I know Bill's the big bad demon everyone is afraid of and he will protect his husband at all costs (when no one's looking), but I think it's also worth mentioning that Dipper, even being the dorky, squishy human that he is, also cares about his dumb demon hubby and wants to keep him safe, even if it annoys Bill, and really, he doesn't need protecting the way Dipper does. He isn't going to puff out his chest and get in someone's face like some macho man, but I think Dipper knee-jerk reaction when Bill's in "danger" isn't to just shrug because he's an all-powerful demon who can handle it. If a blast that could level a whole town was aimed at Bill's head (for him, this just means a bad hair day and a new body), Dipper's immediate impulse is to push him out of the way or defend him against whatever wants to kill his familiar. Because he's not thinking "Bill could literally end this match in .3 seconds." He's thinking "if you touch even one hair on that asshole's head, I'm going to knock yours clean off your shoulders." I don't know what the point even is in this post, just that Dipper is this nerdy, unassuming guy who ends up being viciously protective under the right conditions. Like I think Dipper pulls off the bloody and vengeful look SO well that Bill immediately melts and just lets him handle the situation, even though it's not really Dipper's fight to begin with. He's beating the guy to a pulp with zero reserve, and Bill's off to the side swooning and twirling his hair over his man for getting his hands dirty for him.
It's true! While Bill's not the type to enjoy being underestimated, he has to admit! Seeing his adorable husband all riled up on his behalf is a hell of a sight.
The thing is, Dipper's a good guy! He can't help but put himself in danger over others. Even when all reason and logic say that Bill would be absolutely fine if he got his head exploded or a shiv in his kidney, Dipper's instinct is to fully and immediately get in the way of that. To, in fact, be protective.
Mostly this is only evident when Dipper has to stand up to Ford. Yes, yes, Bill's a vile horrible monstrosity, but he didn't do that particular thing you're accusing him of. Watching him stand up to his uncle is a particular treat!
For bigger threats, though - Well. Bill's gonna be absolutely fine, no matter what happens, thank you very much. But he's definitely not opposed to seeing some guy who was about to literally stab him in the back get a few of his teeth knocked out.
YOUR MALLEUS POST IS JUST!!!!! AGDKFFLSVFL!!!! WHO KNOWS HOW MANY TIMES I RE-READ THAT THING BUT IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT!!!! 😫😭👌🖤💚
I'm so late to this but thank you so much Knight!! 🖤💚🖤💚 I'm so happy you enjoyed Blindfolded Malleus... I was so excited for you to read it, and I'm very happy it lived up to the hype and anticipation!!! Truly, I am so honored and grateful that you would re-read something so long 🥹 it amazes me how supportive you are!! I hope I can continue to write things that you enjoy! One day in the [regretfully] far future I swear to you that I will put out an Idia fic just for you hehehe. I'm so overwhelmed by the amount of things I am excited to write, but I guess that is a wonderful problem to have! I only wish I had more time in the day to write, but alas, such is life. Why the fUCk am I writing so formal right now daiohssadoi;hdSAO not me saying BUT ALAS. SUCH IS LIFE????? It is so.
I'm actually taking a TWELVE DAY vacation from work starting on the 22nd so I might actually do a little request event where people can send me like kink prompts or something. I think that'll be fun!
Okay and FINE I'll do some fluff prompts too for the fluff people but please don't judge my fluff too harshly, I'm still learning!!! For some reason smut just comes naturally dhaDSAHIDDASijdsan I'll start gathering some prompts and we will do a little ask game or something.
📣 By the way FELLOW HONEST THIGH RIDING ANON if you SEE this first of all, ONCE AGAIN: I wish to express my undying devotion to you and your exceptional thought process. I am positively frothing at the mouth over your request and I am PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE I am finally making good progress and it WILL be out soon. We WILL make him cum in his pants. We WILL make him cry, whimper, and moan.
ok i might be talking complete nonsense here, but. the Strict Order as a metaphor for an author facing writer's block.
