#we are all losing this war

[maayanaonthemove]

Big brother

Big brother said to wait

Only book the flights

Closer to the date

Another war is brewing

This one

Even worse

So I guess

Hell isn't fully on the loose, yet?

Is he saying more awaits?

More suffering

More rockets

Blindly falling

Ready to collect the toll

Their bag of souls

I have so many loves

I have been so lucky so far

Is the luck going to run dry?

Have I pushed it too far?

I don't want to lose my family

I don't want to lose my sanity

Not again, anyways

I just want everyone to live

Our side, their side

Everyone is held hostage

Some underground

Some displaced

Some dead

I don't want to lose friends

Is this game ever going to end?

[bbygirl-obi]

obi-wan: cody, do you think i can be difficult to work with? cody: there is no other jedi i would rather serve under, sir. obi-wan: you're speaking to the negotiator, cody. i know how to spot when someone's dodging a question. cody: you're my superior officer, sir. obi-wan: alright then. everything you say in the next thirty seconds is free, starting now. cody, immediately: you're cocky, pushy, reckless, flirty at the most inappropriate times, value vanity more than wearing armor in a war zone, have daddy issues so massive everyone can see it from clicks away- obi-wan: but- cody: i have 22.5 seconds left, sir. i'm not done.

[xxrat--punkxx]

In light of uh... Recent trigun events on twitter, here's a tihylttw and trigun crossover

[phaedraismyusername]

Happy International Lesbian Day! Here's some super brief book recs to celebrate

Books dealing with love, loss, longing and abandonment

This is How You Lose The Time War is a short but beautifully written epistolary novel between two agents on opposite sides of a time war as they slowly fall in love.

Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most beautifully written debuts I've ever read about a woman whose wife comes home wrong after they thought she'd died at sea and how it feels to grieve the loss of someone who's still in your home.

Lucky Red is a western novel about a young girl working in a brothel who meets her first female gunslinger and falls head over heels for her, and the consequences that come with loving dangerous people.

Body horror galore

Camp Damascus is about a young woman living in a super conservative christian town built around the worlds most successful conversion camp and the horrors that are uncovered there when praying the gay away fails.

To Be Devoured is about a woman whose fascination with the local vultures turns into obsession and the urge to know what carrion tastes like overtakes her life and leads her down stranger and stranger paths.

Chlorine is about a girl whose entire life revolves around being a competitive swimmer, and how abuse, neglect, and obsession with being the best takes its toll on the young women caught up in these destructive cycles.

Flawed character studies

Big Swiss is about a woman who has a kitchen floor reset in her 40s, moves away and starts a new life as a transcriber for a sex therapist and becomes obsessed with one of his clients before inserting herself into this poor woman's life.

The Seep is a speculative sci-fi set in a future where there's been a quiet alien invasion that has given people the ability to make almost any changes to their own bodies and what that world feels like to someone who doesn't want to partake.

Milk Fed is about a woman in therapy who feels cut off from almost everything until she meets another woman who triggers in her a melding of sex, hunger, and religion and where that takes her. Huge trigger warnings for ED content. It gets tough, y'all.

Fantastical wlw books

Bitterthorn is an amalgamation of fairytales retold as a slow burn sapphic love story between a sad young girl from a cursed land and the evil witch who takes her as a companion in the latest of the generational sacrifices made to appease her.

All the Bad Apples may be set in contemporary Ireland but it is a fairytale following a young girl as she travels across the country looking for a sister she refuses to believe is dead and the people she meets along the way.

Gideon the Ninth needs no introduction on this site but for the sake of formatting - lesbian necromancers in space who find themselves in an isolated murder mystery plot. It's not a romance but it is a love story and this series will change your life if you let it.

Translated novels

Boulder is a short character study following a free spirited woman when she accidentally settles down with the woman she loves and how love and resentment can take up the same space in your chest when life doesn't turn out the way you hoped it would.

Notes of a Crocodile is a cult classic coming of age story about queer teens in Taipei in the 1980s. It was written in the 90s so please keep that in mind if you choose to read it.

Paradise Rot is about an international student studying in Australia and her growing obsession with her housemate as they share a space that allows no privacy. I've never read anything that feels stickier.

[strawberri-draws]

Doodles from This is how you lose the time war (read it for class and it was very good)

[thewriterowl]

Din: I don't think I really have a type or a taste for a romantic partner. I don't really react. Everyone is just a person to me. Lust at first sight, love at first sight, relationships and romance…it’s got nothing to do with me.

