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reimahowaido · 2 years

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I mentioned the 2 apprentices of Gilded Helm, and here they are~ It them boys, the two dummies Again, don’t mind the quality, these are speedy We got the secretary & the attack dog As is tradition there’s going to be two of them for these split purposes. One of them is chosen by the Elite Soldier and the other is a recommendation from the rest of the Mawkin and somewhat picked by the popular vote in a sense. The Elite Soldier can pick which ever role they’re choosing the first apprentice for, and the remaining one is for the rest of the tribe to decide I’ll write up some stuff on them too - and here be mentions to the previous 2 a handful of times as well

Valiant Crest - He/They - Not based on any game enemy, but one of the Red Armored Mawkin in the Hanubia 100% completion pic The bird here is an Ornate Hawk Eagle He’s average on the height factor Valiant Crest is the more proper of the two apprentices, one who actually helps with Gilded Helm’s workload by keeping an eye on the other Mawkin, reporting back to her and helping when it comes to dealing with problems. Usually running errands, proof reading or writing notes; if Gilded Helm is having a meeting Valiant is likely outside, standing attentively and making sure no-one disturbs them. He might be a bit too focused on the work though, needs to be told to take some time off and he has a hard time thinking of anything to do when he’s on a break so to speak. Calm and patient, he seemingly has nerves for days and you’ll need to work hard to try and get him to miss-behave. Most of this patience has been built up throughout his life, having a younger sibling to look after when they lost their parents to who knows what (they weren’t that high ranking soldiers, just your everyday Silver Armors, so there was not enough attention paid to their children to actually tell them), and be the one responsible for the two of them, Valiant has had to take care of a lot of things for a few centuries at least. His sister was the one that came up with excuses and explanations for whatever they had gotten themselves into, and Valiant had to make it sound reasonable - or simply apologize on behalf of the two for the wild deer roaming around the halls. Proud Gambit is around the age of the two siblings, so he chimed in occasionally to help them get out of trouble. The three of them have been somewhat close ever since they were young, and Valiant was actually chosen as an apprentice to Gilded Helm prior to Proud’s promotion to an Elite Soldier. Proud likes to joke that he did it in order to be able to come tell Valiant to take a breather every now and then (although in reality he was challenged by the previous Elite Soldier who was feeling their position threatened and tried to knock down the competition - and then ended up on dying as a result since 99% of the time it’s kill or be killed and Proud was acting in self-defense, no mercy). And while the truth of that statement may not be an exact explanation, Valiant still appreciates the gesture and these are the rare moments where he does let a smile slip through ~~~~~~~~~ Red Throat - He/Him - The Red Soldier that dares challenge you after what happened in that cutscene in Hanubia, that’s this fella Design from the Siberian Rubythroat Funnily enough he’s fairly tall even if the design referenced is a smol borb And he did used to be a small chick funnily enough, he just ended up growing quite tall. Red is one pampered, self-centered douche bag. He has always been quite full of himself, the man has enough hubris to almost challenge Raven Beak. And to be honest, if one of the Mawkin were to challenge Raven Beak anytime soon, one of them would most certainly be Red Throat. The smidgeon of self-preservation he possesses though keeps him from trying to throw hands with their supreme leader, and he has to be satisfied with being one of the top ranked Red Armors instead - a fact he won’t let go unnoticed and will bring up time and time again as if anyone was even questioning it in the first place. He’s the kind of guy you’ll notice coming down the hall from miles away because he ain’t going to soften the sound of his proud stride in the slightest. Red is a bit more than just words though, man happens to be a prodigy when it comes to combat. He learns fast, is able to master new things with ease and even as a mere chick he’d be able to impress countless other Mawkin. Some do say that any weapon he picks up just seemingly becomes another natural part of him, and statistically speaking Red is near the top of Mawkin with the highest winning rate of all. If his attitude doesn’t command respect convincingly enough, he does have the skills to back them up. Red Throat actually has a higher win-rate % than even Proud Gambit, most of that is due to their different upbringing though; Proud has trained all his life, losing a bunch as a chick and having his opponents be way beyond his skill level just so he could learn more from them even if he’d end up losing. Red in the other hand has won practically every fight he took on. While a handful of these are times where he was challenged by others his age but far bellow in skill level, he has bested a bunch of Mawkin that were classified much more experienced than he was. In comparison to Proud’s hundred-ish early losses, Red has only lost perhaps 15 times in his entire life - A few sloppy losses to Valiant when he’s not paying enough attention - A general he underestimated and doesn’t dare challenge again out of potential embarrassment - Never been able to beat Gilded - And similarly he has never actually been able to defeat Proud, no matter how many times he challenges him. Proud’s first noticeable victory was against Red, and Red has never truly been able to get over it, even if it’s been years, centuries, and Proud sees these challenges as ‘lighthearted training’. The gap between the two’s skills has only grown throughout the years. This only serves in making Red more irritated and jealous, but at least losing to Proud isn’t embarrassing and the other will gladly accept any challenge (in hopes of Red learning something too (even if he’s never going to take it to heart)) so the one-sided rivalry keeps existing (honestly it’s only really taken seriously by Valiant and his sister, both of whom would prefer Red to stop trying). Red wishes to overthrow Proud one day and to take his place, but for now his chances in doing so have expired Whereas Valiant Crest was actually chosen by Gilded Helm, Red Throat was chosen by others. Really, there was no competition on who would be picked when looking at the overall skill of the rest of the Red Armors - ones who weren’t already in the lead of a platoon or anything (Proud Gambit was still a Silver Armor at the time, meaning he was out of consideration). Red wasn’t quite as extremely outwardly pompous back then. Yes he would brag with his achievements, but he did actually let others talk here and there, perhaps in an act of trying to seem nicer. But this event only caused for his ego to swell even further. The man holds his arrogance only when one of the big 3 is around (Raven Beak & Gilded Helm, and when Proud Gambit is around he only does this out of spite and the fact he sees Proud as competition) In fact, he’s quite acquiescent towards Gilded Helm. Perhaps respect, perhaps intimidation, potentially the fear of being demoted if he miss-behaves and she sees he’d do better as food for the Drogyga. The main point here is that you’ll get him to at least somewhat behave if you threaten you’ll report him and his behavior to Gilded (Just be sure there are other witnesses, Red has killed other Mawkin in the past to cover up for himself like this. Can’t make a report when you’re dead, and even as him reporting a quelled rebellion attempt a bit more often than every once in a while might seem suspicious to others, he gets away with a lot with this strategy). Red is also one of the only Chozo to ever having managed to make Gilded Helm feel visibly embarrassed - and for the sake of his ego he prefers to see that as an achievement and to never talk of the incident ever again. Do not accidentally call your superior ‘mom’ everyone, he has since learned to be better with his words, but it did happen

