#whether he means to or not

[anonymous-dentist]

Love the person in my notifications asking why bd!Spreen would be remotely interested in bd!Cellbit as if Cellbit isn’t the dude who broke into Quackity’s apartment and tore off/ate Spreen’s literal flesh and ran Missa over with a shopping cart and then fucking Stabbed Missa, aka Spreen’s literal brother. Like, why wouldn’t Spreen be interested in him?

[x0xx0x1]

He looks so proud of himself.

I don’t know if I’m team Mew is a master manipulator or team Mew is an innocent little pumpkin who must be protected.

[bug-hearted]

bill likes to prank fiddleford sometimes. it gets very funny

[noknowshame]

why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?

[egophiliac]

so excited for Kalim to save the day by swiper-no-swiping this dip. you can do it! I believe in you!

god I hope this reads properly

[sunderwight]

Demon Shen Jiu is such a fun idea though.

Especially if he himself doesn't know. Like imagine, Yue Qi finds this abandoned baby and the baby is REALLY OBVIOUSLY not human. But this also enables Shen Jiu to survive being abandoned at such a young age -- a human baby would die without adequate nutrition or care, but demons are a little more resilient. Baby Demon SJ has a way more forgiving digestive system and can move under his own power from a much earlier age. By the time he's a year old he's hunting his own rodents and small birds, and has to be stopped from biting and mauling anyone he doesn't like. Which is most people. Qi-ge develops amazing reflexes.

Why do the slavers tolerate a demon baby hanging around? Maybe it's really not all that uncommon. Demons come across the borderlands from time to time, and are as liable to abandon their kids or die or etc as anyone else. It's maybe an open secret among slavers that demon-blooded kids are a better investment, even, because they can survive for longer on less. The only downside is if they don't ever look human enough to pass as human, because that limits potential buyers, but that's only relevant when the slavers are trying to sell them. For the purposes of having a network of street kids stealing and grifting and spying and etc, it's fine. A lot of the slavers themselves started out as demon-blooded street kids with no other options.

But in SJ's case, he pretty quickly starts passing as human. Mostly because he's quite strong, and he's convinced that he's the same as his Qi-ge, so he makes himself the same. Makes his hands look the same and his teeth look the same and etc. It's largely subconscious, and once he starts doing it, it becomes automatic. SJ forgets that he's a demon in the way that most people don't retain their earliest childhood memories -- although he remembers that some of the slavers were demons.

Then of course there's the question of why didn't the Cang Qiong cultivators notice?

A few options. One is that whatever kind of demon SJ is, it's really good at mimicking humans. Another is that he's only part demon, and like Luo Binghe, fully capable of handling both kinds of cultivation. So once he starts learning spiritual cultivation, even from a heretic like Wu Yanzi, he doesn't seem different from any other recruit with a patchy education on the subject. Anything else odd about him could be easily attributed to his exposure to Wu Yanzi and his wicked practices.

Although full demon SJ is a fascinating idea. (Also, it could contribute to all those qi deviations -- he's trying to cultivate AND "fake" human cultivation at the same time, I doubt Qing Jing's techniques are totally compatible with everything going on there even without the psychological turmoil.) Like I'd imagine Airplane wrote that SJ was abandoned on the streets as a baby, and the system was like "hmm he probably wouldn't survive that?" and then in some nine billionth wife arc, Airplane also creates a variety of demon that can fully pass as human (for some identity conflict with a prospective wife), even to the point of fooling human cultivators and demon-detecting tools. So the system just ties these two disparate pieces of world-building together in order to patch a critical plothole (Airplane doesn't know anything about babies). Which has the side effect that Shang Qinghua doesn't even know that SJ became a demon!

And SJ himself doesn't know. The only person who knows is Yue Qi.

Obviously this wouldn't come up much in PIDW, but it could be pretty funny in the SVSSS timeline. YQY just sitting there through the whole Luo Binghe being a half-demon reveal, wondering if he should say something. Subsequently being the most absolutely chill about the whole demon reveal thing anyway. Like he's definitely not upset that Luo Binghe is a demon, or part demon, and the multiple people who try to make a point about it just run afoul of his impenetrable smile and get nowhere.

Then eventually Yue Qingyuan decides that he should probably tell Bingqiu that Shen Qingqiu is a demon. For like, safety purposes if nothing else. He's kept the secret so long also for safety purposes (even if someone put Shen Qingqiu under a truth compulsion he wouldn't be able to admit to being a demon, because he himself doesn't know!), and he's done tons of stuff to prevent anyone ever finding out (although Xiao Jiu is so talented that he didn't have to do much), but Luo Binghe is the demon emperor. That changes things. If Shen Qingqiu is going to be visiting the demon kingdoms regularly then there's a chance something could reveal the truth unexpectedly, and that would probably be worse.

So Yue Qingyuan sits down and has a very serious discussion with Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe about how Shen Qingqiu is actually a demon, was just the cutest little demon baby in fact, here he drew a picture from memory of what Xiao Jiu used to look like before he learned to look more human, and also how a lot of slave kids and slavers and people who fall through the cracks in society have demon ancestry, some more recent than others, and Shen Qingqiu always retained a certain discomfort around his own kind because of the adult slavers who sold him off, and etc etc.

[mayasaura]

Shoutout to anyone writing Mithrun Dungeonmeshi: Not feeling hunger fucking sucks.

