#unreliable narrator ass

[transprincecaspian]

Another Trystan Shortfic

basically just here to introduce his dynamic with his cousin, Jurian Amell :3 very mild themes of gender envy/dysphoria like you have to squint

Jurian. Tricky Jurian, lovable Jurian Amell. Everyone adored Jurian. That much had long since stopped being a secret for Trystan Hawke. He’d grown up desperately herding Bethany away whenever Jurian tried to show her his magical tricks too close to the line of sight of the Lothering Templars. Just because he’d made a dashing escape from the Circle didn’t mean that Trystan was allowed to risk the same for his little sister. That didn’t stop Bethany from fawning after him whenever he visited; it was once a year, maybe twice if the Templars to the north were hot on his tail.

When the Blight started, Trystan hadn’t been sure what would become of his second cousin, and for a long time, he hadn’t known. It really shouldn’t have come as any surprise to him to learn that he’d made friends with Naoise Cousland and Alistair Theirin, the Heroes of Ferelden. It should have come as less of a surprise that he was already familiar with Isabela and Anders. Lovable Jurian, friendly Jurian; why can’t you be more like our cousin, Trystan?

Jealousy pooled in the pit of his stomach as Jurian crossed across the room in front of him to curl up in one of the plush chairs by the fireplace. Even with Anders nestled at his side, Trystan felt the urge to wrap his arm around him as if to make a point. Jurian looked exactly like an Amell grandchild should; long black hair that pooled down his shoulders like ink, dark and thick lashes that framed blue eyes, naturally red lips that stood out against his pale and freckled skin; if Trystan didn’t know better, he would say Jurian could have been a spitting image of his mother Revka, from the portraits that he had seen.

Trystan was anything but. He looked too much like Malcolm, and he knew it. Brown hair that was too flyaway for him to tame, brown eyes that had been likened to mud before, Malcolm’s prominent and aquiline nose that was crooked from one too many breaks that hadn’t healed properly. He didn’t look anything like an Amell, and he could never have the courage to sit like Jurian does, with a short bathrobe that rose up past his thighs and that plummeted down at the neckline to reveal the valley between his breasts. Lovely Jurian, he recalled, Jurian from the forests, Jurian in the poems. The thought of revealing himself like that made him nauseous in the pit of his stomach.

Isabela had done a triple-take, he knew, and even Fenris had paused to watch him walk across the room. If it wasn’t for the fact that Anders eyes were closed, exhausted from long hours in the clinic, Trystan knew he would be wondering if Anders’s eyes still followed his cousin like they did when they were younger, in the Circle.

Guilt was always quick to follow those thoughts. It wasn’t Anders’s fault, and if he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t Jurian’s, either. He had no business wishing for his cousin’s life. At least he still had his family; Jurian had no one to lean on but the rare times he would come to visit the estate in Kirkwall. It wasn’t like he lived there, a part of the family. Jurian had done anything he could to survive.

FIN

[imperfectcourt]

Thinking about Neil, bored and nosy, looking Aaron up before they go to visit him so that he has fuel for being a little shit (since he doesn't have any saved up, they've been apart for too long and he doesn't take any part in the twin's weekly calls)

And what he finds..... hey Andrew did you know doctor's can get reviews on different websites?

His 😈 is very short-lived and quickly becomes 😐 becomes 😶 becomes 😵 when he realizes that Aaron doesn't have a single bad review. Bedside manner? Treatment?? There's even a review from someone who's health got WORSE who left a positive review and what the fuck kind of backwards world is he seeing into? What is happening? HOW is it happening? He spent 4 years in relatively close contact with this guy there's no way he would have missed something like this

((He calls Matt about it, who spent his last year at PSU with Aaron as a roommate surely he'll be able to back Neil up on this rigged system and..... wait what the fuck are you talking about he was actually pretty chill?? I thought you were on my side? Matthew Donovan you did not just say that Aaron Minyard was a cool dude how dare))

[skyphloxx]

ok so um. here is a scenario ive had in the drafts for literally over a month and forgot to post. maybe with a second part idk?