#Metroid #Chozo #Chozo OC

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farahgaines45 · 8 days

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rwbytales · 9 months

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Rwby TTRPG

So aside from the first one I did being called island maturin, I really don't know a name if want to give this.. universe, I suppose that I'm creating other stuff for

Eitherway, this is outside my Search and Rescue chapter, and happens prior to, since Island Maturin is the end of their story. And they wanted to continue and have them all meet and such so under ReadMore ima go into stuff and I'd love to now what anyone thinks maybs??

So one of the things I was doing was creating new headmasters for the academies, but I thought it'd be fun if, since Oz reincarnates and if the previous headmasters from what we see in the show, were also based off of Wizard of Oz, but were different versions of the character they were based on.

I only have the Headmistress of Haven, who is also Lion, and I dont have a semblance yet, I have a pic and I know that she was going to be very scared and cowardly p much as a child abd when she was young until she met Oz and others who helped her. And I want her to be a physical in your face fighter, with claw weapon of some sort.

Eitherway

---

I was talking to a client and they don't know RWBY but they know WOZ, and they mentioned that I should add the lollipop guild in some way

And they were absofuckinglutely. Correct I needed to.

I have no idea what I want the Lollipop Guild to be called, but I already added in something for storywise to make it easier and I can slot them into.

Basically, there is a 'Hunters Guild' that accepts and overviews the missions and requests, and they set up and take care of mission boards and payment and such, so it goes through them, they set up boards, and give and take requests. They were set up in every kingdom and worked directly with the council/academies/authority in order to do everything.

They are also stationed in larger cities outside of the kingdoms and in some villages where they also work to protect themselves and others, most of these villages outside the kingdom are filled with their own kind as well. But they are very welcoming to others and have never discriminated against faunus and such.

So the Lollipop guild would basically be a very old lineage, and obviously, most of them are much shorter in statue, the tallest coming to roughly 4 ft.

These people I figured, as one point in time generations ago had met Oz, and was one of the civilizations and people he lived with snd taught, they knew he had magic, saw what he could do. They had seen this man had lived many lives and that he could live many more. He them helped train them and help others later generations, allowing them ease and access into the kingdoms, traveling and acting as huntsmen before huntsmen truly existed, influenced by Oz that even those who don't have Silver Eyes could learn to fight and defend.

-thingd in deciding on after that in regards

Perhaps they are a strong lineage of Silver Eyes warriors and have always been protectors and fighters, predating the Great War by generations. After salem has been hunting and slaughtering silver eyes warriors, they are harder to come across, much as the silver eyes warriors are. Those who are not directly in kingdoms and with others fighting, have quietly fled and relocated to a hidden area in the Domain of Light, where the God of Light resigned before he fled.

