#might be the best thing i've done with year and it was in the span of 2 days

[katunei999]

Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings, and Happy Holidays from Dante and Olive!

#merry christmas #christmas 2023 #happy holidays #christmas #oc #olive #dmc #dmc dante #devil may cry #dante sparda #dante x oc #dante x olive #i flew into a frenzy and stayed up until 4 in the morning to draw this #then woke up and kept going #might be the best thing i've done with year and it was in the span of 2 days #yet other days i can't draw a circle #why am i like this #oh well #TIS THE SEASON

[thankeywa]

Star-crossed | Lo'ak x fem!human!reader part 3/?

A.N: Omg part 3 finally, thank you for all your patience my lovelies, this story is still ongoing and yeah, I'm back baby. Also shh, shh, I've been reading a lot of Goethe, okay?

Warnings: once again, both Lo'ak and the reader are 20y/o, , MINORS DO NOT INTERACT with this or anything on my accounts. NSFW!!! mentions of smoking (don't do it, I'm begging), brief mentions of a/b/o dynamics (nesting), intense making out, heavy petting.

words: 3.3K

summary: reader is a human left behind on pandora, she grew up with the remaining humans who'd been aloud to stay on the planet after the war and has been friends with the Sully clan her entire life. She and Lo'ak were best friends until he began to pull away from her in their teen years for seemingly no reason. This story is about them reconnecting on the day of her twentieth birthday, and dealing with the feelings they have for each other and the obstacles that come with them being from two different worlds.

part 1 part 2 part 4 SEND ME LO'AK REQUESTS

tag list: @aleromania , @ghostjoohoney, @cherry-blossom34, @stephenandfiveswhore , @neteyamforlife, @mochi-yu , @halibanana @notquitehero @vanillacoffeeaddict @kitsune0077 @mara-brekker @sully-stick-together @luthien-naenderthal @phantomalex14 @vanillawhale @omiivr @barbii04 @grierpilots @itszzmoon @wavyteals

Na'vi words:

Ngaytxoa= I'm sorry

“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”  ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Lo'ak had gotten himself into an infinite array of stupidly frightful and dangerous situations in his lifetime. He was more than used to the feeling of his life flashing before his eyes. But nothing, not even the very real threat he'd just escaped of being mauled alive by a Thanator had scared him quite as much as what y/n had just done. Eywa was the keeper of all life on Pandora, and that life hung on a very precarious balance. Everything that was taken will eventually be given back, and vice versa. What was the price that now hung over his own life?

"What have you done?" He hissed at y/n as she got up and turned away from him, her arms crossed over her chest. "Is everything a joke to humans? Eywa is not a friend you can simply ask a favor from-"

"I saved your life!" She snapped back at him, livid from being compared to the rest of the Sky people. But of course, y/n knew by now that was all she was to him. "I don't need you to lecture me, I knew exactly what I was doing and I'm ready to pay the consequences, whatever they may be. I'm not a child, Lo'ak. I can make my own decisions, I figured you of all people would understand."

"Understand?" Lo'ak almost laughed, completely dumbfounded by her words. "Understand what? That you're on a path to destroying yourself? Don't think I don't know what you were doing outside before." He gave her a hard stare, now standing up to tower over her. Y/n felt herself go very pale. She had never intended for anyone to find out about her smoking, and even though it was none of Lo'ak's business, she still felt deeply ashamed.

"So that's what you were doing out there. Spying on me-" Y/n decided to accuse him back, but Lo'ak wasn't going to let her get off that easy. "Nah, nah, we're still talking about you here. Kiri told us her mother was addicted to those things. You might think I'm some dumb savage and try to lie to my face, but I know exactly what they are and what they do to your body!"

Y/n was taken aback. Lo'ak was seething and physically shaking. She knew how much he loved his family, and understood why her vice would have been a slap in the face to his sister, but his reaction was still out of order. Little did she know that her already shorter life span compared to his own weighed on him more and more with each passing day, and discovering she was actively cutting her own life short was a blow to the heart.

"Oh look who's talking! When have you, Lo'ak Sully, ever stopped yourself once from being reckless?" She retorted. "You're right about Kiri, and none of them know, so let's keep it that way. As far as my well-being is concerned, I can hardly see why that would be any of your business." Lo'ak was about to cut her off again, but she continued. "And don't you ever put words like 'dumb savage' in my mouth again. I know we haven't seen each other in so long... but how could you-" A small sob escaped her lips and she was quick to wipe a tear from her cheek. "How could you think... that I see you in such a way...?"

Lo'ak looked down at his hands in shame. He'd just gone and made y/n cry. And he didn't even have the guts to look back into her eyes, which were now brimming with tears. Why had he come? Why couldn't he have just kept himself away like he'd promised himself he would have all those years ago?

"Lo'ak, you were my... entire world. Then you left, and I accepted that you had to grow up and take on your responsibilities. I always knew you had bigger things in your future, way beyond your friendship with me..." Y/n hugged herself, holding her arms around her middle. "And if somewhere along the way you decided to hate me, I accept that too. But I won't... I won't let you turn me into this demonized version you have of me now. I don't hate you. I will never think of you as a savage. I don't care if you're here trying to start an argument with me as a way to make you cope with your sudden guilt-"

"Then what else can I do?" He snarled, finally looking back at her. "Because I've tried staying away, and somehow, I'm shit at that too."

Y/n was at a complete loss. Lo'ak wasn't making any sense. He was the one who'd made the decision to walk away from her, not the other way around. She was certain she had never given him any indication of wanting him gone from her life.

"You still don't get it, do you?" He shook his head, an awkward grin taking over his features. Though, y/n noted, she had probably never seen him in so much pain. "I need you to tell me to stay away. I need you to tell me how much you hate me, how badly I make you sick." As he said this, Lo'ak began to make his way over to where y/n was leaning against the wall, her eyes wide and glued to his.

Y/n shook her head, forgetting about why she'd been so upset, now that Lo'ak genuinely looked like he was on the verge of sanity. "No. Lo'ak I'm not going to do that. Whatever it is, whatever's going on, it's going to be-"

"No?" He asked sardonically, a frown crossing his features again before he wiped a hand down his face. "How about I tell you the real reason why I had to keep myself away from you all this time? See if you don't hate me then..."

Y/n held her breath. Not because she was scared of Lo'ak or what he was about to say, but because he was so close she was forgetting how to breathe.

Here goes nothing, thought the Na'vi. Sure that it was the last thing he was ever going to say to y/n before she chased him out of her home.

"My stupid, useless heart... made me fall for you... from the day we first met..." Lo'ak shook his head again, almost as if he was telling y/n something shameful and disgusting. Meanwhile, y/n was certain her own heart had stopped beating in her chest. "And by the time I was sixteen... I realized... there is nobody else for me... and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't-I couldn't stop myself from thinking of you in a way that was... wrong." He got down to his knees, unable to keep holding up his weight on the low ceiling above him.

"Wrong?" Y/n managed to ask in a whisper. Lo'ak was telling her all the things she could only have hoped to dream of her entire life, but he looked like he was nothing but sick to his stomach as he was saying them to her. She reached out to him, trying to touch his face as she got on the tip of her toes. "Those are the most beautiful words anyone has ever said to me. And I'm hearing them from you, Lo'ak. How could any of this be wrong?"

Lo'ak retracted from her touch almost as if he'd been burnt and all of a sudden, his anger back with a force.

"Look at me!" He cried out, tail whipping back and forth, while his ears were drawn back and his fangs were on full display. "No, really look at me, y/n. Because I know you're smart, so please don't pull that naive bullshit on me..."

Of course, y/n knew what Lo'ak was talking about, but she'd always felt like the one who was wrong for him and not the other way around. "I'm-I'm not being naive, Lo'ak. I'm just saying... that I've waited my whole life to hear you say those words, even though it's selfish of me to even think you could be with me... I'll never be able to keep up with you physically, I'm the one who will never understand what it's like to make a bond. I can't give you a family nor will I ever pass all the hurdles to be a true Omaticaya."

Listening to y/n words made Lo'ak realize how wrong he'd been in thinking he was alone in his heartbreak. He pulled y/n in his arms, mindful of how small and frail she was compared to him. She laughed a little through her tears and held on to him, knowing that was his way of apologizing to her. "The way look has nothing to do with this... no actually, maybe if you weren't such a handsome skxawng, we wouldn't be in this mess right now..." She giggled and he hissed at her playfully, but his somber mood quickly returned.

"I don't care about all those things you just said... about the clan, about having kids..." He said, his voice now sounding raw. "And you're wrong... the way I am physically, compared to you, has everything to do with this. Y/n I can't even fit in your home without having to get on my knees..." Y/n pressed her forehead against his chest, listening to his heartbeat steadily rise. "You know, I hated when dad used to measure our height... every time it felt like I was getting further and further away from you-"

"But that's not true Lo'ak-"

"How are you not afraid? I could easily break you in my hands as you are now without having to try..." Y/n looked up at him, her face showing no signs of worry. Only absolute trust. "You don't know what it's like... I live with the fear of accidentally slicing your skin open with my fangs, of hurting you when I want nothing more than to be the one who makes you feel good and safe..."

Y/n felt her face go red, and she noticed Lo'ak's cheeks livening up with color too at the sound of his own confession. She felt somewhat guilty, seeing as he'd just confessed a very real and damaging fear to her, but now it was almost impossible to get certain scenarios out of her head. While she was aware the Na'vi mated for life, she'd come to know from Neteyam and Kiri that sex before 'bonding' forever with someone was pretty common. She was certain Lo'ak had already had his fair share of experience and being with him was not going to prevent him from someday finding his true mate. Y/n was safe in the knowledge she wouldn't be taking anything away from him if they tried, and she was willing to be a distraction in his life for as long as he would let her. It was more than she could have hoped for anyway.

"Ngaytxoa, forgive me, t-that was..." He rambled. "I shouldn't have-"

"Yawne..." Y/n cooed, immediately leaving him at a loss for words. "I know you're scared, but maybe you should let me decide what I can or cannot handle." She said, letting her small hands run down his neck and over the expanse of his chest as she gently pulled away from him to stand up.

Lo'ak gulped. Audibly. His eyes never leaving her once.

Y/n placed both of her hands on his face and leaned in to peck his lips softly.

Lo'ak felt at that moment as if he were floating on thin air. Everything that had been worrying him up until that moment simply ceased to exist. He hesitated, hands hovering at her sides as he wasn't quite sure what to do with them. No one had ever wanted to be this close to him before, and to be completely honest, he was touch starved. His tail, however, had a mind of its own, and it came to wind itself tightly around y/n's ankle, making her pull away slightly and giggle. "Old habits die hard, I see."