i've been thinking way too damn much about clegan and johns dog coded ass and his feelings around body markings. like, hickeys and bites and bruises etc. bear with me this post got really long lmfao.

fuckin. ok. so in a scenario where john and gale are fucking on the side pretty early on after their arrival at thorpe abbots.

everyone knows bucky is a slut, right? bucky can show up with hickeys and bites and red marks and nobody will question it. he might get jeers or crooked grins, they’ll laugh and say he must’ve slept with every girl on base and half the women in london by now, but it’s expected.

buck, though? everyone knows buck’s got a girl. and maybe he wouldn’t be the first guy to say as much and then fold after months of being away from home. but everybody who knows him knows that buck cleven isn’t like that. and anyway, it would be a little odd considering how consistently he turns down any woman who makes a pass.

you see where i'm going here right.

gale can bite the fuck out of john and leave him with bruises purpling from his neck all the way down to his thighs. when they’re alone together it’s the only time he gets to loosen that iron grip he has on himself, be anything less than carefully composed and controlled. outside gale is the fearless leader, who will sometimes joke and rib but has no vices, no faults. with john he is a hungry, wanting thing, all hands and mouth and teeth.

bucky loves it at first. being desired so much kinda drives him wild, knowing that gale wants him so bad, that there’s so much heat simmering under that cool surface. but there’s also something about the act of leaving marks on him that feels like gale’s staking a claim. that bucky allowing himself to be bitten is showing allegiance, or acquiescence, or maybe ownership. something of gale is left there, written across his skin, even if nobody else knows it. the marks say that gale can do what he wants with john’s body, that john is his. he’s painted his name across john’s neck and chest.

bucky doesn’t object to this feeling. like, at all. on its own, that part is amazing. the problem is he can’t do it back to gale. buck is so paranoid about being found out, and the communal living of the barracks adds extra complications. and john understands his fears, of course he does, he knows damn well what happens to men who get a blue discharge, and he’ll respect anything that’ll help buck feel safer about what they’ve been doing. he’s pretty sure he’d do anything to keep buck coming back, he needs him that badly.

he fucking hates that he has to be so careful. he wants nothing more than to give it right back to buck, to bite the same kind of lurid purple bruises across his skin. he thinks all too often of how buck would react, his shiver at the scrape of john's teeth on sensitive skin and the low breathy noises he'd make. hates that he can't have that. but mostly he hates how he can't stake any claim over gale he way he feels that gale has over him. if buck can do what he wants with john's body, if his bites mean that john is his, then the inverse must also be true: bucky can't do the same, and gale is not his. he has no claim to stake.

which makes sense, really. as far as claims go, someone's already beat him to gale. that's the whole reason the no-markings rule was established.*

it ends up serving as a little reminder to bucky: that the arrangement he and gale have worked out to keep each other sane during all this? it's temporary. when the war ends buck will be going back to build a home and share a bed with someone, and that someone won't be john. he can't forget that however much gale seems to want him in the moment, he's committed elsewhere. john is a way for him to distract himself from everything else going on around them. he thinks sometimes gale does it as much to distract john as himself. taking pity on him or something. he knows buck still loves marge more than anything. he uses her letters like a lifeline, sniffs her perfume off the paper like it might send him back to her if he works hard enough at it.

someone with a better sense of self-preservation than bucky might try to break it off, disengage, try to soften the blow when it inevitably comes, but.

the marks also remind him that he is gale's. has been. is. will be. for as long as gale will have him. bucky needs him in a way that he doesn't bother to deny to himself anymore. his chest feels heavy with it when they’re together. he knows they're on borrowed time, but that just means john's going to borrow as much of it as he can. avoiding leaving bruises or not using his teeth is nothing, really, he would do so much less (or so much more) if gale asked him, any number of humiliating, desperate things to keep gale wanting to touch him, fuck him. it's fucking pathetic, how much he needs that. john's own stupid hurt feelings are nothing, compared to how much he'd endure for it.

so of course he never brings this whole dilemma up to buck as something that bothers him. he would not dare risk throwing a wrench in their arrangement, which is perfectly functional as it is. they've made it this far via mostly unspoken agreements, mutual willingness to not talk about it more than they need to. john will not even entertain the possibility of breaking that or scaring gale off or somehow ruining what they have. he is already so well versed at suffering in silence, and really this trade off isn't bad. he used to fucking dream of this, the taste of gale's mouth or the feel of their skin pressed together. he can stand being reminded it's temporary. he can stand knowing he's pathetic.