#rwby #rwby homebrew #rwby island maturin #rwby oc #rwby ttrpg #world and character stuff

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ramon-balaguer · 2 years

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Good Morning Saints, Sinners and Sinners disguised as Saints; I know who and who’s you are, and Love the Hell out of you. ❤️

I’ve ALWAYS been a gay go-lucky carefree looking through rose colored lenses kinda guy; you know, the Optimist in most pessimistic situations, finding good in bad or opportunity in evil and junk that comes against us. A True Dominican 🇩🇴 version of the Lone Ranger 🐎 happily alone yet striving in diverse company and or usual suspects. 🌈

Stress Free❗️🥰🙏🇺🇸 #REBTD 😇

But not so fast Kimo Sabe, as it turns out, you can experience STRESS even when you don’t seem stressed, feel stressed or show ANY signs of Stress. 😱

Case in point, I’ve been going through a battery of medical and physical tests to determine what’s ails me and as it turns out, PLENTY… from more blockages in my heart and my body overcompensating for lack of useful arteries to the debilitating and excruciating lower back and joint pains to breathing problems aggravated by allergic asthma to kidney stones, severe headaches, great weight loss and increase in urinating, prospect of CANCER, the whole Leftist Liberal Ridiculousness Covid-19 LOCKDOWNS, Fake News, Masks and Vaccine MANDATES, the CRISES (Inflation, illegal aliens, crimes, murders, suicides, abortion, homelessness, military vets, police defunding, BLM and ANTIFA Thugs & Terrorists, SSM, Need for Age & Term Limits for ALL, CRT, Christian Persecution, etc.) Created and or Exacerbated by some IDIOT Crowned Clown In Chief and his Posse, Gang or Squad of Domestic Enemies Wreaking Havoc, Dividing US and Trying to Destroy US and throughout it ALL in a short period of less than 3 months time, I’ve been taking it ALL in stride like a Champ, knowing GOD got me. Plus the Fact that my house has been in order since I was first diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, so that if I go to be with Jesús or He allows me to Live a lil longer, I’m good and so is my family. 🙌🙌🙌

Apparently, my mind, my heart, my soul were one at Peace but my body had a mind of its own and other ideas, and GOD Created it to SURVIVE, so my body unbeknownst to the rest of me has been STRESSED OUT by ALL the NEGATIVITY in the News, MSM, and of course my various docs. And that has given me the latest trouble, Shingles (Culebrilla), a Herpe type virus from Chicken Pox that lays dormant in EVERYONE’S body until it’s hibernation is interrupted by some acute awakening or sudden stress to activate it into action that usually manifests itself in a form of a rash that develops into a wet wound that is Highly Infectious to the person experiencing it and can quickly spread to your entire face, eyes and rest of your body. It is itchy, painful, insightful and very annoying‼️

No, I can’t infect others, well, Not with that, but it can transfer the virus 🦠 to lay dormant in the infected to either manifest itself as Chicken Pox or maybe Shingles⁉️

The Good Doc at MAHC gave me some huge blue pills 💊 UCC Valacyovir- PO 1gr to take 3 x a day as an Anti-Viral junk, some white powder Astringent junk called Domeboro that helps dry up the wound (that’s the white stuff you see on my head in the pics) which in turn helps stop ✋ the spread, and Codeine laced aspirins to help me sleep 😴 trust me, that crap 💩 feels like you’re a Voodoo doll poking you with needles 🪡 in the affected area. Speaking of Voodoo, in DR 🇩🇴 and Haiti 🇭🇹 even the real Doctors 👨‍⚕️👩‍⚕️ send you to the Witch Docs 🧙‍♀️🧙‍♂️to naturally 🍃heal you from this and and the EFFECTIVELY do so in no time at all, in other words, if I were in DR, I wouldn’t have to wait 3 to 5 weeks to get rid of this junk. 🤔

Prior to this, I never heard of it but thank GOD I’m very in tune with my body to quickly identify anything different, and found out several friends had it and all you can do is wait the 3 to 5 weeks to do what it does and go away (with Steroids Treatment for more Severe cases) and then about 6 months later, take an Anti-Shingles Vaccine- which like the Covid-19 vaxx won’t 100% protect you but will help if you get it 🦠 again. 🤣🤣🤣

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highdio · 3 years

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Got an ask and follow-up re: whether Dio is an "archetypal villain" so doing it as one reply (fwiw I just did a reply re: Dio's nuance so keeping this to the 'archetype' part of the ask).

“so, i seen some people say Dio is simply a archetypal villain, perhaps even flat. what would you say to someone that told you he was without nuance? i plenty believe he has, but sometimes i dont know exactly what to say”

“someone i asked about what was their favorite villain told me he was a archetypal villain. and i think two years ago i saw a meme pic about how Dio fans are obnoxious or something. i mostly got my liking from him by analyses, alongside the fact that i do think personally that he DID change as a character, not completely, but he had some development.”

I partly agree with that, although maybe there's not one single 'archetypal villain.’ The person you spoke with probably meant that Dio's is Evil with a capital 'E,' as opposed to a villain who does the bad things for understandable reasons, or who gets corrupted by events outside their control. Araki's vision for Dio (in Part 1 especially) is, morally speaking, black-and-white, with Dio's Evil defined by Araki as an innate trait rather than the effect of his circumstances.

fwiw David Mamet's got a good list of eight villain archetypes - the anti-villain, the beast, the bully, the machine, the mastermind, the evil incarnate, the henchman, and the fanatic - and I thought for the purpose of this reply it's helpful to defining Dio's specific brand of badness. Of those archetypes, two stand out as defining Dio's *specific* type: the Evil Incarnate and (technically not on the list but inspired by it) the Anti-Hero.

