#very train of thought

[madbard]

Thinking about how the Long Quiet outsources change. As the embodiment of stagnancy, it was never meant to exist on its own, never meant to exist as sentient being which, by necessity, must adapt and change to survive. And it handles this by creating the Voices, mental embodiments of trauma responses and attitude shifts and altered worldviews and everything else, externalized advisors embodying the changes it cannot personally undergo.

It accepts these Voices as guides because it needs them, but it refuses to be altered itself. Each princess and each story bring with it a physical change that horrifies it, and every time, it resets those changes, kills the new voices and returns to its original state. Theoretically, it stays the same as it always was.

But still. As it continues forth, it can’t help but remember. With each story, memory returns. Against its will, against its very nature, it changes, because it isn’t only stagnancy. There is a splinter of the Shifting Mound in there as well.

Thinking about how the Princesses exist as mere facets of the Shifting Mound, how the Shifting Mound is scattered among them because personhood requires a certain amount of stability and stagnancy that she cannot perform all at once. How the Shifting Mound cannot exist as a single, stable perspective because even the continuity of thought is contrary to the concept of change and destruction and evolution and death, expanding always and infinitely and away.

She pulls herself together from limited experiences and ideas, rejecting the possibility of being any single person.

But still. At the end of each story, she greets the Long Quiet, offers it comfort and company in the way she knows how. The progression of their relationship, though it is by necessity a story of change, is also a tale of repetition and familiarity. The Long Quiet asks the same questions. She gives different answers. But it is ultimately the same conversation, again and again. And she is capable of that because she is not just the Shifting Mound – there is a sliver of the Long Quiet in there as well.

And the Shifting Mound is only able to reform itself because the Long Quiet makes different decisions each time, bringing her fresh perspectives – because despite being the manifestation of stagnancy, there is a piece of the Shifting Mound to motivate it. And the Long Quiet is only able to try and remain stagnant because the Shifting Mound is able to wipe its memory and reset it – because despite being the manifestation of change, there is a whisper of the Long Quiet to stabilize her.

They weren’t meant to be separated. They weren’t meant to be sentient. As separate beings, they fail. As separate beings, they greet each other with violence and hunger and desperation – the fury of their essential conflict warring with their frantic desire to be reunited, to never have been torn apart. Two people who never wanted to be people. Two people who want to be the same thing and try again and again to join themselves together through bloodshed and love.

Movements synchronized, moving as one. As if they were still the same being because, in a sense, they are.

There is a reason they always appear to be dancing.

[cable-salamdr]

I see Frak on the Ninja team, I go insane. I think about Arin for two seconds with this new knowledge, and I go insane even more. Thank you and gnight.

(Vaguely based off of this post of mine)

[quadrantadvisor]

Even after learning their secret identities, the hero community always insisted that there was something inhuman about the bats. No one doubted that their intensive training had a lot to do with it, but it never quite explained how they could evade a Kryptonian's super senses, how they could melt into shadows, how they could function so long with little food, little rest, little oxygen if need be. Most people dismissed their uneasy feelings, but there was something strange about the bats, something uncanny, something that made them different from the arrows and other vanilla human members. And, slowly enough that no one really noticed, it was getting stronger.

Until one day, during a diplomatic meeting with the ruler of the Infinite Realms, when High King Phantom turned to Batman and his brood and literally brightened. "Oh! I didn't know you had liminal members!"

Or: through a variety of factors (proximity to death, their own death/near death experiences, exposure to the Lazarus Pits, the favor of Lady Gotham, immersion in Gotham's own cursed ambient ectoplasm, being a close knit group who continued to expose eachother, etc.) the batfamily have been becoming liminal/ecto-contaminated without noticing. The powers they're developing have been subtle, and align with the skills they expect to have, so no one brought it up when they started being able to hold their breath beyond human limitations, or got so sneaky that they literally seemed invisible, or had a lucky miss when they expected a bullet to go right through them. And they always exuded an unsettling aura of fear, so no one else thought anything was out of the ordinary either. By the time they meet Danny, Gotham counts as one of the most fiercely defended ghost haunts on the planet, with so many territorial liminals patrolling the streets.