He gave her a bashful look and scratched the back of his neck nervously as he willed his tail to free y/n from its vice. "Sorry... I'm not- I'm not really used to this..." She frowned at his words, gently running her hands through his braids. "What do you mean?"

"I'm not exactly... considered to be attractive... by the rest of the clan, I mean..." Lo'ak fumbled awkwardly with his hands. "The only people who ever wanted to get close to me did it as a way to get to my brother, and... I could never bring myself to see them the way I see you anyway..." This came as a shock to y/n. How could nobody else see Lo'ak? He was a true warrior, through and through just like his brother. He could have flown circles around anyone else on his ikran. He had a good heart, one completely devoted to his family and clan.

And even more shockingly...

"But you're so hot!" She blurted out, genuinely confused and immediately regretting her words. The cocky look on Lo'ak face made her understand he was going to take his way out of having a serious conversation by teasing her. Some things never changed.

"Ah, is that so?" Lo'ak goaded her, before striking a pose to show off his biceps. "This doing it for you?" He asked, raising an inquisitive brow at her. Y/n shoved him, barely even making him blink. "You are so stupid." She huffed, leaving the room.

"No, wait, hey!" Lo'ak laughed. "What happened to me being so hot?" He called after her. Lo'ak never thought things between him and y/n would ever have gone back to being so simple, but somehow, at that moment, it felt like they'd never stopped being friends.

He followed y/n, stepping into her room. Lo'ak hadn't been there in a long time, but not much had changed. Y/n was in the middle of dragging two mattresses down to the floor to make a makeshift bed Lo'ak could fit in, and his immediate instinct was to help her. The scene before him stunted him, however. He knew Y/n was no stranger to having Na'vi guests over, but watching her neatly sort out a bunch of pillows and blankets she'd woven into a quilt for him, immediately made him of one thing: nesting.

Lo'ak had to immediately shake that thought out of his head before he seriously embarrassed himself just from having uncovered a new way of seeing y/n in his dreams. He was more than certain that she knew nothing of heat or rut cycles since they were pretty rare and something that his siblings probably hadn't told her about since it was a rather private matter.

"Oh please, just keep standing there looking pretty while I make your bed for the night, jerk face." Y/n teased him when she caught him staring at her. Lo'ak got a running start before jumping into the 'bed', pulling her down on top of him and making the walls of her bedroom shake in the process. "Skxawng! Do you want my entire house to come down on our heads?" She laughed with him, shoving at his chest playfully.

"You called me yawne." Lo'ak said out of the blue as he stared up at y/n, carefully running his fingers through her hair. "Before."

"And you've only just realized? My, I guess it's true what they say about beauty-" Y/n pinched one of Lo'ak's cheeks and he retaliated by giving her a not-so-convincing hiss. "Smart-ass." He name-called her, before softly pinching one of her thighs, making her yelp in surprise.

He snorted at her cute little sound, but y/n had the last laugh when she decided to shut him up with a kiss. Lo'ak was quick to respond this time, and everything felt different. Y/n's body melted against him as she lay across his chest, and his arm were quick to wrap around her: one of them securing itself around her middle while the other reached down to her thigh. Everything about her felt like a dream to him, and his hand roamed her body with nothing except the upmost reverence for her. "You know..." Lo'ak mumbled in between kisses. "I was actually... trying to say something..." He sighed against her mouth when she dragged her teeth across his bottom lip. "Just now..."

"I know..." She smiled against his lips, not really intent on stopping. "It just takes you... so long... to get to the point..." she mused, taking her chance when Lo'ak opened his mouth to protest, and dragged her tongue over his fangs. The Na'vi felt himself go cross-eyed, knowing for sure he was now sporting an obvious erection.

Y/n looked back up at him when she felt his excitement brush up against her, and Lo'ak didn't know what to do. Kissing, he'd just discovered, was more than okay. They could do it, and safely too. But mating was out of the question, it didn't matter how persuasive y/n thought she was, he would die before hurting her like that.

The human girl couldn't help herself, scooching back all the way down Lo'ak's torso until she was finally sitting up in his lap, her thighs straddling him at both sides as she let out a whine of relief at the friction.

Lo'ak's eyes almost bulged out of his head in arousal and alarm, hastily pulling y/n back to where she'd been lying on top of him originally with a grunt of frustration. "Nah, ke-he, we are not doing that." He tried to be firm in his words, but he definitely heard his voice break at least twice in that single sentence.

Y/n knew Lo'ak was only saying it because he was scared for her well-being, and while she wished to someday change his mind, her yawne had just told her 'no' and she was certainly not going to ignore his feelings, nor would she have ever questioned him in this particular scenario. "Okay, yawne, I'm sorry." She spoke to him lovingly and kissed the knuckles of his right hand.

"You called me yawne again." Lo'ak said, those deep feelings of inadequacy hitting him back in full force. What kind of lover even deserved that title if he couldn't even make the person he cared the most about in the world feel good? "And I can't- I can't even-" He couldn't even make love to her.

"Lo'ak, we don't have to go all the way right at this second if you don't want to... " Y/n placed both of her hands on his chest, feeling the beat of his heart as he sat up and looked down at her, not entirely sure what she was talking about. "Honestly, just rutting down against you felt... well, you felt big and-" She got flustered and momentarily forgot what she was supposed to say. Lo'ak looked like he was going to have a heart attack if she was ever to repeat the words 'you' and 'big' in the same sentence ever again.

"W-what I mean is... you can touch me, i-if you want." Y/n removed her top, exposing her top half to him. "And I want to touch you. If that's okay..."

Lo'ak realized then he might have stood a better chance outside with the Thanator.

#avatar way of water #avatar the way of water #avatar 2 #avatar x reader #avatar x you #avatar x y/n #avatar x human reader #lo'ak x reader #lo'ak x you #lo'ak fluff #lo'ak fanfiction #lo'ak smut #lo'ak imagine #lo'ak x y/n #lo'ak sully #lo'ak headcanons #lo'ak x human reader #lo'ak x fem reader #atwow #atwow smut #atwow imagines #atwow x reader #atwow loak #avatar 2009 #avatar x reader smut #avatar fanfiction

[novelmonger]

So I'm a pretty big LotR fan. And I'm a pretty big fan of the movies. No, they're not perfect, but they're a really good adaptation and a truly masterful work of cinematic art. I've grown pretty familiar with the movies over the past 23 years (@_@) - and not just the movies themselves, but I also love learning all about how they were made. I've watched all the way through all the bonus material in the Extended Editions at least five times (and some of the more fun bits way more times than that XD). I've even watched all three movies with the cast commentary.

But you know what I've never done, not even at the height of my obsession when I had way more free time than I do now? I've never watched the movies with the other commentaries. It looks like there are three more commentaries, with different groups of various people on the crew, and for some reason I never got around to listening through them. I can't for the life of me think why - maybe I thought I already knew everything they'd talk about? maybe I somehow thought it would be boring??? - but today that changes!

I'm going to just jot down the main things that stick out to me that I didn't know before. I've gleaned a lot of BTS information and stories about these movies from various sources, so I'm not sure how long this will be, but I'm sure there will be some new things that jump out at me.

From the FotR writer/director commentary with Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh:

There was a draft of the script where they didn't have a prologue, and all the information about Sauron and the Ring and Gollum and everything was going to be in that conversation between Frodo and Gandalf @_@ Can you imagine? I mean, yeah, it would be more like the book, but At What Cost? (At the cost of several memes and short attention spans, that's what.)

Peter Jackson says he doesn't like magic or wizards in movies. Um...sir? Why the heck are you making fantasy movies then???

The location where they shot the Ford of Bruinen was a real ford that was used during the gold rush in New Zealand! Because New Zealand had a gold rush around the same time as the one in the U.S.!

Hugo Weaving actually did the voice of Isildur when he claims the Ring and says, "No." I have...questions.

Peter Jackson says the journey through Moria is the best sequence in the book, and Fran and Philippa say it's the best-written chapter. Interesting! I don't know what I would point to as the best-written chapter of FotR; I don't think I've ever thought of that (though I might say some of the best descriptions in this book are in Rivendell).

They said they might redo the Gollum scene in Moria to make him look more like he does in TTT. Uhhh...it's been 23 years, guys, where's my remaster? XD

The Frodo-Gandalf conversation in Moria (the "all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us" conversation) was done with forced perspective??? I never realized that! I thought they just had Elijah sit a little lower than Ian so their eyelines would be right! They totally look like they're looking into each other's eyes, but they're not! :O

"Often in movies, that's a rare thing, to have shots in which nothing is real." - Oh, PJ, if you only knew what the state of things would be in two decades....

The scene of the Fellowship mourning Gandalf outside Moria was filmed before Ian McKellan had even arrived in New Zealand! :O So they were all mourning and reacting to the death of someone they probably weren't even sure what he looked like yet!

Sean Bean was apparently the only one of the primary actors who had any experience with a sword? Or at least he had the most experience. Viggo had to do the Weathertop fight scene on his first day, when he'd never touched a sword before @_@

In Boromir's death scene, the words sung by the chorus in the background is an Elvish translation of Faramir's line "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." ;A;

At one point, they were going to have Frodo fighting off an Uruk-Hai before he goes into the boat??? They even shot some of the footage?! Thankfully, they realized that was completely the wrong way to go about his end to this movie; it needed to be an emotional climax, not an action scene, and Frodo's victory is over his own doubts and the Ring's influence on him, when he grasps the Ring and marches forward to continue on his Quest, alone if need be. Thank goodness they realized that before it was too late.

SEAN ASTIN WAS NOT UNDERWATER IN THE SHOT OF HIM DROWNING WHAAAAAT MIND BLOWN

The shot of Boromir's boat going over the edge of the waterfall was actually footage of a barrel going over the Niagara Falls, and they just used CG to replace the barrel with the boat O.O

Fran Walsh: So Viggo's just put on Boromir's gauntlets... Me, a nerd: Vambraces, actually.

#lord of the rings #lotr #peter jackson #philippa boyens #fran walsh #these might be a little slow coming in because i don't want to binge the movies three times in a row #but i WILL be going through all the commentaries besides the cast commentary which i've already heard

[my-moony-and-padfoot]

A hand to hold

Word count: 3 500

TW: eating problems, disordered eating talking about it and mentions of throwing up etc. It's set in the fifth book, kind of, it doesn't really matter but anyway Note: I wrote almost all of this in one sitting, so even though I've proofread this twice now there still might be weird bits here and there. Because quite literally this is written in the span of five hours, just my thoughts flowing, I hope you can follow :)

Sirius stared at the plate of food in front of him, there wasn't a lot, some vegetables, and chicken, but he didn't really feel like eating, the thought just made him feel sick. He closed his eyes, taking a few deep breaths before looking around. Tonks was sitting across from him, eating her food and chatting with Ginny, then glanced at Molly who was at the end of the table, she was already done, her head resting on her hand as she waited for everyone else to be done as well, so she could clean.