(fwiw you can read my convo here about why Dio isn't a bully type. I see him mistyped this way especially by people who want to expand Jonathan's role in the series. tl;dr, basically it comes down to the fact that Dio's charisma - his most important character trait btw - draws people toward him while a bully actively seeks out confrontation. The bully barges into a room, the charismatic character gets you to barge into a room. Dio is the latter.)

Evil Incarnate's almost self-explanatory - Dio's literally called that in the series (邪悪の化身) - although I can talk more about this if you want. By contrast, his anti-hero role's maybe less obvious ... but that designation offers us a way of reconciling some of the stuff listed under Mamet's 'Evil incarnate' that doesn't work with how Dio's written. Specifically, an Evil incarnate-type villain's primary role in the narrative is usually as an obstacle to the hero's journey, ie, as an antagonist. imo, Dio functions instead primarily as a parallel protagonist.

(I've written about this before but) Araki's said this a lot: Dio joins Jonathan as a dual protagonist in Phantom Blood, and Dio's own story follows a Hero's rising arc.

(Was surprised I didn't notice this until I hunted a gif for this reply: while the Part 1 OP features both main characters throughout, it's Dio alone who's given a special manga panel mini-montage during its bridge, emphasizing his hero-style arc.)

In a lot of ways Dio's more fleshed out than the actual hero since Araki had already worked out the specifics of his personality in a prior series (whereas Jonathan was vaguer to Araki, even as Part 1 was being published: "just as Jonathan was unsure how to live his life, I was unsure as to where to take his character.") Phantom Blood starts off with Dio's introduction, not Jonathan's. As Araki puts it,

The title of the series is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but first and foremost, I actually wanted to draw Dio.

The hero's introduction is inserted within Dio's introduction, as a story-within-a-story recalled in a flashback by Dio's dad. We don't get to meet Jonathan on his own terms until the next chapter, and, because of this ordering, if you read Part 1 cold you could start off thinking it's Dio who's going to be the hero. Dio's story's a riff on your stereotypical rags-to-riches tale but with the obvious twist that he's written as unapologetically Evil. Like the rags-to-riches protag, Dio's faced with increasingly difficult setbacks and challenges throughout his story's progress, and, in spite of these, he keeps moving forward. Araki, again:

Dio moves in a rising direction, like Jonathan. Dio accepts and embraces his evil nature and follows his dark path without hesitation. In other words, both Dio and Jonathan are living life with everything they’ve got, and both always maintain a rising personal arc.

In other words, Dio has his own upward rising arc by design and it's independent of the hero's. ofc his interactions with the Joestars throughout the series are significant and their back-and-forths drive the larger story, but the trajectory of Dio's arc remains largely the same throughout all this.

If you see Dio as a protagonist then you also recognize that Jonathan's (and later Jotaro and company's) relentless pursuit (yes, they pursue him, because charisma is a gravitational force) provides the antagonistic force to Dio's arc. (And going back to the Araki quote, that "without hesitation part" is really important - Dio's willful embrace of his Evil nature and the intentionality of his actions throughout Part 1 again align him with a heroic type: it's a positive character trait, just in Dio's case it's executed wrongly.)

So call Dio an anti-hero or, if it makes you more comfortable, a Villain who thinks he's the Hero in the story. This isn't a unique situation (and probably as you're reading this you might be thinking, well all villains have their own story arc too) but imo Araki writing Dio with this specific perspective and intent sets him apart from what we think of as the more generic model of a villain, whose role within the narrative is secondary to the hero's and whose arc is cleanly set up as in opposition to that hero.

Ofc, a villainous anti-hero is by nature appealing because we know we really shouldn't root for him. We should hate him ... but we still sort of love him, especially when, because of that rising story arc that Araki gave him, he keeps coming back after stupidly impossible odds. Usually when you get decapitated you lose but Dio's not like that, and there's something compelling about a character who repeatedly breaks the narrative flow by improv-ing his way through impossible situations.

tl;dr, basically if you're looking to characterize what 'type' of villain Dio is (and why he's attractive), Dio is Evil personified fused with the inconvenient fact of his also being more or less protagonist-identified. Araki wrote Dio with a hero in mind, and that fact keeps him interesting on his own terms and places him in the contrarian posture of a particularly reprehensible anti-hero.

#Anonymous #replies tag #jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #dio brando #mp #dioposts #dio talk

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chem-24 · 3 years

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some thoughts on one of the datamined/leaked characters and Inazuma

Specifically, about this funky Aetherface-looking dude + some stuff about the Electro Archon got in too, somehow :/

(watch as this gets debunked into the ground when the Inazuma update is released)

What are the scraps that we know of him so far? Well, his name is “Kazuha”, and he’s going to be an Anemo Sword!

