#uh i know i should :/ have a tag for that

[lucabyte]

you dream of devouring your friends whole

[felsicveins]

I like to think that the only reason Otto doesn't flirt with Branch is because he considers Branch too young for him but not like in a "oh sweetie I'm too old for you" type of way but in a "Ew who let this 16 year old in" type of way. Like Otto seems like the type to absolutely despise kids in public spaces, and even tho Branch his NOWHERE considered a child, Otto still treats him like that. Aka, "Why did they even let you in here?" "I'm 25."

Otto isn't scared of the bros... He's scared of Poppy 😳 ... but don't give him too much credit

[ghouljams]

I finished the medieval Ghost drawing and I drew what I imagined the Royal Crest to look like. The chainmail wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Fun to draw 10/10 would recommend.

Let's fucking goooo, that's my MAN!!! I could stare at this for fucking hours, I'm going to stare at it for hours, thank you. Also the crest?? The Crest???? So good.

God!!! The hand on the leg(too far up to be proper I see u Ghost) and the way he's sort of bowing to her like I can feel the emotion in my teeth I want to eat this. Have some fic.

"You're wearing your helm," you keep your voice low, hardly moving your head to speak to the knight behind you. This is one of those tedious things you have to do sometimes. You stand with your seated parents as they hear the people's complaints, and try not to think about how you would handle things. You're supposed to be pretty, not smart. Although you are smart, and you do have ideas, you're expected to keep them to yourself.

"Didn't want to show you up," Ghost jokes, voice as monotone as ever. You smile a little to yourself.

"If you're so much prettier than me, you can take over being the show pony," you joke back.

"And rob the kingdom of seeing you all dressed up? Wouldn't dream of it," you can hear the slight chuckle in his voice, it's a comfort. Having Ghost nearby is always a comfort. He has such a way of calming you, keeping you from pulling to far into yourself. He treats you like a person, not a princess, when you need him to.

"I'd quite enjoy seeing you in a dress, something to emphasize your waist maybe?" Although finding something to fit his broad shoulders might be a bit more tricky. All that swinging a sword around has certainly built him a nice physique. It's silly, but the thought makes your placid princess smile a little more genuine.

"What do you know about my waist?" He asks, you can still hear his amusement in his tone. That's good, you'd hate to offend him.

"Only what I've seen of it," you hum.

"Sneaking peaks are we?" He clicks his tongue and the sound reverberates through your bones, you feel it like he's physically touched you the way it slides down your spine, "Naughty girl."

You tell yourself he's only joking, but that doesn't dull your reaction. Heat blooms over your cheeks, you swallow the feeling that wells in your chest, and wet your lips. Does he know he can take you apart with just those two words? That the depth in his tone, the growl in his voice, makes you want to melt where you stand?

You turn to tell him you absolutely were not sneaking peaks, and that even if you did happen to it would only have been while you were on the road together. Which you hardly think counts considering there's hardly any privacy when camping anyway. You catch your mother's glare at the first twitch from you. You keep your eyes forward and do your best not to pout.

"If you stand there nice and pretty like a good girl I'll tell you why I'm wearing my helm," Ghost never whispers, but he speaks so that his voice doesn't carry. You watch your mother for any sign that she's listening, and she hardly bats an eye. You suppose you're both far enough back, and her attention is far enough forward, to grant you some level of privacy. You give the barest hint of a nod for your knight, and he lets out a breath.

"Good," Maybe one word is all he needs, you like the way he says it, the way it brushes over your skin. He's quiet for a long while. Two people get up to air their grievances before he speaks again. It's long enough that you almost want to ask, to jog his memory. If you didn't know better you might squirm.

"Wanted to make sure I wasn't caught staring," He tells you finally.

"What are you looking at?" You smile to hide the quick twitch in your brows. It's not like Ghost to be distracted doing his duties, you wonder what-

"You're clever, what do you think I'm looking at?" His voice is so thick you wonder how he was able to speak at all. You take stock of the room, the throng of people and servants. His eyes should be everywhere, there's only one place they truly shouldn't be. On you.