"the Strict Order abandoned the world," yeah if i wrote a sweet potato story where the main character just keeps suffering with no sign of resolution, i'd drop the story too (<- has actually done this with a tesilid fanfic orz)
"The world rejected the Strict Order's abandonment, so to keep the world going the Strict Order made Tesilid keep rewinding time." That's just like when you get stuck at a certain point in the plot and keep rewriting the events leading up to that moment to try to make it work. nods sagely i understand. i too make my OCs go through scenarios lots of times until we get it right. sometimes it takes months. sometimes it never works.
"The saintess only exists in timeline ~86," oh yes, the classic 'idk how to solve this problem so i'll introduce a new character' trick. i'm familiar
"okay but if time looping is the Strict Order rewriting the story, then why can Tesilid remember it" because the author already wrote those scenes and it'll be sad to throw them all out. and also it's a cool gimmick to have a regressor story. (<- has drastically changed the premise and worldbuilding of a story just to make an alternate timeline relevant before)
"what about ailette's existence--" same as muriel, where you insert a new character in hopes of solving a plot problem. except this time the characters write the plot themselves, because just this once you give priority to their character traits & goals rather than where you thought you wanted the plot to go. (tesilid has someone he can be himself around and who can do certain things on his behalf, instead of being fully constrained by his obligations. ailette gets insane buffs instead of being restricted by the world's difficulty.) therefore the chars now have more agency and are not only solving problems, but also taking the story in a direction you never would have thought of before. (whatever the hell tesilid and ailette are cooking rn, separately, which is surely going to result in interesting developments later on)
tldr; the strict order as a metaphor for an author who hit writer's block. their friend World Shaper inserts their OC Ailette in and their writing style is to let the characters run away with the plot. it works. world shaper and all their friends are co-writers working on the story together and reacting to it in real time.
yes im trying not to be so mean yes im working on my temper but under no section of my Healing Contract does it mention that these things must apply to my sister. in fact if you read the fine print it says im actively allowed to make her miserable. for my mental health
inspired by my own 9-1-1 / bad buddy post, here's a bad buddy / starsky & hutch sequel about cutting ties with your past, polluting the ocean, throwing small shiny rectangular objects, etc. 🌊
📽 action!: rank all six of the films (or three if you're a hater)
Answers for this LotR ask-game.
Ahh okay so at this point I have to confess something terrible: I still have not seen the third Hobbit movie. I'm sorry! I just couldn't do it. The fuckery of it all, especially in the second movie with Mirkwood and Thranduil and Legolas ("a lowly Silvan elf" what the FUCK what the fuck PJ WHAT THE FUCK), was just too much for me. Character-assassination is one thing, and I thought after Denethor I knew what I was going to be getting with Thranduil but NOPE! It was literal world building assassination and I just CANNOT.
Don't get me wrong, Lee Pace did an amazing job and actually seeing Mirkwood was amazing and it was genuinely delightful to see Orlando put those ears on again; but the OuTrAgE that filled my heart at the yeet-ing of what minimal canon we even have for the Mirkwood elves was just intolerable, and while I did mean to go see it, really I did, I just...couldn't actually get the motivation to go before it was out of theatres. I've heard the EE are better (less studio fuckery) so I'll watch them someday! Honest! I just...haven't. yet.
And as to the Lord of the Rings trilogy...man, I don't even know how to do this. In terms of which is the best film, or in terms of which one I enjoy watching most, or in terms of which on hits me in the heart hardest or...? I don't know if I can objectively rank my feelings about these movies even in my own brain because RotK ends with Into the West and I have FeelingsTM about the Undying Lands and Sea Longing okay. So the last scene of RotK at the Grey Havens is a fucking spear through the heart every time and I can't even describe the knot of feelings it engenders, and I think overall TTT may be my favorite but also it has Plot Issues that piss me off even more than the Plot Issues in RotK I think,...yeah, we're going to do this in terms of Film Crafting rather than personal favorites because I'm having too many feelings lmao. So! In order of most-well-done-movie to least:
I'll scream my little head off about this forever, but any post still mad about the 2016 election fundamentally needs to note that we fucking outright won that one for the email lady except that our allegedly democratic system of government does not award the supreme executive role to the person with the most votes. As much harm as Trump and did and is still doing, the people to blame aren't the marginal voters who didn't like their choices it's the fuckers who built the electoral college and senate, we need serious systemic changes to our voting to undo the damage, which is a lot harder of a fix than yelling at people about how they didn't vote enough when so many of us fucking did but live in a fundamentally undemocratic system that doesn't reward the winner of the vote with the office they were running for.