Yeah there’s been some prior misinformation about him being a pyro polearm (even I thought he was going to be pyro sword), but that was more just him getting confused with this other guy called “Tohama” (who’s also supposed to be Ayaka’s (arranged) fiancée? No idea how that’s going to turn out). Plus, you can see Kazuha’s Anemo Vision on the second pic here:

It appears to be an autumn motif instead, which is also pretty cool and can still tie into the wind theme

The second thing I did notice though (first being ooooo new pyro character) was that he looked like a samurai. It’s also why I had doubts about him being a polearm user.

*[Yes I know historical samurais have used bows and spears in the past. But even Japanese media pushes the “samurai = katanas” angle, and Kazuha strikes me as more of a “pop culture-style Japanese swordsman” than a historically-accurate one if you get what I’m saying.]

To digress a little; how’s Inazuma looking? Well, according to Zhongli: the Electro Archon, also known as “Baal” or “Raiden”, has issued a “Vision Hunt Decree” to confiscate her people’s visions and decorate them on the hands of a “thousand-armed statue”, as well as closing off the country. Furthermore, it is said that no one has received an Electro Vision in a year in-story by “the will of the Electro Archon”.

There is a runaway NPC from Inazuma to Liyue called “Atsuko”, who provides a tangible picture of Inazuma’s current state of affairs:

As pointed out in this reddit post, Baal’s actions are a parallel to other real life Japanese rulers such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi & Tokugawa Ieyasu; from closing the country and confiscating swords (visions) from the populace, up to melting all the swords to create a giant metal statue (that one didn’t work, but it’s the thought that counts).

**[my personal thoughts on this is that someone or something else has either succeeded or stole Baal’s position as the Electro Archon, which would explain the sudden extreme personality change.

Like, try to think of this in terms of the in-story timeline - the lockdown specifically happened a year ago; no one knows what’s going on inside Inazuma, nor does Inazuma know anything about the outside world. Thus, the Electro Archon shouldn’t know about ‘recent events’ like Venti getting his gnosis stolen or Zhongli’s “”death””, so her/their(?) current actions are definitely not influenced by what’s happening to the other Archons - this was something the Electro Archon decided to do on their own, independently of the Tsaritsa’s/Fatui’s plans.

Venti has explained before that anybody with a vision is capable of becoming a god, so the possibility is there. Hell, they may even be posing as Baal and hiding the truth of their ascension for some reason.

If you’re familiar with Japanese history, then think about how Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa came to power in the first place.

To summarize briefly: Hideyoshi was originally a vassal of another warlord called “Oda Nobunaga”, who united most of Japan. However, Nobu was betrayed and killed by another one of his vassals known as “Akechi Mitsuhide”, so Hideyoshi stepped up and finished the rest of the job.

After Hideyoshi’s death, Tokugawa (and 4 other men) was supposed to look over his son until he was of age to rule. But Tokugawa was growing in popularity at the time, so he stepped to take power himself.

So in the context of the Genshin story, perhaps the “Toyotomi Hideyoshi” and “Akechi Mitsuhide” figures are being fused together (aka: this person killed the previous Electro Archon and took her place). Or it’s a Stanley/Venti’s friend situation 2.0

Plus, it’s added dramatic irony to the whole ‘God of Eternity’ also being the god of lightning; something fundamentally transient and brief. Their so-called ‘eternity’ is as fleeting as a lightning bolt, or something.]

Anyways, back to Kazuha.

If we’re going with the implication that the Archons are responsible for giving out their respective elemental Visions (others have theorized about this too); then what does that say about Kazuha, who has an Anemo Vision (proudly displayed in full view too!) given by the God of Freedom?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Kazuha may turn out to be a “wandering vagrant” or “ronin”-archetype character; kinda like what Miyamoto Musashi does. A vagabond that wanders the land and maybe hides in a village once in a while, but never having an established home.

Of course, there’s still plenty of unknowns such as what his actual personality is like - but I think that with this, we can narrow down one part of his character concept at least.

Take another look at his character design: Kazuha is associated with “autumn”, which invokes the imagery “falling leaves in the wind from a tree” and “the passing of something”; possibly exemplifying Kazuha’s nature as a ‘wanderer’ who never stays in one place for too long, and perhaps the presence of a former/deceased master or organization(?).

Furthermore, Kazuha has very albino-esque features with white hair and red eyes, which could further indicate him being a “outcast”. Razor is another character with white hair and red eyes, and he’s very much an “outcast” from ‘normal’ human civilization too - what with being raised by wolves and all. (there’s also some people who think Kazuha and Razor could be long-lost brothers, which is kinda eeeeehhhhhhh 🤷 for me)

Combining that with the historical context of “confiscating swords = confiscating visions”, that would make Kazuha either:

A: a wanderer from the start, and thus far enough away from Inazuma’s capital to avoid the initial Vision Hunt order when it started

B: went on the run after the “Vision Hunt Decree” was issued

Either way, by refusing to give away his “sword” (vision), it would most likely make Kazuha a high-profile criminal and wanted target in Inazuma. Possibly with a bounty included too.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By the way, as some have already pointed out: some significant characters (interestingly, most of the gods) in Genshin share design similarities with other Honkai Impact characters (another Mihoyo-made game). For more examples, here’s official art of Fu Hua (a Honkai character) that makes her look suspiciously like Zhongli.

