#unending screaming

[zombiequeenblog]

I just wanted to say that I love you all so much and I really appreciate being able to scream about satanic clergymen cock here with you all thank you for making life worth living

[noisyghost]

family photos

[starculler]

strap in for this week's fic flavor: the failsafe episode of season one of the young justice cartoon except the simulation just won't. fuckin. end.

(fics that inspired this at the end)

If I ever did sit down to make my own fic, I'd split it in 3 parts:

The Simulation: bits and pieces of the 40 years Dick lives after most everyone he knows has died

The Return: the immediate aftermath and healing from the trauma of having not-quite-actually lived a whole life only to wake up and find out it was all fake. nothing traumatizing about that whatsoever.

The Unintended Consequence: aka the twist I'd love to add and would hint to in the second part - finding out the simulation, through martian mind fuckery, pulled from the real world (and in many cases, from real minds). Dick meets a bunch of people he didn't think were real outside the confines of his simulated life. A bunch of rowdy, heroism-inclined teens across the years get to meet the sibling/friend/mentor figure they all dreamed up one night.

(actual idea snippets under the cut)

.

Dick Grayson is 14 and most of the world's heroes have died. He planned a suicide mission that left him the sole survivor of a doomed team he helped found. The invasion may have been stopped, but is this really the price he wanted to pay?

The first face he sees in the infirmary is Roy's, and he has to close his eyes and just breathe for a few minutes because for one painful moment he'd thought it was Wally. But this isn't the world where his best friend miraculously survived alongside him. This is the one where he got his best friend killed and didn't even give him the courtesy of following behind him. Behind them.

.

Dick Grayson is 27 and has lived longer without Bruce than with him. The invasion's anniversary is always a tough day for him, but that morning seems especially harrowing. He'll get shit for it later, but can't resist stepping out onto the balcony of the manor's master bedroom (Bruce's old bedroom) for a smoke -- his first since he'd promised to quit if Jason, just 15 then, did too.

"Bad habits tend to pile up," he'd said, a rueful quirk to his tired grin. He'd tapped the cigarette twice on the railing and added, lower, "and this one's especially nasty, huh."

He inhales, watches the sun creep across the horizon, and lets acrid smoke burn through his lungs for a long moment before blowing it out in a small cloud. His eyes water, but he doesn't cough. It tastes just as bad as it did the first time he smoked one, not even a year after the invasion and treading water as Robin proved insufficient.

There hadn't been enough heroes to go around then, and Dick had been trained by one of the best. It hadn't been fair, but it had been his plan that had ultimately stopped the invasion. His shoulders everyone's expectations fell on.

He takes another drag, then smudges the lit end against the rail he's leaned on when he hears a boot scuff purposefully against the roofing above him.

"Todd and Pennyworth will be upset with you."

He doesn't turn around. Damian doesn't jump down to join him.

.

Dick Grayson is 54 and wakes up in a room full of ghosts. He hears his long-dead father-figure tell his long-dead team about a simulation they weren't meant to win. A training exercise gone wrong and only half a day spent under their mentors' careful, if slightly panicked, supervision.

He looks at his hands, watching the way his gloves crease when he flexes them in and out of tight fists. He looks at his team, their eyes a little haunted but shoulders slumped with relief even as they grumble. Batman's heavy, gloved hand settles on his shoulder and the weight of it is a nauseating mix of foreign-familiar.

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

Tears prick his eyes behind his domino mask, and he tells himself the suffocating, acidic void building in his chest is just some leftover side effect of the ordeal and not the grief-guilt of outliving yet another family (no matter that they hadn't been real in the end).

.

Dick Grayson is 16-going-on-56 and well used to the coincidences piling up between his simulated life and the real thing. Some of it -- missions and villains he remembers cropping up -- he's marked for Bruce to review and sort as he pleases. Some -- security for the cave, team building anecdotes, and training regimens -- he's shared with the team. And some he keeps only for himself.