Luke: (exists)

Din: Well that was a fucking lie.

[zeb-z]

I’ve made a billion fucking drafts and can’t find the words to talk about cellbit and bagi from today. how the fuck do you explain the intricacies between a brother who has lived a life that has sharpened him to cut what he touches, and a sister who had to live with his absence? a man who has to see the childhood he never got to have whenever he looks at the woman he now knows is his twin? said twin who cannot understand why her brother would be anything but glad they are reunited? how do you get across that tangled mess of emotions cellbit had to get him to burn his old pet worm? the paradox of longing for what could have been while desperate to get rid of any reminder, with a healthy dose of paranoia that anything could be a federation bug. or the pure devotion bagi has to decide to stick with her brother even though he is not close to the same as he was when he went missing? the unfairness of it all, of cellbit being taken and made into a killer before he turned 14, of bagi looking for him at the detriment of her own safety and self, of ripped up childhoods and everything that could have been? the fact that the first thing cellbit asks is what he could have done to deserve it? the disgust he holds for himself for what he’s done, and the anger he has for the federation that’s taken everything from him, and the resentment he has towards bagi no matter how unfair it is because she never had to go through what he did? how after bagi swore to help him burn the federation down, cellbit went to bad instead, because bad was there and fought alongside him, and he trusts bad because he’s seen him at his worst, and all he feels like doing is his worst right now? the two of them so similar still because they’re consumed by their need for revenge, while bagi just wants to leave the island? how the fuck can you summarize all this and the emotions that accompany it?

[antianakin]

There is exactly one criticism that I agree with my, very anti-Jedi, cousin on and that's the Jedi were TERRIBLE Generals. Generals may TRY to make sure their men mostly come back. But useless sacrifices are not only acceptable, but expected, the men are mostly expandable in war. The Jedi did not consider sacrifices like that acceptable or expected. Sure it did happen. It was WAR. But they tried their best to make sure it DIDN'T. The Jedi were terrible Generals. But they were the teachers and Leaders the CLONES NEEDED.

I'm not sure I'd ENTIRELY agree with that. I think I'd be willing to agree that the Jedi were perhaps less CONVENTIONAL Generals, and they definitely do seem to at least TRY to place the lives of their men above just tossing them away for an easy victory, but you can just as easily claim that keeping the men alive to keep fighting is a good strategy in and of itself.

The biggest piece of evidence I'd point to that the Jedi were actually perfectly good Generals is the Citadel arc and Tarkin's criticisms. The one real criticism he makes of the Jedi as military leaders is that they're occasionally too soft and will abandon a mission if it looks impossible to win without near total casualties (on either side). But he's generally fairly positive about the Jedi and if they were truly awful at their jobs, I don't think TARKIN of all people would hold back on saying so, even to the Jedi's faces.

And we DO see the Jedi willing to make sacrifices and accepting that this is a necessary part of war. The Citadel arc is, again, a perfectly good example of this. Obi-Wan and Anakin go in with like 3-4 men each I think and they come back with a grand total of 3 (Rex, Cody, and Fives). A LOT of clones die on this mission that they all KNEW was basically a suicide mission because the Jedi themselves decided that getting the information about the hyperspace lanes was vital enough to the war that it was worth losing multiple lives over (including their own).

So it's not that the Jedi don't understand that sacrifices are necessary in war or even that they avoid it entirely, they just avoid what they see as UNNECESSARY sacrifice for what might amount to a fairly minor victory. Keeping more of their men alive might, in the long run, be a better strategic choice than losing all of them on one campaign, especially if it's over like one uninhabited moon or something like that. There's nothing to say that the losses the Jedi deem acceptable are things that would've changed the entire tide of the war had they chosen to push forward instead.

The other good evidence that the Jedi acting this way would've been the WORSE choice is the Umbara arc. We are told and then see that Krell IS the kind of General who is willing to lose a lot of clones in order to gain victories in battle, and the clones do recognize that he has a lot of victories under his belt. But never once do they discuss whether those victories really MEANT anything or had a large impact on the war effort. It certainly never seems that the Republic is majorly pushing back the Separatists because of Krell's victories, nobody ever mentions that Krell gained them a major advantage with those victories or took out anyone of any consequence on the Separatist side with his strategies. And by the time he gets to Umbara, he's explicitly using this strategy to WEAKEN the Republic side and cause a loss. Several of his strategies WOULD'VE meant the Republic lost on Umbara and it's only the clones utilizing different strategies that put fewer of them at risk that they actually end up continuing to HAVE victories at all.

