#imagine making a cohesive set....i wouldn't know

[thisreputable]

omega!ghost x fem!alpha!soap thoughts

bear with me plz. so, august of last year i read an omega!ben x alpha!rey fic that has lived rent free in my head ever since. ben had isolated himself, doing research that kept him far from civilization - far from alphas - until rey shows up

now, imagine. big, silent, deadly ghost who keeps to himself, begrudgingly accepts he needs to interact with the others of the 141, if only to kept things cohesive out on missions. accepts the fact he had to socialize a little. keeps it to the bare minimum, though. never volunteers anything personal: his past, family, plans for the future, designation. sometimes he'll give short, clipped answers, simple questions. tea over coffee, mystery novels (will never, ever admit, even under pain of death, his love for bodice rippers). action/adventure movies with a sprinkling of sci-fi. nothing too deep. nothing anyone could potentially use against him.

(price knows some things. more than most for sure. an unfortunate necessity as ghost's CO. not everything. not what or who ghost is under industrial strength blockers and the best suppressants money can buy. under the mask where simon lurks.)

so ghost's innermost everything is locked up tighter than america's fort knox. impenetrable. inscrutable. impossible to know beyond mere surface level. even then, the mask assures it's not something likely to happen.

enter joan "soap" mactavish, the newest member of the 141.

loud. young. offensively confident. vibrant. unafraid. alpha.

she smells like his and it terrifies him.

everything ghost has tried to steer clear of for longer than he can remember. since before he died and clawed himself out of the ground. since before betrayal, and being the last riley, and learning the taste of his own blood in his mouth. before ghost and ghoulish masks and too many scars to count.

since the shape of his father's meaty fists bloomed purple-red across a pale canvas. since useless and pathetic and omega became synonymous with simon.

she's everything he fears and hates and admires and envies and desires and covets. everything he ever wished but could never be.

he does his best to steer clear of her. does his job, of course. would never let anything keep him from completing his objectives, keep him from making sure everyone on his team made it back in one piece. wouldn't jeopardize the one good thing in his life just because an alpha has his skin prickling and his hind brain whining for something he'll never be worthy of.

soap's a force of nature unto herself, though. persistent doesn't begin to describe her. every obstacle he attempts to put in her way, she bulldozes right through them. leaves a trail of destruction in her wake with a beatific smile on her face and a manic, gleeful light in her too-blue eyes.

for whatever reason, she's set her eyes on ghost and nothing he does or says seems to sway her from getting closer to him. she seeks him out if they're ever in the same room. will lean into his personal space. will ask him question after question and stare until he gives her an answer good enough to satisfy her curiosity. will sit next to him during meals and shamelessly nab food from his tray before giving him things off of hers (he steadfastly ignores the warmth that pulses in his chest when he realizes everything she puts on his plate are things that he enjoys).

will place a steady hand on his arm or shoulder or back (the one time she touched his chest is seared into his memory). doesn't blink when he flinches. will just smile - a little smile that has too many meanings for ghost to parse - before staring him right in the eye and touching him again. like she's daring him to run away, to tell her to stop.

he never does, tongue tied and mind wiped of every thought.

he doesn't know what she wants, is the thing. to be friends? colleagues? more? less? to be the first to peel back a layer of the thing called ghost and brag to everyone else that she's succeeded where so many others have failed?

to be one soul inhabiting two separate bodies?

eventually, though, he buckles under her continued attentions. like all man made things when faced with the awesome power of nature, his defenses are washed away, eroded until nothing remains but the tender core of a man. of an omega desperate to feel wanted and desired and safe.

until all that's left in the aftermath is simon.

it's terrifying. he feels naked. scraped raw. unmasked. seen.

he expects many things once she corners him in his office and he gives in. expects condemnation. ridicule. confusion. scathing remarks as to his designation. expects to be left in tatters after she realizes that her efforts were wasted on him.

instead, she kisses him. instead, she slides a gun calloused hand to the back of his neck and pulls him down, down, down until their lips meet. instead, she steals the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his stuttering mind and his awareness of the world beyond a flimsy door.

ghost is remade, reborn, in the seconds-hours-years they kiss. he's left gasping, knees weak and hands fisted in soap's ridiculous (stupidly attractive and absolutely against regulations) mohawk, in the aftermath. it takes more effort than he's willing to admit for his eyes to flutter open. he's met by a sight that steals his breath all over again.

soap's eyes are blown wide, pupils rimmed by the crimson of an alpha barely grasping at self-control. a delightfully fetching blush has spread from her cheeks down the column of her throat. her lips are glossy with their shared spit, swollen and tender looking. just beyond them, he can see a hint of wickedly sharp fangs.

she's the most beautiful person he's ever seen. it's almost debilitating how much he wants her. how much he wants to be hers.

"mine," she says and it takes his foggy mind an embarrassing amount of time to realize that that wasn't some kind of auditory hallucination. that she's just... staked her claim on him. just like that.

ghost is left blinking owlishly, mouth opening and closing but unable to form a comprehensive thought, much less words.

well.

"my simon." a purr underscores her claim. "my omega."

and who's ghost to tell her otherwise? how could he possibly deny her the one thing that has ever felt right in his long, wretched life?

and then something something sudden heat and rut something something reverse knotting something something claiming bites something something years later something something retirement and pups something something they lived happily ever after

...yeah. just a silly little thot 🙂

#ghoap #ghostsoap #soapghost #john soap mactavish #simon ghost riley #cod #call of duty #omegaverse #fem!soap #alpha/beta/omega dynamics #into the wips folder

[transmutationisms]

Repeat anon from before talking about bodily superiority and piss <3 I can't believe you picked up SO spot on. I've been reading Kropotkin's Mutual Aid for a couple years, revisited it the other day, and I owe that exact read of Succession to the dude. What you said about the show presenting a sharp analysis of the characters' ethical motivations tracks with me too. I did get ahead of myself tho, 100%. I get your point now, Succession really has refrained from telling a clear cohesive politic to imagine different worlds, like anarchism or communism. Came to my next conclusion more after chewing on your reply: its core philosophy runs incompatible to liberation. This has been stuck in my head since I heard it, Jesse Armstrong in Controlling the Narrative for the S3 finale goes, "People's essential selves don't change. In a way that's what makes drama and choices interesting." I do witness that bleed throughout the show. I love that the writers put capitalism and fascism under a microscope through the characters' intimate, erotic relationships with each other. But the thing is, they tell us stories over and over of their failures to change. Like, if Succession's a tragedy about characters stuck in unbreakable cycles of failure, then is it also a tragedy that considers capitalism and possibly all forms of domination unbreakable cycles, too? If so, not a cute vibe! Genuine Q that lingers since day 1, that I don't think the show answers... yet. Unless Waystar crashes at the end with no reiteration in sight, I wouldn't be surprised if the show sticks that landing more firm for the big finale. At best I could read a core story of Succession being that the characters' circumstances (nuclear family, corporation, capitalism) keep setting them up for tragedy precisely because of their more basic senses of cooperation, and the show's input ends there. And I'd love that, honestly. But I have a feeling the show will bring us to a more hopeless place, I only don't know where yet.

ok i knew it.... yeah kropotkin had such a major influence on basically all left-leaning understandings of evolutionary theory. i mean prior to him the options were basically bourgeois darwinian malthusianism or some strain of lamarckism, which latter was 1) increasingly hereditarian anyway, 2) not emphatically structured around 'natural selection', and 3) fundamentally drawing from sensationalist psychology, which meant moral sense tended to be presented as a result of habituation rather than as a rational social interest. so you can see why kropotkin was such a game-changer for anyone invested in defending any version of evolution-by-natural-selection as a non-teleological, non-theistic, materialist view of nature---but without the addition of british capitalism lol.

anyway, to answer your actual question: yeah, this is a huge tension in the show imo, and it follows from it being a huge tension in marx. in interviews jesse has quoted the marx line right out of '18th brumaire' about circumstances constraining men, and talked about how he doesn't think people fundamentally change. there are obvious reasons why, in that particular text, marx was especially pessimistic about the possibility for people to defy their circumstances lol---1849 was his case study in history 'repeating itself' because of (what he saw as) essentially the same class tensions as in 1799 rearing their heads again. but at the same time, marx's entire political project was predicated on the notion that true revolution is not just possible but expected, as an outcome of the historical development of the productive forces in conjunction with increasing labour estrangement and alienation.

frankly i don't think the show will end with waystar destructing or anyone meaningfully changing their social, political, or economic positions. and this would be fine, IF the read is, like you said, that the continued imposition of structures of capitalist production constrains the characters to acting in this selfish, dominance-seeking, antisocial way. like, i'm fine with the notion that the entire show is a tragedy and always has been, and that the characters are incapable of change as long as their circumstances remain the same. but i agree with you that there's a risk of implying (or outright stating, lol) that people are simply and intrinsically incapable of meaningful change for reasons predating capitalism and grounded in some kind of bio-psychological discourse. i would hate this ending and this moral lol and i have been hoping for 3 and a half seasons now that the writers' room is too smart to take us there. we really will have to see how these last few episodes play out.

i'd add that i think this sense of hopelessness and helplessness can add to the show's psychological writing, for example in the cynicism and nihilism of roman. roman essentially sees capitalism as an alien force he can't control or counter in any meaningful way, so why bother? which is certainly true to how many people (even literal billionaires) feel in the face of such a complex and entangled system. and it's not like i expect the show to end with some kind of raising of revolutionary consciousness, but i also don't want it to end with a total denial of the possibility of human cooperation and mutual aid as governing behavioural principles in different circumstances. i don't believe that as a species we're doomed to the way logan roy capitalism encourages us to act, and it'll really annoy me if that's where the show lands after all this time lol.

that said, i do think no one on this show is escaping their circumstances in any material way. i don't think any of them actually want out (certainly not the kids, tom, greg, or the old guard) and i do believe that the broad outlines of the ending have been pretty clear since day one. whether or not they keep waystar they will continue to operate in logan's world because his empire was always just one articulation of this broader capitalist discourse on domination and 'survival of the fittest'. even if a character on this show tried to cash out and dip they'd still be caught in this global financial web, and none of them are inclined to do that anyway because [class interests and family business]. which is i guess to say that i don't think we will see any of these characters change on a deeper level, but i think it's possible for the show to end that way and still frame it in a way that allows for alternate readings of human behaviour and sociability IF placed in different material circumstances. we'll see whether jesse and the writers have the subtlety to stick that landing, though. ultimately yes, the show is a character study and not a political polemic, but i will be really very irritated if it turns out to be a character study premised on a fundamentally reactionary, essentialist understanding of 'human nature' and social behaviour lol.

#blood sacrifice

[astxroiid]

being married to jaskier // headcanon -- from this request

navigation

❥ first things first: the proposal.

it was more beautiful and well thought out than you thought possible. -- he’d rather excitedly led you out to the forest and into a field. -- light from the candles he’d placed on stumps danced across the grass, though the light from the full moon would’ve sufficed. -- Jaskier had flowers placed in a circle around a large blanket on the ground and a basket full of foods set atop the blanket and beside and ornate bottle of wine. -- you both ate and drank first, though you had no idea what was coming. -- he spoke of old times and adventures you’d went on together, you admired his charm. -- when he took a knee, you were shocked enough that you dropped your bread on the blanket.