Tim is one of those. He knows it's not fair to the kid (so much smaller now than he ever was when Dick lived his simulated life), but he can't help being selfish just for this. Tim is the one kid he's sure he didn't make up, and if Dick's taken to babysitting the kid just to be near at least one member of the family he built for himself in the wake of the worst days of his life .... Well, anyone who says shit about it can happily stand in line to have their teeth kicked in.

Despite this, it still catches him off-guard when he sees a familiar face pop up in one of Bruce's reports.

Jason Todd, caught boosting tires off the batmobile, is nearly the same age now as he was when Dick met him. He stares at the words, but none of them really sink in beyond the kid's name and address. He's moving before he's even made the decision.

He's used to the world kicking him when he's down - lived it for 40 frustrating years. But he has Bruce again. And things with Tim have been so good. And he's always been selfish when it comes to family. If he could just see Jason. If he could just meet him. If he could talk to him.

If if if if if--

.

Inspirations:

Circles in Shattered Mirrors by InfinityIllusion

Fine (But Not Okay) by CharlotteDaBookworm

Verisimilitude by mutemelody

[decolonize-the-everything]

"The reasons we have to treat others only in ways that could be justified to them underlie the central core of morality, and are presupposed by all the most important forms of human relationship. These reasons require us to strive to find terms of justification that others could not reasonably reject. But we are not in a position to say, once and for all, what these terms should be. Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task."

- T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (1998)

[oldbutchdaniel]

[coldgoldlazarus]

Zero Mission: Slight detour toward the end, but Samus is doing well.

Prime: Momentary bittersweetness, but Samus is doing well.

Echoes: Despite everything, the day was saved. Samus is doing well.

Corruption: The day was saved, but at a cost. Samus is... alive.

Return Of Samus: An ugly, yet hopefully necessary task, offset by a small ray of hope at the end. Samus is not doing well.

Super: That hope was delivered... and then immediately stolen, warped and mutated, and then killed. The last Metroid is dead. The galaxy is (not?) at peace. Samus is not doing well.

Fusion: Actions have consequences, and the consequences for extinction have shown themselves. Samus has lost nearly everything familiar and comfortable, with only the ghost of an old friend found instead. Samus is not doing well.

Dread: New bullshit after new bullshit, piled higher and higher and higher. Samus is not doing well, but that doesn't matter, because Samus is fucking done.

[unohanadaydreams]

So, I just finished reading the Eumenides and there’s honestly so many passages that could apply to Bleach because of the whole ‘when is enough retribution enough’ but this quote in particular really sprung out to me as being very Tosen & Hisagi.

“I urge my people to follow and revere neither tyranny nor anarchy,

and to hold fear close,

never cast it out entirely from the city.

For what man who feels no fear is able to be just?”

[unknowablecore]

she chose violence today

[squidyyy23]

🚨 if everybody would please focus your attention over here for just a moment... 🚨

today is a very special day. today is our lovely bee @gallawitchxx 's 🎉ONE YEAR FIC-IVERSARY!!! 🎉

one year ago today, we were first graced with her mind blowing words. and i thank everything that is holy she hasn't quit blessing us since! (if you missed them fuck, no, EVERYBODY go check them out here)

in one year she has given us:

at least 110k+ words

THREE multi-chap works

a TWENTY-FIVE week continuous galladrabble that hasn't missed a prompt yet

a brand spanking new spicy sideblog

and so much art i didn't even attempt to count them all up

what would our little corner of the internet look like without our resident sweet, spicy, witchy little bee? 🐝

so to honor our girl on her very special day, i am demanding giving everyone the excuse to go bask in her stories, her ficlets, and her art. because it all rocks. and so does she.

