lightdescending

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An update, and a sort of final message from this blog:

I hope that I didn’t worry anyone by going dark, and I apologize if I did. Real life became abruptly overwhelming in ways that couldn’t be reconciled or dealt with quickly, and in late summer that meant the quickest way to stay healthy and sane was to cut off access to fandom for a long time (which also meant cutting myself off from this blog through which I was running most of my fannish interactions).

I am okay, and doing well, and things have stabilized and then some. This is being written at the end of the long tail of that process, so I’m feeling content with the new approaches I’m taking to fandom and Tumblr in particular.

That said, this blog will no longer be active. It was a sideblog -- and remains a sideblog -- and it wasn’t sustainable to continue using it the way I had been for about a year.

I’m still online, still active, participating, and making things -- just not here! This blog will stay up as an archive of the activities I ran through it.

I hope you all are doing well and are able to stay safe in what continue to be challenging times <3

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Lesbians will see a fictional older woman with questionable morals and emotional baggage and be like that’s my wife ❤️

#correct

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freeze! ✧ ─=≡Σ((( つ•̀ω•́)つ you’re under arrest for being so lovely. copy this message to 10 other blogs (only if you want to) that you think are beautiful and deserve it. keep the game going and make others feel beautiful! 💖💖💖💖

🥺 ahhh thank you so much, right back at you!

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*thinks about my favourite character getting fucked over by canon* this is unacceptable *goes off to write fic where I fuck them over in my own, superior way*

#yeah that’s the one

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#HA! #Nile Freeman #Andromache of Scythia #Quynh #Andy/Quynh #The Old Guard

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Nile/Kiki study to practice a new brush🖋

#STUNNING EFFERVESCENT I'D LIKE DOZENS MORE LIKE IT #Nile Freeman #Kiki Layne #The Old Guard #TUISKUUUUU Its GORGEOUS

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I’ve made posts like this before but I think time loop stories are some of the most concentrated essences of the nature of a story having a narrative function. A time loop story takes the fact that any story can be reread, rewatched, relistened to forever without ever changing the end, and makes that a literal function of the story, the infinite repeatability becoming the driving factor. And then the story says “but what if the infinite repeating cycles did change? What if it was possible to get it right, to break the loop, to free yourself from the narrative? What if the universe (the reader, the author) wants you to get it right, no matter the cost?”

#YES #Elmo flames emoji #and as pointed out by previous tags - all the iterations thereof #reincarnation; time travel; etc #I want to tell the story again #time loops #tropes #wait; let me rearrange the world for you

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speaking of competence tbh NILE???? nile just got dropped into an extremely confusing and destabilizing situation, took stock, and seamlessly integrated herself into a fighting formation that the old guard has had 200 years to practice and perfect. nile seized up the situation and slotted herself into the group dynamic PERFECTLY. and not only did she sync up with the formation, she IMPROVED it. she immediately saw a need (protecting andy) and filled it. COMPETENCE!!!!! KINK!!!!!!

#nile freeman #yeah same #the old guard

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thank you miss ngô thanh vân for making my shipper heart explode in this rainy cold night ♥

#SCREAMS AHHHHHHH #Charlize Theron #Ngo Thanh Van

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Uh... so I guess T:DF had an official tie in song and MV in China.

#OKAY ONE THIS IS A BOP #TWO I saw a Pugsley cameo and I love that #Terminator: Dark Fate #violence cw #skeletons cw

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actually also quỳnh and nile have been bouncing around my head for a couple weeks now. none of my thoughts are comics compliant but it’s my blog and al gore’s internet so:

quỳnh walking out of the ocean and nile waking up in the med tent without a scratch are both women who have suddenly entered a new and very different world. that is a very specific and alienating experience and i think they’d realize that after spending five minutes in a room together.

quỳnh knows andy and nicky and joe the way you can only know people after many lifetimes, but she’s also lost so many years with them. joe and nicky’s eyes are so much older now — and oh, andy’s — and when she looks at them sometimes her chest constructs unpleasantly, like she’s just tried to take a step and only found air instead of the ground. it doesn’t help that while they look at her with love and gratitude sometimes she catches moments where they also look at her like she’s a ghost.

and nile still feels like she’s staring at the rest of humanity through a glass window she can’t go through. her friends, her family, her whole city is RIGHT THERE but she can’t reach them. she feels like a ghost, haunting people and places that aren’t gone yet. a woman with nothing but time, with no way to comprehend the sheer scale of it.