❥ his speech was heartfelt and absolutely beautiful. -- naturally after you said yes you kissed him which turned to something heated as you made love on the forest floor.

❥ he’s a sucker for clichés, so he definitely carries you through the door much to your dismay.

“Jask! Put me down! M’not a child!” -- “But, my love, it’s tradition.”

❥ he’s an absolute gentleman.

massaging you after hard days and bringing you a drink while he does. -- some mornings he brings you breakfast in bed and some days you do the same for him.

❥ it’s a cohesive and fair relationship and the best one you’ve ever been in.

❥ he’s an absolute sweetheart when you’re sick

“are you sure you’re okay, darling? I can get you more soup or a warm towel or—” -- “—Jask. Honey, I’m okay. I promise, I won’t die.”

❥ begging you for a child.

"But imagine a mini us? They'd be adora-" -- "that sounds like a nightmare, jask. Not right now." -- secretly your pregnant.

❥ your house is amazing.

you have infinite time to decorate and design. -- candles everywhere, cozy furniture strategically placed. -- the fireplace almost always burning because jaskier had to choose a cold place to live. -- it's fine though, you enjoy the cold (most of the time).

❥ having geralt over all the time.

you've trained him to take his muddy shoes off before coming inside, but figuring out what to do with his blood soaked clothes is another thing. -- he always compliments your home. -- geralt is the sweetest to you. -- "jaskier, your wife looks especially lovely this evening, wouldn't you say?" -- "i would say she looks especially wonderful every day." -- there's a designated room in the back for geralt to crash in, and a designated box for all the clothes he brings in covered in gods-know what liquid. -- it's Jaskier's job to wash them. -- "why must i?" -- "because. He's your best friend, and you get to clean up behind him." You smile.

❥ having a small farm with plenty of sources for food.

you gave each of the hens nature-themed names. -- the two cows got named daisy and dandy. -- your favorite group to harvest will always be the strawberries, stealing some to eat in the moment being a habit by now.

❥ jaskier got a dog to heard the sheep.

he named him Bailey and taught him how to sit, lay, and shake within the first 2 weeks. -- he cuddles up to the two of you at night, keeping you both warm. -- his best friend is a brown sheep named Jack. "Jaskier, your dog just farted." You say, half asleep in the dark of the bedroom. -- "no, love, that was me." He says apologetically.

❥ going on vacations and making geralt take care of the house and animals for you.

"And where is the dog's bed?" geralt asks, begrudgingly. -- "oh he sleeps in the bed with us usually." Jaskier quips. -- "great." -- and even though geralt seems displeased with Bailey, everytime you leave and come back home you find the two cuddled up together in bed. Fast asleep.

❥ vacations to the beach every summer.

there's a little hut jaskier build a couple years back that you share, usually opting to sleep under the stars anyway. -- swimming together every single day your out there. -- catching and cooking seafood. -- always bringing home extras for Bailey and geralt. -- you collect a sea shell each year you go, making a memorial wall for all the trips.

❥ the love songs jaskier writes during married life are some of the best in his career.

every new song gets massive cheers and applause from any crowd in a tavern that hears it. -- of course every song is about you. How you'll they not be? -- Jaskier hasn't wrote a sad song since the day he said his vows.

❥ he's a total bed hog.

jaskier and Bailey both, though mainly Jaskier takes up almost the entirety of the bed, tangling himself in the blankets. -- and yet, he feels bad every morning he wakes up and sees you on the edge of the bed, curled in a ball. -- you never mind, staying asleep for all of it.

❥ and somehow, the most obnoxious man you ever met became the best man you'll ever know.

omfg I'm so sorry that took me so long to write for you, love! that writers block came from nowhere jfc.

#jaskier #Jaskier headcanon #headcanon #the witcher #jaskier the bard #jaskier the witcher #request #jaskier x reader #jask

[ludwigbeilschmidts]

a symptom of being human - master post

a symptom of being human is my humanverse gerame & pruk hetalia au. i am hoping to write a cohesive story about it one day but for now i'm compiling this information here (taken from discord & my google doc) for you to look at. i'll link to the other posts here.

all posts of this au will be tagged as #asobh.

general info.

it's set in germany. arthur meant to study abroad for two semesters, but ran into gilbert because they studied the same thing (art history) and then never left. alfred wanted to escape the unites states and went to germany as an au pair, which is where he met ludwig.

arthur and gil are 4 years older than lud and al.

ludwig has autism.

alfred & gilbert are trans.

arthur speaks fluent german, alfred is learning german but is having a much harder time learning it than arthur.

alfred and matthew are still twins, but matthew lives with his father in canada, while alfred lived with his mother in the united states. they still talk generally.

the next paragraph is technically also general info but it needs to be expanded so it gets its own bullet point list here.

gilbert and his thing with death.

terminal illness! discussion of death and dying!

gilbert has an unspecified illness that is going to kill him before he's 30. i haven't decided on what yet, but it's a degenerative disease that he was born with, and it got diagnosed when he was a young child, and he has been raised with the knowledge that he won't make it past 30.

UPDATE: gilbert has hermansky-pudlak syndrome type 1, an extremely rare autosomal disorder, that causes albinism, bleeding diathesis, immunodeficiency, and pulmonary fibrosis.

he has a life expectancy of around 30, and has been raised with that knowledge. he's well aware he's going to die.

so is ludwig, of course, but it's still hard on everyone. ludwig cannot cope with the concept well, because he cannot fully grasp it.

gilbert's mortality especially becomes an issue once the relationship between arthur and gilbert becomes serious.

because gilbert didn't talk about it when they got together, because he assumed they wouldn't stay together long enough anyway, and then suddenly arthur is proposing to him and gilbert realizes this is a conversation they have to have immediately, 'cause he will not marry him under false pretenses.

gilbert is pretty optimistic despite the dying thing, usually. he planned his own funeral because he's pragmatic like that. his testament is written and he jokes about it constantly, he doesn't care because he never knew anything else. but of course even he has his limits and gets very, very upset about it sometimes.

when it comes to leaving his family behind, or even more personal things.

like settling down or starting a family he has difficulties dealing with it. because he's good with kids, maybe would even like some, but he knows it's not really feasible. he wouldn't live long enough to see them growing up, and he couldn't put the stress on arthur on raising children alone, and he couldn't put the stress on the children either. to lose a parent. adopting isn't an option because of that, and biological kids even less so because he would be too scared of passing his illness on. and he is really struggling with it, because it's something he always wanted.

the only person gilbert really talks about his issues with is his father. gilbert can't possibly imagine how hard it must be for him to know he's going to lose his son, but he talks things through with him a lot and in the end they both feel better, especially because gilbert sometimes just needs to rant.

that and his therapist. because you bet your ass germania put this kid in therapy the moment that diagnosis came.

links.

the german family. german family part 2.

pruk.

germerica.

bad friends trio.

roderich.

misc.

fic: baby, pull me closer. [prueng, explicit]

[will be updated with other links, like arts or fic.]

#hetalia #asobh #hwa germany #hws prussia #hws america #hws england #pruk #gerame #germerica

[sheepishs]

dumb question but how do you do those color studies for fictional characters (like the one you did for the dr2 cast)? i can do color/light/shading studies when i have a reference but when i try to make them up from imagination my brain has trouble checking whether the shadows and colors are accurate. any books/videos youd recommend?

there are no dumb questions when it comes to art!! its hard to figure things out on ur own :D

honestly its difficult to describe how i do them because for me its a very self-indulgent "turn my brain off and put colours wherever until it feels right" type of activity. but i will put my general advice under a cut because i talk a lot about drawing

my main advice would be to keep doing what ur doing, studies will always be more useful than anything else. for me i see the most improvement when i just chill out and observe things irl even if im not drawing them. i genuinely just stare at things and think about their colours, no need to do anything more than observe.

im the worlds #1 art tutorial hater so i don't have any cool youtube recommendations or anything but The Practice and Science Of Drawing by Harold Speed is public domain and is very good for just bringing ur brain back to the fundamentals of how drawing works if you haven't read it before.

in practical advice, my drawings improved hugely once i started paying attention to values. its easy to check this when doing digital art by having a layer thats just a flat midtone grey with the layer style set to saturation. i constantly turn that layer on/off whenever im drawing to make sure im happy with the amount of contrast between dark and light, and also to see whether im happy with the shapes of the highlights and shadows in my drawings.

to me making sure the values are correct is much more important than anything else. its always possible to go in and change the hue or saturation of a colour to make the drawing more cohesive, but much more difficult to correct the values if you've placed a bunch of colours in the same mid value range.

while im doing studies or just drawing in general i also save swatches of colours that ive used that i think look good (not sure if this is a feature on all drawing applications but i think it is in most major ones like photoshop, procreate). you can probably see similarities in colours that i use throughout the things ive posted because if i feel like i don't know where to start, i often start by placing colours that ive used before and then modifying them to whatever i want. its also fine to look at real things when you're drawing fictional characters, i'll often just take breaks to look at a bunch of photos or videos or even just go outside to refresh my brain on how things look.

last and most important thing ever is that sometimes ur colours will just look like shit. i have made so many bad drawings in my life with muddy colours and poorly done lighting but i just keep going until i make something that i like 💪 i think for me the most important thing ive ever done is just let go of the expectation for my drawings to be good. sometimes they are just complete garbage but to me thats an indicator that im doing something outside of my current skill level, which is exactly what leads to improvement. so i wouldn't worry if it feels like your brain is having trouble working through certain things at the moment, it just means your practical skills are in the process of catching up to your observational skills

#i hope i dont sound like an asshole or pretentious or anything sorry if i do #i just unload all of the things i wish someone had told me earlier whenever someone asks for advice

[nyaagolor]

I just finished Adastra and I am about to make that everyone's problem

Tldr: it slams and (if you are over 18) you should play it

Disclaimer: Adastra is an 18+ VN. There will be no nsfw content in this post but like. If ur a minor get outta here

This isn't a liveblog, since I already finished the game, but it's a pretty similarly scattered collection of my thoughts while playing so there's no real narrative cohesion to this post. If u were looking for a detailed review just watch the video by Boringkeith

I think the biggest thing about the game to me is how insane the plot gets at Act 2. Act 1, while admittedly kind of dull, does a great job at setting up characterization and tension over time, introducing motivations and worldbuilding in a really natural way. The way the author handles the delivery of information is just. Fucking fantastic if I'm being honest, and the conversations-- ESPECIALLY arguments-- just feel so natural. There's a great tension and release that the game has, and it's a really gripping story. I think writers like this shine in this medium because God. GOD. the dialogue is good. Then Act 2 happens and shit hits the fan and does not STOP hitting the fan until the poor thing is bowled over and unplugged from the wall. Genuinely unhinged, the pacing is breakneck and it is GOOD

