#until he has no choice

[drinkingbeerfroma]

Okay. So. How about a 90s sorta online dating Harringrove AU that's also omegaverse where Steve is a very picky omega and he's had so many matches to his dating profile bidding for his attention and he knows he's like the creme de la creme, the bees knees, rare and beautiful and smells the best and most intoxicating scent that it makes everybody stupid to a point that it's gotten pretty dangerous. But he doesn't mean to be picky, he's always wanted it easy as much as the next guy, it's just that he has the most sensitive nose, ever since he was a kid, even gotten worse after he presented, and just a whiff of any scent he can't particularly stand he gets the most godawful allergies and sneezes and sometimes even coughs his lungs out if it's really strong and bad. And there aren't really meds for it. He can use scent blockers on himself, but that's it, that's the only extent of protection their health care system has right now for his case.

So he's lonely, he's become a really lonely guy, can't really leave the house without a mask on like he has seasonal allergies all year round, hard for him to make friends and keep them when he can't really see them for too long, even harder for him to find someone he likes. Since he works at home anyway, he resorts to online dating. Because why not? He's desperate. It's the 90s, there are tons of lonely people out there who are completely normal and aren't complete pervs. It's what he tells himself. Now that he's looking at an overwhelming amount of matches, with countless alphas and betas who keep sending his P.O. box all kinds of things that carry their scent for mate matching, Steve has his pick of the litter so to speak, only it's twice as awful, has become a great inconvenience because he has to smell each one, each damn sealed and ziplocked package. It's become literal hell. He can't believe romance in the 20th century has gotten to this. Just when he's gotten sick and tired and literally exhausted from sneezing and coughing, just when he thinks he can't smell a damn thing anymore and has to air out the whole damn apartment from all the nasty foreign smells from strangers, he finds it. Smells it. Right before he almost throws away all the bags in the garbage shoot, he gets a whiff that escapes a not-so-sealed bag.

It's from a shirt.

The most heavenly, mouth-watering scent of an alpha is coming from a pit-stained, worn-thin, hole ridden, a little dank, shirt. Steve doesn't know how to react because it's so careless and unthoughtful and lazy, and the most disgustingly amazing and stupidly addictive scent he's ever smelled in his entire pathetic omega life.

Which belongs to one Billy Hargrove.

The douchiest asshole in the great Chicago area with the prettiest bluest eyes, the embodiment of everything Steve hates in an alpha, all cocky and charming and oozing with unrighteous confidence, his dating profile consisting of a bunch of half naked pictures of him flexing the muscles of his muscles, hobbies are getting his dick wet, his knot popped and looking at himself in the goddamn mirror, sweet words filled with bad intentions.

But Steve can't help but stuff his face of Billy Hargrove's disgustingly damp shirt, can't help but drool and moan on it while he touches himself in his underwear, spreading the wetness between his thighs, he comes hard. For the first time in a long time, he comes easy.

He sends him an e-mail. Fed-exes his underwear to Billy Hargrove's P.O. box the next day. There are tons of lonely people out there who are completely normal, and who aren't complete pervs, of course. But Steve isn't one of them.

[poobirdy]

bingqiu human/demon role reversal as requested by alliechickfics on twitter! for a modest donation to the listed organizations and individuals over at SVSSS Gotcha 4 Gaza, you too can get a prompt fulfilled in exchange.

[theribbajack]

"Now, the vow will be honoured, and my Lord brother's soul will return."

Radahn stans keep winning, but I personally am in Miyazaki's walls rn

[ofswordsandpens]

I fear that "fire bending didn't come easy to zuko" and "zuko isn't a prodigy" (both true) has somehow snowballed into "zuko is a bad or at best average fire bender".... which simply isn't true, especially by the end of book 3

[sibylsleaves]

wait sorry im just thinking about eddie brat taming buck and like. canonically. his method of taming is just indulging him. he literally TRIES to do it the other way in 2x01 and he's like hmmm not working. okay new plan. i'll tell him he's a good boy. and it works immediately.

[howlsnteeth]

and are you really okay? are you really okay?

[currentlyonstandbi]

[jaarijani]

here's Joost almost accidentally saying "this is crazy, this is party" in Tilburg :)

[ashestoashes7]

What happens to Kevin if the Foxhole Court needs renovation or to get something fixed? If the lights go out, does he sit there until the moment they go back on just so he can make up for lost time? Do the Foxes play a ‘distract Kevin’ game? I don’t know why I started questioning this but really I’m curious.

And Neil? Now I’m imagining them trying to convince Wymack practicing in the dark is a very safe and ‘oh it can help work on coordination and team synchronization’ while he stares in horror because goddamnit now there’s two of them

[oceanwithouthermoon]

i posted abt this on my tiktok story but i need to rant more so im putting it here 😭😭 the way a lot of mikosai shippers (on tiktok, pinterest, reddit, etc) are is such a big reminder to me of why i hate the strictly romantic soulmates trope with every fiber of my being 😭😭😭 people who interpret soulmates as "that means theyre canonically together" regardless of how the characters actually feel about each other and if they ACTUALLY get together is so fucking gross to me oh my god its so fucking gross i hate forced romance so bad 😭😭 someone cant just say "hey, we're soulmates so you HAVE to date me and its literally weird and impossible for you to like anyone else because i said so!!" and also aiura WOULDNT do that anyway ???? HELLOOO???

you have no idea how many people ive seen call all saiki ships with anyone other than aiura "problematic ships" just because "theyre soulmates"

[protagonist-art]

i may have problems and issues 🥳

[childrenofthesun77]

...okay, so I'm probably not the first person to notice this.