(bucky is a lying liar to himself. he is full of resentment and frustration. he will pretend he's not full of resentment about this for as long as it's physically possible to. gale knows something is up with him but won't say anything too specific about it for the same reason john won't - they don't talk about it if they can avoid it. that's the whole point of unspoken agreements.)

*bucky has not considered that gale would be similarly paranoid even if he was not openly in a relationship and loyal to it (loyal in heavy air quotes lmfao) if not even worse, just because gale cleven is a high-strung freak underneath all the calm collected shit.

[liam-summers]

Just saw a post where someone said that Buffy is an unreliable narrator because of all the times she said she doesn't love Sp*ke, since the one (1) line in season 7 "why does everyone in this house think I'm still in love with Sp*ke?" makes it indisputably canon that she has loved him since maybe season 5, definitely season 6, and this is clearly her finally admitting it after having lied to herself about it for seasons....

Honestly, the level of delusion it takes to get to this conclusion is truly impressive, because not only was that not even the original line/intention from the script (the original being "why does everyone in this house think I'm in love with Sp*ke?") but the way some people will watch the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer for 6.5 seasons where this woman has repeatedly and consistently and violently said that she DOES NOT love Sp*ke's crusty ass, and then dismiss all of that based of of one line that wasn't even meant to have that one extra word that has fuelled rabid delusions for 20+ years in this cursed fandom.

and then to make matters even funnier, these same people will turn around and twist the line "I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life" (Buffy re: Angel in S7) into "she meant before, she doesn't love him now, it's so out of character.", ignoring the part where she says "MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THIS LIFE", which means more than she's ever, has ever and will ever love anything in her life, something she has repeated at least once a season for 7 seasons straight..........like, not only are you all delusion, but you also apparently have extremely poor reading comprehension skills.

[aroacettorney]

for a character with a reputation of being extremely rational and logical, many of ludger's actions are actually quite emotionally motivated. even when he stays oblivious to his true emotions, there are still many instances where we can see how they unknowingly manifest in his actions and subtly influence his biases. i think ludger's second most toxic trait is that he tends to subconsciously cook up a seemly logical reason to spontaneously cover up his emotional ass because he cannot admit to himself that he feels emotions intensely.

exhibit A: his vengeance for arte's death required him to admit that he had a strong attachment to the kid, so he stated that eliminating the evil and offering solace to the victims were the actual reasons. counter: there were many better ways to deal with delica's incidents if his goal was simply enacting justice. even hans realised that this was a weak excuse to conceal his regrets.

exhibit B: his mercy towards aiden required him to admit his unwillingness to eliminate him, so he covered it up by reasoning that it would be too risky to take a student's life. counter: we know very well that he's fully capable of eliminating someone without leaving a trace if he puts his mind to the task.

exhibit C: his sparing casey's life twice required him to admit his disinclination to kill her, so instead, he reasoned that she was more useful alive and that her excessive pride wouldn't let her easily expose him to the public anyway. counter: strategically speaking, turning her against blackdawn was an obvious blunder. he didn't even need her to deal with them. plus, somehow he conveniently forgot at the moment that casey could still have told her best friend, terinna, about his identity regardless of the matter of pride and subjected him to even worse danger.

exhibit D: his taking owens under his wings and founding u.n. owen required him to admit his emotional bonds to them, so he claimed that he needed a strong fortress for his goals and his own protection, especially against the bretus. counter: considering his op-ness, he had never really needed protection. he also mainly tasked owens with leg work while dealing with most of the dangers by himself. he even ended up disbanding them to confront bretus on his own and telling them to prioritize their lives over his goals.

at first glance, his reasoning might seem sound and logical, but if we look at them for more than ten seconds, they are actually quite flimsy and contradictory. this is not to say he's inherently an idiot or a terrible liar. ludger's capability of reasoning is proven comparable to that of casey. he is also an excellent liar when it comes to deliberately lying to someone. but how does one reason or lie about feelings that they themselves are not even aware of?