The protagonist actually being their own person was also fantastic, and honestly one of the only ways I can see this story going. Despite inevitably being a romance VN with intertwined political drama, I never really felt myself occupying the protagonist (Marco)'s role too much, and this is for the better. Ultimately, Amicus (the love interest) is perfect for Marco, but not for me. Neferu is hotter anyway. But Marco? Amicus??? Those two dumbasses are made for each other. Plus, the actual codified personality of the protagonist allowed for a great deal of information to be presented and withheld in ways that wouldn't be allowed by a blank slate protagonist. The dynamics wouldn't have worked as well either, and I think the story is all the more engaging for it. I, personally, would have been more lenient on Alexios but Marco? He wants that twink OBLITERATED

Cassius is the funniest character in this game I think. He just reeks of like. Loser redpilled 17 year old projecting all his insecurities into the incel takes imaginable. I'm going to wring him out like a wet paper towel. Yes he's a borderline space fascist but I can fix him I swear. When he hotboxes and trips so hard he sees God, only to have God call him a cringefail loser and he starts crying about it? Yeah that's babygirl material. Pathetic beast

It is very funny to me that the game has to spend 80% of its runtime trying to convince you that Amicus would make a good emperor and explicitly has rules in place to say that females can't rule because you KNOW within 15 seconds of her opening her mouth that Virginia is the un-debatable best choice. The fact that Amicus doesn't immediately give up his throne for her is his biggest flaw

Cato is kinda one note but he is supposed to represent heternormativity and the pitfalls of bigotry in this giant scifi queer allegory so he gets a pass. I'll admit I found him to be a lil too mustache twirling snarky towards the climax, but eh. Also I'm dead convinced that the parents meddled with him. He started freaking out when his visor got taken off and acted more erratically now that he lost his parental tech (hm) and also him crashing the parents' ship was totally out of line with his motives even as mentioned by other characters. The parents def manipulated him I can feel it

The Parents are sus as fuck I will stand by this. The game really makes you want to choose the option of trusting them (and I did bc I just want Marco and Amicus to be happy) but like. Fuck man. They mad shifty I don't trust like that they got some other shit going on. BoringKeith says more than I ever could about it just watch his video

For personal reasons I am furious about them not showing the ram civilization. We know about four of the civilizations (greek cats, roman wolves, egyptian jackals, and indian tigers) but like. What about the rest? Based on the little we've gotten it looks like the bears are norse and there are rams but I don't even remember the other two. What are they I want to see them

My only mark against this game is that both of the disabled characters are evil. I don't think there are any non-villainous disabled people which kinda blows. I heard Echo is better about it which is good? but even still it left a sour taste in my mouth

The art? is really good??????? I love the expressions and the way the CGs look especially. Fucking fantastic

The themes of homophobia in this game are ROUGH and really really raw. Again not gonna talk about it much here watch the boringkeith video but Woof. This game is so good I highly recommend

Go play Adastra

#adastra #mod vex

[melonsap]

Novelist thoughts (aka I am holding myself accountable so help me)

I waited to make this post for over a month, just to make sure it wasn't a passing worldbuilding idea that I liked the thread of (I have a LOT of those, in the hundreds), but this one's stuck around and continued to develop into its own thing.

I need to state that this happens very, very rarely for me. Finding ideas is extremely easy, and finding ones I like enough to obsess over isn't much harder than that. The trouble is hanging onto it without getting bored—it has to develop, partly on its own, and hang onto my attention. As I get deeper into it, rather than approaching a topic and going "I need conflict from this, what can I do?" an idea that sticks long-term continues to give me threads to follow without my bidding.

My biggest (and arguably first) world like this is one called Oremus. I started it in October of 2018 after watching Mary and the Witch's Flower, and I'm still adding things to it to this day. It's a fun world I like to play with, from history to fauna to magic, and my roommate and I sometimes make mini-stories that take place in it that let me expand on it more. However, it's very much a kitchen sink sort of world; it started from a collection of concepts I just found vaguely cool and ran with, and some evidence of that can be seen in its construction—the names of different places having little cohesive identity, the bits and pieces borrowed from media I was into at its inception (which have evolved to become their own things, but still have transparent threads), the kinds of settings I like to explore with it.

This also plays into its size; while it's huge and expansive, with me doing things like making entire biomes just to account for the fact that I wanted giant foxes, there are parts of the world that have much more identity than others, and a cast of nearly a hundred unique characters with their own lives and stories. That's not a bad thing, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it's evidence of how much I've been able to grow as a writer over time, and how much practice I've had at making settings and people feel unique with minimal input.

The problem with it is, I built a world without a story to tell.

You could tell a lot of stories in Oremus, but it wasn't made to tell a story. Which means that the things I want to show about it are completely isolated from each other, and trying to build a novel out of it is a daunting task, if not outright impossible. Which country do I start in? What characters do I use? How will cameos of characters I like not derail whatever I'm trying to tell with it, knowing what they're doing at that moment but not being able to show its entirety?

I've tried writing that very story, and I can never really get past the first half of the first chapter, both because the characters I've decided are my protagonists didn't get the same treatment as the characters IN the world, and because I'd have to cut and change so much of the world I made, just to fit them, that it might as well not be that world at all.

I still love it. I still plan to continue to play around in it, build and crash empires and make more and more nuances between countries. But it's not novel-making material, just like a composition notebook wouldn't work as a movie poster.

Another world I've constructed from this feeling is on a much smaller scale, called Amara. That one's a fanfiction exclusive; it takes the world of Fullmetal Alchemist and gives it an opposite foil. For those of you who play Zelda, Amara is FMA's Lorule. The characters have the same names and faces, but a few different traits that set them apart, and the world they live in is dying.

Because it's so small, and because it's fanfiction only, it's very self-contained. It's easy to make it make a story if I want it to. But that then presents the flipside of the coin from Oremus; because it's fanfiction, it wouldn't work as a standalone piece. Even if I renamed everybody and used the world I built as I pleased, without the context FROM the original world, the way I've twisted it doesn't hold any weight to it.

Both of these have been instrumental in my ability to grow as a writer. I learned how to make complex characters. I learned how to craft plots that were interesting and hammer out plotholes—I have my roommate @doin-a-heckin-science to thank for that, since any characters we put into the setting WOULD find those plot holes by interacting with them and asking questions.

Back to my original point.

I think I've caught that shooting star again. It started from an idea, then gathered up more sparks as I thought about it and what it could mean. It's an original idea I've held for a month, building a world around it and giving it its own identity. And the new thing about this one is, I actually have a plot.

Not just a cool story to tell.

Not just characters I want to play with.

Not just an environment I want to show off.

I have an actual plot. With themes. I have subplots and foreshadowing and an ending. I have an outline.

I never make outlines.

I'm writing this here partly, as stated, to hold myself accountable. I love this idea and I don't want it to burn out, which so often happens with fresh new worlds once the novelty's worn off.

But another big part of it is excitement. It's a world I want to see on paper. It's a STORY I want to see on paper. It's something that's actually motivating me to read, and study, and practice, with the hopes of publishing it one day and signing copies, running a blog about its worldbuilding and conlangs.

I don't know how to end this essay thing off. It's just sort of an update on where I am in terms of…ME. It's a thrill and a daunting task and it's something I really, really look forward to.

I'm going to keep it under wraps, at first. I don't know what exactly I can say or not say without wrecking my publishing chances before they've started, and I don't want to disappoint people by talking about things I might have to axe later. But as I get closer and closer to making this book a reality, expect to see more details and ramblings and other such pieces of this puzzle I'm cutting.

Thanks for the read.

#torchblooded #writeblr #long post #i actually went and tracked down the post i made when this idea started #because genuinely it began out of spite #i heard the reviews on witcher blood origin and got so disappointed with the worldbuilding that i went off to make my own fantasy world #just to get my proper fix of it #i made a post when that happened #and immediately after that started adding things to my notepad app on my phone #anyways this idea was born on Dec 27 2022 #and the genuine point where it was conceived was when i typed 'I’m gonna go write something fantasy to get my fix instead' in a tag #and then i did #https://www.tumblr.com/melonsap/704842883362111488/netflix-sigh #^ that's it that's the one #at 6:22 PM #just...wow

[zoestarlings]

Not sure if your taking broken cursed Au ask right now, but how does Vanessa and Hat Kid interact in that Au? (P.S I may be making something for your Au if you don’t mind)

hmmm... i wouldn't say they are on good terms but not that bad either? Vanessa most likely doesn't remember Hat Kid at all, but Hat Kid DEFINETLY remembers her and i think at first Hat will be reeeeally salty and bitter towards her, while Vanessa is hella annoyed that this little weird kid seems to not respect her at all. but later maybe this will change to a more friendly tone? i've said that i don't really want to redeem Vanessa but she should eventually at least get a little bit better since this time 1) no one is going to tolerate her behavior; 2) someone may get concerned enough for her to actually offer help. also HK is appearantly not a person to be mad at someone forever, looking how forgiving she is to many people who tried to literally murder her in the game. so i've been imagining their general relationship to be a bit like what we see between HK and Snatcher in a sense that they are teasing each other and stuff, but still spend time together. i just wouldn't call it friendship particularly? they are not as attached to each other as HK and Snatcher. it seems Vanessa used to like kids in the past, so maybe something is left in her since these times, and she will be okay with playing and chatting with Hattie when the mood is right.

note: i'm not really sure how much HK knows about Subcon's backstory here? both her knowing it all and being like "so okay how do you guys know each other?" are valid to me, but this can shift her initial attitude towards Vanessa greatly. this part is not set in stone. the timeline of events is also unclear, i mean, HK is still on the planet, so Mu hasn't been defeated yet? or perhaps something made her to stay on the planet a bit longer? a lot of this au is just me thinking about Vanessa and Snatcher and how they learn to live again and how they start to understand each other a bit more and also how they are big dorks lol, so many, many things are really floaty for now and open for discussion and questions. so, in the end, i don't mind your desire to do smth on the au at all, please feel free to do it, i will be glad to see!

P.S. btw i have a long post in my notes about my overall headcanons on how Vanessa got to the point we know her at, if that helps to better understand my vision that does apply to everything i do with her i can edit it to be more cohesive and post here if anyone is interested

#broken curse ahit au

[magicshopaholic]

Ok, so for part two of my feedback, my actual thoughts around this. more generally.

First, this is around the F1 worldbuilding. I used to watch it with my ex and his brother so I kinda get it but I'm not big on following sports. What I do enjoy is the behind-the-scenes, the pressure, drama, politics, emotional toll, etc, so I enjoyed the Netflix series. I think you're including just enough to get what's happening and what's at stake (either during the race, like the fraction of a second, to the type of maneuvres, or outside of it, like how 25 points are so detrimental and how loosing to Max is what's she's been running away from this whole time - I'm proud I remember this actually from my actual F1 knowledge). There's not too much detail to the point that it's overwhelming or boring for someone who isn't a fan, but just enough to set the stage and make us invested. I wouldn't usually seek out to read about sports in general, but I think I would read other fics of yours in this setting based on this.