He glanced back down at his plate, swallowing down the growing sickness, before looking away. The seat on his right was empty, there was no one he could hold hands with secretly underneath the table. A simple gesture, but it just felt like home. It was something they had done since they were kids, and every time Remus was away he missed it and realized how important it actually was to him. It had been a week now and Remus should've been back yesterday, so he was starting to get worried.

Eventually, he ate a few pieces of the chicken and a few slices of the steamed carrots. It didn't really taste like anything, but at the same time it tasted too much, making him feel sick, but Sirius did his best to ignore that feeling.

When people started to be done and left the kitchen, Sirius decided to stay behind and do the cleaning, letting Molly go do whatever else she had on her endless to-do list. She thanked him before leaving the kitchen, and he just smiled before focusing on the task. Though they didn't always come along, he still liked to help her every now and then. Right now, he just needed something to do, something to do to stop the continuous buzzing in his brain.

He gathered everyone's used dishes, emptying them and washing them by hand. He had always liked washing the dishes by hand even though he could use magic, Sirius just liked doing it like that. When he was done washing and drying them, he set them back into their places.

After the kitchen was cleaned, he went upstairs and into his bedroom, well, what was now his bedroom. He had refused to sleep in his childhood bedroom, though he hadn't told the reason to anyone, not even to Remus when he had asked. The things that had happened there he had always kept to himself, and he would do it in the future too.

He was tired and wanted to sleep, it felt like he was always tired, no matter how much he'd sleep, he'd be tired even if he did nothing but lay in bed, he was just tired. He sat down on his bed, grabbing Remus' jumper from the floor where it had been left a week ago. It still faintly smelled like Remus; vanilla, and occasional cigarettes, but it wasn't enough to soothe the ache in his chest he felt when he thought about Remus.

The smell was comforting, it had always been, ever since their days in Hogwarts, it just was something he had found comfort in even in the hardest of times. That was one of the things he had missed the most during those twelve years, and still, he missed it every time Remus was away.

It was only afternoon, he had already decided not to come out of his bedroom before the next morning, so he changed into the red checkered pyjama pants, pulling Remus' jumper over his head. There was an old record player in the corner of the room, the only thing he had brought from his old bedroom. He put some classical music to play in the background, not liking the quietness of the room.

Then he laid down in the middle of his bed on his side, grabbing a pillow to hug, needing something to hold, so he could ground himself because Remus wasn't there, or no one else for that matter.

Sirius was really starting to be worried about Remus, he was meant to be back yesterday, and he wasn't. He knew Remus didn't like being where he was now, so he didn't really understand why he'd stay there for longer than he needed to.

Maybe something had happened? Something bad and he just didn't know, or simply wasn't told. What if it had been a rough full moon, and he had gotten really ill after because that happened often. Remus also didn't like to be alone after his transformation, and even though Sirius knew he technically wouldn't be alone, still he had this dreadful feeling that something was horribly wrong.

Lately, he had been thinking about Azkaban a lot, and every so often he felt like he was still there. It was this weird memory of cold stone wall on his back, the wind blowing through the bars at the small window, the Dimentors sweeping past. The incredible coldness he could feel deep in his bones, the coldness that wasn't just a feeling, but rather an emotion that made him forget and feel forgotten. It reminded him of all those nights he had spent looking at the moon, sometimes it was full, sometimes creasing, and sometimes it matched the tattoo inked on his wrist. But every time the moon came up, it brought Remus to his mind, his moony.

There was this reappearing thought where he felt like he was still prisoned, like he had always been. Like he had gone from one prison to another all his life. When he was a child, he had been locked up in his home until school, then he had spent twelve years of his life in Azkaban knowing he was innocent. And now, he was here again, back at his childhood home, without permission to go outside.

Like was trapped inside this house, no way to escape, but at the same time nothing to escape from anymore. His parents weren't there anymore, none of the horrible things he had to go through wouldn't happen anymore, it was only a memory. Maybe it was that, maybe it was the memories making him feel trapped and stuck in the same place.

It was almost three hours later when he heard a knock at his door, pulling him out of his thoughts. As he got up he realized that the music had stopped as well, how hadn't he noticed? Maybe he had drifted off or something.

Getting up made his head spin slightly, and he had to wait a moment to gain balance, but he decided to just ignore it. Sirius opened the door, seeing Tonks standing there with a cup of tea in her hands. “I thought you'd like some tea.” She said with a smile, giving the cup to Sirius, who smiled back, even though he felt nothing like smiling. He set the cup down onto the dresser next to the door, leaning against the door frame to keep himself upright as he looked at Tonks. The dizziness had grown over the past few hours more than he had expected it to, and it was hard to keep himself balanced. “Everything alright, Sirius?”

“Mm yes. Just tired. Don't worry, Dora.” She nodded, though gave him a pointed look because of the name. “Alright sorry, thanks for the tea though.”

“You're welcome.” Tonks smiled again. “Have you- Have you heard anything from Remus?” Sirius shook his head, looking away momentarily, the same dreadful feeling coming rushing back. “I'm sure he'll be back soon, try not to worry too much.”

Sirius nodded with a small smile, looking back at her, playing with a loose thread on the sleeve of his jumper. “Albus visited.” She said after a moment of silence.

“Oh.”

“Nothing new, just repeating old things, everyone didn't even have to be there.” Sirius nodded. “Anyway, I just wanted to see you before I go.”

“Say hello to your mum and dad for me.” Sirius smiled, and tonks nodded, suddenly pulling Sirius into a hug. It took him by surprise, and the tight grip hurt, but he hugged her back, patting her back a few times. “see you.”

“See you, bye, Siri.” He waved at her before slipping back into his bedroom and closing the door behind him. He grabbed the tea cup, sitting down at the desk with it, he glanced at himself in the small mirror, not really liking what he saw there. He took a small sip of the tea, it was made in the way he liked it to be, lots of honey, but today was one of those days when the sweetness of it made him want to throw up.

It wasn't the first time this was happening, Sirius knew the feeling all too well, but he never said it out loud. He didn't exactly know what it was or where it came from and why it happened. The feeling just came, and stayed, not going away.

But it had always sort have been there, the weird feeling that came with eating every now and then. When they were in school, it always got worse after the holidays, he always got thinner during the summer and Christmas breaks, and Remus had always been the one to notice. It always took some time until he'd admit what he had been doing, and talk about it and let Remus actually help.

When he was in Azkaban, he didn't get to choose what he'd eat and when he'd eat or how much. There was this same small portion of food each day, and Sirius wasn't sure if he liked that or not. But when he got out of there, he continued in that same routine without even realizing what happened until it was a little too late.

Remus had once again been the one to notice what he was doing and how he kept getting thinner and thinner whenever they saw each other. And for a few months it had been better, he had been doing good, but some time ago, it had taken a turn for the worse once again. Sirius did realize that it always got worse when Remus was away because then there was no one keeping an eye on him and his eating habits. He could do whatever he pleased without making anyone throwing worried glances at him and asking him to eat. Though sometimes he missed that too, missed the worried glances and someone just caring.

His tea had gone cold, not that it mattered, he wasn't going to drink it. He did appreciate the gesture, and he could tell tonks had seen him during dinner, and that he simply didn't eat. Because she usually didn't come to say goodbyes to him that often, she did that only when she was worried, but not worried enough to say it out loud.

Sirius got back into bed, this time getting under the covers and just listening. Someone was walking up the stairs, someone was pacing around in the bedroom above him. Doors closing and opening, stairs creaking because no one else but him knew which ones to avoid.

But after a while those sounds died out too, everyone had gone to bed, or at least locked themselves into their bedrooms. But Sirius couldn't find himself to fall asleep as the clock ticked on. He was too worried, too unwell and too scared. There was just too much of everything.

It was a few hours later when Sirius heard the front door opening downstairs, immediately making him scared, though he knew no one he didn't know had access to this place. Then someone walked up the stairs, but none of them creaked, Sirius turned to lay on his side, so he'd be facing the door.

The light that was on shined into the hallway in a way that Sirius could see the shadow of whoever would walk past. When the shadow came, it stopped in front of his door, and then the door slowly creaked open, and Remus slipped in, trying to be as quiet as possible.

“Hi.” He smiled, looking at Sirius, who smiled back with a small, but genuine smile. “I thought you'd be sleeping already.” Remus said, starting to change his clothes into something much more comfortable than what he was wearing.

When he was dressed in his pyjamas and a new clean jumper, he sat down on the edge of the bed, next to Sirius. “Why are you not sleeping?”

“Dunno.”

“Just can't sleep?” Remus started to play with Sirius' hair, twirling the curls with his fingers. Sirius shrugged. “Okay.”

“Cuddles?” Sirius asked quietly, looking up at Remus who smiled, nodding before he laid down. Sirius rested his head onto Remus' chest, closing his eyes with a content sigh. “I missed you.” He whispered, throwing one of his legs over Remus', who wrapped his arms around Sirius.

“Missed you too.” He whispered into Sirius' hair. "m'sorry, they just wouldn't let me leave when I wanted to. And Albus sent me a letter about something I had to do before I could come back.”

Sirius nodded, snuggling closer to Remus. “you're still a jumper thief.” Remus said, and Sirius could hear the slight grin in his voice. Remus had been calling him a thief as long as he could remember, he hadn't done it in a while, though. “Did twelve years teach you nothing about law?”

Sirius smiled slightly, but he didn't want to think about that now. “Don't, re. Please.”

“Okay, sorry.” He whispered, before letting the silence fall over them. Remus gently rubbed Sirius' side over his jumper, then he let his hand slip underneath his jumper. He felt Sirius' ribs, and hip bone, but Remus was sure that they stuck through more than they had before.

He felt bad that Sirius did it to himself, he didn't always do it on purpose, but sometimes he did and it always worried Remus. Sirius looked tired, dark circles under his eyes, his hair was tangled from the back and his lips chapped, like he'd forgotten to take care of himself.

“Love?” He whispered after a while, and Sirius hummed, fluttering his eyes open. “How have you been sleeping?”

“Just fine.”

“Don't have to lie to me, y'know.” He said gently, not wanting to push Sirius into talking if he didn't want to, but knowing at the same time that it would be better if they talked, it always helped, and Sirius knew that too. “I only want to help you, yeah? Don't want anything bad for you.”

“Can't sleep. It's like my mind is running all the time.” He mumbled. “Been having bad dreams.”