But gear's earing that he points towards when he says that he did the same ritual he wanted to help kuro with already on himself before:

actually looks pretty similar to the pieces of the necklace the count used to create the servamps:

The different pieces of the necklace seem to contain one demon each and the count used them to create the servamps.

So...did the count either learn this technique from the werewolves or is he possible even originally a werewolf himself? It would explain why he's immortal, that's why I'm wondering about this.

Gear says that the ritual is used to remove spirits, could it be that the count removed his own sins using the werewolf ritual and created the demons this way? But he went too far and removed too much unlike gear who only removed one part of himself? Him removing the sins from himself would also explain why he's so weird and doesn't understand other beings. As the sin demons say, they are a natural part of being a human and we have seen multiple times that denying their existence is harmful, removing them all from you would probably lead to you not being able to relate to other people anymore.

Maybe removing all these parts of himself is also why he has no appearance. Without his demons he's not a person anymore.

The count originally being a werewolf would also explain why he has magical abilities (gear can also use magic) before other magicians existed and why he's so anxious about certain people dying. Gear talks about how his immortality makes him sad because human friends do die, but unlike the count gear seems to accept death, grieves in a heathier way than the count and is able to move on and make new friends. Could also explain why his magic and creations are all strongly tied to the (full) moon.

Another similarity is that while werewolves apparently can't reproduce gear was able to have descendants by sharing his life force (it's mentioned in chapter 135 which isn't translated yet) with a woman and through her human children tsurugi is related to gear. Sigurd explained to nicco that the magicians came to be because the count let humans drink his blood, three survived, got magical ablities and became the ancestors of all human magicians:

Maybe the count is more of a werecat though. He and the sloth demon do seem to have a closer connection, even though the count's appearance changes depending on the person looking at him he does usually keep his tail and the tip looks exactly like the one of kuro's cat/lion form and similar to the the one of inner sloth's non-human form.

It was also stated multiple times that the sloth demon is the strongest. I wonder why that is. Servamp comments on the fact that being lazy is often actually a sign of depression/anxiety through kuro's arc, so maybe the count was depressed and that's why the sloth demon is the strongest? Basically the demons strength depends on how much the count suffered from the different sins? It would also explain why melancholy is so strong, I assume kuro refusing to see him no matter how many siblings he sent his way to tell him to come looking for the count made him extremely sad and probably even made him come up with the plan to have himself be killed and then put in the same body as kuro through the ritual.

I assume he was behind C3 ordering the servamps to kill him because he's the one who created the magicians and thus C3 and lily who is kind of working for him was probably the one who put the idea that the count needed to be killed into the head of his eve (aka a member of the alicein family who hold a lot of power in C3 basically since the beginning. I explained this in more detail in another post). The people from C3 even said that the count can only be killed if he wants to and yeah, kuro didn't truly kill him, but he did destroy his body and kuro seems to have met little resistance when he attacked the count. Which probably means the count wanted this to happen.

[whetstonefires]

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

[kopykunoichi]

I'd like to take a moment to appreciate how incredible Echo is

When Wrecker had to go to the far end of the compound and turn on the breakers (Jurassic Park feels, anyone? He even had to PRIME the handle), that left Hunter, Crosshair, and Echo to deal with the wyrm, while Omega was ready to flip the switch for the perimeter fence. Now, normally, Crosshair would be their eyes in the sky, taking the tower and covering them from up high; but he can't because of his twitchy hand. Without missing a beat or embarassing Crosshair, Echo immediately volunteered to take the high vantage point to call out directions - good thing, too, because Cross can barely hit the broadside of a barn as he is right now.

As a strategist and a leader, Echo has come so far. The way he mediates conflict, encourages the team, guides Omega, and keeps them focused on the mission "here and now" is remarkable. He has all the best qualities of Rex and Obi-Wan. I'm just so proud of him.

[grapejuicegay]

Sometimes I just start thinking about this moment - paired with Maddie's "I just think that maybe you're not sure of your own feelings yet. And if there's something that you need to tell Eddie, you will. Just, in your own time" - and then don't stop thinking about it.

Maybe I'm just reading into it but the way this moment moves. Eddie steps forward, Tommy steps up to exactly where Eddie was, Buck turns to look where Eddie was, doesn't find what he was looking for but still finds something good. It's not just ep 4 and 5 where the focus on Eddie blows me away, it's also this.

[aibouart]

apparently never posted these tiny guys from last year?? or i didn't tag it correctly if i had

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TOBY/Pastavee he/him Babyvee she/he/they Shitvee they/them