Second, damn I feel for Dilara, the pressure of the position she's in would be huge anyway, but to add to this being the first woman racing with the men (wow imagine this actually happening... it hasn't right?), to loose 25 points over a teenager on a Vespa when you're already stressed to the max, man she needs a hug and a drink and an island holiday, away from all things BTS lol.

Also, I like how you've written this timeline. Like you've skipped a huge plot point, then slowly revealed it, with a tini tiny bit of info at a time. Keeping us on the edge of our seats, I like it. Also, the way all of their stories show such different couples. This one is probably the most dramatic, I like that some of them provide us comfort (i.e. Namjoon x Kaya & Jungkook x Lia - JK & L my faves I miss them, good old fluff is needed to cleanse us from the stress of Jimin & Tae), others not so much lol.

Your fics are a unique collection of cohesive works, with enough realism and distinction between stories, also with OC with clear and defined personalities, that I find myself being extremely enthralled by your work.

Overall, 10/10 looking forward to whichever member you choose to post next because you could write about Spongebob at this point and I know I'd enjoy it. This is to say that regardless of my go-to preferences for casual reading, I will always enjoy your stories.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk, it is now 2am and I should crash soon.

Be still, my heart

Firstly, I LOVE that there are a few readers mentioning how they used to watch F1 or maybe watch DTS or have like a bit of knowledge and it's all suddenly coming in handy 😂 But absolutely, the important stuff isn't about who's in which team or how the race is going but the nuances of it, like what a big deal 25 points is or how quickly drivers can lose a seat. I'm not a sports buff by any means either but I absolutely love F1 and I need to make a conscious effort to not detail out unnecessary stuff (my initial drafts are so much more race heavy - exciting, but only if you're a diehard fan).

Timeline: yesss. I thought about it quite a bit, about making it linear or doing it this way but in the end, I chose to kind of mirror how it happened to Dilara. Again, not giving anything away, but it's a fair sense of foreboding before the truth hits her in the face and that shock is still kind of staying with her.

I'm so glad you love the different couples! Different people have different dynamics and I can't imagine Seokjin, for example, having this level of drama in his life. He just wouldn't have the patience for it while Tae, despite everything, is such a passionate person that he would lowkey like a certain level of drama (not this level, but a Confessions level probably). Namjoon and Kaya probably think themselves too mature for stuff like this and Jungkook and Lia are way more laidback - so there's something for everyone <3

Thank you so much for enjoying my work and my OCs (my loves) AND taking out the time for such a fantastic review. Honestly hoping to post the first Yoongi and Hoseok ones soon so that all characters are truly interconnected so I hope you enjoy those as well!

#out of words to appreciate this :') #the best reviews #notes🍷 #taehyung x dilara #seokjin x nari #namjoon x kaya #jungkook x lia #quarter-life-crisis2

[saltypiss]

Ask yourself this: Is there any point in pushing graphics anymore. We're genuinely at a point where it's become an intervention.

The sheer amount if budget put into graphics, aka marketing, is unbelievable. We've discarded artistry to the point that most people's highest standard is still Silent Hill 2 for the PS2

That's not a "Grams tobay R all poopy, my gen best gen!" I'm a PS1/N64 head, I know the fact every screen projects a different image impacts the overall view into whatever people operate. I don't and have never cared about graphics. I've been impressed, but never have I bought a game solely for it, there's no point.

See, the issue is people don't know the difference between artistry and graphics. The problem with gaming as it progresses is it's discarded artistry to push for a realistic or impressively clear image that honestly? Does nothing.

Seeing the pores of a character's face isn't creatively intriguing, it doesn't inspire me to create worlds or scenarios in my mind. It doesn't make me more interested in the character, the setting, the world, the story, which is also yet another problem to get to later.

You know what intelectually intrigues people? Makes them creatively consider concepts they otherwise wouldn't have concieved? Making the player stop and examine, not look, examine. Not judt take in "the detail" but actually examine and creatively or intelectually consider more than it's face value.

Do you have a trashcan? Go look at it. Really take some time too. Hopefully it's clean, but still. Is there a sticker you didn't know about? Maybe you'll find the manufacturer's date, or what company produced it. Maybe a scratch you never knew about. In fact, the scratches on the bottom, they've come from so many moments in time, but where, when?

You can take in alot just by stopping to look at something that, all you did was consider at face value, just a trashcan. Notice entire new things that otherwise just blended right in. I call it the Trash Can example. Because it's more than trash, it's what you percieve it to be.

Being able to tell one of Claire's tits is bigger than the other honestly doesn't do anything for me. Does it happen in real life...? Yeah. What does it add tho. What does it mean about her. Jack shit.

Just adding detail isn't necessary, it's the purpose and ability to see why that matters. The trashcan's bottom is scratched because I slide it accross the tile floor in the kitchen sometimes. That's detail that in a game at surface level is meaningless, but it's something to consider if you analyze it.

Just shoving as many fucking polygons on screen, as much blur and bloom, sunray beams and god damned grey filters? It does nothing for me. It doesn't need to be technologically impressive. It needs to serve a point.

The best way to examplify it is to imagine a flashlight, and imagine a little village that's being shown by it, it's at an angle, and everything is set up in order to present a perfect image, the shadows on the roofs don't block one another entirely, allowing every top of the triangular shape to have light upon it on on side, the people below are set up in ways to bolster their sihlouettes against the light of the floor surrounding their shadows that obscures parts of them as it falls to the ground.

Every piece was set up with precision and purpose.

What I see from modern gaming, is adding sparklers in random places, there's a spot light on one area that kinda looks better than default, they moved most of the pieces and now it just looks like a kid was playing with toys, the flashlight was replaced with a disgustingly blue colored lightbulb on the cieling just shining everything, and someone poured an entire bucket of Grey paint onto everything anyways.

It literally looks like nobody had any cohesion with anything with the graphics department of most companies. It straight up looks like they have a checklist of advertisable graphics they just slap in and the developers just have to work around it.

Silent Hill 2 stands out for a ton of people, not me because I honestly hate it and prefer SH1&3, because it came at a time where all developers could do was their best with the graphics, and then spend time on making it actually look good. Before motion blur was standard, before grey filters were cliche, before lighting was overbudgeted, before filters up the ass were overused, before the budget for gaming was remarkably not increased for development, but the advertising and marketing was.

We're getting worse games solely because it's more marketable to spend time on the dipshit, amateur hour graphics. And some poor soul is deperately trying to make the artistry present, but it's impossible, you have a marketing team who's making trailers and screenshots, don't forget the bloom! And the motion blur for trailers! Hey that sunray technology would look good herex what do you mean you can't possibly optimize that in time? Do it anyways!

Can anyone. Please. Can anyone tell me when and where gaming has improved since early 2010?

It costs more because publishers saw opportunities in the mobile market, so followed along and hired addiction experts to get you financially and mentally worse just by having their games in your life.

They cut out content to sell later because nothing was going to stop them. Capcom put On-Disc DLC a long while back and people just act like companies stopped doing that for some reason. DLC was NEVER a default, it was a consideration, and not one that should've been treated as updates.

Microtransactions forced gaming into an always online bullshit atmosphere, where now every game you launch, from release, to the end of fucking time, will be outdated because the main menu has a store option, the main menu also has an update section, a blog post section, a website section, a community page section, a DLC section. Your children will play incomplete games not because of any uncontrollable force but capitalism. Don't get me started on both DRM and preservation.

Look, all I'm saying is gameplay has not remotely improved since early 2010s, we've merely obtain minor QOL with a massive reduction in literally everything else.

Lemme ask you something. You know how you thought gaming couldn't look any better than (x)? And you bought the newest tech to play it at resolutions and framerates consoles couldn't even dream of?

Do you have any legitimate reason to upgrade again? Honestly? It's not like gaming looks better, it just has RTX or whatever, and it's kinda shit. Worthless, is the actual thing I'd call it.

We went from developers having to make the lighting on textures directly in multiple cases, meaning they had to focus on details that a program doesn't, to...that, a program that doesn't give a shit about details.

It's a mess. It's embarrassing. Capitalism and the forceful need for technological growth has bombarded the industry into an honestly shameful display. I've genuinely never been embarrassed of gaming, but with gamers genuinely demanding 70$ incomplete rushed products, not for better pay to developers, not for literally more than 1-2 years of development time, not for QA, not for better work enviroments, not for the removal of DLC and Microtransactions, no, solely, to give CEOs, even more, fucking, money.

Why? "Becuz gamering spensive!" No. Marketing is expensive, and you're a fool you giggles at shiny keys. I just like the sounds of them, I'm different, I'm unique, I'm alpha, uwu. Xoxo

#gaming #gaming industry #gaming artistry

[yangjeongin]

in loving memory of hyunjin’s long hair ♥ may 2020 - september 2021

#hwang hyunjin #stray kids #bystay #createskz #staysource #idolnexusedit #hyunjin #eyestrain #*gif #*ccarly #*carly:hyunjin #*hyunjin #this set is like half a joke asdsdgsddg #i think these r all my favorite hyunjin hair looks in this time period #imagine making a cohesive set....i wouldn't know #it was fun to make tho and that's what matters #the more i looka t it the more i dislike it and idk how to fix it #so i will post it and look away <3 #*hits

[lokiondisneyplus]

LOKI 4 PRESIDENT! For a narcissist trickster sorcerer with the personality of a praying mantis, there are few occupations in the world that would suit Loki better than president of the United States. A few years ago, in the summer of 2016, comic book writer Christopher Hastings imagined just that in a satirical limited series for Marvel titled Vote Loki.

Five years later, Vote Loki has found its way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the fifth episode of the Disney+ series, “Journey Into Mystery,” a variant Loki (still played by Tom Hiddleston) appears in the desolate “Void” surrounded by a Mad Max-esque posse. On Loki’s tattered blazer is a red, white, and blue “Loki” button, indicating this Loki was, uh, elected to lead. Turn on the subtitles on Disney+ and you’ll find this Loki is credited as “President Loki.”

In an email to Inverse, Christopher Hastings says he had no idea this was going to happen.

“I found out [they were doing Vote Loki] when a trailer for the show featured the campaign outfit from Vote Loki,” Hastings tells Inverse.

When Inverse exchanged emails with Hastings, it was prior to the episode’s premiere, to which Hastings said he was “very curious to see exactly what from the comic gets into the show.”

“I love time travel and multiverse material,” the writer says in praise of Loki. “I am a big fan of the TVA as a setting. I'm eager to see how it goes, and what it might mean for the next phase of MCU movies, especially since multiverse wackiness seems to be a major part of those upcoming movies.”

In 2004, while a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Hastings wrote and illustrated The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, a serial webcomic about a doctor who is also a ninja. The series was a cult hit, at one point attracting 110,000 unique visitors a day. By 2011, Hastings was doing work for Marvel, writing single issues of A+X and Howard the Duck. With Chris Bachalo, he co-created Gwenpool — a bizarre blend of Spider-Man ex-girlfriend Gwen Stacy and Deadpool — and penned the 2016-2018 solo series The Unbelievable Gwenpool, teaming up with Japanese studio Gurihiru to create the character’s deeply unique comedic tone.