“You've been having more nightmares?” Sirius nodded. “poor baby.” Remus whispered, kissing his head. “When was the last time you ate?” Remus asked, dreading the answer, as usually, it wasn't anything good.

“Today.”

“Properly, Sirius.”

“I don't know. A few days ago?” He said slowly, and quietly. “Just don't feel well. I feel sick.”

“You feel sick 'cause you haven't eaten.” Remus said, waiting for Sirius' reaction before continuing. But it didn't come, he stayed quiet, starting to draw shapes on Remus' side with his finger. “And if you don't eat, you'll start feeling even more sick. I know it's hard, I know love, but you need to eat.”

Sirius shook his head. “c'mon, look at me.” He whispered softly, and Sirius nodded slightly, shifting, so he could look at Remus, his chin resting on Remus' chest. “Tell me what you're thinking about?”

“I don't know, Remus.” He said. “It just feels so- wrong. It's stupid.”

“It's not.” Remus said, brushing a loose curl behind Sirius' ear. “You said you are today, what did you have?”

“Some vegetables and a small piece of chicken.” He admitted quietly. “Dora brought some tea.”

“Did you drink it?” Sirius shook his head, hiding his face into Remus' chest. “That's alright. Don't worry. Let's get up.”

“No.” He protested, not wanting Remus to drag him downstairs and eat something, like he knew Remus would do. He always did. He appreciated it, yes, and knew it was for the better, but still, he still didn't want it. “Remus, please no.”

“Sirius?” He whispered, and Sirius looked back at him. “I know you don't want to, but you look like you're going to pass out any minute. And I'd rather not have that. Let's get up.”

Sirius nodded slowly, moving to let Remus up from underneath him. Then he slowly sat up and inched closer to the edge of the bed, the ever-growing dizziness was even worse now than it had been when tonks came. He was usually very used to the constant nausea and dizziness, but sometimes it just tipped on the side of too much.

He looked up at Remus, who smiled slightly, offering his hand to Sirius. He let Remus pull him up from bed by his hand, the sudden upright position made his head spin, and he closed his eyes. He did notice the hands holding on to his shoulders, it did help to steady himself on his feet.

“Ready to go?” He asked after a moment, and Sirius nodded slightly, looking up at Remus, he looked really worried now, and it made Sirius feel bad. Remus took his hand, slowly leading him out of the room and down the stairs.

When they got down to the kitchen, he sat down on the chair, tucking his knees up to his chest as he watched Remus look through the cupboards.

Then there were two slices of toast and a glass of water set in front of him, and Remus sat across from him with a tea cup. “You don't have to eat all of it, and I can find something else for you if you'd like, but just something, please?”

Sirius nodded, staring at the two lightly buttered slices, taking a few deep breaths, but eventually, he just hit his forehead on his knees, not wanting to look at it anymore.

It broke Remus' heart to watch Sirius struggle so much, it broke it even more that there was nothing he could do or say to make it better. The only thing he could do was to be there with him, trying to support him the best he could and offer comfort when he needed it. Even though he didn't exactly understand why Sirius did this or why it happened, he didn't know the reason behind it, but he'd still be there, the reason didn't really matter.

He reached across the table, placing his hand over Sirius' shaking one that was resting on his knees. He gave it a reassuring squeeze, before intertwining their fingers together.

It took some time until Sirius finally looked up, he first glanced at Remus, then at the plate that was still in front of him. His eyes looked wet, like he was on the verge of crying and like he had been holding the tears for a while. “Talk to me.” He whispered softly, rubbing small circles into Sirius' wrist with his thumb.

“I feel really sick.” Sirius whispered. “I can't Rem. I just- I don't want to. I can't.”

“Yeah you can, I know you can.” Remus said, looking Sirius in the eyes, he was looking back at him, but not really, there was just something off, but Remus could quite tell what it was. “But I also know it's scary and difficult, and there's nothing wrong with feeling like this, absolutely nothing.”

Sirius nodded slowly, looking down at the plate, biting his lip. “I know you're feeling awful and sick right now. But you're going to feel worse if you continue this.” Remus tried to reason, but at the same time he tried not to be too harsh because that wasn't good either. “Just have a small bit? And let's see how you feel after?”

Sirius nodded after a minute, glancing at Remus, before letting go of his hand, he grabbed one of the slices, taking a small bite after a few deep breaths. He closed his as he slowly chewed on the piece, it soon turned into tasteless mush that felt impossible to swallow down, but eventually, he managed.

He wasn't sure if it made the nausea or the spinning in his head worse or if it did nothing, so he took another small bite. It didn't feel good, but it didn't exactly feel bad either. He wasn't sure what the feeling was, so he let it be, taking a few more bites of the toast, though still chewing for way too long.

Sirius could feel Remus' worried gaze on him the whole time, but he didn't mind. He knew Remus was worried and that he couldn't help it, he had always done it, ever since they were young. It was fine. It wasn't the judgmental type of staring that he didn't like, and was used to, it wasn't that, so it was okay.

It took a long until Sirius was done with the first slice, but time didn't matter, it was just important that he ate. “Feel like you can eat the other one?” Remus asked, and Sirius shook his head, glancing at him as if to check it was okay. He nodded, getting up from the chair, grabbing his tea cup and Sirius' plate, quickly cleaning them.

When he was done, he walked back over to Sirius, who set down the now empty glass of water. Sirius looked up at him, his eyes still looked shiny and he just looked so sad. Remus reached his hand to cup his cheek, gently running his thumb over the sharp cheekbone.

He leaned down to kiss Sirius' forehead, who closed his eyes, focusing on it. When Remus leaned back, he offered his hand to Sirius, pulling him up and into a hug when he took it.

Sirius hid his face into Remus' neck, holding on tightly, as if Remus would just slip away. The slow gentle hand going up and down his spine, soft whispers into his hair, and the steady breathing made him feel calm and gave something to focus on.

“Let's go to bed, love.” Remus whispered after a while, and Sirius nodded slightly, taking a few more moments before pulling away from the warm embrace, letting Remus take his hand again and lead up to their bedroom.

A/N:

Hello, hope you enjoyed this one :) and could follow it just fine.

I like the idea of Sirius and Tonks having some kind of a relationship, that they care for each other because they're cousins so I thought I'd add that into this, hope you liked it too

This one is a little different than what I usually write, it has very little dialogue, because most of my works are more dialogue than describing things, if you know what I mean. It was fun to write though. It also has significantly less pet names than what I usually use, but I thought it wouldn't have fit as well in this

Anyway, take care, see you

(please tell me if there's something else I should tag)

<3

#sirius black #remus lupin #sirius orion black #remus john lupin #remus x sirius #sirius x remus #wolfstar #fluff #fluff? #fluff and angst #angst #disordered eating mention #tw eating issues #tw disordered eating #disordered eating thoughts #eating disoder trigger warning #order of the phoenix #tw emetophobia

[rosemarydisaster]

Steve was almost certain Nancy's been flirting with Robin, and he was loosing his god damm mind about it. Not in a jealous way, Nancy and him had their time and whatever happened in the upside down clearly hadn't stuck. He simply wished he could be certain so he could tell Robin! Look, it's not that he didn't trust her, but it had always seemed like she exaggerated the difficulty of telling apart flirting from girl friendships. But now...now Steve understood.

It was such a weird experience because he remembered distinctly Nancy sitting in his lap as one of the big "she likes me" moments. It was obvious, why would you sit in a boy's lap like that -arms around his neck, head on his shoulder- if you didn't like him? Now with a girl, it was different. Was she giggling coyly because she liked Robin? Or was it because that's the way girls talk with each other?

Robin wasn't of much help, she was panicking about her crush and had not that much experience on girl friendships. She seemed convinced that Nancy was just trying to be besties, which was Steve's reason to begin his secret crusade for the truth. His reasoning was that, having dated Nancy, he could easily tell. he thought that just by looking at Nancy the answer would drop from the heavens...but no luck so far. Sure, everything Wheeler did screamed "she's flirting" to Steve, but everytime he tried to frase it, it felt inconclusive. He needed hard facts for Robin to believe him.

It was Byers, high as a kite who actually made him feel less crazy. Eddie was DMing for the kids while the non kids played cards in a different table. They've given up on actually paying attention to the game -Steve thought Eddie sounded really cool when he explained things in that intensely theatrical voice, but he didn't have the attention span to actually understand anything- so now they just sat next to them. That way Eddie didn't have to spend 6 hours hanging out with only highschoolers.

Jonathan and Steve were betting whether the kids were going to realize Eddie was high or not, when something caught Steve's eye across the table. Nancy had offered to paint Robin's nails and had her legs on Robin's lap while poor Robin rambled endlessly. Nancy was holding Robin's hand up to inspect her handiwork, but that's not what really interested him. She just softly smiled while telling Robin "Oh woah, your hands are sooo big!". It was the way she elongated the os, her embarrassed little laughter -like she was somehow high too-, it was so obvious! And when he looked to his right, sure enough, he could see his face reflected on Byers'. It was a kinda funny expression. The "am I too high or did we both see that happen?".

Suddenly feeling not alone in his madness, they both made the unspoken pact of solving the mystery right then and there. Steve decided to re involve himself in the conversation just to stir up trouble. He was done just observing Nancy, he needed to know. And giving Robin's near catatonic state, he needed to know as fast as possible. His platonic soulmate would not survive much longer.

He threw every single topic he could think of, trying to gauge Nancy's feelings from her answer. It was Jonathan who actually had the winning idea. "how's school going, Robin?". Of course, he didn't know about Robin, Steve realized. He was laser focused on Nancy, but Byers might want to actually know whether his "ex-now-best-friend" had a chance. It was an innocent enough question, one important to someone like Nancy but that would not ring any alarm bells for Robin. And easy enough, she was rambling about senior year being a bitch. She was fine for most classes but her history was proving to be a real pain in the ass. The teacher was against her, apparently.

"I could help you study! I have the best notes" and bingo. That was Nancy's signature move if she had any. "I've seen 'em Rob, Nancy's quite the miracle worker". Nancy's eyes snapped to his, an unspoken conversation. He made it clear she didn't need to panic but that also, he was onto her. They both volunteered to go search for more drinks and snacks for the brats the next time they'd inevitably asked them. It was a quiet trip right up until the kitchen door was closed.

"I knew it!" "Let me explain" turns out she didn't need most of her explanations. If she seemed surprised by how well Steve took it, Steve tried not to take it personally. He did call Byers queer, so maybe he deserved it. The second she realized Steve was safe, she immediately asked for help "You have way more experience at flirting with girls!" "Not in a gay way!". Nancy's gears were turning in her head while she searched for chips in the cupboards. She always did that, focus on the goal and nothing else. Steve had always thought it was really hot, and so did Robin.