my hypothesis:

when his suppressed emotions subconsciously influence his biases and/or manifest into his actions, ludger needs to convince himself that he is still being logical, and thus, without even realising it, he tries to rationalize them and grab onto whatever reason that momentarily sounds in his mind: why was he so dedicated to teaching his students? he couldn't get caught half-assing his job, and he wanted to earn the trust of the president. why did he save esmeralda? quasimodo annoyed him, so he had to step in. why did he delay the first princess' orders and prioritize the students' safety during the attacks on the capital? it was the princess' trusted blade himself who suggested saving the students, and not him. why did he accept casey's companionship during his moriarty's era? it was an act, and he was simply getting into his character.

whether ludger wants to admit it or not, he has always been a person moving according to his emotions. and the actual reason why we see so many inconsistencies and hypocrisies in his actions when aligning all of them together with his own logic is that his reasonings are only flimsy excuses that his subconsciousness makes up on the fly to rationalize away his repressed emotions, i.e. his strong attachments to this world.

[lorephobic]

i think i should get paid to explain saltburn to people who don’t get it. i think it should be a tenured position and i think i should make a quadrillion dollars a year

[starlooove]

Ppl will say fanon v canon doesn’t matter and it’s all jokes and I’m sooooo close to going sure sometimes and then I remember y’all removed a major role of one of the if not THEE most prominent black character in Bruce’s story who was created a whole decade before tim and gave it to tim based off a run where he literally handed the role back! Like IN THE COMIC Tim was CEO in name only and handed it back to Lucius relieved when he didn’t need to front anymore like.

[forpiratereasons]

izzy just rambling off to spanish jackie about how much he hates stede.....my dude would like to believe that he’s a stone cold professional but at the end of the day he’s still half drunk whining about his crush’s new boyfriend to a person who wishes to god he’d passed out three drinks ago 

[magnus-the-maqnificent]

People debating about Alec’s ass and meanwhile a quick skim through Magnus’s POV will only show you - shoulders shoulders chest arms shoulders chest boobs shoulder arms arms arms shoulders chest chest arms stamina rune shoulders chest shoulders chest chest-

It's very clear that what Magnus appreciates is nowhere near the lower department 😂

[yikeshereiam]

why is everyone so attached to tara raeken??? there’s two whole other characters we actually saw theo murder with our own eyes and tara is who we're stuck on????

[lycianlynx]

✧ where the delicate stops

assassin mastery drabble.

much has been taken from you.

your fingers knit together when you think about it, trying to keep the memories from falling through your fingers. you would rather die than forget, you think, the wrongs done to you. wrongs are wrongs are wrong, and forgetting means leaving it in the dark to go unseen, unjudged. your roots, your childhood, your home: you are the only one who sees the depths of these losses, in the knowledge the lone bearer.

it was tolerable, once. easy to bury and let be, like a time capsule whispering wishes into the earth. but even mountains erode, even earth breaks. what is a pair of shoulders in the face of that kind of force? those slight things can't bear the thunderclap of the highest order of theft, the pillar which breaks the childs back. the greatest heist, the easiest theft, the most unskilled and the most devastating.

life. it's life. of course it is. kick someone wrong, can't feed a mouth right, slip of the hand. easy as that.

and the way you remember it, it was unceremonious. unskilled. unjust, unfair, unforgivable—embers left in a forest, waste dumped in the water. monsters bearing down on an unarmed man, laughing and jeering. knocking him over like building blocks. blood on the dirt. blood on your garden. blood on those tenuous things you were starting to think about holding close again, for what is sacrifice and bearing all that weight but love?

blood on his robes.

what is sacrifice but love? you love and that's undeniable. you think about burns on your hands from a pot running too hot. you think about a sack of pilfered potatoes slung over your shoulder as you run. you think about plunging the knife in and in and in to make sure that lance doesn't rise again. you think about the saints and wonder if they'd accept a dirty little thief like you, lopsided and bloodstained. does love lead to this?

