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Patiently waiting for the fanart of Sam wearing sunglasses and that one shirt that says "I'm not a step dad, I'm the dad who stepped up"

#I desperately need this #I could probably do it myself #Who knows maybe I'll make a shitty drawing of it #tmagp

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placing my hands out placatingly, asking everyone to please be cool and not reignite og!elias burnt out gifted kid discourse. okay? okay. I think this is setting up some more sam and gwen parallels. from mag 193, we know that elias bouchard (original flavor) was told from a young age that he was smart but lazy, he was squandering his advantages, and he was wrong to envy other children because they were meaningless and he was better. he seemed to internalize this to some extent, because by the time he was in his early twenties he had no friends and no family and no real life, just the certainty that he was destined to deserve better.

I think it is reasonable to assume that gwen received similar messaging during her childhood, as she seems to be treating the OIAR the same way elias treated artefact storage (as a stepping stone job to a bigger career waiting for her up the ladder), and she takes a lot of offence when she feels disrespected. from magp 03, we know she's reticent to tell her friends that she's still working this same job, especially because the friend's party she was going to was to celebrate making partner at a law firm.

from this episode, we know that sam was declared "gifted" as a child and his parents rigorously enrolled him in every program they could find, and it started going down hill when the magnus institute rejected him (did they reject him outright or was he there for a bit and then kicked out? what he said to celia doesn't quite fit his earlier statements, but moving on). he has a lot of pent up and fixated feelings about not being chosen by them, he didn't get into oxford, he just missed the highest grades, and he's reticent to tell his parents that he's working this job, especially because he used to be at a law firm.

we know the bouchards are a wealthy and influential family, and as sam speaks with a south asian accent I think it's safe to assume that his family immigrated. of course, there's a massive amount of variation in the socioeconomic statuses of south asian immigrant families in the UK, and I don't know enough about how british gifted kids programs work to know if sam having been in a bunch of them would imply anything about his parents' disposable income, but nonetheless I still think their different backgrounds potentially say a lot about how they handle these feelings of not meeting the high standards that were expected of / promised to them. gwen is fighting to be on the same level of social status and power as her peers, and sam probably felt like he was he had opportunities for upward mobility in this brand new place but kept failing them. it's causing both of them to be very active characters, they are the two people pushing the story forward the most by far, but the ways in which they are active diverge greatly.

gwen, until recently, had felt like she was unfairly stagnating, like she was "not most people" and was cut out for better, and being constantly barred from climbing the ladder made her both resentful of lena and extremely paranoid / insecure about her own worth. now that she's starting to crack it into the "real work," it's obviously taking a great toll on her, but she doesn't want to back out, she wants to prove herself and take what's rightfully hers and not show herself to be unfit for real power. her actions appear to be guided by an ethos that her life hasn't been wasted yet, she still has time to make good, she just needs to ignore that weakness masquerading as a conscience, please god don't let her fail.

sam feels like he's made mistake after mistake after mistake and led himself to his own desperate state where he only just managed to avoid destitution because his ex was kind enough to hook him up with an emergency job that is actively destroying his physical and emotional health, and he has pinned all this frustration on trying to figure out what the magnus institute was all about and why it didn't choose him. like gwen, great things were expected of him, but unlike her he doesn't seem to still be striving for them, that dried up when he had a breakdown at his last job. now he just wants to figure it out and make sense of it, as if solving the mystery will let him fix it and undo all that time and un-waste his promised potential. his actions seem to be guided by an ethos that, even though he's already screwed everything right up, solving the ghosts that haunt his life will some how lessen their burden and maybe, just maybe, give him closure on the Flaw That Doomed Him and allow him to move past it without dragging it still forward.

#ooh this is so interesting #I can’t wait to see how both their arcs play out #tmagp

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please you don't understand i genuinely love adelard dekker so much. "that sounds like a great way to get hurt to me, but apparently i use the word "rave" wrong, so what do i know." i need him in tmagp right now i need him to have a speaking role in tmagp I NEED HIM IN THERE DO YOU UNDERSTAND.

#Best character ever #he's so iconic #tma #tmagp

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Agnes is the father.