(booker and quỳnh are ...complicated. booker has only ever known quỳnh as literally a nightmare. he has only ever known the gaping, raw absence of her. she’s only dreamed of him in her semi lucid moments, but they add up. the point is, they’re not starting from scratch.)

nile, though, nile looks at quỳnh and sees ...well, just someone she knows slightly less than andy and the rest of the gang. she’s not new in the way that nile is new — that is to say, young. but she’s a woman whose whole world had tilted and tilted and tilted until it didn’t make sense anymore when she got back up, and right now nile gets that more than anyone.

quỳnh looks at nile and sees another new one. she remembers, more than she has in millennia, how disorienting and terrifying this is. and she remembers andy coming through the desert for her all those millennia ago, and she remembers finding lykon and yusuf and nicolò and the centuries in the sea, and feels fiercely grateful that nile has never had to know that kind of loneliness.

i imagine they both have trouble sleeping, and sometimes it’s just the two of them sitting in the dark in the kitchen or porch or balcony. quỳnh smoking cigarettes because she likes the way they fill her lungs and teasing nile (unable to shake a childhood of ‘smoking kills’ commercials) because she won’t. nile can be pretty blunt when she wants to be, and i can’t imagine that quỳnh would pass up many chances to talk after lifetimes in a box. i think they are both trying to understand the rest of the guard from different directions — especially andy. (if you’ve ever had friends — or god forbid one or more exes— from different eras of your life meet, you have a vague idea of what andy experiences.) i think in their own ways they’re overwhelmed with time: too much and too little at once. i think they’re both struggling to come to terms with what their life looks like now. and i don’t know, i think they’d like to talk to each other about it!

#THANKS THIS MAKES ME FEEL FERAL OH GOD #Quynh #Nile Freeman #the old guard

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want to be clear that if i ever talk about a headcanon and then later discuss a headcanon that is directly contradictory to the first one, that’s because headcanons exist in a quantum state where they are all simultaneously true and not true up until the point where i discuss it in detail, in which case that is the one that is true in that instance. schroedinger’s headcanons

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Margaret Atwood, from “There Are Better Ways of Doing This”

#poetry #DONT #wait; let me rearrange the world for you

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I Met You On LJ → Episode #046: 69 Tropes (Nice), Part II

Soulmate Geese are one of the things that makes me so happy that fandom is a thing. Professional books aren’t going to have a soulmate goose!

#soulmate goose of enforcement #fandom podcast #this episode introduced my wife to the concept of this goose #and I’m SO glad I got to witness their reaction live #we love this

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This fic is a LOT of fun; and I didn’t know a thing about the Night World before reading this fic, and it was so accessibly written that I could follow everything. I really loved beta-ing and can’t wait to read this in its final form!

The long-hinted Old Guard/Night World fusion fic is here! Ft. soulmates, shapeshifters, vampires, antiques, destiny (maybe?), and religion on the first date. This is very much an ensemble fic so there should be something for (almost) everybody. There are five chapters and an epilogue; they’ll go up every second day or so, I’m still fiddling with the last couple but the whole thing is done in draft form. 

I was blocked for like four months on this because I insist on writing stories which climax in action sequences even though I absolutely loathe writing action sequences, so enormous thanks to @werebearbearbar and @lightdescending for respectively helping me smash the final few scenes and helping me get the Andy/Quỳnh storyline where it needed to be. 

#Also: Joe's POV is deeply funny and deeply lovely #<3 #can recommend #Seriously this is a great fusion fic and it was a really enjoyable ride -- I can't wait to read these chapters as they're posteddddd #thank you for letting me beta!

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Ngl this one makes me laugh quite a bit

#SCREAMS #Grace Harper #Sarah Connor #Terminator: Dark Fate

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“red is rare in the landscape. it gains its strength through its absence; momentarily, in an ecstatic sunset… then it’s gone.  painters use red as spice.”  —on red, by derek jarman.

↳ nile freeman appreciation week, day one: favourite outfit

#nile freeman #the old guard