[chalkrub]

reminiscing about childhood books after that ask - all due respect to cool sleek movie toothless....but to me, he will always be a mean little gremlin

[chimerafeathers]

you know what i think Mirabelle deserves to get a little fucked up freaky in how she processes learning about Siffrin’s loops post-canon. for fun. as a treat

thinking about this line in particular and stretching out the implications like taffy

this is a more romanticized, cutesy facet of her interests but she’s still framing Siffrin’s situation through storytelling. so like. What If.

i mean. this woman loves horror and gore and monsters and horrible things happening to innocent people. IN FICTION. in fiction!!! obviously!!!! and it’s beyond terrible that something even remotely close to any of that happened to her real friend in real life!!

BUT.

maybe. maybe sometimes, if the conditions are right, she gets a little too wrapped up in her imagination about the bloody, awful poetry of it all. maybe Siffrin tells a joke that's a little too dark and gory for anyone else, borderline or full-on Concerning, but she latches onto it without thinking about the Implications and plays along with increasing gruesomeness because FINALLYYYYY someone will play with her in the Horror Space (like Isabeau does in the romance space!!) and then. OOPS. the implications!!!! and she has to recalibrate out of Fun With Fiction mode into Oh No, My Friend Underwent A Horrifying Ordeal mode.

but being able to joke about things, even the awful things, is...kind of comforting, to Siffrin. makes them feel less like they're being babied and pitied and more like what happened was something...normal, almost? something that doesn't have to feel like the end of the world all over again every time it's mentioned, at least. so he tries to reassure her, and Odile and Isabeau have to go “actually can you PLEASE not joke about dying horribly it’s freaking us out and also might not be the Best for you? mentally???”

maybe Mirabelle will get a little Too Into trying to weave meaning and symbolism into the scant details that Siffrin gradually reveals, like she’s trying to finish the orange poem all over again, or eagerly meddling with the romantic reunion of the two actual people in the House with undelivered bonding earrings, writing their story for them without their input.

it’s easier to justify the tragedy of it all when it has a purpose, isn’t it? finding the beauty in the darkness, the love powerful enough to end the world. romanticizing the horrors until her friend can talk about them without shutting down.

and she feels guilty about hearing something and immediately thinking “ohhhhhhh this is JUST like Blorbo From My Novels,” because she should treat Siffrin’s situation with the gravity and care he deserves!! they’re a real person, not a character who exists for entertainment, to represent the ~themes~ of some story.

but if she admits as much…maybe Siffrin is safe to admit that he had started seeing the rest of them as actors, endlessly reciting their lines. maybe that’s just how people process things sometimes, grasping for metaphors when unfiltered reality gets to be too much. maybe it’s okay to talk about that part of it all, too.

[aquanutart]

I was talking and I mentioned that I have my old Game Boy and original Pokemon cartridge. I said, "I think they still work."

I was told, "The internal batteries on the Game Boy cartridges have run out. They're all dead."

"Oh," I said, trying not to show how crestfallen I was. I felt like I was losing nerd cred for not knowing that, although I never kept up with that type of info anyway. I'm here for the fantasy and imaginative aspects of games, and tend not to follow the competitive or technical details.

I tried not to feel anything as I went home. If they were real animals, I reminded myself, I would have had to say goodbye long ago.

But like so many other people, Pokemon was my childhood. It was all I thought about and dreamed about, and the closest thing I could imagine to heartbreak was the knowledge that they weren't real. I spent nearly all my time writing longhand self-insert Pokemon fanfiction--far more than I spent actually playing the game. My Pokemon were with me in my imagination wherever I went. I started playing Pokemon Blue when I was 5, and the last time I had played it was probably when I was 9 or 10. I remembered I had turned it on again one more time after that, not to play it, but to look at my childhood Pokemon.

It was during high school, after a move overseas that completely upended my life, and I was struggling with the crushing blow of being taken away from everything I knew and trying to make sense of anything (least of all adolescence) in another language. All I wanted was to go back to childhood and have everything go back to how it was before.

Seeing my Pokemon, just as I'd left them, had comforted me. I had looked at their stats pages, taken photos of them with my digital camera (that I don't even know if I still have), and then turned it off without doing anything.

That was probably 9 or 10 years after the games came out. It had been a long time since then. I had long since taken the AA batteries out of my Game Boy Color and left it untouched. I didn't even have AA batteries anymore.

It had worked then. But now it had been 27 years... I thought about not trying to turn my cartridge back on. As long as I didn't turn it on, I could believe my Pokemon were still there, the way I remembered them.

On my day off, which happened to be Pokemon Day, I googled and read that some people on forums and Reddit were still able to play their original Pokemon games.

Then... it was possible. I went out to buy toothpaste. At the store, I asked where I could find AA batteries.