then why do you still want to love? you don't know. it's selfish. it's grotesque. but even if it's an uneven scale, even if your side is tipped too far down and drenched in sin, you wanted to. you still want to. you want that bright, warm thing you knew love at its best as again, even if you feel ground-down, raw and half-dead in it. o god, why do you keep the faith? why does love lead to this?

o god, is this what happens? is love to suffer and die? is it good to keep the rage, the remorse this close for something like love? is it good for love to be having the shadow of a mourner stand behind you, ready to take your hands and mind? what will that rage make you do? what will that mourner make you do?

in that, you aren't sure you care for what is good anymore. but love is good, isn't it? you need to be good to be loved, don't you? (this thought scares you.)

o god, so give me the bitter cup. it's easier to bear the conflict in silence. easier to bury it and draw that love into anger. easier to draw that love into burdens and memories. easier to do all this than to think of the root of it as love.

so you don't think of it when you draw the blade, the dagger, the notched arrow back. you remember the things taken from you, your roots, your childhood, your home. you think of father. you think of the blood; think in anger of seeing the echo of it elsewhere and find it repulsive. think that all that red's better off on your hands than anyone else's, anyways.

so to the grieving heart, this is right. ceremonious in the skill, fair and just. perfect cut, bulls-eye. clean kill.

really, just look at that. keeled over without a damn sound. noone will find this idiot for days, here.

hah. you've really become the worst kind of thief, haven't you?

[antiqua-lugar]

look I think that the writing in Baldur's Gate 3 is very good as much as the next guy, but.

it's also as subtle as a brick to the face.

"Oh but how could we ever know if this ending is Good TM or Bad TM for this character" they tell you. they literally tell you. characters look straight in the camera and tell you.

why are we having this discussion when the characters are looking straight at me going Oh Boy Sure I Am Glad That Other Thing Did Not Happen

[dangans-ur-ronpas]

writing this damn trial like. how many times in one arc can i write a shocking development being revealed and surprising everyone. at this point is anyone really surprised anymore. do they still have that energy

[cam-stopped-eating-candles]

Being a Legoland fan and creating fanfics and fanart is always so ridiculous because aside from Penny and Ezra there’s literally no other characters on stage.

You want a well characterized cast of teenage characters? Sorry, you get Tammy Edwards and some fucker named Todd, have fun

[blitz0hno]

Mikoto almost definitely has other alters besides John, I wonder if he'll ever mention anything along the lines of hearing their voices sometimes etc....

Unrelated thoughts under the cut Double spoilers and allusions to the VD that I can't bother sourcing lol

Not a super big fan of how they lowkey implied John split to deal with the stress and then murdered people, but I'm also convinced he split *after* the first murder. The implication that they're giving versus the information that we have so far is contradictory and thus I feel like there's a twist here.

Alters are extremely privy to losing access to information that they experienced firsthand, it's kind of the point of the disorder; since Mikoto is the host it makes sense that he needs to forget he did such a thing if he's going to continue living as normal in society. In MeMe he talks about what he would do if he could go back and change it, and since like I've said before Mikoto seems to be the one who is the main focus/POV of the songs as per the rules of Milgram.

It gets a little fuzzy because technically alters share a subconscious, so obviously it's not going to be all Default Mikoto in the music video; but he himself perpetrated the crime and carries guilt he doesn't even remember.

Alters can't just pass trauma and stress around forever, and when the amnesia walls start to crack I feel like Mikoto's gonna be laughing a little too much. After all he as an alter is repressing the most of all and no amount of emotion holding from John is going to help all the residual stress that is no doubt building up for him.

I like how they're going for the angle that violent alters are violent for a reason but aren't necessarily someone to be feared any more than the average person. Like come on EVERYONE is a murderer here, milgram is all traumatized ppl singlet or not.

The average person might even be scarier than John because they hold so much back. Ever read American Psycho? Default Mikoto might be kinda like that (hope not but hey it's a show about murderers SOMEONE is gonna be legit scary).

[barkilphedros-hat]

I’m in two minds over whether I actually enjoyed Saltburn or not, though I will admit the Stag and Angel imagery during the party/confession scene scratched my brain real good