Once things were neatly set on the tray she finally stared at Steve. "How do I let her know I'm flirting in a gay way?" Steve did not know how Nancy's opinion of him had changed so fast from "might be homophobic" to "knows about gay stuff". He would have been more surprised if he had not gone from one to the other equally as fast himself when Robin confessed to him. He thought about it, conjuring in his brain all the little things Robin had explained him about queer culture. "Okay, we might need more time to properly prepare you for this". Nancy only gave him a little wondering look, but decided to ultimately thank him and plan for a Tuesday while Robin was at rehearsals with the band.

That Tuesday Steve gathered every single nugget of knowledge he had on the topic of lesbians and bisexuals just so he could educate Nancy. Considering he was just Robin's apprentice, he did not feel at all prepared for the task at hand but damm him if he was not going to give it his all. He started with Rocky Horror. Maybe because that's what Robin started him with, and maybe because Tim Curry did look really good in fishnets. Then it was all about listening to Robin's casettes (he made sure Nancy did not suspect they were from her), talking about clothes, about all the little details that signified you liked girls. Nancy was all but taking notes. By the end she thanked him with a hug that just melted into friendly cuddling. Steve realized he had not been the only one that missed their relationship. After all the evening's intensity, they both felt drained and closer than ever.

It was the next day when Robin stormed Family Video with a panicked look on her face. "Steve" "mmm?" "Nancy has Doc Martens" "yeah, they look good on her" "No, Steve, you don't understand!" And so she explained to her friend in excruciating detail what that could mean, clearly having forgotten the fact that she had already explained it to him months ago. Steve nodded his head, feigning surprised at the appropriate moments.

He gave it a couple more days before actually speaking. He waited for Robin to be absolutely certain that all those little clues could not be coincidental, and then he pounced. "You know, I keep thinking about how she offered to help you study, because that's how she flirted with me". Robin stopped dead on her tracks with an incredulous look on her face. After a theatric pause -he was starting to understand why Eddie enjoyed them so much- he continued pointing out all the things he'd noticed. "You should definitely take her up on her offer for a study session".

So if the next time they were in the Wheeler's basement Robin and Nancy sat a little closer and giggled to themselves, that was their business. He enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done. Nancy obviously tried to thank him and inform him they were together.

"Yeah I know"

"But, how?" Nancy looked flabbergasted.

"Knew about Robin, remember the whole platonic with a capital P? Besides, who did you think taught me about the lesbian things?"

Nancy looked at him like there was a puzzle piece missing in this equation.

"I thought Eddie taught you"

"Why would Eddie Know any of that? He's not a lesbian. Well, I mean gay"

"Wait" Nancy stared at him like he had told her the sky was green "so you two are not dating?"

"huh?"

"I...Steve, you're the smartest idiot I know"

She said it laughing in that "don't worry about it, I've got it handled" way of hers, and Steve was left asking himself how had she known about his crush and why had she thought it was reciprocated. As another customer entered he simply put on his best smile and tried not to give himself a headache thinking about it. Look, if Nancy had it covered, he was just gonna trust her to do her thing...and maybe allow himself to hope for a bit.

#ronance #steddie #fruity four #robin buckley #nancy wheeler #steve harrington #eddie munson #jonathan byers #stranger things

[virtuosapickle]

LocoMotive - My dream video game

Hello! I suppose I should explain this here, I'm working on a 2D Platformer video game called LocoMotive! I've been mentally developing it and making music and some concept art for about a year now, and things are slow but smooth! The story is just about done and all major plot points are mapped out!

LocoMotive is a game about a girl named Elise who runs away from home to become her own person. Her city is home to an urban legend, that of a train that comes through the old abandoned station in the dead part of the city in the dead of night, only once a year. She boards that train, texting her best friend Cammy along the way, when it suddenly takes off, and she's transported to a strange, usually inaccessible place on Earth, The Oasis Isles. There, she meets a strange old train conductor named Riel, and- oops, maybe I've said too much? Hopefully that's enough to get you hooked! It currently spans about 9 levels, has tons of funky music, many silly characters, and some story that might be a bit sad...

Estimated release? Literally no idea lmao I'm 17 and growing up, there's a lot going on right now, but sometime in the future! It will release!

I might make a blog for the game at some point in the future for updates and sneak peeks, but until then... Keep moving on!

#indie game #concept art #2d game #platformer #indie #trains #LocoMotive game

[the-badger-mole]

What are your thoughts on Azula redemption. Like if it was done properly and she got all the help she needed. Because honestly it's hard to find good Azula redemption takes without them being stans or something

I've talked about this before (here for instance), but I don't really think Azula needs the kind of redemption people seem to want for her. I think a transformative arc would fit her better. Like, yeah, she changes, but she's not necessarily redeemed through it. First of all, I don't think she'd ever be completely sorry about what she did, and I think that's a baseline requirement for a redemption arc.

Second, in my opinion, too many of these "redemption" arcs for Azula focus on her reconciling with everyone, and I just don't think that's realistic. I see her reconciling with Zuko and maybe Iroh, but beyond that, I don't see Ty Lee coming back (I actually like to think that she found her happiness far, far away from Caldera and the messiness of court). I could see Azula not wanting Mai back. Zuko's friends don't owe Azula anything either, so it bothers me a bit when I see stories that start with Azula being best friends with everyone with no explanation or acknowledgement of how odd it is. Especially when the stories are within a year or two after the war ends. The problem here is focusing so much on the trauma Azula went through, there's no focus on the trauma she caused. And she caused a lot.

Like, A LOT.

She contributed to Zuko's years long abuse, she controls Ty Lee through intimidation and forces her into service, she pimps Mai out to get Zuko in line (although, it seemed like Mai was into it, so this might be iffy?). Then there's everything she did to the Gaang. All of this before you dig into what she was like before she joined the hunt for Aang. This is my own personal theory, and not one I necessarily expect to see in fics, but I'm 100% sure Azula did a lot of damage even before she left the Fire Nation. Intentionally or not (and tbh, it probably wasn't intentional), it's pretty heavily implied in the show that Azula has a body count off screen, and those bodies were friendly fire (i.e. Azula has killed and injured people from the Fire Nation). Beyond that, Azula seemed to enjoy what she did. I know she was victim of abuse, but she was also an abuser. Just like a bully being abused at home doesn't automatically absolve them of being a bully, Azula has a lot to answer for. None of the people she harmed are required to welcome her in with open arms.

How I would approach a transformative arc for Azula would be to tell the story over a span of years- well into her adulthood, and probably into middle age. The only one from the original show she would have a firm relationship with is Zuko, and mostly because he insists on seeing her every so often. Katara, who is obviously married to him, would tolerate Azula for Zuko's sake, but things would be cold between them, and Katara would understandably want to keep her children at a distance. Iroh would forgive her, but wouldn't be super inclined to force a connection between him and his niece. He would support Zuko's efforts, though. Azula wouldn't live in Caldera. If she doesn't end up imprisoned after the war, I think she would end up semi-exiled to one of the outer islands of the Fire Nation. There she would build a new life for herself, and rediscover her humanity. She might come to regret more of her actions, but I think ultimately she'd end up absolving herself and not really care about making amends to anyone outside of Zuko (and maybe Iroh. Maybe).

Personally, I'm not super interested in punishing Azula, but I want there to be heavy consequences for her actions. I want the validity of people not wanting her in their lives to be acknowledged. I want to see how she navigates her life post war after losing everyone and everything. I want to see her carving out a place for herself that doesn't have much, if anything, to do with her life in Caldera. If she can make amends to one or two people from her past, that's fine, but it needs to take into consideration that she hurt them, and not just be them accepting her back because she "wasn't herself", because she was herself when she hurt them. I want Azula's redemption arc to be messy and imperfect and incomplete.

Well, either that, or I want to see her go full power trip and try to take power from her brother in an epic and tragic final battle between the siblings, because who doesn't like Shakespearean drama with elemental magic, amirite?

#atla #azula #azula's redemption arc #no one owes azula anything #and i think her next #THE YEAR OF CONTENT!!!!

[keystone8379]

keystone you should talk about something in regards to kirby fighters 2 community edition

Oh you're right I haven't done that yet! Regarding Kirby Fighters 2: Community Edition, there is a metric TON of stuff to talk about here. The dev team is some of the closest friends I've ever had. Smash Tactics is a thing because I was able to test the game over and over again with the members of the dev team. We've spent many hours sharing progressively crazier character ideas. We have created some warcrime moves. (or, well, more warcrime moves. KF2 already has plenty of those) I think, however, the best place to start for CE on the KF2 lore account is probably just a development history.

So it's late September, the year is 2020. Kirby Fighters 2 was leaked, got a trailer, and released all within the span of 24 hours. Soon after that, firubii (you might have seen her before) shows her findings from a Twitter datamine, that being evidence of a 3D Kirby game. "Wow! Awesome! I sure hope it's nothing like Battle Royale!" I say at the time. But I digress.

A few months pass and eventually fish gets in touch with Firubii for I believe checking hitboxes and frame data? We get a few things for some of the weirder moves from characters like Ninja, but the fact that a modder was among us got people excited. The prospect of a balance patch mod was an undeniably appealing one and could breathe new life (and a time) into the game. And one that Firubii was interested in.

March 16th, 2021 rolls around and Fish pings everyone saying that they had set up a poll for balance suggested for Firubii to implement. They also got an all star cast of top players and fighting game expects and colgate and me. because I "have lots of opinions." We're all put into a dev chat and poll responses start flowing in.

This poll was crazy. You had Ninja downplaying Mag like crazy. You had Celica Trying His Best. You had nonsense adjustment suggestions like "Not really that effective." But my favourite would have to be probably Qwertz saying to EVERY balance suggestion box "The game needs no balance changes, only quality of life changes."

So we all in the chat start throwing around ideas while not really getting anything done. This will be a running theme. About a month later I was like enough is enough and starting pinging people for proper balance discussions and locking in changes. There's a few notable things we did for v0.1, including making Sword a LOT faster, giving Hammer Palutena's Lightweight, (the s4 custom move) making Bandana Dee's spears stick into the ground for a few seconds, and making Cutter's boomerangs bounce off walls. That last one was our first real criminal change, as Cutter could effortlessly lock down the entire screen. I spent hours labbing counterplay only to find none and grew to despise the character and suggested massive overcorrections for v0.2. Oops.

Overall v0.1 was pretty good! It had some iffy stuff and launched with a Whip desync in game but other than that it was a success I think. It came out during July of 2021, a little under 4 months from the initial announcement. There's a few public tourneys with good turnouts but run via Parsec and Parsec makes me want to commit violent crimes. Progress on 0.2 also goes fairly well. There's some bad ideas in there like making MK not very fun but overall it's not so bad.