But during Gwenpool, Hastings spent the summer of 2016 playing with a different Marvel trickster: Loki. In the four-issue miniseries Vote Loki, Hastings spoofed the chaos that was the 2016 race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In Vote Loki, an ambitious Loki seeks the seat of the president with a very unique campaign strategy: being honest about lying.

With “President Loki” having a minor cameo in the MCU, Inverse caught up with Hastings to look back on his explicitly political riff that took place inside the Marvel Universe.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Take me back to the origins of Vote Loki. When did the seed for the story plant in your mind? What was going on in the world of culture/politics at that time?

Gosh, it's tough to come up with one thing specifically, because we were making the comic by the seat of our pants, and so many things got scrapped and rewritten along the way, often at the last second. But one of the core topics I wanted to cover had to do with narratives versus reality. It's kind of a given that in the world of politics, truth is this malleable thing, and now more than ever all you have to do to make people believe a lie is to repeat it enough times.

I liked the idea of Loki playing with narrative in a way that wasn't necessarily outright lying, more bending. (Except the bit about being born in Maryland. One outright lie there.) The other driving point I wanted to explore was how Americans can have a tendency to incorporate their national-level politics into part of their identity, and what that does to a person, particularly when a character like Loki is the one on the ticket.

What sort of conversations did you have with Marvel about a political satire starring Loki? What was the elevator pitch that got approval?

Like I said, things changed so many times, I'm not even entirely sure how many versions were kind of approved and then scrapped on the way to get to what was actually published. I think it was more that I assured editor Wil Moss that I could jump on the book (which Marvel was determined to make; they just hadn't decided who was writing it when I was pitching) after talking about the stuff about narrative and identity, and the basic idea that the viewpoint character shouldn't actually be Loki but a journalist covering Loki's campaign.

Vote Loki introduced the character of Nisa Contreras. What was the primary inspiration for her?

That would be my real-life friend, Nisa Contreras. She's not a journalist, but she’s someone I'm sure could take down Loki if he were a) real and b) got on her bad side. I wanted the story to be more about witnessing the tension and the comedy of Loki running for president, about not knowing what was up his sleeve. And so I came up with [a] journalist.

Vote Loki was published over the summer of 2016 when the election was ramping up in awkward ways. (“Pokémon Go to the polls!”) Did the real election influence the comic in any way, including any specific moments?

The comic was a direct response to things that were happening during the 2016 campaign, specifically that a “joke” candidate that was obviously terrible could get pretty far with enough media oxygen and a comfortable political system that ignored the disgust a lot of people had with it.

Vote Loki ran for four issues. Was there ever a possibility for more?

If it was a smash hit, I believe there would have been a President Loki to directly follow Vote Loki.

What do you think of Vote Loki's inclusion in the TV series?

Top five surreal moments of my life.

Do you think Vote Loki could be the focus of its own adapted series/movie?

Oh for sure. You wouldn't even have to take the material from our comic; there's so much more brand-new political madness that a new Vote Loki series or movie could tap into.

A lot has happened in the five years since Vote Loki was published. What are your feelings looking back now in 2021? Did your opinions on the book ever change?

There was a lot happening in American politics in 2016 I missed and wish I had been able to see to include. For example, how broken political polling has become. I had no idea, along with the rest of the country.

It was tricky to do a cohesive narrative amongst a shifting Marvel continuity we had to stay inside; a lot of feedback and demands from various sources within the company and an election that was changing every single day. It was truthfully (heh) a quite stressful book to write, but looking back on it I'm proud to see what we absolutely nailed about American culture. In particular, what we had to say about politics as entertainment and identity, and how a slippery enough politician can not only shake scandal [off] by speeding up an already fast news cycle but embrace and twist it to their advantage.

LOKI WILL AIR ITS FINAL EPISODE JULY 14 ON DISNEY+. VOTE LOKI IS AVAILABLE NOW.

#President Loki #Vote Loki

[iamnotawomanimagod]

how would you rank the Halsey albums, if you had to?

Hmmm... tough question, anon. It's not really set in stone! But if I had to rank them right now:

4. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom

This album does have some absolute bangers on it. I still love "100 Letters" and "Devil in Me" and "Don't Play" sooo much. But there are enough songs on it that I am not absolutely obsessed with to keep it in last place.

I still love it, though! It's one of my favorites to blast while I'm cleaning. And I still think it had the best aesthetics - I loved all the bright colors, and the Romeo + Juliet references (I am a sucker for Baz Luhrmann,) and the way she color-blocked different parts of the era. We also got so many great performances from it!

3. Manic

I will always treasure this album for the way it allowed Halsey to open up and be more personal in their songwriting. It was a beautiful, broken, bipolar little era. Came out right when the pandemic began, but had such a long lead-up that the era both never quite started and simultaneously felt complete before it really ended.

"Ashley" is probably my all-time favorite song by them. The pastel/playful color palette was really pretty and fun. It's a great album - but I don't love most of the second half, and I think the bonus tracks were absolutely robbed by not being included in the official release.

2. Badlands

Without this record, we wouldn't have Halsey. They introduced themselves as a visual artist with an edgy, neon aesthetic, reflected in the videos and their style at the time. That iconic blue hair and the leather and galaxy print and skater skirts. It was such a cool era visually, never a dull moment.

There aren't any songs on this album I don't absolutely adore. Although the lyrics are simplistic (they've come a long way as a songwriter,) they capture a really specific vibe that fits so well with the industrial-pop sound. There truly isn't a bad song from this era, even if there are some I like more than others. With songs like "Gasoline" and "Hurricane" and "Young God," it was hard to imagine a more iconic time for Halsey's career. She had come so far, and created really interesting bodies of work with her second and third albums, but for me personally, nothing really had the It Factor of Badlands. Not until...

1. If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power

A masterpiece. Visually stunning and aesthetically cohesive - goth-rock with a renaissance edge, lots of lace and chiffon, and black and crimson, and dramatic shapes. Releasing an IMAX film with a story that weaves perfectly into the real-life details Halsey divulges in the lyrics - brilliant. Epic storyteller material. And the lyrics themselves are fresh and exciting, with more complexity than ever before. There are only two songs on this album that I don't absolutely adore, and I still really really like those songs.

The mystery leading up to it made hearing the songs for the first time so much more exciting, and really gave me a chance to appreciate the album as a whole, cohesive piece. That was refreshing and impressive after Manic, especially considering that they had a baby and maintained a makeup line and filmed an entire movie, which she developed the looks for - I think they worked really, really hard to deliver something complete, and they knocked it out of the park. I want another single though. "Honey" deserves a video.

I think my only criticism for this era is that so much of it is behind a paywall. Don't get me wrong, Halsey deserves to be paid for all the work they did, and so do all the people who helped make this album possible. But at the same time, while I was fortunate enough to be able to see things like the IICHLIWP film and the Moment House performance, I know a lot of people had to miss them. Since a tour is really unlikely at this point, I hope the visuals and performances that are available become more accessible with time.

Thanks for the ask, anon! Y'all know I love the opportunity to ramble about Halsey. 🥰

#halsey #iichliwp #badlands #hfk #manic #if i can't have love i want power #hopeless fountain kingdom #manic the album #stephspeaks #asks #anon

[mysticdragon3md3]

I too was excited to see why Ryuji is trending and... ;_;

People are comparing him to a sexual abuser, like Kamoshida? I mean, yeah he shouldn't have looked down Ann's shirt. That wasn't cool. And some of his comments about Ann's Panther costume when she first got it, were not in good taste. But is Twitter seriously saying that puts him on the same level as Kamoshida? KAMOSHIDA???????????? omfg... I just can't anymore, you guys...I just can't anymore... x_x

Just this past week, I watched an Anituber video essayist mention the ubiquitous female objectification in anime as "because you know anime is going to anime", and I felt so validated about sensing that the amount of female objectification in Japanese media has become pretty much expected, normalized, even in the most unnecessary, tiniest ways. I'm so tired of being gaslit about this. Yes, Japanese media in general has a problem with making sure to have close ups of girls' bodies being ogled and women being reduced to (romantic) prizes to be coveted. That beach scene in Persona 5 did panning close-up shots of the girls' swimsuits; not the guys'. All the dating options in Persona 5 are from the pool of female Confidants; not the guys. Because "guys as romantic prizes to be won? Feh, what a *riDIcUlOuS* concept!" I understand that sex sells, that traditionally female sexualization sells to a traditionally cishet male audience which is still presumed to be the largest demographic, and that the anime industry (and presumably other Japanese pop culture creation) is actually financially high risk with low financial rewards for most studios, so they have to desperately scrape for any advantage. (Though recently, the Japanese pop culture industries, like anime and videogames, have begun to realize that there is a cishet female market, large enough to cater to as well, by mainstreaming series like Touken Ranbu. And they've also even recently begun to recognize that catering to fujoshi is worth investing into mainstreaming the BL genre, even a little bit. Thus, we're starting to get more mainstream BL fanservice, through series like Free Iwatobi Swim Club, Yuri on Ice, and Classmates.) So it's kind of our fault, for incentivizing studios to mandate and ensure each thing they make contains female objectification. The audience's spending habits and the industries' presumptions of our wants/demographics, have made cheesecake fanservice and waifu bait the most reliable bet for most studios. We spend the most money on collecting waifu bait merch and gacha cards of waifu. We argue the most about who is the "best waifu" and show our allegiances by buying their merch. We have turned waifu and cheesecake fanservice of such waifu, into the most reliable financial returns on investment for studios. And with studios so constantly, precariously on the precipice of bankruptcy, we the audience, have incentivized the mandate of cheesecake fanservice (of women/girls), even at the cost of cohesive storytelling/characterization. I understand all that. Studios are desperate, and they need to stay afloat. They need to cling and scrape towards any advantage they can get. That's why I'm so tired of people saying we're just imagining things. Anime and videogames are mandating to insert female cheesecake fanservice for cishet males, even at the cost of cohesive characterization, story themes, and good writing.