I’m bringing this up because some twitter users have pointed out that Kazuha seemingly looks like Fu Hua in her [Phoenix] battlesuit:

Is this just a coincidence, or does it really hold some deeper meaning? Personally speaking, I’d prefer that Kazuha stays human, but I guess another god isn’t too bad either :X

and with that design significance, my dreams of obtaining Kazuha as a 4* are flushed down the drain

#genshin impact #genshin impact theory #genshin theory #inazuma #genshin baal #genshin kazuha #kazuha #tohama #genshin razor #I accidentally brushed a finger past Post on mobile while it was unfinished #so I had to delete and rewrite this all over again from memory urkjrerjehrejhfyslfir

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wandaluvstacos · 3 years

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"If they didn't want to do it, they wouldn't do it"

So whenever an animal rights activist shows up on some youtube video of an animal performing for human delight, the usual counterargument is:

"If this animal didn't want to do it, it wouldn't do it!"

This is partially true. You cannot pick up a horse and force it to jump a jump if it really doesn't want to jump it. Horses that have no passion or ability for jumping or cutting do not make it to very high levels of the sport, and if you have to spurt/whip a horse repeatedly to get it to do the thing you want, then you're not going to get far.

However, there are many violent ways you can get a horse to do want, such as horse "dancing".

youtube

Unlike the piaffe in dressage, which CAN be achieved through ethical and compassionate means, this sort of "dancing" is done by tying a horse between two poles and whipping it until it has to trot in place. Often its knees are struck until it picks them up higher. Eventually you remove the poles and you can get a horse to "dance" like this with the rider. It tends to swing back and forth because during training, they'll tie chains to their feet, and the swaying is how they avoid being struck by the chains.

There is also soring done to Tennessee Walker Horses:

youtube

This is where you "sore" their front legs (basically by rubbing chemicals on their legs and plastic wrapping it to "bake" it in) until they're sensitive/painful. This means they step higher in the ring, as a way to avoid being in pain. It's a very different gait than the typical TWH gait.

Both of these are instances in which you actually CAN get a horse to do something against its will; it's just that only the most tolerant, patient horses end up "doing well" because any horse with less tolerance flunks out.

There's also the blue tongue phenomenon in the highest echelons of dressage. And let's not forget the hot mess that are barrel racers.

Any animal can be coerced into doing your bidding. However, it's also ignorant to say that all animals must be violently coerced into performing; plenty of horses are happy and healthy doing the exact same disciplines as the horses that are forced into it. As someone who has ridden a variety of horses, you instantly know when a horse is a "jumper" and when it's better left off as a trail horse. There is no amount of whipping you can do to turn a lazy horse into an Olympic jumper, nor a winning racehorse. A lot of them HAVE to enjoy it in order to succeed as well as they do.

I've also been thinking about these weird freak-outs top tier dressage horses have, what I would call a complete "shut down". A LOT of barrel racers do this same thing. They absolutely refuse to move forward. They act spooked but there's no clear indication of what's spooking them. Kicking and spurring does little to convince them to continue. It's like you're trying to have a conversation and getting no feedback. Some might say that horse is "over threshold."

A lot of people in the comments of these videos will say "every horse has its days". But these are TOP TIER performance horses, not backyard ponies. They've been in dressage rings just like this a hundred times. And as someone who has a horse who is hot, she has simply never reacted to anything in this way, even on her worst days.

This is the sort of shit she pulls when she's displeased about something.

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Usually she states her opinion and then we continue moving forward. Usually her opinion is that we are not going fast enough for her taste, lol. In this video, she saw some horses she wanted to go visit and I told her "no", and that's why she got so upset. Notice she comes right down to a loose-reined walk, and after that there is no issue.

I took her to her first show this weekend, and it was a shit show. It was her first time being in a ring with a bunch of horses, and she was NOT happy about it. It was a walk/trot class, which is obscenely offensive to her, apparently, and any time she wanted to canter, my aids bringing her back pissed her off so much she had to do her crowhopping thing. Needless to say, we were eliminated.

However, I noticed there was another horse in the class who WON both walk-trot classes, walked into the ring to jump, and absolutely shut down. Refused to go forward, both inside and outside of the ring, spun in circles, seemed like a completely different horse. I'm not saying anyone did anything wrong with this horse, or that there was any abuse. What I found odd was how two different horses went about reacting to too much stimuli. Athena never "shuts down". She reacts to the thing she's mad about (almost always me telling her to slow down), we move forward. She happily jumps anything I place in front of her. She's an INCREDIBLY frank horse. If something pisses her off, she let's me know. And we just keep moving. Despite her hot and often cautious nature, she's never just refused work. It's kind of nice, in a way. If something is hurting her or bothering her, I never have to guess.