You can feel them, the weight of his gaze as it travels over you. You can feel where it settles: your waist, your hips, your chest, your neck, your lips. You let out a breath and know his eyes have settled on the movement of it. How are you supposed to survive the rest of this interminable function with his eyes on you like this?

"I am clever aren't I," You tell him, knowing the way he hums in assent will do nothing to stop the heat that follows his gaze.

"You are."

It's strange how you can have so many eyes on you and never feel their pressure, but knowing your knight is watching makes you almost self conscious. You can feel every brush of your skirt, every shift in your posture that your breath brings, every little twitch in your body magnified under Ghost's watchful eye. You haven't wanted to fidget since you were a child, and yet here you are. Your skin crawling, your bones begging to move, if for no other reason than to give Ghost something to look at, some reason to watch you.

Suddenly you're not standing for your parents, or out of duty to your position, you're standing for him. And that's so much different isn't it? You can't move, can't directly speak to Ghost, and though your fingers ache to touch him neither of you would dare. What pleasure does he get from this?

More so, how is it so pleasant for you?

You wonder if he looks at you often, if he likes what he sees. You wonder if he has favorite dresses, favorite jewelry, if he ever hopes you'll wear something again. You wonder if he has favorite parts of you, if he likes your eyes as much as you like his, if he thinks about your hands as often as you do his. You hope he does. You hope he looks at you and thinks of you sweetly.

It's all either of you gets.

[weaselishmcdiesel]

mrrp

[arsenicflame]

i Do Not Trust people who make Mary the bad guy in their stories when the show went out of its way to specifically show us how she was suffering just as much as stede was in their marriage and that shes, yknow, a good person

[cairafea]

i think the fast travel in this game is very cool 👍

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OOH YEAH BABY! PARTY TIME BABY! MUSIC! DRINKS! SOCIAL PRESSURE & A PSYCHEDELIC BREAK DOWN! WELCOME TO VAMPIRE SOCIETY MOTHERFUCKER! ARE YOU SCARED? DO YOU UNDERSTAND YET? ITS OKAY IF NOT. FIRE DISSOLVED IT! ITS ALL GONE NOW. HAVE FUN!

[grassbreads]

I’d love to know about Yulma and how important it is to representation in shounen manga

This has been sitting in my askbox for a couple months (because I am incapable of punctuality), but anon sent this to me back when I was talking about Yulma over on my vnc blog. For those unaware, Yulma refers to Yu Kanda and Alma Karma from the manga D.Gray-man.

So the thing is, to be honest, I don't know if you can say Yulma is/was important for representation. They don't tend to get brought up as an example of representation (except by diehard d.gray-man fans like me, lol) in shonen, and their whole thing is complicated enough that I feel like the queerness of it all flies over a lot of people's heads.

However! They're very important to me personally, and I do think it's kind of remarkable their story came out in like 2010. Because even though their queerness gets overlooked a lot, it's like. really there no matter how you interpret it.

The short version of their very complicated story is that Kanda and Alma are a couple who were resurrected into new bodies. Alma was a woman when they were originally together in their past lives, but is physically male in the present. Kanda is still very much in love with them by the end of their story, which, depending on the reading, makes Kanda very bi and/or Alma very trans.

This sound like something you want details on? If so, let's talk about how D.Gray-man's fan favorite edgy badass toughguy character briefly became the star of his very own heart-wrenching tragic queer romance.

Here's a brief crash course in Yu Kanda and Dgm for the uninitiated:

D.Gray-man is a manga about a group of exorcists (in the loosest and most anime sense of the term) in the 1890s fighting a holy war against mechanical demons powered by the souls of the dead. There are two things you need to understand about this plot for me to explain Yulma:

The Black Order, the secret branch of the church that exorcists work for, has a long history of committing horrific human experiments to further the war effort.