This includes Persona 5 shoehorning Ryuji into being the horny audience surrogate, no matter how awkward, nonsensible, and misaligned it would skew his characterization and previous writing. This is why fans of Ryuji often say his more "perverted" actions in canon, simply feel like a case of bad writing. Those actions don't feel like him. They feel more like fulfilling the Japanese pop media "obligation" to objectify women, than aligned with his character, as set up so far. Because anime/games just *have* to provide a POV audience surrogate character for everyone to ogle the girls through. Or at least reinforce the types of reactions they want from their audience, after showing us all these T&A shots. It felt more like fulfilling anime tropes than further building upon Ryu's established character of defending people, including women, against perverts like Kamoshida. I mean, this is the guy who was chasing down Kamoshida's car because he knew that pervert might do something. This is the guy who ran straight to the faculty office to punch out Kamoshida for torturing Shiho to her tipping point. The guy who jumped in front of a moving cab to rescue Makoto. The guy who survived watching himself and his mom get abused by his dad. And you want us to believe he wouldn't think twice about looking down Ann's shirt on the way to Futaba's Palace? Or up Ann's skirt, when she laid down from a food coma, after they Yusuke's welcome-to-the-Phantom-Thieves meal? Or so eagerly coerce Ann into posing nude? o_O? Atlus wanted us to believe this was consistent characterization??? To the Atlus writers' credit, they did write Ryuji feeling too guilty about going through Project Maid-Watch and they wrote him ditching it at the last minute. But they also wrote AkiRen to look down Ann's shirt without any hesitations and they wrote morgana to also look up Ann's skirt when she laid down from food coma. The Atlus writers---and most Japanese pop culture---just seem to have an unwavering determination towards these female objectification scenes, and they just saddled Ryuji with it, because he's the "silly, rambunctious, comedy relief" character "that you won't have to feel bad when he inevitably gets hit with *slapstick* retribution". Nevermind, it's counter to the story's theme and his characterization, that they've driven pretty hard as being something to take seriously. So some Ryuji fans will just call-out his inconsistent characterization into being creepy towards girls, as "bad writing".

On the other hand, it's wholly possible and realistic for a guy to exist who is against all the sexual abuse, that scum like Kamoshida do, while still being a dumb horny teenager who will do dumb horny teenage boy stuff. (I'm sorry for all the toxic heteronormative presumptions. But that's kind of the archetype that Atlus has been trying to slot Ryuji into...unfortunately.) They grow out of it. Gradually learning to curb dumb horny inclinations, is _not_ the same level as a sexual abuser! Why are people conflating that today?! o~O????????

And from what I've seen of Ryuji in Persona 5 Scramble/Strikers so far, he has been growing out of it. There's a whole lot less creepy ogling coming from him (AKA the writers), even during scenes which any other anime would have. He didn't get creepy about the girls' yukata, he didn't strain to listen to the girls on the other side of the Sapporo onsen, he didn't make grabby hands at the girls' swimsuits again, etc. Any other anime---hell, even in the previous chronological episode of their story, in the original Persona 5---Ryuji and the camera would have been creepy about the girls' yukata, he would have shut up the other guys so he could listen to the girls compare boobs in the onsen, he would have tried to sneak a peek at the girls' onsen, and there would have been a repeat of that close up scene of the girls swimsuits, with Ryuji providing the expected lecherous audience reaction. But none of that happened in P5S. Heck, even if you choose the option to say onsen are great, as if to imply that overhearing the girls talk about their boobs is great, Ryuji gets embarrassed about the topic and immediately tries to change the subject. Watch any anime from the 2000s or earlier, and the goofy, masculine archetype, like Ryuji, would have not only agreed, but would have suggested sneaking a peek at the girls' onsen. I'm actually really surprised that the Kyoto onsen scene didn't result in fanservice, because that's usually what happens. Even in anime where the boys know to escape fast instead of sneaking a peep, there's usually a screw up where they'll Rube-Goldberg-trip into girls' boobs or trip into full-view of the girls without their towels. Any other anime or Japanese media would have done that. It's typical, expected. "Anime is gonna anime." And yet, none of that normalized perversion happened in that scene. Persona 5 Scramble/Strikers, including Ryuji, did a whole lot less "dumb horny teenage boy stuff", suggesting Ryuji was growing out of that with time. Because even if Ryuji can be a little bit of a "dumb horny teen", he still knows better than that, is curbing such inclinations, and is a much better person than to increasingly act on or nurture such inclinations.

Ryuji is a good boy. Please don't conflate him with Kamoshitty.

9:53 AM 9/17/2021 Ok. I found the original Tweet that started this shitstorm. https://twitter.com/HerielP48/status/1438677678400409607

But this Tweet isn't actually saying that Ryuji is the same as Kamoshida. I thought this Tweet was saying that the overall writing, using Ryuji as a mechanic for "pervert comedy" was a bad decision from Atlus's writers, especially since it contradicted the themes of the Kamoshida Palace story arc. I actually agree with that.

9:56 AM 9/17/2021 Oh, wait. There's a previous Tweet to that one: https://twitter.com/HerielP48/status/1438677262145101824

I see that you tried to save the first sentence, with your second sentence---which I agree with: I agree that the writing made an awful decision in having Ryuji or any character sexualize their female friends, after the sexual abuse they suffered. But your first sentence was still very strongly implying that Ryuji as a character is a problem, more than the writing injecting out-of-characterization into the character that they had already established with Ryuji thus far. That wording was just kindling waiting to start a firestorm. ~_~;

10:29 AM 9/17/2021

Well, the one good thing I'll say about Ryuji trending because of dumb, offensive reasons, is seeing the sheer avalanche of people jump to defend him. This wasn't something Ryuji got, early in the fandom! ;o; Remember when he was the most hated character in the fandom??? And now, everyone is overwhelmingly loving on Ryuji today! ;u;!!! Thank you guys. ;u; He is a good boy. ;U;

#toxic fandom #ryuji is a good boy #actually a happy ending #character analysis #out of character #writing #soooooantishuh #twitter is a hellsite #trending tags #trending #ryuji sakamoto #popular characters #popular #popularity #canon characterization #female representation #OOC #processing thoughts #rambling #tw #trigger warning

[fandom-hoarder]

listen I have so many questions about Stanford Sam, like this kid who was raised in the wild, barely aware of acceptable social conduct arrives with his 2 ectoplasm stained t-shirts at his dorm and like ????? is he very aware of it at first? or does he think he's hiding it well? and like moving in with Jessica?????? he doesn't know how to water plants and that you have to pay electricity bills ??? Like obviously he's not stupid, we know that!! But there are certain things about ordinary everyday life that are just impossible to pick up when you're raised like that. And this is just surface-level stuff, like I feel overwhelmed just thinking about how many tiny things I do in a day, just normal life stuff that I've always done, that Sam would be like ???? so weirded out by, or maybe creepily fascinated ??? Would he try and copy everyone around him maybe??? and then all the odd things that he'd probably do !!! like just basic marine survival nonsense he's dad probably taught him applied in mundane life situations that would make him stand out and he wouldn't even notice !!! And he thinks he's doing fine, people seem to accept him, but then suddenly someone mentions like... TRL or something and he's like ??? and then Dean picks him up and it all falls to pieces, because it's so EASY and ingrained and he doesn't have to pretend and it puts it into perspective how not okay he was doing at Stanford even when it felt like he was ?? god I'm just rambling, like I barely even have headcanons, I'm just so overwhelmed by all the possibilities of how this would play out !!!!

Holy crap, first I wanna apologize if this has been sitting here awhile. The Ask notification location in settings instead of notifications on the app is so weird and I get them so rarely I don���t think to check. (and the website shows that I have 4 but this one is the only one it’ll show? How does tumblr work? Oh yeah, it doesn’t lol.)

Anyway, I have so many thoughts on this! But they’re not necessarily cohesive?! Like first we all know Sam is super smart. He’s curious. He’s inquisitive. But he’s also sheltered in weird ways. There are things he’s known about the world that most people would never know about, let alone kids his age at any given time; yet the existence of those things--and the understanding that therefore potentially anything could be real--also lends itself to keeping him childlike--he had an “imaginary friend” at age nine and believed in the Easter bunny through age eleven, which is much later than the average probably???

By middle school, he definitely would’ve been feeling the strains of his otherness around his classmates, even if they weren’t constantly moving around, but of course the nomadic lifestyle just makes it even harder.

I think Sam is a very observant person, though. He figured out something was up with their dad and The Truth at age 8! So people watching is Sam’s saving grace for getting along in the mundane world. He definitely learns to mask his otherness by mimicking mundane people.

And I get sidetracked here because then I start thinking about exactly how their childhood went. We know John used Pastor Jim and Bobby as childcare/parenting support to some degree. I don’t think we really know anything about Caleb, maybe I’m forgetting something, but my headcanon is that Caleb functioned as a “fun younger uncle” type to Sam and Dean: cool, responsible in a pinch, but mostly not given childcare responsibilities because of his wilding tendencies. (they learn swears accidentally from Bobby and John, but Caleb TEACHES them.) Sam and Dean didn’t even know about Missouri until s1, so she’s off the caretaker list. They had that babysitter they met up with in uhh... Swap Meat! But largely we assume that Dean had a lot of the caretaking responsibilities; maybe with temporary babysitters in other places the same as Swap Meat.

And lbh you just can’t expect well-rounded, informed child-rearing from a kid only four years older. There’s a reason I associate a lot of weechester flashbacks with Sammy watching TV like in Something Wicked, because literally little siblings are A LOT and sometimes you just want them to sit still and quiet and leave you alone for a bit omg.(wait, give me a minute, I’m imagining little 6 year old Dean on the phone with Bobby because John ran out for food supplies and isn’t back yet and Sammy is still asleep but Dean’s creeped out in the longterm room they’re staying in because he KNOWS about the supernatural already. but then bobby gets on John’s case about it--and instead of never leaving Dean alone with baby Sam again, Dean learns from John’s belt not to call anyone when he’s left alone unless it’s an ACTUAL EMERGENCY. Or maybe, because marine, John doesn’t use his belt; maybe he uses PT instead and every time Dean thinks about calling Bobby for that reason again, his abs ache from the memory of punishment situps, or his arms get suddenly shaky thinking about doing pushups til he just couldn’t anymore.)

I haven’t read all of John’s Journal, and I know it’s not actually canon, but IIRC the bits that I’ve read from the wiki show John and the boys staying with a family friend in Lawrence for a few weeks, MAYBE a few months before John visits Missouri and everything STARTS. I think if he hadn’t picked up and left with them then, the family friends would’ve been contacting CPS because they’re starting to think John’s grief is making him unhinged. (I really want to read the journal tbh--there are bits I’ve seen that make me fantasize even more about boyking!sam storylines... but I’m getting even more off track.)

So we’ve got this weird/interesting dichotomy of kids that are groomed with these hyperspecialiizations, too weird to really fit in with other kids but sheltered from the actual hunter life also--like the fact that there ARE other hunters, like as a THING, not just their dad’s rando friends that, as kids, they may just assume know about the supernatural because their dad told them! (jfc they’re SO PRIMED to be each other’s entire world omg I’m gonna die)

So like, by being quiet and observant (an imaginative kid, by nature and by nurture as John starts to take Dean out more and leave Sam alone with his own thoughts), Sam would pick up a lot of things. But they’re never anywhere long enough for him to fully grasp everything and he would definitely suffer a bit from the Dunning-Kruger effect--not having enough knowledge about a thing, but having just enough that you don’t realize you don’t.