It was a big thing for me to be able to go to the store and buy things myself. When I moved at age 13, I felt like something went wrong with growing up. It was difficult to follow what people were saying, and people didn't always understand what I said either. I had been introverted even in English, but now I had enough negative experiences that I became afraid and stopped trying to talk to people altogether.

I threw myself into video games and reliving childhood memories. The internet was where I could communicate in my first language and understand. I lived online and didn't interact with the real world. On the internet I felt like I was understood and could find people who shared my interests the way I did, but in the real world it always felt like I could get hurt if anyone knew me.

I realize now that I could have had a better experience overseas if I'd known how to adapt and socialize, but this was not something I knew even in English, and trying to learn in another language made it ten times harder. I'm sorry now for missing out on interactions that I know I could have had, but I just didn't know how. I wouldn't know how until I learned, and it took me a long time to learn.

I grew up online, in the company of others who had trouble fitting in with the real world, even in their own language. Those experiences shaped me, and the friendships I've made and support I've received online are invaluable to me. The internet gave me a way to live, and through it I learned how to interact with others. But in many ways, for many years, it felt like my life was put on hold and I stopped growing up.

Several years ago I moved back, to not far from where I was born, and I was able to work for the first time. I began to interact with people and feel like I had a place in the real world.

After shutting myself away for so many years, every little step I made out in the world felt terrifying. But every little thing I did on my own made me feel like I was living for the first time.

Even something as little as going to the store and buying a pack of batteries.

I was directed to a shelf at the end of an aisle, and found myself looking at a rack of lithium AA batteries. Did they not sell the old kind anymore?

I walked around to the other side and was relieved to find the familiar black and brown Duracell batteries I'd known from my childhood. I felt more confident about putting in a battery that looked the same as I remembered. The smallest pack they sold was an 8-pack for $12.99. I really didn't need 8 batteries. I didn't have any other devices that used them.

I thought, what if I turn it on and it doesn't work and I'll have wasted $12.99?

I also thought we might already have batteries. I might be able to say, "Mom, do we have any batteries?" and she'd pull out two AAs from a drawer somewhere and I'd save my money.

But somehow I felt like part of what was important about this was being an adult and being able to buy my own batteries.

Yet... what if it just ended up making me sad? Was it better not to know?

I went to the checkout with just the toothpaste and stood hesitating at the edge of the checkout line.

If I didn't get the batteries now, and it turned out we didn't have any batteries, I wouldn't try it. I knew I would just put it off until even more time passed, and then... "Are you in line?" someone asked me.

"No," I said, and I turned around and went back to the shelf.

I bought the batteries.

At home, I took out my original Game Boy Color from the drawer where I left it, the one my dad had surprised me with when I was 5 years old and that I had brought overseas and back.

I put the batteries in and turned it on without a cartridge first to make sure the batteries were inserted correctly. The Game Boy logo scrolled across the screen and it made the familiar blinging Game Boy startup noise. I turned it off again, satisfied.

I took out my original Pokemon Blue cartridge, momentarily having to remember which way it went in, and slotted it in.

I turned it on, watched the whole Pokemon Blue intro out of nostalgia, and then pressed START.

My heart leaped for joy.

MY POKEMON!!!! MY POKEMON ARE ALIVE!!! 🥺🥺🥺

My original Pokemon, that were with me in 1998 when I was 5-6 years old, are still with me 27 years later. I want to cry!!! I love the old sprites, I'm SO happy to see them again 😭😭😭 the Pokemon look so little and cheerful at the same time, which I love 🥺🥺🥺 I know there are people with many more hours on their games, who have leveled all their Pokemon to 100. But these are my Pokemon who were with me through my childhood, and I spent many more hours making up stories about them than actually playing the game. I'm so happy to see them again 😭😭😭

All I want is to see my Pokemon. My other Pokemon are in boxes. Now, how do I get to the nearest PC? Where am I?

Oh... Oh. I have to confess something. When I was a kid, I was scared of the dark cave areas, and whenever I got to them, I stopped playing for a while. (I was stuck at Mt. Moon until I was like, 7.) So I never actually beat the game.

And here I am on Victory Road, with the team of Pokemon I was taking to the Elite Four, without an Escape Rope.

The only way for me to see my other Pokemon is... to finally make it through Victory Road, after 27 years?!

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

AU where Bill gets double trapped in therapy

Edit: OH! I FORGOT HIS SCAR- WHOOPS.

