#trust life fic

[bellia-25]

Another Trust Life comic/doodle based on a conversation in the server about "I won't say I'm in love" from Hercules. The idea would not leave my head. I had to draw it.

[fandomonic-plague]

I got to the epilogue. I won't. I can't, more accurately.

I've cried 13-ish times in this session alone. I can't do it.

[petricorah]

scenes i loved from Real Enough to Get Me Through by @marriedzukka <333 [ids in alt]

[ollyrewind]

The stars tell us of a great king. They rise, the pole star will ascend the heavens with the constellations of the king's namesake upon the higher cycles of the Earth, foretelling his rise and the golden age that he will bring. His age will go on and on and reach its peak in the far future when the pole star comes to occupy the truest central position in the heavens.

Like Every Tree Stands on Its Own by wonderful @mightybog

[daisy-mooon]

dear the long-suffering Pearlescentmoon fandom trying to find fics that are actually about Pearl:

go onto advanced search

go to character tag and enter Pearl's character tag

go to "any field"

then type "summary: Pearl"

hit enter

you now only have fics with Pearl in the summary of the fic

profit

[skitkattl]

hey guys sorry i forgot about this site. guess who developed a PLA fixation while i was gone

[chinelacanta]

i love putting dragon in Situations <3

BIG FAN of the ‘dragon is xebec’s son’ but i can’t decide if i like it in a funny way or a sad way 😭. do you think dragon thought he’d lose his father’s love if he knew he was taken in by a marine. do you think he mourned garp’s favor when he also failed to be a ‘good man’ and turned to revolution, that he wasted garp’s life efforts in saving a child from evil and a life lead to a death sentence. do you think dragon grieves that he managed to disappoint both his fathers. do you think that when he held luffy for the first time he realized he was no different then xebec, that he’d condemned his child to the stake for the crime of existence, a life of loneliness if he lived, a forced marine career and shackled dreams from his only ‘relative’. hey man what if i cried real hard abt it

[milo-media]

THIS SONG IS SO SNOWBUGS!!

Based of the fic Trust Life by @chaiandsage

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[kori-senpai]

Fanart for @honeydots Fire Emblem fanfic. I've been using it as a reason to fluke out of social interactions for the last two weeks and boy oh boy I will continue to do so >:)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Smell Check [Easy: Failure]

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 1 (part 2 - part 3)

[bellia-25]

Kind of did an alternate version of a scene from a fic.

[fandomonic-plague]

Hey the plague is spreading again, I’m reading trust life for the fourty-ninth time. Start to finish. I have one thing to say:

CHAI, I LOVE YOUR FIC.

[mewtwo24]

Not to be That Guy but like.

Am I the only one that can't stop thinking about how Tianlang-Jun says about Luo Binghe that he pretends to be cold-hearted like his mother. The hint of fondness there, the heartache in that utterance.

Like it drives me absolutely insane. Imagining her putting on a front of strength, cold and driven and unrelenting. Why does TLJ say that about her. Did she secretly look for solutions that meant reconciling with demons instead of hurting them when her sect wasn't looking? (I wonder this because I feel like his weird fondness for SQQ would lowkey track if it's connected to the woman he once loved.) Did he mean that she was tasked with basically assassinating him and she fell in love with him instead (re: failed step one)? Did he mean that she was fond and doting in her own way (e.g. conceding he was attractive, paying for his exploits and humoring him)? Did he mean that, like LBH, she thought that power would be the thing to protect her--and that it was disguising a person who was deeply and privately wounded? All four????? I don't need sleep I need a n s w e r s

Did she know about the Huanhua Palace Master's skeevy ass intentions before she met TLJ? Or did those only come to significant light after she fell in love with TLJ? Is that why she never anticipated that level of betrayal, because initially she had no intention of being with anyone romantically? And HHPM just assumed she would be under his thumb forever?? Was she furious at her own indiscretion or did she try to use the pregnancy as a bargaining chip, a way to try to stop the immortals of Cang Qiong Mountain from attacking TLJ (plus the bonus of marriage entrapment no takesies backsies this is where LBH gets it from)? Did she try to use that claim on her to dissuade HHPM from his covetous advances, framing herself as tainted so that she could finally escape? Did she dream of a life by TLJ's side, far away from Cang Qiong Mountain?

Like. Literally every single permutation of what this could mean guts me to hell. Do you ever just cry about tianxi because I--[loud bawling noises]

[eddiesghxst]

steddie x sensitive!reader where eddie’s ur best friend that you do ‘more than best friend’ things with and steve was the asshole at school that would tease you and always make you cry.

eddie knew about it but he didn’t know your bully was steve so when eddie and steve start working together and you stop by one day eddie doesn’t think much of it when u see steve and ur really jumpy and look like ur ready to bolt out of there because you’re often shy around strangers.

and steve doesn’t even fucking remember you and so when you leave steve is like “is she always that jumpy?? like was i being weird or??” and eddie just shakes his head and is like “nah she just has a hard time w strangers. some asshole used to tease the shit out of her in high school. she never told me who it was but the day i find out i swear i’ll hunt them down and strangle them myself.” and steve is like wow what kind of an asshole would do that to a girl like you??

because steve thinks you’re pretty and sweet and he likes you and he thinks he wants to ask you out but how will he do that when he: 1 - can’t seem to have a conversation with you and not scare you off 2 - is convinced you and eddie are definitely dating even if eddie says it’s not like that and 3 - can’t decide who he’s more jealous of when he sees how close you two are

because is that even normal? is it normal to like two people at the same time? is it normal to feel left out when you and eddie are snuggled together during movie night? is it normal to want to hold both of your hands, kiss both you, touch both of you??? iS iT ?!!?!

[sugarpasteltmnt]

(whispers) hey friends I appreciate your excitement but gentle reminder it’s not very polite to ask fanfic writers when the next chapter is gunna come out