Let’s say Sam observes and picks up some things about normal residential life by being around a few mundane babysitters. The nature of John’s “work” would mean that, even if they were in a more in-home-daycare-like situation, they’d be likely to be the “after hours” kinds of kids that are still there when everyone else is picked up and the babysitter would normally be doing their normal life stuff: changing clothes, cleaning up from the daycare kids, making dinner, etc (sam and dean would definitely help, either out of kindness or duty or because it’s agreed that if they help out John will get a discount on their care costs--don’t mind me, just projecting my childhood onto the winchesters hahh. I’m NOT going to go off on a tangent about Dean already having so much experience caring for babies cuz of Sam. He definitely doesn’t have all the under-4s following him around begging for attention while he burps one of the three babies their babysitter cares for after a bottle. it DEFINITELY didn’t make Sam (age 4, 5, 6 maybe) jealous enough to repress the memory so that over a decade later he would claim that Dean doesn’t even LIKE kids.)

Uhh... what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Sam. Observing normal life. Anyway so maybe after things settle for the day, sometimes a babysitter will sit at the dining table with the weekly bills and their checkbook and do the bills. And Sam kind of loves things like this: it feels like something important; it feels like playing school before he was old enough to go (quick aside here: John totally enrolled Sam in school early, both because that’s the only way his age works with canon timeline and because it would make life easier if Sam was in school just like Dean--more cost-and-time efficient.) And maybe Sam goes and sits at the table and just. Watches.

And then he asks questions. When he’s curious, he doesn’t keep his questions to himself as a child (unless the subject is expressly forbidden: see Dean’s reaction when Sam brings up Mary). But his age would inevitably limit the scope and understanding of those questions. Adults are generally disinclined to fully explain the adult world to children, especially when it comes to finances, and in the 80s and early 90s?? With most of the adults of that time that I knew, those kinds of questions were considered rude and nosey. He might understand that adults have to pay bills; he may even understand something about utilities; but he wouldn’t necessarily understand all the requirements and frequency.

Though their nomadic lifestyle wasn’t stable by any “normal” definition, one thing to be said about mostly living out of motels is that your power is never cut off, or your water, or your heat. There’s always television, usually with cable. And the only form of payment you see going on is dad handing over cash or plastic at the front desk--one and done. My headcanon usually disallows the idea that they would’ve squatted in empty houses when Sam and Dean were kids (John makes plenty of bad decisions but I just don’t see him staying in a place without power or water with CHILDREN. Teenagers? SURE.) They would learn how to clean house and make proper beds even when it wasn’t always necessary with housekeeping available--both because of John’s military parenting style and because John would be most likely to opt out of daily housekeeping to lower the risk of having people ask questions.

So yeah, there are so many little intricacies of the mundane world that Sam wouldn’t be conditioned to even think about. Even the realization that he doesn’t know enough about regular life, as he grows up and longs more and more for that very thing because he’s never had more than a glimpse of it, wouldn’t necessarily be enough.

Would his natural curiosity lead him to ask those questions? He can’t ask John because he already asked Dean and got a dismissive answer because ‘what does any of that matter, Sam? we’ll never have to worry about that shit.’ and if Dean seems borderline offended by the sheer audacity of the questions in the first place, he knows John will be worse.

In the 90s, life skills were still kind of a thing in most U.S. schools. But in a really inconsistent way. Sometimes it was in health class curriculum; sometimes your math class would actually do a short focus on balancing a checkbook and banking if there was a chapter, but a lot of times those parts get skipped. You never use the whole textbook. Sometimes life skills was only in Home Ec, but H.E. was completely elective in my area when I was in middle school (the same exact years Sam would’ve been in middle school) and I’m assuming the same for most of the U.S. Sam may have taken it, or he may have taken something else instead (wood shop or computer class were the alternatives in my area). Maybe the nature of school hopping meant that he HAD to enroll in Home Ec, because resources for the other electives were finite, but somehow always managed to miss the bills and budgeting portion. Maybe he couldn’t even take Home Ec due to class size or resources and they just put him in a study hall for that period. (Maybe they put him in the computer class, where he mostly does book work until he gets a turn on the PC he has to share with his classmate.)

As an observant person, Sam totally would’ve known about TRL, I think. There’s no way at least one group of kids in the halls or lunchroom wasn’t talking about it every day in high school, especially with the advent of Britney Spears and Eminem and Jesse freakin Camp. Maybe he goes to someone’s house to try to hang out or to study and they turn it on and Sam watches raptly because it’s such a strange phenomenon and he hardly ever gets to hear new music, much less watch the videos. But he can’t actually get into it because the fangirls are annoying and his analytical mind won’t let him suspend his disbelief about how the voting works. (Maybe he tries giving it another shot in their motel room sometimes, but Dean vetoes that bubblegum pop shit IMMEDIATELY--no Sam, look, that shit isn’t REAL music; most of them don’t even play instruments. And it’s really not fair because Dean TOTALLY watched MTV’s The Grind in the early 90s for his fix of suggestively gyrating bodies before he figured out how to access porn without getting caught.)

Sam and Dean actually make a LOT of pop culture references, which always fascinates me. I imagine they did a lot of TV watching and VCR/movie renting in the times they weren’t working on a case with/for their dad (projecting again; my dad’s house was a very boring place on his weekends). The nature of Dean’s idolization of John and disinclination to let Sam have his own separate likes means they have a mix of age-appropriate pop culture knowledge and a lot of Boomer-era TV and movie knowledge--Dean more than Sam, maybe when it comes to things like cowboy movies and TV lol.

Anyway, as the realization that he doesn’t really know how anything works crept in, maybe Sam would try to lowkey create situations where he could ask his friends/his friends’ parents those normal life kind of questions. But maybe after his first few tries, he’s become so uncomfortably aware of how weird he is to even need to ask that he stops asking. Maybe he starts to tap into his specialized skills and starts snooping/creeping around their houses to try to glean knowledge. Maybe he scours the library for books on ‘what you need to know for life’--I have the urge now to do a google search on actual titles of books on this subject that may have existed at the time, but I’ve already spent a lot of time on this without going into research spirals. lol Maybe he can’t find exactly the things that are pertinent--still doesn’t fully realize that, though--and in the meantime his cache of esoteric knowledge continues to build.

So he gets to Stanford and he mostly understands how the financing works; enough to get by with enrollment and stuff. He understands that he’ll need to get a job of some sort to make ends meet because he’s there to be normal and normal people don’t pay for everything with scammed credit cards and billiards money; he knows that much. But he doesn’t really know about wages, minimum wage, freaking payroll taxes, etc. (I feel like Dean would’ve had odd jobs as a teen, some legit some under the table, but that the nature of John (and Dean) wanting to keep Sam home and safe would’ve made the subject of Sam working through high school a banned topic. And anyway, much as I’m not a fan of the characterization in Drag Me Away (From You), what Dean said to Sam about the impossibility of getting into college with the way his academic career would look is accurate. So Sam would’ve probably spent most of his free time on academics so he could get the fuck out, rather than trying to get a job.

Maybe having to buy his textbooks would be a surprise? John probably always qualified for Sam and Dean to be on free lunch/free book programs in public school, not to mention the likelihood of the records being at least partially counterfeit. But at the same time, John was probably very hands off with their school enrollment crap once the boys were old enough to handle it themselves, so Sam would at least have an inkling.

Sam would be a weird mix of no-boundaries and too-secretive, and his first attempts at acting normal would be a bit too put-on. He’s got experience acting per 1x16 (oh, maybe he did drama instead of home ec somewhere lol), but acting on stage is so much different to acting in a more personal setting. On stage you have to exaggerate your movements to project all the way to the back. Early-Stanford Sam, I guess, is a bit like Soulless Sam. He knows there’s something off about him compared to the people around him, and he just does his best to pretend he’s the same as them without calling attention to his differences, which ends up coming off robotic. A little Stepford. A little uncanny valley. He learns to bite his tongue every time he’s about to let something normal only to his family roll off it; learns to be even more vague than he used to be, because now he’s around strangers ALL THE TIME.

At some point, Sam has a little-but-big breakdown about a payment he missed or the fact that he had to steal shampoo because he didn’t even have toiletries in his budget and couldn’t even afford a bottle of White Rain or Suave, so since he was stealing anyway he got the special brand he really likes and then feels too awful to even use it and doesn’t wash his hair for a week. Brady takes pity on the cute but hapless puppy-boy who is a physical and academic behemoth but has obviously been living off-grid on some kind of militia commune for the past forever--at first the rumor was that he was Amish on rumspringa but the amount of times Sam has busted out some supremely random survival knowledge in casual conversation changes that rumor quickly--and has no understanding of the world. And by the time he moves off-campus with Jess, Sam has this masking thing down pretty well; he can almost forget he’s not normal sometimes and Jess only knows about his previous helplessness in a cute, anecdotal kind of way.

And then Dean comes and gets him and Sam’s all “you and Dad still doing credit card scams?” and Dean’s like “well hunting doesn’t pay the bills.”

AND SAM’S LIKE, NEITHER DO YOU DEAN! DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT BILLS ARE?! BECAUSE I DIDN’T AND IT WOULD’VE BEEN NICE TO KNOW!

#ask #@princessconsuelapark #stanford era #sam winchester #pre-stanford era #sam n dean #john winchester's a+ parenting #long post

[sunnykeysmash]

S14's theme of Trust: How Global Warming reaffirms the Macden meta we already know

Or, a half reworked set of discussions from my Twitter about the underlying themes of FAITH/TRUST and CHANGE present in this season. Particularly between macden because I don't give a damn for the rest. Sidenote: my twitter thread about trust that takes up half of this post was actually written BEFORE GW came out, and despite that it got reinforced thanks to GW meta.

I apologize in advance if the reading isn't as fluid as it could be, it's hard to order the threads in a single cohesive explanation but I still tried my best. Plus, english isn't my first language.

This post contains speculation that links to my previous meta posts, tagged under "iasip meta". That's where I discuss the theme of change more in detail, not here. They're a little outdated in terms of episode prediction but the meta analysis in them holds up and was reinforced in GW.

The bible = Trust/Faith

So, how does faith/trust get in the way of their relationship? Who has it, who doesn't?

Let's address it. This might be long but bear with me I guess. First we need to address what broke their trust.

North Dakota

(aka the element that broke the link of trust between macden for good, from which they are still trying to recover; and how we got there; their shift in dynamic because of it and how it's a vicious cycle that feeds itself until a breaking point, with no possibility for rational discussion. "How Mac will reject Dennis as a final test to restore their trust")

Part 1: how it affected Dennis

It is my understanding that dennis has been left profoundly scarred by how his decision to leave to north dakota went and he has been blaming the gang for failing to stop him from leaving, and especially blaming Mac. Which lead to the events in Chokes.

Where he felt frustrated at Mac for doing everything Dennis says and never going against him. He's constantly pushing him and being abrasive because he wishes for him to snap and act on his own volition.

Because aside from feeling like he can't trust anyone, and like no one in the gang cares for him, he most of all feels like he can't trust himself. He has been scarred by the consequences of his own actions, and doesn't know what else he might do that could have a similar effect.

Of course a person who can't really trust himself would feel paralyzed, they would not act or do anything. Which is why we are moving away from that, slowly. We need to have this progression in order for Dennis to Realize anything at all.