This horse, who was so well behaved in the prior two classes, was clearly saying NO, I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS. I think more tolerant horses may be more prone to this shut down. They just let minor things coast off of them, but it builds and builds and builds and then just EXPLODES. These are the kind of horses most vulnerable to abuse, because they just take it-- until they can't anymore.

It also makes me think of my other horse Dragon, who is Athena's complete opposite. He is so stoic and tolerant, so much that when he got banged up in the trailer (no real reason beyond his own clumsiness; he'll be wearing extensive padding from now on) he barely hesitated to get back on afterward. Athena wouldn't have done that shit! You'd never get her on a trailer again if she hurt herself while on one! I imagine Dragon would be the perfect horse for an abuser, and who knows, maybe there's one in his past, considering how cautious he was around people when we first got him. An abuser would have a MUCH harder time with Athena.

This is what's most sad about abusive tactics in horseback riding-- it usually only works on the nicest horses, horse you could actually train with ethical methods if your only goal wasn't winning a show. Honestly, this is why I kinda like Athena's piss-and-vinegar attitude about stuff. Yes, it's annoying clownery especially at shows, but deep down I know she won't tolerate any shit from me, or anyone else.

Anywhere, here's a pic of here from the show where she acted like a lunatic and got eliminated, lmao. We were allowed a practice run over the 18" walk/trot crossrails that she jumped at full-out canter, having the time of her life. She is NOT a hunter pony, that's for sure, lol.

#was thinking about this a lot #despite all her faults she has never once shut down on me #she's just opinionated that's all #horses #my ponies #Athena #Youtube

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shoelace-and-friends · 3 years

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First week of dog grooming school!

So this week was my first week of dog grooming school. I have like, no prior experience, but we’re still jumping right in anyway and I’ve already started working on some actual dogs.

Day one: Teddy the goldendoodle

This is the very first dog we did, so me and a couple of my classmates teamed up on him. I learned how to use my clippers on Teddy and I was responsible for shaving his back (this pic was taken before his face was completed which is why it looks different from his body)

Day two: Denver the Labrador Retriever

Denver is the very first dog I had all to myself. Labs are simple though. I bathed him with some special deshedding shampoo and then he got brushed and dried and I clipped his nails. He didn’t like his feet touched (none of the dogs I’ve done have really), but he was otherwise smiley the whole time

Day two: Lucy the shih tzu

Lucy is probably the groom that I am most proud of so far. She’s like, the first groom groom I did mostly by myself (Other than the area around the eyes) that wasn’t just bathing and brushing. Lucy is an elderly dog. She’s 13 years old and is both deaf and blind, so on top of doing a haircut for the first time, I also learned how to do a geriatric dog and how to make a dog safe through touch when she can’t see or hear anything going on. Becuase she was old and matted, she got a shave all over, but I did some scissor work on her legs as well.

Day Three: Truman the standard poodle

Because Truman is so large, I teamed up with one other classmate. He already came in with the stereotypical poodle haircut, but we cleaned it up since it had overgrown. The thing that I improved on the most here I think was cleaning up the feet (paw pads, top of feet, nails). I grew more confident in doing them with Truman despite his feet being his least favorite spot.

Day four: Tucker the teddy bear (shih tzu/poodle mix)

I was initially supposed to have him to myself, but one of my classmate’s dogs never showed so in the end we collabed on Tucker. Tucker was by far the best behaved dog I had so far, so learning how to shave, do feet, do sani areas on him, scissor legs, etc, was easy. He was a very good boy canvas for learning.

Day Five: Jasper the cockapoo

Jasper was probably my most difficult groom for a number of reasons. For one, his owner wanted his fur kept long despite the fact that he was badly matted. Secondly, Jasper is a puppy and this was only his second groom ever. Obviously as you can probably tell from the photo I did not do Jasper alone and got lots of help from the instructor as we tried to find a compromise. My instructor did the entire bichon-style head, but she taught me how to do his schnauzer-style legs. I basically did the clipper stuff on him while she did the scissor stuff. He was very well behaved as far as puppies go, but still really tricky and I had to give him a lot of treats in order for him to listen.

I’m gonna try to see if I can make a post like this about my grooms every week.