Until development just HALTS. To my understanding, I believe it was something personal Firubii was going through but I don't have all the info. Then again, I didn't ask. Like sure, I'd like to have the new CE versions as soon as possible, but ultimately the well being of the people actually making the mod is the top priority, it's why it's so irritating when people are jerks about CE's slow development. Obviously I want the new versions out. But we all have lives outside of this and sometimes other things need doing.

Eventually 0.2 gets out, at the start of Febuary 2022. It's solid but still has some things that irk me. After a few months, we ask for player feedback on overall balance and specific changes and get not many results. Granted, CE doesn't have much players so balance discussion is somewhat meaningless for a game this unexplored. I think 1.0 fixes all of the glaring flaws though.

At some point, once again, development freezes, and this one was rough. No communication from Firubii led to a lot of dooming, especially with how close we got to actually launching 1.0. We DO actually know why she vanished for so long this time, it's because her house caught fire. It didn't burn down don't worry! But this still caught us all SUPER off guard.

Anyway, CE resumed development and went for a little while, but hit a brick wall when trying to add training mode. I'm not an expert on the inner workings of KF2 but I know Firubii talked to Ryn (yes, the goku in strive Ryn) about it a little bit. I actually posted about this to my Threads account but who gives a shit about threads. That's more or less where we are now. It's been a while since the last tester build but what can you do.

There's also a few other things but there wasn't really a good place for them. Colgate thought it was a good idea to make a tierlist video for a game no one could play. It wasn't. I had to spend the days after that video doing damage control. There was a playlist where people could suggest songs to add to CE, but tbh it was more just an excuse to listen to music in VC while we could still do that. We were gonna move off Gamebanana because the site is run by N*zis but this was during the fire arc so didn't happen. AV also thought it'd be a good idea to shittalk CE and ask to join the dev team in the same day. There was also the time we had to rush out a trailer for Savi's Dream Display but I have a few criticisms about that which I'll share with him one day.

I think that's it? If you wanna download the mod I'll link it right here: https://gamebanana.com/mods/303920

#kirby fighters 2 #kf2 #fighting games #fighting game community #community edition #KF2CE #mod #kf2 lore

[invisibleicewands]

David Tennant, Michael Sheen had a hell of a good time making Good Omens season 2

n Good Omens season 1, Aziraphale and Crowley saved the world. Now, they might just have to save each other.

David Tennant and Michael Sheen return for a second season of the hit comedy, premiering July 28 on Prime Video. Originally, the show was only intended as a six-episode miniseries, adapted from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's beloved 1990 novel. But before Pratchett's death in 2015, the two authors had brainstormed ideas for a potential follow-up — ideas that Gaiman later adapted into Good Omens season 2.  

Speaking to EW before the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Tennant and Sheen opened up about reprising their roles as everyone's favorite grumpy demon and fussy angel. Originally, both actors assumed the series would be one and done. But they became fast friends on set, and in between shots, they would chat with Gaiman about ideas for a potential season 2. Little by little, Tennant says, the second season "crept into existence."

"Neil would often tell stories of how him and Terry had dreamed of a sequel, and there were some ideas they kicked around that they never got to explore," Tennant, 52, tells EW. "But there was no sense initially that would actually bear fruit."

"They even had a name for the sequel that never got written," Sheen, 54, adds. "It always used to make me laugh so much because the name they had come up with was 668: The Neighbor of the Beast."

Now, that second season is becoming a reality, once again centering on Aziraphale (Sheen) and Crowley (Tennant) as they find themselves in the middle of a celestial crisis. (Last time, they teamed up to help prevent the apocalypse. This time, they find themselves in the middle of an angelic mystery.) Season 1 took a deep dive into the pair's unlikely, millennia-spanning relationship, stretching from the Garden of Eden to Shakespearean England. Tennant and Sheen say that season 2 will go even deeper.

"That was one of the most exciting things, being able to explore that relationship," Sheen says. "It's the most simple relationship — and also the most complicated. On the simple side, they're two beings who love each other. On the complicated side, they're about as opposite as possible. So, there are all these obstacles to their relationship, both without and within."

Season 2 also sees the return of Jon Hamm's glowering archangel Gabriel — who appears suddenly at Aziraphale's bookshop, having entirely lost his memory. The Mad Men star gets to show off his comedic chops as the amnesiac Gabriel, puttering around the bookshop and smiling blankly. "He sort of became famous as this matinee idol, but I always think that Jon is naturally a clown," Tennant says of his costar. "He's a very funny, witty man, and he's got that comic sensibility."

"He's such an aficionado of not just American comedy, but British comedy as well," Sheen adds. "He knows the most obscure British comedy things. It's always ironic that the character that he became best known for and that brought him into the public eye was this very serious character, when everyone who knows him knows how funny he is."

Tennant and Sheen say perhaps the biggest surprise has been how fans have embraced their versions of Crowley and Aziraphale. Tennant notes that Pratchett and Gaiman's book has been "beloved for decades," and while filming the first season, he felt "terror that we would break it." But about six months after the show premiered, he attended a fan convention, where he started to notice a heavenly trend.

"I've been to Comic-Cons over the years, and I often meet people dressed up as a character I played on the BBC — and I still do," Tennant explains. "But increasingly, I was meeting people dressed up as Crowley and Aziraphale. And one of the loveliest things is that you always meet pairs. You don't really meet someone dressed as an Aziraphale, or somebody dressed as a Crowley. You meet an Aziraphale and Crowley. They always seem to come in twos."

"You started to see people reacting to it online, and people starting to respond with their own artwork and their own fan fiction, and you saw it all starting to blossom and grow," Sheen marvels. "I'd never experienced anything like that before. David, of course, had gone through the whole Doctor Who experience, but it really blew me away."

Season 2 relocated filming to Bathgate, Scotland — about a mile from the hospital Tennant was born in, he notes with a laugh. The new cast includes Quelin Sepulveda as a newbie angel named Muriel, Maggie Service as a local record shop owner, and Nina Sosanya as the proprietor of a local coffee shop. But Aziraphale and Crowley are the season's emotional heart, and much of the series will focus on their friendship — or might it be something more?

Returning for a second season also meant that Tennant and Sheen had to slip back into their otherworldly guises. Sheen was thrilled to be back in Aziraphale's bookshop, but how did Tennant feel about donning Crowley's contact lenses and wigs again?

"It's rarely a wig!" Tennant says with mock indignancy. "I mean, that's my hair a lot of the time! Obviously when it gets a bit longer, there are bits added in. But there was a lot of bleaching and dyeing going on before we started shooting. That was probably when I knew there was no going back, when I got the flame-red hair put back on my skull."

#Michae Sheen #David Tennant #Good Omens #Good Omens 2 #Interview

[poindexters-labratory]

I'm going to scream into the void right now. I don't expect much response in return, I'm more or less using my blog as a medium to explain my emotions to myself. What I'm thinking and what I'm feeling after having a difficult past few days.

For context: My partner of four and half years and I have separated on good terms, fair terms, and I'm not really sure what to do. Toward the end of this relationship, I had found myself predicting every possible situation and where every outburst might potentially occur. They were an explosive person, but not in a malicious way, more so in a way that they didn't know how to control. We decided it would be best if they left to learn how to control it.

At the moment, we're taking a weeklong break of no contact, maybe longer, but that's what they've told me before we start conversating again and start on the road to becoming friends. I'm, again, putting this on the blog because I don't have any specific person I can confide in about how I'm thinking and feeling about this large change in my life. They were everything to me, legitimately the only person I had to go to for things like that.

When you know someone for that amount of time, when you're as young as I am, knowing someone for four and a half years takes up a lot of time in the mind. From the point right before I started my freshman year of high school, to eventually now, where I'm almost a year out of school. And when you talk to the same person pretty much every day, there's this thing that happens, especially to folks like me that have brains wired in strange ways, to where everything all the time at every point of everyday centers around them. A dependence. An addiction.

I was hurting, I am consciously aware of my situation and I am consciously happy to get out of what I know is a bad situation, but my soul aches for just one more conversation, one more word, one more stupid meme that will give me that hit of dopamine that reassures me, "There's someone who cares about you."

It's very strange to be so attached to a person, like you have no idea what to do when they're suddenly ripped from you. I'm depending on them to make me feel worthy of everything that I have ever done or have ever thought of doing. And now that security is gone, and now I have to be brave enough to confide in someone else, learning along the way that I cannot depend on a single outside piece of reassurance constantly.

Somehow, with a mind that has been constructed only to be able to love myself whenever outside sources tell me that I should because of the things that I can do. How talented I am, how smart I am, how wise and thoughtful I am. Somehow, that mind has to find that outside source from within and at the moment, that sounds downright near impossible.

My mind has also been made to solve problems. I'm not very book smart, but I figure myself to be emotionally intelligent enough to try to help and encourage other people, and more recently, that includes myself. I've been trying to keep up with taking care of myself physically and emotionally. But there are going to be moments where I fall and feel like in that moment, I can't get back up without help. And it's good to need people, but I need my circle to be more than just one dependent who does all the work.

Loneliness is difficult. I've faced loneliness for most of my life. People don't want to be your friend on the playground when you're odd and prefer your own company. Even in the company that I did find when I was young, they eventually went away. I've moved over nine times in the span of 18 years and it's not a fun experience having to uproot the life you made every couple of years to leave and start a new one. That means leaving people behind.

But recently with the power of technology, I had been able to keep up with my partner. I was fourteen when I got my first legitimate smart phone, and they were the only person I would talk to on it. Putting that small timeline of four years into perspective that we got together right after I received my first hand-me-down phone and now I'm on Tumblr posting Five Nights at Freddy's fanart and buying MatPat's last merch run is absolutely bonkers to think about.

That's only a small percentage of my life and I'm sitting here in agony and emotional belief this is the end of the world. Absolutely it isn't, but it's still pain that's here in the present and I have to acknowledge the present day and my emotions or else it means so much disrespect to my future and past. I didn't come this far into my life to essentially burn down all that progress, and I don't think my future is going to be so happy if I give up on it.

I have to remember, and I'll deliberately have it here to reread if I ever need it, that I'm capable. I'm capable of making change, of changing, of striving to be the best version of myself that I can comfortably be, of doing things on my own, and I'm capable of asking for help whenever I feel I need it. I need to listen to my body, my mind, and my soul so much more intently than I have before so that I don't end up in a pit of despair and disappointment. It's not good for me and it doesn't make me a pleasant person to be around.