So Chokes as an episode is sort of a milestone, it runs really deep in multiple overarching events and developments. It's not just fixing macden's dynamic, it's beginning to fix a core problem that stops dennis from reaching macden and that has been prominent at least ever since Tends Bar.

It's something that has been going on in the background for a while, that is touched upon sometimes. Dennis desperately wants the gang to care about him.

So when he is surprised by the RPG on the day that for him is most emblematic of the gang not caring, I think it hit deeper than what we're assuming. His feelings were challenged.

DDL is a result of many things. On the surface it's him wanting to be a dad for his child the way Frank never could for him. I think it was also a test though. If they truly cared, they would stop him. They wouldn't want him to go away.

Now. They don't. That stings. Then things possibly go south in North Dakota. That also stings. It's easy to mentally connect the two and realize the hurt he's experiencing. "If they had stopped me, none of this would've happened" I assume is the correlation he made mentally.

So then he probably thought about Mac, and the gesture he made. He thought that meant something, but then him, like the rest of the gang, did nothing. So he's even more angry at him. "For a moment I really thought he cared, why wouldn't he do something?" Betrayal.

So that to me explains why he's been acting like shit towards Mac. And he's been slowly trying to work through his feelings on the matter, as S13 sorta showed initially, with him not wanting to address it at all for a while, and when he tried again no one cared. He's been trying.

I wonder if it's a possibility that, as we reach the resolution to this circumstance, he will try to bring it up again. I wouldn't count on it necessarily, but character wise it would simply make sense. If he's getting over the problem, he's leaving ND behind. He should, I mean.

Part 2: how it affected Mac

But this isn't just a circumstance that hinders Dennis, it has deeply afflicted Mac too, in a way that is just as personal. "No matter what I do for a person, they can still choose to leave me", it is no wonder to see that side of him exacerbated, then.

Before ND, Mac trusted Dennis' words, enough to let him leave if he said he wanted to, even if it hurt. Before ND, Dennis trusted that Mac would always "be there to catch him if he faltered", that he cared, especially after the RPG moment.

These were true. They could always count on each other, trust each other. ND changed everything, and altered their dynamic in a way that we are still feeling, and still trying to remedy. That Mac and Den especially are still desperately trying to remedy.

They /want/ to go back to their codependent dynamic, they /need/ to. But the way they are desperately trying to is only making things worse and worse, and it's a terrible cycle.

[ The more Dennis rejects Mac in hope that Mac will finally go against him, the more Mac is desperately trying to appease Dennis so that he won't leave him, the more Dennis is annoyed and dissatisfied of Mac's submissive behavior and becomes more abrasive in return. ]

Which is why I think discussing that event is a necessity in order for macden to even happen at all. They theoretically need a face to face conversation to resolve these core insecurities that are getting in the way of their friendship (and possibly more).

It doesn't have to be a romantic thing either, it is just necessary for this conflict to be addressed in order for their dynamic to go back to normal. But that can't happen without a breaking point. We know them enough to assume that they're not gonna just discuss it rationally. It would be the correct way to handle the situation, but they're not like that.

Whether everything resolves positively (as in, their dynamic finally shifting back to before ND) depends on how much they want to stay together and what they are willing to sacrifice or compromise for it. Whether certain grievances can be stronger than their bond itself (and I'm pretty sure they can't, or mac and den would've parted already, long ago).

Mac's internal conflict is likely what will make it so that we have to wait a year. If it just isn't resolved, then he would want proof that Dennis isn't /just saying/ stuff. Den might assure him that he isn't but is that enough for Mac?

How do you resolve a conflict that is basically just a huge almost debilitating fear of abandonment and mistrust of the other person's words? In what way can you possibly prove it wrong?

We know Mac loves Dennis, of course he does. But does he trust Dennis? The way he has been behaving towards him tells me otherwise. He doesn't stand up to him.

Not only that but, more specifically, he's always "interpreting" everything Dennis says, you can see it in Texts for example. He knows den never means what he says, and always has an ulterior motive or hidden meaning. He doesn't take den's rejections at heart too much because he knows they're fake.

So now imagine Dennis has a change of heart. Now he goes to Mac, and he tells him Exactly How He Truly Feels. Knowing the way Mac is used to interpreting Dennis, I don't think he'd believe him. He'd want to, but he probably couldn't.

And I don't think Mac even realizes this lack of trust at all. I think it's gonna hit him exactly as it's happening. He might feel happy at first, then be confused at his sense of uneasiness like he's been used and lied to, like Dennis is saying it to manipulate him.

But that's just for words. Physically speaking, I think Mac is very much aware that Dennis has no intention of ever leaving again, nor can he really. That's how it seemed to be in tggr at least.

The abandonment Mac is afraid of is purely emotional at this point with Dennis. It doesn't need to be a "what if he moves out". More of a "what if he doesn't like me anymore and is using me".

So anyway, about the cycle I mentioned earlier.

This feels like a build up. They can't go on like this forever, they will reach a breaking point. I don't expect them to have an honest and open and calm confrontation and solve their differences before a huge snap of both of them happens, I expect the snap.

You know, either Dennis gets too abrasive and Mac finally "snaps out of him", or Mac gets too submissive and Dennis grows tired of him.

However thanks to Chokes and now Global Warming, we can safely predict it'll be the first one. Chokes set us on a path of Mac making his own decisions, which thanks to GW we know will backfire.

They'll fight, Dennis will be overwhelmed by it as Mac ""leaves"", more on that later, first let me finish my discussion on trust.

I find it suspicious how all the episodes with a semblance of resolution that we have had so far only seemed to fix Dennis' conflicts with Macden. We have failed to address Mac's lack of trust in Dennis' words, even in Texts I think. Especially in Texts.

In Texts it wasn't communication that solved the problem, it was an act, a stare. And we only ever heard Dennis' side of it. Mac at this point already believes that Dennis likes him, so there was nothing new for him to discover at the end.

If anything, it reinforced his belief that Dennis says the opposite of what he thinks, that he isn't honest. Because despite how he's been acting all day, he still saw affection in his eyes, I assume.

But Mac has already always paid attention to what Dennis "really meant", I mean, he does it throughout Texts, thought in the wrong way because it was still through text (miscommunication) and he didn't like to consider the alternative.

I put "really meant" in quotations because Dennis doesn't really work like that. Sure a lot of times Dennis doesn't say what he really means so of course Mac would start interpreting him like that, but there are still many times when he's actually honest. This is just Mac's black and white way of seeing den.

Anyway.

As a result of not feeling heard, Dennis actually developed a heavier and more frequent use of sarcasm. Because if people won't do what he says, then maybe if he says the opposite they'll listen to him. It's a reflex born out of frustration.

Back to the "trust" thing now, because see, all this time Dennis has been acting under the underlying assumption that Mac will choose Him every time. Mac doesn't have this assumption, he has been acting to Prevent Dennis from NOT choosing him.

It's gonna be really interesting, if this turns out to be correct, to see the tables be turned and find out that Dennis was the one with faith. We are used to see Mac believe have it, in god and in their relationship, but ultimately it's Dennis that is trusting Mac to make the right decisions. Which includes choosing Dennis every time.

That's a bigass trust to have for someone who says they have no faith. In contrast to that, what faith has Mac put in Dennis? None that I can think of, he actively does stuff that will please dennis, so far.

"leaving"/"rejecting" Dennis in the finale would constitute, again, Mac's faith in Dennis. He would be choosing something that goes right against everything Dennis wants, having faith that this won't mean they grow apart, and maybe even trusting that it's what Dennis actually needs. And it's what Mac would need as well, as proof that Dennis is serious. Because if he doesn't change his mind, then he is. And you can finally see how the whole season has been constructed as a way to move away from the ND conflict in order to fix their dynamic and broken trust in order to make macdennis work.

This calls back to my meta reading for the first half of the season. Again. This is old stuff. But still accurate.

Some snippets.

I now have a more detailed speculation on how Jumper will go which is no longer the one I had in that meta post, but I will spare you the useless talk and get back to my point. Maybe save that for another post. All I need to say here is that Dennis will be adamant that the answer is SHOULD WE: NO, Mac will want to prove him wrong but Dennis will be proven right, subsequently starting the path for Mac's change of outlook. And what will make him say "no"(t yet) even once Dennis believes they should. Boom, karma.

ANYWAY.

Dennis knows he can depend on Mac or at least he's learning so, Mac isn't sure if he can do the same.

As the two bicker over who had trust in who, and who broke the other's trust, it'll come to the surface, through text, that the roles have shifted. Dennis was trusting Mac all along, Mac wasn't.

Which is why Mac deciding for himself, deciding something that goes against Dennis, saying "no", is the biggest leap of faith Mac can take, the thing that would show us that yes, finally, Mac believes Dennis will still choose him.

TGGR's final part of macden's plot itself shows us Mac accepting Dennis' cynical point of view and losing faith. "I guess we're not gonna get that romantic comedy ending after all". But that is not the note the episode ends with.

Right as Mac accepts that it's not happening, we see Charlie and Frank's ending part of their plot. They're reaching back, they have a new realization. Nikki says that they feel the same way, but they still say no for the time being.

How does this all link to Global Warming, finally?

The Global Warming meta

The jump, the realization, the acceptance, in all the meta I have analyzed in the episodes, it all comes AFTER the explosion, the rejection. First things explode and Mac "leaves", THEN Dennis is overwhelmed and changes his mind, reevaluates. Think of the Nikki&Alexi and Charlie&Frank plot as a frame of reference for this. Think of Chokes also, first Mac says "No", then Dennis is satisfied.

NOW, Global Warming macdennis meta, at its most basic, goes as follows:

Dennis thought what he liked was the sexy girls dancing, then they revolted against him and literally overpowered him, and in the aftermath he has a new outlook on the japanese guys that he once disliked. At the same time as this happens, Mac isn't there to help him.

At the same time, we always see Dennis trying to rationalize his way out of conflicts, and it never working, not with Mac, not with the people in the bar.

Basically, we reach a breaking point in the conflict, and Dennis is overwhelmed by it, Mac doesn't help him in GW, he "leaves", I imagine this symbolizing that Mac finally agreeing with Dennis in the actual final conflict would feel to Den like Mac is "giving up on them". Dennis took Mac choosing him for granted, and he now learns how much trust he had in Mac despite saying otherwise (Chokes) and how much it meant to him. Dennis comes out of it changed.

They both do.

This, as I posted about previously, is all part of "God's plan". Dennis gave Mac back his "free will" in Chokes so that Mac's harsh final decisions could ultimately aid their relationship and trust.

We need Mac to turn Dennis down for the time being AND for Dennis to not change his mind during the wait, for the trust to be restored for both of them. To remedy North Dakota once and for all, and move into the macdennis territory. In a year, aka next season.

So finally, we can see how TGGR, Chokes, Texts and now GW all work together as milestones that set us in that direction.

#iasip #it's always sunny in philadelphia #macdennis #macden #season 14 #the gang solves global warming #iasip meta #this is long and complicated but I hope at least one person will get what I mean