it’s cold af outside, grass slippery from the beer on the ground, the smell of grilled Nürnberger Bratwurst is in the air, people are screaming and fighting, your friends are lost and not to be found, your phone is missing and you don’t know what time it is and the 8 beer you drowned are hitting you all at once and the shots from playing Busfahren aren’t helping, at last you suddenly hear police sirens

[reliquaryforstarwarslore]

I’m gonna sound crazy but you know who I think acts more like books thrawn than tv thrawn does…. Padme in the Phantom Menace…

[reallyhardy]

Sorry what’s up w the Ethan slater stuff? I know him only from your posts / SpongeBob stuff

HI HELLO please buckle in

yep -- the same guy from the spongebob musical, and my posts abut the spongebob musical.

he blew up completely and now the general public knows him as 'ariana grande's new boyfriend' - their relationship seems to have started off the back of co-starring in the upcoming wicked musical film adaptation.

it's just been like. a monkey's paw curling sort of a way for him to get catapulted to fame, as i had always really enjoyed him as a performer (as spongebob, yes, but also in the other roles i'd seen him in,) and my biggest hope back around 2017 was that he would continue in and be really successful in theatre, get a lot of broadway roles, maybe take on some existing parts i thought he'd really suit, like seymour in little shop or ogie in waitress.......... but instead he booked the role of boq from wicked in a massive hollywood film production instead, where he met ariana grande. THE ariana grande.

and then yeah. at some point, he and grande broke up with their respective partners, (slater leaving both his wife AND newborn son) jumped into a new relationship, and now the whole wider internet knows who he is but certainly not for the right reasons.

there's been speculation regarding whether or not grande and slater had cheated on their previous partners before their relationship began with various sources coming out of the woodwork saying "yes they did" and others saying "no they didn't" -- humans are all perfectly capable of making stuff up, the media especially, so i simply don't know who to trust and i admit it had completely shattered my whole good impression of him - PLUS it gave the wider internet an absolutely awful first impression of him, resulting in, yeah, the (frankly, unflattering, sometimes downright cruel) memes of him popping up on twitter and, as i discovered yesterday, in non-theatre youtubers' videos who would literally never have heard of him if not for the slater-grande romance 🥲

FULL COVERAGE of the situation as it was happening can all be found on the lovely @notasimpleslater's blog under the tag 'ozgate' if you want to delve deeper!