I need to trust that the people that I love, love me. I need to remember that there are connections waiting to be explored, discovered, and cherished just as much as I cherished this person. I still do cherish and love them very deeply, I never won't. I believe people are capable of changing if they're willing to put in the work and effort, and they are a very hardworking person. But so am I.

I'm not afraid of the hurt or the aching. It's evidence of love with nowhere to go and I will cherish those feelings and I will be saving them, experiencing them. I'm more afraid of what I am going to do now. I guess the next step will be continuing to work on and toward what I'm passionate about.

I am not angry, I am not spiteful or vengeful. I simply will be forever grateful for the times and moments we shared, and the new moments we will have. Even if it is for short specks of time.

This has been a moment of peering into Poindexter's mind.

(pic of my cat for good vibes)

#poindexterchatter #text post #rambling #teeny tiny vent #thinking with poindexter #i have a slow processing speed #so it really helps to talk it all out #addiction mention #happy ending #apologies for the outloud thinking #i'm aware this isn't what I usually do #but i'm just living life rn

[starchaserdreams]

Erm, hello!

I am an aspiring writer. I have these stories in my head that I love and want to write about. But when I try, it's the absolute worst shit I've ever seen in my life.

Sorry, what I'm trying to ask is, any tips for younger writers who have no idea what they're doing...?

Hi! I have no idea what I'm doing ever, but I'll try to answer as best as I can. I'll start with generic advice, then say what works for me specifically. Sorry this got so long.

We're all kind of fumbling through life. The writing habits that I have have come from three sources:

a) hearing what other people do and building from them. I'm always in one writers group or another (currently I'm in a local writers group, and I'm regularly involved with two different NaNoWriMo groups in November, one locally and one virtually) and I've picked up a lot from them

b) a metric fuckton of trial and error. Because while part (a) is great some of the time, most of the things that work for other people don't work for me. I can't set a strict schedule at the same time everyday. I can't edit for a long time after I write.

c) NaNoWriMo (see link) helped me SO MUCH. I don't think everything can be written that way, but in terms of getting a handle on your own voice, preventing yourself from stopping to edit, and letting the story flow on its own, NaNo is amazing. It's a great starting point. Editing can come later, once the words are done on the page.

If you're unfamiliar, it's a (totally free) event that happens in November every year where everyone tries to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel in the span of one month. That's 1,667 words per day, so there isn't much time to stop and edit as you go. You just keep going. It's a competition against yourself rather than anyone else, to see if you can accomplish the task. It's also a community based event, so you can commiserate with other writers about the bad and celebrate with them about the good.

They have smaller events in April and July, but to really get the feel of it, November is when it's a party (or a rollercoaster, either way). I went to write-ins in cafes, bars, grocery stores, on the subway, etc. The event is a whole vibe, and now they have in person events again (they paused for covid). If you want to stay virtual, they have that too!

And as for what works for me:

1.

This most certainly wouldn't work for everyone, but it's my current strategy:

I think best when I'm in motion. By far. So most of my storyboarding I do while walking or driving, and I dictate into the notes app on my phone.

I do most of my dialogue this way too, because speaking it out loud makes it feel more like a conversation and more natural. I won't dictate the narration, but I'll include action tags. So it comes out like "Anthony: *flings door open, eyes wide* what in blazes are you doing??" (I add punctuation later)

Then when I get home, I often have several thousand words of notes to work from. My notes file for my last fic was 30k words, almost all of which had been dictated. It's a lot. It might sound daunting.

But it was done while out for a walk or drive, so it felt easy and effortless. And then when it came time to actually write, I got 48,000 words of a first draft done in 8 days (about 15k of which was just copy pasted from the outline. The whole time it felt like cheating and using guidelines to write the actual story, but it was all my original work, just done at different times.

2.

Keep writing as an exciting treat rather than a chore.

I've started to create little writers retreats for myself. My friends and I rented an AirBnB for two nights this winter, where the entire goal was reading and writing. Sure there was sitting around the fire talking and eating good food, but we built it up so that the writing was the exciting part. It worked SO WELL. We did writing activities together too, not just staring at a word doc. We did character studies and made little AUs to imagine our characters in.

A friend and I took a six hour road trip for another writers retreat too. We spent the 12 hours (RT) in the car talking about our stories and characters. We'd started with dozens of prompts so we'd have enough material, and we never ran out. Then we took rest stops at gas stations and restaurants and did little 15 minute writing sprints. It really got me fired up. I wrote 6,000 words over the two days of that retreat!

Keeping writing fun can be big things (my sister and I did a writers retreat like that in Hawaii) or little things (I always treat myself to a donut and a coffee on Sunday mornings and then have a leisurely morning in the cafe writing).

I can't say if any of this will work for you, because I can't even say whether it'll still work for *me* in a few years. But I hope it's food for thought!

Anyway this is like one million words long so sorry about that, hope it was interesting.

#psa for nanowrimo #thats what this felt like #but i cannot speak highly enough of that organizations work #they are the reason i forced myself to write when it felt like a chore #and the reason i remembered i love it #nanowrimo #writing #habits #i have a lot to say on this subject obviously so sorry i said all of it #fanfiction #creative writing #writing goals #just writer things #also that line from anthony isnt real but i wanna work it into assumptions my regency novel #new writers on tumblr #young writers #millennial writer #creative process #novel #storyboarding #dialogue #thinking beat in motion #i feel like thats an adhd thing but i could be making that up

[thimbledoll]

The Ken Doll

Warning: Shitpost

Years of training. Weeks of tracking. Days of preparation. Everything has brought the huntress here, to this moment. Her first target lay before her eyes, accompanied by a doll clearly made more for eye candy than self-defense.

Tall, suave, and sporting an impeccably white smile, the plastic resin doll was quite pleasant to look on. He reminded the huntress of something from ages past, but she brushed the memory aside. He would clearly be no threat to her, the huntress assessed.

The witch was a more curious being, eschewing the traditionalist revival popular among heretics for a more modern look of Converse, striped socks, and a graphic T with a cartoon character and runes she couldn't read. They were young, probably just coming into their powers.

They walked together down the city street, completely unaware of the danger that observed them from the rooftops above. The Academy had taught the huntress to never underestimate her target, but she could recognize that this was going to be all too easy.

Leaping from her position on the high ground, the huntress landed in front of the little witch and their resin doll. She paused there a moment, eyes turned to the floor, before slowly raising her head with a grin full of malice and delight.

She wanted to savor this, let the moment of the heretic's doom hang in the air, all the more to draw out the tension. The fear in her target's eyes would be all the sweeter prepared slowly than if she just got things over with.

"Rejoice, young one," she said while drawing her long, jagged blade from its sheath. "We could not have met on a more auspicious night. Your blood will be the first my blade drinks. When I've killed you, you will not be forgotten by this world; you'll be remembered as my first."

Finally meeting their eyes, the huntress found… boredom…? They were yawning, leaning back against the chest of their doll, like one might a locker. "I'm sorry, are you done yet?" they asked, tapping away at their phone.

Anger flashed across the huntress's face. "It's bad enough you're such a miserable excuse for a heretic in that getup, take this seriously!" she shouted. "And what is with that doll of yours?! What kind of doll is he supposed to be? A boytoy? You'll regret making him your first."

"Oh, him? He's a ken doll," they replied.

"You made… your first doll… a Barbie doll?! Killing you will be doing you a favor," she cried out in disbelief, rushing toward the witch with blade in hand. It dragged across the concrete, lighting the night with sparks.

Bloodlust filled the huntress as she raced forward. A single swipe and this heretic among heretics would be naught but blood on the pavement, she thought. If they couldn't provide her the fear and anguish she desired, then best to get it over with and move on to her next target.

Inches from the witch's face she swung her blade, eager for the sickening squelch of when flesh meets metal. Instead, it clattered with a ptang as her blade was stopped just before it could cut them down. The doll had ditched his arm, revealing the katana it sheathed beneath.

"It seems you've misunderstood. He's not a Ken doll. He's a 剣 doll," the witch exclaimed, their voice full of haughty superiority.

"Senpai, what would you have this one do with this… interloper?" the doll asked.

"Leave her. We're going to be late for the simulcast."

The doll pulled back as the huntress seethed in rage. Picking up his arm, the pair walked past the huntress to continue on their journey.

"You look this far down on me? You spit on my abilities?! You think yourself merciful? You turn your BACK ON ME?!" the huntress cried out

She wouldn't let them get away with this. She wouldn't let them embarrass her like this. She wouldn't let them take pity on her like this. The huntress span in an arc, looking to catch them before they walked too far away, but by the time she had turned, the doll had disappeared.

From behind, she heard the doll's voice once more. "Nothing personal, kid," he said, before the pavement was dyed that crimson red she'd so yearned to see.

(Old story reposted from Twitter)

#dollposting #microfiction #fantasy #witches #huntress #empty spaces #my writing

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Hi Elli!

I saw that you've started editing on Till Death - congratulations! Do you find that you follow any particular process when editing? Have you come across any lines or sections that made you proud or happy to have written them?

Hello! :)

Uh, except for running around in a circle, screaming and crying.

First, I do a read-through directly after I've finished the last chapter, taking care of all notes I left along the way. (The dress was green, remember there's no glass windows, remove reference to x, should she buy lamp oil?)

If I am aware of any particular quirks that found their way in, I might try to kill them already. This time, I had an ungodly amount of "by the time" and "attempt", on top of normal culprits like again, still, almost, that.

Unfortunately, and don't take that as advice, I already stick it into InDesign at this point, which is a bad idea, 0/10, every further change has to be done there AND in my doc, and can mess up my layout. (I guess it does help to see it in other formats for a read — epub and pdf, but still too early.)

Then I try my best to let it rest for a while, but success is questionable. This time, I could leave me hands off it for almost all of October! :D

I usually don't have beta readers like I did this time, because before, stuff has been posted directly on Tumblr. So now I have a lot more notes to take a look at. (I do have 1-2 people who can crawl around in my google docs almost as soon as it's written, but those are also the same people who get relentlessly spammed during writing, so it's probably harder for them to tell if X makes sense, when I have talked about X to them nonstop for weeks.)

I fix whatever came up in the meantime, and pay closer attention to formatting already, because the last step is gonna be checking for widows and orphans and stuff. Sadly I do not have the attention span to do a whole check for commas etc, at some point I start just reading 😭 oh well.

I will re-read it half a year after I put it up for download and find a dozen more things I know better now and want to fix 🥺 Sometimes I do. Like today with HmW.

As for the second question, if I am fully honest, almost every single part of this WIP is something I am happy about. This is really pure self-indulgence. Every bit of pain, and suffering, and sadness, and fluff, and hope.