I'll also point out that the Jedi continuously getting their men killed en masse would've bankrupted the Republic a LOT earlier because they'd have to be paying for more clones a LOT more often than they did in canon and I can't imagine anyone would've considered that a particularly sound strategy and at some point I'm sure the Senate would've felt obligated to put a stop to it anyway and insisted on strategies that kept more clones alive for longer. So I'm not sure it's fair to claim the Jedi were utilizing BAD strategy by not just exclusively using tactics that meant most of their men were killed for every single victory.

So the ONLY criticism we EVER see of the Jedi's ability as military leaders is Tarkin claiming they're "too soft" and Tarkin is the kind of person who would likely say that until the Jedi started carpet bombing entire Separatist planets. Would it give them a victory? Yeah, sure, maybe, but that's the exact same strategy the Separatists are using and look how well that works out for THEM. Everything else we ever see seems to showcase that the Jedi are in fact perfectly good Generals, not just in that they're kind to the clones and are unwilling to carpet bomb Separatist planets, but also because they're just... good at this. They CAN be strategic, they CAN run wars if they want to. And I think that's the whole point of the Jedi in some ways is that yes, they CAN make war when they need to, they just actively choose NOT TO every time they can. THIS is why Qui-Gon tells Padme that he and Obi-Wan are there to protect her but that they can't win this war for her and they end up going off to fight off a Sith while Padme has to actually win the war with her own people and the Gungans instead. The Jedi don't WANT to be in the position of doing nothing but fighting, but they're absolutely capable of this kind of work.

That's the tragedy of the war in some ways, the Jedi ARE good at this no matter how much they wish they weren't sometimes. But being good at it means they can actually protect the Republic, their own men, and even the Separatist civilians better, so they're not going to just sit there and do things that will screw over a bunch of people. Yes, they're going to fight the war in such a way that they reduce casualties as much as possible, but reducing casualties also requires doing enough to not LOSE the damn war, too. It's a delicate balance they're trying to hold on to and I'd argue they manage it better than anybody else would've ever done in their position.

[lunian]

men.......

[constellation-skirmishes]

it's no worries, i've got nowhere to be, but home

it's okay leia. you don't have to be strong all the time. you're allowed to grieve.

i'll always catch you when you fall.

[maayanaonthemove]

War

For a second I forgot

We are in active war

An evil, evil war

Extremism served on silver platters

They are winning

They are killing us all

No matter the toll

Each side more convicted

More efficient

More blindly blazingly going

No matter the toll

They are killing us all

We are losing our soul

We can never forget

This

Is

War

[nobie]

stop making fives and echo comparisons ICANTDOITANYMORE

[shirozora-draws]

... so anyway, I'm a lying liar who lies about not drawing for the rest of the month. If I say I'm gonna "doodle something real quick and then write", grab my access to Clip Studio Paint and all my tablets, and run.

One is a sketch/color test based on a scene in the staircase fic and inspired heavily by Eyvind Earle's work for Disney's Sleeping Beauty. The other is me feeling a bit spicy and also letting my brain build up on a sliver of an idea. But it's mostly me feeling a little bit spicy, as a treat.

[xysidhe]

Regulus: Do you think we've been here before?

James: What do you mean?

Regulus: Sometimes it's like I've known you for years, for lifetimes. Countless reincarnations. A love story told over many worlds, many realities, many eons.

James: And in every one of those realities and lifetimes, you think we've met?

Regulus: I think in every version of us, every life, that I've always known you, always loved you.

James: I think, it's the same for me.

Regulus: I don't think every one of our stories has been a happy one.

James: What about this one?

Regulus: I'll make this one a happy one, whatever else I do.

[queer-books-bracket]

okay we have finally narrowed down the list of books enough to make a bracket! lets all have fun finding out what tumblr’s fav lgbt+ fiction book is!

[etrevil]

In Dazai's head rn: fuck, shit, balls, fucking- screw you, Dostoevsky. This was supposed to be a fun getaway from work, where I end up dancing over your dead body. Why tf did you have to bring Chuuya into this? Now I have to watch and hear him drown. Oh, no. I already am hearing him drown. Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts- I hate you, you crusty-ass rat-looking mf. Sigma was the best thing to have ever come from you. Die.