Due to complications of world building, only a tiny number of people can become exorcists, and tracking down new ones is extremely difficult.

Yu Kanda is one of the exorcists, and though not the actual main character (that's the lad in my icon), he's a very important secondary character. Arguably he's the most important secobdary character, since he's the main guy's biggest foil and the first character to play deuteragonist in a major story arc. He's also a huge fan favorite. The character popularity polls that Jump used to do always had him and the mc going back and forth over who won #1 most popular.

Kanda was also a classic edgy toughguy character. His first two scenes are him almost murdering the main guy because he thinks he's an intruder, then complaining about people grieving for their friend too loudly. He never smiles. He argues with the righteous mc about wasting time/energy protecting civilians. He threatens (and delivers) violence on anyone that annoys him. He looks like this:

TLDR; Kanda was an adored-by-fans mean badass archetype in a 2000s shonen manga. Not generally the guy you peg for starring in a piece of queer romantic storytelling.

And for the entirety of the original anime adaptation's 103 episode run, for the first 188ish chapters of the manga, you do not learn a single thing about his early life. You learn he joined the Black Order very young, and you meet the mentor that took him in at that point, but although there are little hints, a couple cryptic mentions of him searching for a certain person, his early origins remain a complete black box.

Then came the Alma Karma arc.

This is the point where I start getting into spoilers.

To make a very long story short, the Alma Karma arc reveals that Kanda is one of the Black Order's human experiments. The Order ran a secret project 9ish years before the start of the series in which they essentially tried to re-use dying exorcists (since finding new ones is so hard). They took the bodies of dying or recently deceased exorcists and harvested their brains, implanting those brains into new magically grown child bodies.

Key to this project—the second exorcist project—is that these newly grown second exorcists were not supposed to remember anything from their previous lives. Kanda, however, recovered a few hazy memories from his past self. Most importantly, he can recall an unclear image of the woman that his past self was in love with. This memory gradually becomes Kanda's reason to live. He wants desperately to find and meet that person.

Now, aside from Kanda, there was one other successfully revived second exorcist. This was a boy named Alma Karma.

Over the course of their brief shared childhood, Kanda and Alma become extremely close. However, due to a series of horrible events that I'll spare you the details of, Alma is eventually driven to murder-suicide. He wants himself and Kanda to die together to spite the Order, and Kanda almost lets him do it.

The one thing that keeps Kanda from letting Alma kill him, the thing that drives him instead to kill Alma, his most beloved and only friend, is that he can't bear to die without finding that woman again.

Have you figured out the twist yet?

9 years later, in the present, Kanda discovers that he didn't actually quite kill Alma. The Order kept Alma secretly half-alive in order to do more dubious experiments. And, more importantly, when they meet again, Kanda discovers the truth. The woman that he's been searching for his whole life, the woman he's in love with, the woman he tried to kill Alma in order to find, was also killed and made into a second exorcist. And her brain was placed into the body of Alma Karma.

After quite a lot more violence and tragedy, Kanda and Alma end their story arc by running away together on their deathbeds. Alma dies, for real this time, in Kanda's arms, and his last words are to tell Kanda he loves him. These words are presented as something Kanda hears from both the boy and woman versions of Alma's soul.

So! At the end of a very long and complicated story, one thing holds true: Kanda and Alma are in love. As passed down from their past selves, they are specifically in romantic love. They were a couple. And to speak as a fan, the sheer absolute devotion to how Kanda's love for Alma is presented is seriously intense and moving.

Now, given the absolute hell that is Alma's life, gender identity is frankly the last thing they have time to worry about, so it's hard to say how the whole "literally a woman's brain in a male body" thing might have settled for them if given time to think about it. But that is inherently a pretty trans narrative. And given the whole Alma gender situation, there's simply no reading of their whole situation where neither of them is queer.