I liked this paragraph I came across earlier:

Instead, she reached into the pile of fabric and picked up the bracelet she had made. In the dim firelight, the glass beads looked dull, their colors barely distinguishable from each other, and her plan that had been so clear in the afternoon sun now lacked confidence. She lifted the bracelet, took a deep breath, and hoped that at least this idea of hers was going to work out.

#salad-ask #sarandipitywrites #wip: till death #I mean 'usually' is a strong word #considering Thorns and its process are a hot mess #and everything else except Till Death has been posted on Tumblr before I put it together in a book-shape #so there was a 'post it' step squeezed in somewhere #but the rest was roughly the same #also I should probably look into a better program like atticus but #it works. and I am lazy.

[thatfailedpokemontrainer]

Hey what's it like owning a Dedenne, and do you have any care tips? Just curious. (- @battle-subway-ghost)

:O!!!!!! crossing my fingers that you'll get one!!!!

Anyways.

Dedenne are very loyal companions and a very common starter in kalos because of this. They are generally good natured and more commonly kept as companions then battlers. Dedennes have a 4-8 year life span, that can be - uh- shortened by battling intensely and frequently, not that it can't be done saftely!!

A lot of dedenne prefer to be close to their trainers, because they like the warm and electrical charges of their bodies, this is why you'll see them often sitting on the shoulders and or head of their trainers.

Dedennes are not solitary creatures, it is recommended you have another smaller pokemon for them to interact with safetly, Thorn likes to chill with Amber and Reed, used to be best friends with static!

So. For care tips. Large encousure, it is very easy to loose a dedenne, I recommend having an area of your house dedicated to dedenne care. They need cover, they are a prey species, so being concovered and unprotected makes them feel unsafe and stressed out.

Dedenne need chew things **need** them. If they are not given sufficent chew things they will find sufficent shew things and it might be your hair. Having loose wires and charging cords you no longer used for dedennes to make into a 'nest' in their home. Buying toys from an electric type pokemon store that release energy slowly, as this gives dedenne an even feed over the day.

When you want to hold your dedenne, wait for it to climb on your hand, do NOT grab it (unless your dedenne has extremely high trust in you but still is not recommended). Make sure your dedenne is safe and secure whereever it is on you, weather it be on your shoulder or in your pocket.

.... Oh shit I've been infodumping- Ghost how could you make me do this!?!?!?

#sprite :> #pkmn irl #pokeblogging #rotumblr #pokemon #rotomblr #pokemon irl #pkmn #dedenne #dedenne pokemon #pikaclones

[opbackgrounds]

Since you are reading the older arcs, I feel like you have a better vantage point to talk about this: how do you feel Oda's pacing has changed over the years? I keep getting the sense that he's going through stuff faster than before but when I check the number of chapters for each arc, the later arcs are so much longer. I don't know if it's nostalgia but I feel like the older arcs might have been shorter but they felt really detailed and well paced.

I've actually thought about this quite a bit, and I'm convinced that the answer is in the edit.

There's a lot of factors to consider when considering this question. Firstly, the cast is much bigger now. A bigger crew requires more enemies for fights, and grander world-spanning stakes requires an equally grand second- and tertiary characters. This is an inherent problem with creating a world and story that's as big as One Piece's and Oda's hardly the only person who's ever struggled with it--Just ask fans of GRR Martin how they're holding up waiting for The Winds of Winter.

However, while some of the growth is necessary and expected, Oda's done himself no favors. The recent Road to Laugh Tale sketches show that the Red Scabbards started out with only four samurai. Personally I think five or seven would have been a better number, but just imagine how much shorter Wano would be with the samurai plot threads essentially cut in half. And, really, as cool as it was that Oda was able to sit down and come up with the Eleven Supernovas in an afternoon, once they're introduced into the story Oda has to do something with them. In one fell swoop Oda introduced nine plot lines that simply did not exist before the Sabaody Archipelago. He did the exact same thing when introducing the Seven Warlords, and while that's a cool group that definitely has a place within the world of One Piece, I understand Oda's grief when he says he wished he'd made it a smaller group.

But, what's done is done and having introduced all these characters Oda doesn't really have much choice but to use them. I think for the most part his handling of the Supernovas has been really good, weaving them within existing arcs, but not every group has been that successful. The absolutely best thing Oda could have done for his pacing is cut out a lot of the fluff and streamline the story as much as possible. That's not to say that there's not a place for character interaction and jokes, but its like finding steak with the right amount of fat. You want enough for some flavor, but not enough to ruin the cut.

And that just hasn't happened. I brought it up at the beginning of Water 7 about how tight the plotting is. Even a lot of the jokes and character interaction end up tying back into the themes and plot of the story itself. I distinctly remember a chapter early in Wano where a ton of pages were spent on a joke about Franky going from

place to place looking for blueprints to Orochi's mansion, and while it's a good joke in and of itself, it didn't do anything for the overarching story of Wano. Had Oda cut it, the story would have lost nothing and he could have used those pages on something more important. The same can be said about the cute fox story the tied into the weapon stores. It was cute and heartwarming, but the benefit to the overall story of Wano did not justify the page count Oda spent on it. And it's not just Wano, because there's no reason why everyone and their dog deserved flashbacks during Dressrosa, and Doflamingo definitely didn't need three.

That's the power of the edit. Working on a serialized schedule means editing works differently than someone making a second pass on a novel. You have to be ruthless when deciding what to cut and what to keep before anything's been drawn. Because as I've said before, making a comic is one of the least efficient ways to tell a story out there, and stupidly labor intensive even when working in black and white and using assistants.

Oda's also made several comments, more lately, about being ready for One Piece to be finished. He has a different mindset now 25 years later than a young man just starting out on his journey. I don't think the fandom appreciates just how much of his life he's given up to see this story through, the years he wasn't able to spend with his wife and children, days of little sleep cooped up in a room drawing on a grueling schedule known to kill people. That has an effect on the story itself. A person only has so much endurance, and while I'm sure Oda still loves One Piece you can definitely tell how the simple passing of time has affected how he's gone about writing it.

#sarc talks #long post

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Soooooo if Zack and Seph were friends in Crisis Core, why did Seph turn on him at all? It seemed kind of abrupt imo

Lots of CC feels abrupt, much as I adore the game. I don't blame the writers, as the game itself takes place in Zack's perspective and has to juggle his relationships with LOTS of different characters in a way that gives the player just enough time to get a feel for each dynamic. It essentially has to squeeze a lot in one sitting with limited time for a smaller-scale game. Hopeully, Reunion might space things out and add a bit more details.

As for your question... (WARNING: LONG lol)

This is all my personal headcanon, mind you, as I've established in previous fics and writing.

Barring the theory that Sephiroth is being manipulated and swayed by Jenova (which I definitely adhere to, at least in the case of Nibelheim), I believe that, after Genesis' betrayal, Sephiroth completely disregarded all of his feelings towards any lingering relationships.

You have to understand that, around the time of the Nibelheim Incident, Sephiroth had been essentially betrayed three different times. First with Genesis, then with Angeal, and then with Lazard (who I don't think was his FRIEND per se but they definitely seemed to have a friendly/respectful working relationship). He's sleep deprived, exhausted, was already feeling ready to abandon his job and titles, and just had his best friend essentially spit in his face, call him a monster, tell him that he's a lab experiment, and then ask for a one-sided favor. He's not in good shape at all, especially after he finds out the truth about his origins (AND also figures out Gast was involved which seems to distress him).

Sephiroth's life, in more ways than one, is a story about abandonment. First Lucrecia. Then Gast--who could have very well been a father figure based on how reverently Seph speaks about him. Then his two best friends. His boss. Everyone and everything he ever cared about. All gone. And the ones who come back only come to hurt him.

Which brings us to Zack.

Throughout CC, in the scenes in which they are together, Zack is friendly, but also assertive around Sephiroth. He's respectful towards him and has a lot of his usual positivity and energy, but he also isn't afraid to call him out either. And Sephiroth, as Nomura said in a recent interview, greatly appreciates that. I think it's why he's very patient and kind towards Zack overall. He might view him as a piece of Angeal, with Genesis' ambition mixed in. A piece of his vanished friends, someone who treats him like a human being.

So why the betrayal?

Because Genesis and Angeal were his only real loved ones. People he trusted, people who he was growing sicker and sicker worrying about, people who he was ready to leave Shinra for. He refused to fight them, gave them time to escape, never spoke ill against their transformations, and never stopped believing in them. Even after the death of Angeal, Sephiroth still had no ill feelings towards Genesis. Not until Genesis directly hurt him at the reactor. But by then, it was one blow too many.

In the end, Sephiroth lets go of Zack. Just another human connection. Just another traitor. And if not now, then surely later. Another backstab. Another bit of grief to add to his growing collection over the span of two years. If he can finally be with Mother, and finally reclaim his birthright, what use are humans? Why would he ever trust someone he knows will betray him and leave him like Genesis and Angeal? Why should he bother at all when all humans have ever done is manipulate and hurt him? Zack is probably manipulating him too! Zack was probably IN on it! Zack probably planned everything from the beginning! Just like Shinra did. Just like ALL humans did! Humans conspired against him, experimented on him! Zack HAS to be in on the experiment too! All humans are!

On and on. I explored this mindset at the tail end at AMT but basically, Sephiroth's mind is gone by the time he goes on his bender in the library. And by the time Zack comes to find him, there's nothing left of himself. He's completely lost it and there's no going back.

Do I think Zack could have saved him? Maybe. If given the right timing and the right words. And if they'd gotten out of Nibelheim and away from Jenova. I think she probably intensifies a lot of his emotions after "awakening" the cells within him and so there's no telling how easily Zack could persuade him if she's got her claws in. One thing I do think is that Zack did care about Sephiroth and never wanted this to happen. I think there was a Dissidia game where Zack confronts Sephiroth and is STILL distraught about what Sephiroth has become. I don't think he hated Sephiroth, even after what he did. He was willing to take Seph out and put an end to it, but I think he mostly just wanted to end the madness. He said himself that Sephiroth is no longer the Sephiroth he once knew.

So yeah. Drama, ugly emotions, a LOT of paranoia, and trust/abandonment issues basically ended what could have very well been a meaningful friendship. I'd like to think Seph would have found a new friend circle through Zack and Cloud and could have healed in time, had they gotten out before the crazy shit went down. It's a small tragedy that I wish more people thought about when it comes to Crisis Core.

In the end, Sephiroth felt he had no one left but Mother. And thus, nothing left to lose.

#sephiroth #zack fair #ff7 #crisis core #ffvii #final fantasy 7 #asks #sephcanons #genesis rhapsodos #angeal hewley #nibelheim incident #sephzack #ffvii crisis core #crisis core reunion #Alto rants #jenova