will prob not start reading either for a while regardless el oh el but i have both six of crows and pride and prejudice so if anyone is reading this tell me which on u think i shld read first 👍🏽
it’s like every day i flipflop back and forth between “katsuki should say ‘eijirou’ as many times as he can all the time. ‘eijirou come look at this’ ‘jesus christ eijirou it’s 7 a.m.’ ‘eijirou, steak or fish tonight’” and “i need krbk to call each other baby or else i’ll die”
Decided to do with my anxiety what I did with my body dysmorphia ages ago which is to beat it with the affirmation stick until it eventually becomes a central part of my belief system. This round is "I am strange and I am loved. I may be misunderstood and that does not make me alone. I am surrounded by people who accept me"
I keep thinking of that reply in my Odysseus/Agamemnon post about how I regard differently Odysseus' and Agamemnon's actions, while acknowledging that at times Agamemnon is written as a sweet man and Odysseus is always straight up shitty, and how it was taken as some sort of defense for Agamemnon and as a form of pointing out the double standard; and that wasn't at all what the post was about for me, even though I can see where they were coming from. To be honest, given I didn't imagine it would spread anywhere other than my own blog, I didn't explain myself very well (or at all).
The fact is that when I talked about Odysseus not caring about hurting someone else's child to start and end a war I was indeed comparing his actions to Agamemnon's, but my words about supporting Odysseus' wrongs and cheering him in his terrible actions, while in a joking tone, weren't entirely a joke. I do think that Odysseus does some very shitty acts, and some quite terrible ones depending on the sources. That's a fact, that he does is at the core of his characterisation and it's what makes him so much fun; but not even when he is at his most cruel does he harm his family, his own son. Agamemnon, while sweet and loving at times in some texts, at his worst is willing to sacrifice Iphigenia. When readers regard with more sympathy Odysseus over Agamemnon despite both being responsible for children dying, I don't think there's a double standard in this aspect at all considering it's never his own kid Odysseus harms. And that's the key, I think.
Odysseus and Agamemnon have very different priorities, a very different view on loyalty and duty. It could be said that Agamemnon acts out of selfishness, but it could also be read in a kinder light, saying that Agamemnon is ruled by the gods first, and by his role as head of the achaeans; Agamemnon is not entirely himself. In opposition we see Odysseus acting perhaps mainly for himself and his own family and men; yes, he is a king, but he has not the role Agamemnon has. As a consequence, Agamemnon submits his family's wellbeing to the war, to the gods, while Odysseus stops the plow before hurting Telemachus but is (depending on the source) the cause of Iphigenia's sacrifice and Astyanax's death.
Both Odysseus and Agamemnon have reasons to support their actions, and both can be sympathised with; it's fiction after all. When it comes to fiction, at the end of the day which character a reader is drawn to or sympathises with is mainly an issue of personal taste, but I suppose it also implies a certain level of one's own views or preferences on morals, what makes us find certain actions more justifiable, or tasteful (perhaps that's a more accurate word), than others. Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter, no matter how sympathetic or understandable the reason, generally sits worse on people than Odysseus doing the same with someone else's kids, because they're someone else's. This different emotional reaction they provoke has place not just metanarratively, but also inside the very story; it is narratively significant, given it determines how their arrival home plays out, how their wives react to them, and thus their futures. Ultimately it determines whether they live or die.
I think both terrible acts go in line wonderfully with each characterisation, showcasing the role they hold in their world, what they value, what they care for, what they're willing to sacrifice for themselves and the others, how much of their own they're willing to give and bend. While looking at the wider picture it could perhaps be drawn that Agamemnon is the better person out of the two, but Odysseus' selfish actions are perhaps easier to empathise with, especially from a modern viewpoint. Odysseus is treacherous and prone to betrayal, but not against his own; Agamemnon follows the rules of the gods. How fitting in that context that Odysseus doesn't die at the end of his story, that he cheats the death heroes so often are fated to, almost as if cheating the narrative itself, bending the rules of the world he is ascribed to; how fitting in the context of those texts that point towards Sisyphus being his father. But that's another topic, and I've already talked a lot.