Constant thought in my brain recently: being chosen by the Hydro Sovereign as a sacrifice (or really, the base on which he'll judge humanity for this era) after you willingly took the blame and punishment of another person. You're told not to look at the Sovereign or lift your veil before reaching his domain, being guided only by clawed hands as cold and dangerous as the ocean depths and a voice as powerful as crashing waves.
The shock that goes through you when you see the Sovereign's lands in their entirety; bright, blooming with life...a far shot away from the dismal, rocky shores you've long heard were uninhabitable.
The Sovereign giving you free reign of his residence - except for his own chambers - and leaving you to your own devices whilst he returns to the waves lapping against the gleaming shores. To hunt? To govern? You don't know - the Sovereign has yet to utter more words than necessary and you're still too frightened to delve into the questions he's refused to answer.
Your only solace is the Sovereign's sole retainer - Neuvillette was his name, though he seemed to have trouble recalling it at first. He's the closest thing to human here, though you have your reservations. He answers some of your questions and elegantly redirects the ones he doesn't wish to answer; you can't really find it in yourself to complain. Especially when you know that this hospitality might be the last kindness you get before the Sovereign returns to claim his sacrifice.
Though, perhaps, the Sovereign will prove merciful and allow you to remain here with Neuvillette. At least for a little bit longer.
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There's something so insane to me about being able to create and recreate vintage or even ancient music, clothes, fabrics, building architecture, anything, really.
I watched this video about a lady who knit a WWII-era vest, and it was really unique, because the cable work would eat up yarn, when there were shortages of fibers. This pattern would have likely been used by people to send overseas to soldiers, and now it's being created in a time where this war has been over for generations. What were the people making this pattern thinking of? What about the people making the vest? Could they fathom a world where world wars didn't happen back to back? Could they imagine what peace felt like, or did it fade like a distant memory, a faint friend? All we have now are the remnants of their efforts, a "simple" vest that would warm the bodies of countless people the knitter would never have imagined were here on earth with them.
We're reaching across time to learn about other people - we're reaching our hands out just to grasp anything tangible. And when we've take hold of something, all we can do is say I love you I love you I love you
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You know Mandarin??
sometime in the spring of this year i kept encountering the idea on other social media that chinese is impossible to learn for europeans, that it's too difficult, that no westerner can learn or truly understand it, and in combination with a mainland friend visiting and telling me the ancient chinese etymology of some basic characters (and the 白人饭 Lunch of Suffering meme) i got fed up/enchanted and did the extremely mentally healthy thing of teaching myself basic mandarin, through about ~april to july. at some points in may i remember coming home from work, scribbling characters in my mandarin notebook over and over, doing chores, going to sleep, and repeating the cycle. a taiwanese friend on here helped out with a lot (it's much, much easier if you have chinese friends to help you, however, i am really not about traditional, although i admit it's more beautiful) and baptized me with a chinese name.
i don't know mandarin, and at this point a lot of the characters i'd learned have faded from memory, but i insist that it's not actually difficult to learn chinese (up to a point— maybe HSK 3 or 4 is where it gets really difficult). in fact, learning chinese is really, really fun.
the difficulty lies in the fact that you have to do it every single day for at least an hour, probably for more (i spent pretty much all my free time on it, but there was something not normal going on with me then). you'd think, isn't that the case for every language? yet i don't remember doing daily french like that, and i consider some aspects of french conjugation/russian grammar much more difficult than what chinese throws at you at similar difficulty levels (good luck with motion verbs, non-slavic speakers). i found learning characters to be very, very easy. they're all distinct. if you learn them together with their etymology, looking at ancient chinese and how they developed along with associated idioms, it's endlessly rewarding. at least in the early levels, there's a bit of a system to how characters and words come together and increase in complexity—sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's cute. it's a breath of fresh air to start reading even basic sentences and idioms in a language so entirely different from anything you've experienced before. many people say speaking chinese is easier than reading/writing: in my experience, that's false. i barely started getting a grasp on the tonal system (my goal was to get to HSK 1 solely through written chinese); i remember listening to the same 2 minute audio clip of two people exchanging phone numbers for half an hour or something once before getting everything right. people say "chinese doesn't have grammar" but that's not true, because otherwise it won't be a language at all, though you don't have to learn any conjugations, declensions, etc. at HSK 1-2 you just throw a modifier/particle into a sentence and you're good to go.
the other main difficulty besides tones is that imo chinese culture is borderline impenetrable if you want to have a genuine stab at it (but for this you don't, necessarily, need to learn mandarin). you can learn HSK 1-2 in a few months or a semester, but it will take you years to genuinely understand the cultural context—there truly is no context clue or familiar idea you can latch on to, as opposed to when learning a european language/history, or even turkish, arabic, persian; there is nothing in common here, and if you guess, you'll probably wind up wrong. it all makes me think of how many journalists/experts get russia wrong: i now firmly do not believe a word of what people write about asia unless i find the author knows the language
anyway
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Oh boi even more of One au in like 3 hours lol
I like to think that like how in @phoenixcatch7's Doll au there's gas versions of like cures and such in the batfam's gas masks since they don't need to breath when possessing the puppets right? I like to think there's an organic version of that with the meat puppet bodies, at least with Bruce, where the plates on his neck opens up into vents of sorts, pictured here with a few spikes removed for visibility reasons.
This gas could be some cures for like Joker venom & Fear gas and such, or it could also be sedatives, paralytics, could even vary between each member. (For example in the Cryptidverse Steph has Anesthetics on her claws, Jason has reflective powder that mimics embers/sparks, Cass has paralytics, etc).
Honestly I am just brainstorming so this could definitely change lmao
I do like to think they start developing their own venom though, gotta' have those fangs & tusks for some reason lol
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The queer comunity these days is OBSESSED with stereotyping people like it's some cute quirky lil thing it's infuriating. Lesbians looove frogs and mushrooms lmao, nonbinary people are all littol wittol rat creatures, asexuals love nothing but cake and garlic bread, transmasc little boy ukulele music, transfem TRIPPY WEIRD MUSIC, what do you mEAN you've never seen shitass lesbian film shitass lesbian film and shitass lesbian tv show what's wrong with you are you even a real QUEER? You HAVE to have seen- Shut up!! We're not a hivemind!! I'm going to puke!!
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when rooster’s face drops and he asks “what’s that supposed to mean?” to hangman’s “it’s no time to be thinking about the past”, he’s not thinking about his dad or mav. he is, in fact, thinking about the audacity of this bitch bringing up their messy personal history in front of the entire class.
(because rooster doesn’t know hangman knows about goose and what happened with mav. rooster goes ballistic because he’s totally blindsided and exposed without ever knowing he was in danger of being so in the first place.)
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