If you take present day Alma as a guy, which is more or less how he's presented in canon (though again, who knows how he would've felt about that male body in different circumstances), then congratulations! You've got mlm in your shonen manga. They were straight in a different life, but now one of them's a dude, and they are still deeply in love with each other. They've even got not one but two "let's forget it all and run away together" scenes, just as every mlm couple seems to have.

On the other hand, if you go with the angle that Alma's still a woman based on her mind/soul, even in her new body, then Kanda may not be canonically queer, but Alma is inarguably trans. Again, literally a woman's brain in a male body. It may not be how most people end up trans, but that doesn't change the facts of her situation.

You see what I mean about how they're undeniably queer, but also kind of easy to miss? There's so much other insane shit going on in their story that Alma's whole gender situation can get passed over. Plus, you can look online to this day and find people arguing that Kanda's not "technically" explicitly in love with the present day male version of Alma, since he doesn't 100% unambiguously say as much. I love reading comprehension.

Also! As a possible extra reason for why people don't talk about them much, the official English translation of the manga translated Alma's final "I love you" very differently. There's always a lot of nuance and argument when it comes to translating "大好き" into English, but given the full context of their relationship and the scene it's in, Viz's handling really sets off the censorship bells in my head.

Here's the different versions (Japanese then fan then official), if you want to compare:

Nothing more classically queer than censorship by way of questionable translation 🙃.

At the end of the day, Kanda and Alma are in kind of a strange middle ground. They're each in love with the other one, but the whole second exorcist brain transfer situation makes it complicated enough that people argue their feelings aren't explicitly romantic (and thus not gay) in the present. Alma is literally a woman's brain implanted in a male body, but we don't have time to dwell on the gender complications of all that because of the hell that is the rest of their life. They're canon but not canon—queer people whose stories don't have space for them to be queer.

However, given that all this messy, tragic ambiguity was published in a fairly popular shonen manga back in 2010, it still feels kind of remarkable to me. Alma is somewhat an antagonist (it's complicated), and he dies at the end of his arc, but once again, Kanda was/is the fan favorite! And when he re-enters the main story after Alma's death, he's more important than he's ever been, and his history with Alma continues to be a huge part of his character.

Katsura Hoshino took the much-beloved edgy toughguy character from her long-running shonen series and, after keeping his origins secret for such a long time, confirmed that his whole life has revolved around love this entire time. Almost every facet of his character can be traced back to his love for his lost best friend or his yearning for his past life's missing partner. And then she reveals that the best friend and the partner are one and the same.

You can go back and forth about the degree to which they work as representation, but in any case, I think their story is something people ought to know about. It's romantic and it's heart-wrenching and it's fucking wild, especially given the context in which it was published (a Shonen Jump spinoff in 2010). I never see anyone besides the few remaining hardcore dgm fans talk about them, and I think that's a shame.

So anyway, that's tale of one of the most insanity-inducing romances I've ever seen put to paper. I love queer people.

Here's some choice pages if you want to cry with me (the last two are a sequence):

[silverware-is-interesting]

WOE! object show doodles be upon ye!

idk some doodles and some ss redraws of object shows i enjoy

[kideternity]

[Image ID: An inked digital drawing of Digimon character Amphimon. Amphimon is a cyborg humanoid wearing an altered diving suit, they have large chunky gauntlets and boots, lightning bolt embellishments across their design but most notably on a buckle at their waist, on the bottom of their chest armour and on their diving helmet window. They have diving helmet style shoulder pads, a large jellyfish like skirt connected to the buckle made up of two layers- a puffier top layer with jellyfish markings on it and a longer flow-ier bottom layer- and large circular pads at their hands, feet and knees. The ones on their knees and hands have a cross symbol on them and the ones on their feet have a minus symbol. They have large jellyfish antenna coming from their diving helmet and the exposed parts of their body- such as their forearms, waist and at the inner upper thighs- appears made of straps. They’re in a front facing action pose, with their right leg and arm pointed down whilst their left leg is raised the calf slightly tucked in, and their left arm is raised over their head. /End Image ID]

I haven’t seen all of ghost game yet but Amphimon is by far my favourite new digimon from it

[b4kuch1n]

the legends speak of it as a kind of enthrallment: the life ended by the tiger is tied to the tiger. in this way there is a line of souls following the beast, for no reason except to show that they were killed. that they could be saved - if only the beast would die [...] in the dark of the wood you see it walk, shadow to shadow, followed by loss after loss after loss, a tail trailing seemingly into the deep death of night [...]