Let me elaborate. Every day, you wake up. You think "I should eat breakfast," but you're still groggy, and that would take work, and you have somewhere to be soon, so you just add it to the list of things to do today. You go through your day doing whatever it is you do, and sometime in the early evening, you notice you're feeling kinda stressed, like you've got frame lag in your brain. Thinking is harder than it should be. After a moment's reflection, you realise you never ticked "eat breakfast" off today's chore list, but you've got other stuff going on right now so you make a note to get to that soon and move on. It's late evening. You should really be in bed, but it's whatever. You feel dizzy and nauseous. There's a pervasive sense of dread; something is deeply wrong and you can't tell what. Are you tired? Are you sick? Is the world just a horrible place inhabited by cruelty and idiots? Oh. Maybe, but you also just haven't given your idiot body its calories yet, and it's buttonmashing stress responses like a cat yowling for dinner.

It's one o'clock in the morning. You finally eat breakfast. Now it's time to go to bed, and try again tomorrow.

[astrolavas]

thinking about the... potential clawthorne woodcarving mentorship.

+ bonus cuz also thinking abt how if hunter ever met dell's palisman and got reminded of flapjack, he'd probably feel bad abt making that association cuz he knows what it's like to be seen only as someone's different version (even though the bird wouldn't mind much so lol)

[afterthelambs]

Goro Akechi is for the girls and the gays because he perfectly encapsulates the clinical insanity of being a teenage girl going through puberty. The underhanded compliments? The threats so subtle no one can actually complain? The pleasant composure hiding feral gremlin rage? Simultaneously admiring and envying your gay crush? He's like if Regina George could kill people

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I really do think a lot on Edwin’s very serious declaration of never letting the two of them get separated after Charles shows concern about it in episode 1, and it’s abundantly clear that he’s just as protective of Charles as Charles is of him. However, due to the kinds of situations they ended up in during season 1, Edwin fell a lot more into the role of the one who needed protecting, which is why I really badly want to see Edwin have a moment in season 2 where he protects Charles or saves them from being separated again, through clever words maybe, or his spell books.

I just desperately want some kind of follow through on the ferventness of his “I will never let that happen” because with the conviction of that line, god I believe it, but do I ever really want to see it too

[greywoe]

child ward in search of belonging indulges in juvenile fantasies as a coping mechanism. sad!

[age-of-moonknight]

“Systemic Approach (Part Two),” Avengers Unlimited (Vol. 1/2022), Infinity Comic, #64.

Writer: Mat Groom; Penciler and Inker: Caio Majado; Colorist: Pete Pantazis; Letterer: Joe Sabino

[ohmyglobwhatthefrickamievendoing]

Love that Izzy got in one last shot at Stede in a situation where Stede could under no circumstances retaliate and won their two season long bitch-off by then immediately and permanently peacing out

[myrkulitescourge]

i'm surprised i haven't seen any text posts yet about the Unsubtle Differences between astarion’s tiefling party/high approval forest scene and the one you get after the goblin party.

there’s something so terribly interesting about how the conversation afterward plays out depending on which variation you pursue.

like, most people have seen the tiefling party version by now. astarion basking in the sunlight the morning after, playing off most of what tav says with relative ease, even when they ask about his scars and he tells them about cazador. his cadence is smooth and composed, his smile almost friendly, even though you know, as the viewer, he’s playing a game of manipulation at this point. the only real crack in his demeanor is if tav notices that cazador’s “poem” was written in infernal, which, understandably, startles him.

but recently i watched the goblin party version of this same scene, and everything reads so differently. unlike at the tiefling party, it’s still the middle of the night when astarion tries to leave, thinking tav is asleep—almost immediately after the act, in fact. when tav does speak to him, he’s visibly nervous, halting and stammering in the middle of lines delivered unflinchingly in the other version of the scene. he gestures broadly and fidgets more while talking, his smile comes and goes. there’s even some of his distinctive high pitched, fake laughter sprinkled throughout the exchange, almost identical to later scenes where he's very, very obviously uncomfortable (like if raphael mocks him and magics off astarion's shirt to show the party his scars in act 2, or when confronting the gur children in their cell in act 3, etc etc).

siding with the goblins represents something deeply familiar to astarion, a level of cruelty he's more than familiar with and embraces likely because cruelty and duplicity, to him, go hand-in-hand with the power and freedom he craves so badly—but he won't stay the night with this tav, even if he approves of their actions. no, in this case, he'll keep to what's familiar and attempt to leave them in the forest under the cover of the very same darkness he resents having been cast into by cazador. when he gets caught, it sets him on edge, and everything he says becomes such a blatant lie to save face that tav would have to be completely oblivious not to see through him, or maybe just not care enough to.

but if tav saves the refugees? challenges his worldview and comes out victorious? oh, he'll complain of the poor rewards for his trouble at the party and whine about it being boring, but he decides to stay with tav through the night while they're asleep and on past dawn. he takes a moment to enjoy the morning sunlight, returned to his life after two centuries without. the same is true if you have high enough approval that he asks before the party, in which case, you've almost certainly hit his biggest approval gains: trusting him and supporting his safety. maybe he doesn't trip over his words when he speaks because, well, maybe this is someone he doesn't have to worry about. someone who's already more than proven themselves a foolish, heroic sort with a bleeding heart or otherwise demonstrated that they're already in his corner. in other words, not a threat—at least not to him.

does any of this make sense. i wanna study this guy under a microscope.

[raebonnz]

who up sqlointing they peter rn

apotheosis 12 spoilers below cut

literally finished drawing this right when he died like what the hell dude 😭 im literally so afraid to start the finale tho dude 13 pt2 alr made me cry 😭

[kasterarts]

Moving Forward. (Spoilers for YTTD up through 3-1b)