[starcurtain]

Considering we know that Aedes Elysiae was home to faeries Memlings, I'm constantly imagining a Phainon who lives his life by all these in-grained, seemingly unnecessary (to outsiders) traditions designed around the fae folk...

Don't give your real name to strangers.

Always keep your promises.

Never trust anything offered freely.

Don't express any of your own wishes; you may not be able to pay the price of the granting.

Eat only the food of those you know by heart.

Wear a ring of iron to ward off the ill-intentioned.

Carry sweets and trinkets in your pocket to distract mischievous fae.

Do not enter a home until you're sure of your welcome.

But also: Do not reject visitors--greet all who come with hospitality; you never know what disguises a fairy may use.

Sometimes the children come back from the forest a little bit different. You didn't see anything and nothing has changed.

Make equal time for each who you hold close; jealousy is among the gravest dangers.

Leave milk and golden honey on the window ledge in offering.

Let no debt go unpaid, and leave no injustice unavenged.

Mydei: Castrum Kremnos was the most untamed place in Amphoreus--

Phainon: Aedes Elysiae was surely a paradise in comparison. One of my old neighbors traded his firstborn for a goat that talked in riddles once!

Mydei: --you know what, never mind.

[rungian]

reject negativity embrace community

[quixoticanarchy]

when my grandfather moved to the us after living through wwii in occupied norway he said the most striking thing he noticed here was the waste. the wastefulness, the sheer amount of excess stuff and the fever for consumption and how blasé people were as they threw it all away. and despite nominal awareness of the issue since then and and sometimes-counterproductive efforts to recycle, overconsumption trends have only gotten worse. trash, like any other ‘flow’ of materials, goods, etc, has gone global, and accumulates unevenly between where it is produced and where its burdens fall

which is a tangible, material disaster for the people living next to incinerators and landfills (in environmental justice communities of the imperial core; or abroad, in the poor countries where the rich ones dump their waste), and for the people doing the also-toxic and dangerous work extracting all the materials and making the things that are destined for the landfill, and it’s also a psychological and paradigmatic disaster for the overconsumers: to be so disconnected from where your stuff comes from and what it really costs, to expect endless cheap varieties of food and consumer goods from all over the world, to think no further than the instant gratification of next-day-delivered fast fashion orders or a new phone every year, to not realize that what you throw out never really goes away. the ‘western consumer lifestyle’, wherever it’s practiced, depends on and enforces the willful ignorance of its consequences and the disinclination to see other people and places as real. and while most waste is industrial, not just your personal household trash, the finished products you throw out have an industrial history too, and are tied to far more waste than you’ll ever personally see. which is to say not just ‘we shouldn’t buy so many things’ or ‘we shouldn’t send our trash to be dumped in other people’s countries’ - true, but also most of these things should never even be made

[miasmadevil]

Alucard should be more specific

[orpheuslament]

i just think that in general people need to be more comfortable with interacting with art that makes them uncomfortable, as strange as that sounds lol. imo weve gotten way too used to everything being made to appease us & making us feel good (tm) about ourselves that anything that dares cross that invisible barrier is immediately deemed wrong & immoral

[tanasha-not-yet]

rain

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Suspirium - Thom York

[cassandra-silver]

Ages ago, I promised a sequel to my Ruthlessness sketches with my new Poseidon design, and well... See, I had a very specific vision for this, my beloved 🫶 favorite song in the whole entire musical. And I guess I was finally brave en- I mean, found the time to bring it to life. Enjoy 🙈🌊🔱

@glisten-inthedark look at what I've done now

[mrspronouns]

dear malevolent podcast fans, why does no one ever talk about john and kayne and their whole dynamic . not even necessarily ship dynamic. no one talks about them NEARLY as much as we should be.

do you guys ever think about how whenever arthur and kayne have their weird gay shit going on, john is the one Witnessing it? arthur can't even see kayne's gay ass. JOHN can though. and he DOES. do you guys ever think about that. how he's forced to watch that?

do you guys ever wonder about what exactly happened with the whole deal to get john out of the dark world? why did kayne say uhh "the things you did to make this deal happen" . WHAT things? did kayne make john give him a little kissy? like did john have to massacre millions? theres so much to be explored here guys come on why aren't we talking about them more

they have such a weird freaky power dynamic and no ones even talking about it. it doesnt NEED to be like a ship thing. just in general. BUT ALSO do they even have ??? a ship name??? these are two of the main characters of the podcast guys. i know we all care about arthur sooooo much but..... but what about them.......