[kingofthewilderwest]

Moral Orel hit me in a sweet spot. I think it’s beautiful seeing fans on different paths discussing how the show touched them. I’ve seen people who’ve left the church, agnostics, atheists, and Christians all say the show spoke deeply to them. Of course the show’s black humor on religion offended many, especially before its last season aired, but I think the show’s resulting legacy - connecting to people who’ve both left and who’ve stayed - demonstrates successful nuance to how Moral Orel was crafted.

The show’s creators have said it’s not against religion per se, it’s against hypocrites. Even with the first season, I felt that and found appreciation (frankly, joy) for what was satirized. Here was a show speaking up, exaggerating, and lampooning the facets of Protestant American Christian culture I’ve vented about in confidence to relevant friends and family - without, like many modern shows which tackle this subject do, mocking followers themselves, faith itself, and suggesting to viewers one way of life is better than another, one group of people is (ex: intellectually) superior to another.

Some people have stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me when I left church,” or outright, “This show taught me there is no god.” And that’s not an unfair way to interact with Moral Orel because it doesn’t preach what you “should” do there (a sign of mature writing, really). I stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me in the areas I get frustrated,” which assuages my feelings and makes me more confident in my faith and place within culture.

I feel awkward in contemporary culture because I was raised with minimal secular exposure - daughter of a worship pastor, student at a private Christian school until high school. Meanwhile, in adulthood, I didn't attended church functions for over a dozen years. My group of friends have largely been non-Christians who hold negative opinions about the religion and don’t live remotely similar lifestyles to what I was raised with. I love what I've learned from them. Unfortunately, this also means the cultural building blocks that make me who I am seem shared by no one I'm around, which, even though I'm in my 30s, remains disorienting.

On the flipside, I'm the weirdo with the third eye in Christian spaces, too. I’m an ever-thirsty knowledge-seeker who strives to comprehend forbidden topics from all angles. I spent my twenties researching, questioning, rebuilding knowledge, and critically analyzing everything about the Bible. Church attendees and services feel painfully artificial, with mental blockers to topics I feel are critical to understand.

In either community I partake in, I feel “off.”

I’m grateful to have been raised by parents who didn’t pussyfoot around issues, with a father who deep-dives research. Discussions, delving, and digging into the hard stuff has always been fostered. My family spoke to pastors when we disagreed with their theology. I grew up around people who practiced passive acceptance, but my family was not that.

In the last year, I’ve returned more strongly to my faith and have been reintegrating with the Christian community. In some areas, my faith has grown and, humbly, I’ve learned much from peers. Despite stereotypes, I want to note that, in certain fields, the church community has always been deep and meticulous! And there are so many beautiful and uplifting areas in the church. But likewise there are those areas that get assumed, aren’t questioned, and aren’t… responded to well by questioning spirits. There have always been areas in the church culture I find disingenuous, foolish, illogical, limited, oversimplified, denialistic, or susceptible to hypocrisy and immorality. I’m not better than any person on this planet, but I’m rubbing shoulders with a community that has different blinders than I do, who don’t even consider asking the types of questions or seeking out the information I find necessary for a solidified faith.

Moral Orel disparages the toxic elements of Protestant culture, the misinterpretations, the artificial facades, the mindless assumptions, the poorly-hidden underbelly, all the areas Christian community can and does go wrong. It makes me feel justified feeling awkward in two worlds: someone for whom Christianity is deeply important, but someone whose mindset doesn’t jive with the rest of the town. Someone who can find and wants to find the best lessons outside of Christianity. Someone who believes in questioning, rethinking constantly, raising her eyebrows at common notions within church culture, and striving for the actual love, sincerity, dedication, and goodness our faith should be based on.