#This is now true to me until confirmed otherwise #agnes montague world's hottest absent father #tmagp #tmagp 13

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#tmagp #tmagp 13

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the roots have freed themselves from the weight of my meat

tmagp 3 fanart yipeee!! my fav episode so far :3

#This episode was both absolutely distusting and strangely beautiful at the same time #I can’t explain it but this absolutely captures the vibe for me #tmagp

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Clervalstein is great but what about the inherent lesbian tragedy of Elizabeth and Justine? Like are we not gonna talk about “I wish that I were to die with you; I cannot live in this world of happiness????”

#forever thinking about them #morenza #frankenstein

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college days at ingolstadt

#I adore these outfits #they slay so hard #frankenstein

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uh oh

UH OH

#JAIL!! #why are you putting me through this?? #tma

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A scientist

#GO GIRL #EAT THE SUN!! #i believe in you #tma

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Thinking about a reality where Grizzop survives home and the bittersweetness of helping Sasha raise her kids and thinking about the clutch he left behind, about his childrem he will never see again, the babies he'll never raise, we don't know how old they are but we know that at some point Sasha's kids would cross the develomental thresshold and Grizzop would have to think about how he'll never see his childrem make that progress. His kids won't even be born for thousand of years and here he is dealing with his morality even worse than before.

#crying rn #why are you doing this to me #rusty quill gaming

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In the archives. Straight up beholding it. And what do I mean by it? Heh... well let's justr say... my statements.

#tma

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I never considered smokeyeyes before discovering your blog...now I can't stop considering it and how amazing it is

*slaps roof of the Gertude Agnes ship*: This bad boy fit so many dynamics inside! They are old ladies! Only one of them looks like one! They kiled multiple people Agnes called Gertrude her anchor!! Also, consider that Agnes knows Gertude way before she become what Shasa called a stone cold bitch- she was just a human

there is so much in this ship!!

#I'm becoming more and more convinced of smoky eyes #like this stuff is good #morally questionable women <3 #tma

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Sometimes I think about how Wilde actually saw Grives burn down the Eiffel Foley because there's no way he got away from Paris before that. And about how much he had to be lying to himself afterwards to keep working for the Meritocrats without thinking about the innocent people that were still trapped there and about the small gang members that while not innocent definitivaly didn't deserved to be burned by a dragon. If when talking about how Sasha was an unreplaceble asset to Apophis he wondered how many young lost people with same backstory as Sasha burned in Paris. How many kids? If in his nightmares he would sometimes go back to exchanging puns with Sasha only for them - the team - be in the fabric while Apophis burned it.

About how the moment Grizzop presented Wilde with the list of Barret's man Wilde's questions are not about how many moles are there but "is there any proof that the Harlequins are involved with the Similacras at all?" How he was ready to belive the dragons were lying and there was something sinister going on from the start.

Sometimes I wonder if the party not being there in Paris was part of what made then still proud meritocratic agents till the end of the word. Sometimes I think about how while they didn't saw it they knew about the destruction Guives caused and they had to know that not everyone escaped. Sometimes I think how much Apophis being resonable and being nice TO THEM influenciated them into staying.

Because Sasha created the Harlequins the moment she saw Rome burn.

Sometimes in a different dragon tangent I wonder if Sasha felt weird talking about meeting Apophis and Hamid's ancestry. Trying to explain to her kids and to Cicero and to the comunity she built about the dragons that ruled her word (and weren't always bad nor were evil just complicated shades of gray) when the dragons ruinned their lifes.

#hnhngbhggh #thinking about this #rusty quill gaming

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My FTH piece for @emwoman25 is finally finished 🎉 it was a blast to work on it and quite fun to return to drawing my beloved Hamid again.

[ID: a digital drawing of Hamid and Skraak from Rusty Quill Gaming. They are both flying over a pine forest with mountains in the background. /End ID]

#this looks so cute #rusty quill gaming

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Moths and Flames or 70's Smokey Eyes

the outfits

look at this and tell me it's not them

#tma

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God I love Gertrude Robinson. You spend the season one convinced she was history's biggest ignoramus then it turns out she'd spent decades travelling the world and walking right up to whichever eldritch monster made out of nightmares was trying to cause the apocalypse this week; and then she'd do the equivalent of schpritzing it like a misbehaving cat, which usually involved murder. And she did it all while serving flawless strict librarian realness

#Gertrude is so iconic #tma