[odetolovers]

[boysdontcryboycry]

this post is pretty metaphorical and almost entirely nonsensical. sorry

thinking again about dustin's s2 mindflayer analogy falling apart when hopper asked how to kill it. thinking about how will the wise is a wizard but mike (who is pretty much never wrong about anything) (except for calling el a mage when mages are npcs and she doesn't even really have mage powers she's much closer to a wizard leaping between schools of magic but also manifestationgate 👁👁? cuz this sure descibes her before she broke out of the lab

) called will their cleric. how vecna's curse is literally necromancy in the form of draining a person's life force and how henry should have died from the radiation burns he got traveling between dimensions or disintegrated like jason was by the gate opening in the creel house but didn't because he just necromanced like thirty people. and how the mindflayer isn't actually a mind flayer but a tool and the physical representation of the hivemind that henry is the brain of as the actual dnd mind flayer and so henry is a paradox in that he is both the mind flayer and the undead (lich? zombie? both? who knows!) that can resist the mind flayer's thrall oops i started reading about thralls and having revelations

billy was DEFINITELY a thrall, and will was well on his way before being blasted out of it by the power of love and seventy space heaters. i think the shadow is like a physical representation of the thrall and plugs you into the telepathic network and is also possible to expell Like A Demon so they could do a quasi-thrall that was reversible?

the rest of the flayed in season 3 i think were somewhere between ceremorphs and (reverse?) oblexes? possibly because ceremorphs henry wasn't really looking to make more mind flayers and ceremorphs ? he was just looking to kill? the hive mind. let me be coherent in a different paragraph (although i will say oblexes were introduced just over a year before season 3 came out as the creation of a make-a-wish kid and thus the similarities might've been a happy coincidence)

ceremorphs. illithid tadpoles injected into beings to eat their brains and take over their bodies and either become mind flayers themselves or become some other ceremorphized being that either was a subset of the hivemind to boost psionic ability or to find new victims to become food/members or other stuff idk etc, or in special cases becoming a being powerful enough to split from the control of the elder brain and start their own colony. the flayed in s3 get their faces sucked by tentacles a lot like will in s1, when the tadpoles were first deposited. they certainly look like corpses whose brains are currently being devoured from the inside.

anyway i don't think henry was particularly looking to make more mind flayers at this time partially from his fixation on el and will and also thinking pretty much the entire planet isn't worth it and they don't deserve the power and are better off as food and then as a biomass in his meatflayer that we still don't really know the end goal for? and so their orders were to munch the brains and then destroy the host body! yummy chemicals! the meatflayer ALSO could've been his attempt at literally physically creating his own elder brain. tadpoles plus nutrients plus hivemind shadow particles plus biomass? all the makings of a big ole brain ready to stew in some brine in a deep dark cave with lots of tunnels oh yeah that's why they were digging the tunnels

also btw besides ceremorphs a super rare tadpole will birth a super powerful mind flayer whose job it is to split the colony and move somewhere else and to become a new elder brain :)

and so im gonna black out cuz i can make absolutely anything about rosegate and the mind flayer "deities" ilsensine and maanzecorian just SCREAM rosemary and dick wheeler respectively, bro just trust me (go read their wikis), even dick's glaring abscence from the narrative as maanzecorian "died" and yet survived and his principles still being followed also .

mike wheeler knowing things he absolutely shouldn't check.

so like im convinced there is a (metaphorical?) elder brain underneath the creel house that tadpoled henry on move-in day (running from the bathroom?) and he became a ulitharid and is now splitting off to form his own colony with an elder brain under the library that may or may not be a brainstealer dragon. this bitch tadpoled tiamat

also if time travel is your thing Illithids Are Your Bitches

i completely lost the plot of this post

[gothamcityneedsme]

me gushing over rwby superman and his design and that hes gonna be friends with ruby etc etc

also me:

[worstloki]

Scary story: loki getting THOR'S helmet tattooed on his body.

Scarier story: soulmark AU

[clonewarsahsoka]

It's so funny I'm walking around the sales floor of this convention and bf is like "oh what's your fave anime let's find you smth you like 🥺" like buddy my fave animes are like 2012-16 shoujo and mid shounen there will be NOTHING for me

[wyvern-flames]

Associating Quinten (and Lost.wing) with Higu.rashi music is just fitting. For Great Justice sidequests prove it and that is my excuse for why my brain associates them and gets inspired to write him and his people whenever I hear them.

Even the cicadas crying just... makes me think of what happened to him, his eccentricity, and what happened in Lost.wing in general. I'm just sobbing over here while trying to actually write the damn fic to get them out of my head.

[impossible-rat-babies]

sticks eyrie in a jar and shakes them