[bring-onthe-rain]

its worse then we thought !!!

[risu442]

[arom-antix]

My feral little man

[lunapegasus]

This was a terrible idea. Really, it was. With how many times she’d been rejected it was practically ridiculous that she thought this would go over well. And Amy was well aware of how low her chances were. But she just couldn’t help it. Besides, he was far too reserved to ever ask her out. She had to be the one to do it.

Amy sighed and looked at her dress in the mirror again. It was a medium length white dress covered in a leafy pattern in various green hues and even had a ribbon to match. It was brand new. Which she may or may not have bought for this specific occasion. An arguably unnecessary expense but Amy justified it by telling herself she needed something nice to boost her confidence. 

But… what if it was too nice? If she got rejected then it would have all been a waste and every time she saw the dress again she’d be filled with disappointment and heartache and loneliness and-

She panicked and darted over to her wardrobe and began to frantically look for a possible alternative. How foolish she was to buy such a dress. What if he didn’t even like green!

Amy startled suddenly at the knock on her bedroom door and a young rabbit poked her head inside.

“Amy, aren’t you supposed to be on your date?”

“It’s not a date, Cream. Well, at least not yet. But hopefully, it will be.”

“I’m sure he’ll say yes! I have a feeling this one's gonna work out. And I don’t need any fancy tarot cards to know that!”

“That’s right! I should do a reading and then I’ll-”

“Amy!” Cream shouted, cheeks slightly puffed up in frustration, “You already said you were gonna ask him. You promised me you wouldn’t back out again.”

“I know, I know. You’re right,” Amy sighed and wandered over to her drawer and pulled out her old deck of cards, “These cards have just really helped me out a lot, you know? I’ve had them nearly my whole life. If I hadn’t listened to them and left home then I never would have even met him, or anyone else, or even you.”

Cream quietly wandered over and sat down on the bed next to her friend and waited for her to continue.

“I’d been alone for a really long time, which was why I was traveling the world. I wanted to find a new home, somewhere I belonged… I’d read about Little Planet before, they used to call it Miracle Planet. It sounded like a beautiful place, “a world that defies time itself”, relics that create miracles, I couldn't ask for a more perfect place to call home… But just like everything else, it was temporary.”

Cream frowned as Amy sat down on the bed beside her. The little girl watched as Amy shuffled through her deck before finally pulling out a single card and handing it to her. The image depicted a brave looking knight valiantly standing upright with a single sword in his hands.

“But then I pulled this card,” Amy said, continuing her story, “The Knight of Swords. It represents action and says that if you propel yourself through ambition you’ll be rewarded. That’s when I knew that if I continued to trust my instincts, the same one that brought me there in the first place, then I would finally get to meet my knight in shining armor!”

Cream giggled, “And you did! Even if it was a little messy at first.”

“Heh, a little, but you gotta admit, he really knew how to sweep a girl off her feet.”

The two giggled some more before Cream suddenly sprung up from her feet, “Amy! You’re gonna be late! You need to hurry!”

“Oh Chaos you’re right!” Amy jumped up from the bed and hurried out the door, but when she reached the doorway she paused and looked back towards her friend again. “So, you really think he’s gonna say yes?”

Cream walked over to her and gave her a big smile, “Of course I do, Amy! Things are changing now and so are you. You’ve been the princess in the tower already, now it’s time for you and your knight, your real knight, to have your happily ever after!”

Amy returned the smile, gave her friend a big hug, and fought off the tears she felt forming behind her eyes, “Thanks Cream, you always know just what to say.”

The two waved each other away and Amy took off, and as she closed the front door behind her she couldn’t help but smile.

This was it. She was finally going to ask out the blue hedgehog of her dreams. It was finally time to ask out Metal Sonic.

[idea by @khalewren]