#dog grooming #dog groomer #pet grooming #pet groomer #dog #dogs #puppy #puppies #goldendoodle #labrador #shih tzu #teddy bear #cockapoo #poodle #doodle

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curiosityjams · 3 years

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re: iz*one

first of all, i wanted to say i didn’t plan on writing something about the disbandment. the past few months have been incredibly rough on my mental state to the point where i feel as if i’ve lost all sense of self. shit has been so rough for me, their disbandment being confirmed made that even worse for me. however, i realized i need to learn how to be okay with like...being open about my own emotions in a time of uncertainty and writing them out helps me in a way even if a lot of those emotions i’d rather keep private. i’ve also been going thru a time where i’m currently reevaluating this past year and everything i’ve done/felt in the past few yrs (2.5 of those years being izone’s run), so i thought i’d write something about the disbandment and what iz*one means to me, esp during this point in my life. i’d write more about what led me to this point, but if i did, i’d end up writing a whole novel, so i’m just going to keep this as short as possible.

also if this is a jumbled mess, i’m sorry!!!!

since we’re here to talk about the inevitable, i just wanted to say that i’ve probably had a harder time accepting them being gone than i thought. i knew they were gonna disband eventually bc lol produce group, but also, knowing what happened with the voting scandal and the panasonic, it makes it even worse for me. i hate that they didn’t even bother to handle their disbandment in a way that wasn’t complete horseshit. i hate how the pandora screwed everything up. i hate how we didn’t even get a proper goodbye from the girls. i knew that this was going to happen, but i fucking hate how it all turned out. i can’t say i’m 100% happy with the ending and honestly, don’t think i’ll ever be able to fully accept that they’re no longer a group.

that said, i’m not here to vent.

while i’m obviously upset that they’re gone, the fact that they were ever a group to begin with--i’ll forever be grateful. i avoided getting into them for the longest time because of my own trauma from being involved in the 48 fandom (smth i’ll talk about at a later time bc it’s a lot), but the moment i decided to watch their “up” performance and actually give them a chance beyond looping la vie en rose, that’s when i fell in love. i fell in love with the music. i fell in love with the visuals. i fell in love with the bond between the girls. most of all, i fell in love with the fact that during a weird transitional period in my 20s, i found a group that gave me the closure i needed in a time where it felt like the world was against me while also giving me the strength i need to move on.

while we’re on that topic, let’s talk about kwon eunbi.

as you already know from my url, eunbi is obviously my bias. she’s the leader of the group, under the company my ult group, lovelyz, is also in, and THE absolute all-rounder. she’s extremely talented, super fucking funny, a babe of THE highest order, and the best single mom you could ever ask for. every time i watch a video of iz*one’s or look at any of their pics, i’m always in absolute awe of her. while i love all of the girls (j-line has a very special place in my heart bc of my time in 48 fandom) and do consider the entire group to be one full of bias wreckers, it’s eunbi that instantly caught my eye and the one i’m incredibly proud to call my ult.

“now, drea, why is it that you’re taking so much time with talking about how special this group and that girl are to you?” well, it’s mainly because that eunbi and i are the same age (both 95-liners, but i’m older by 2 months) that i’m so drawn to not only her, but the group as well. yeah, it’s normal to be drawn to members born in your birth year, but for me and esp in this case, it’s far more complex than it seems.

around the time i got into the group, i was (still am) going thru a quarter life crisis. i had just finished my a.a., was a few months away from turning 24, and had pretty much decided i was going to take an indefinite hiatus from twitter due to the amount of harm its done to my mental health over 10 years. i felt like shit knowing that so many people my age were living their lives, getting married, having kids, etc all that shit while i felt as if i was frozen in time and like i could never accomplish any of those things because according to society, my time was up. as a woman on the autism spectrum, i never felt like anything i did was enough and knowing that even after years of trauma, the feeling that if i don’t have my entire life sorted out by 24/25 scared the living shit out of me. knowing that a panini happened made those feelings even worse.

i know it’s weird to like...feel so many emotions over this esp since 23-25 is young and starting your career out at that age is normal. that said, knowing how eunbi was already in a group prior to joining iz*one that ended up disbanding months after they debuted, the road she took to get to where she is now, and the fact that she’s 25/26 and will get so many chances to start over is what gives me hope after such a shit year. i can finally get to where i want to be, i’ll graduate from university, i’ll hopefully get a job that will earn me enough money to move out of my mom’s house, i’ll find love, etc who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? i hate that after years of hating myself and being afraid of getting older because people often have this mentality that you should abandon all sense of yourself once you hit your mid 20s, it’s taken me THIS long to actually start accepting myself for who i am and living my life for myself, but i’m excited to see where the fuck life takes me after years of self-hatred, trauma, and trying too hard to please ppl that don’t give a shit. seeing eunbi just have a fucking blast on stage, take care of her members, and overall be the amazing person she is gave me the strength i desperately needed to actually get to the path i want to be on as someone that’s a few years away from turning 30.

as i said earlier, i’m not ready to just outright accept iz*one being gone. i’ll probably spend the entire month of may just watching their content since there’s still a shitton of stuff i have yet to watch and i’m lowkey embarrassed that as a fan, i’m admitting this, but also: there’s no time limit. i can always watch that video at another time, i’ll like that pic later, etc. i wish iz*one was one of those things that had no time limit because i’ll always cherish them, but in the 2.5 years of their existance, i achieved some big things and survived a pandemic. i left twitter, got closure in chapters i needed closure in, finished my a.a., etc among many other things during that time and it’s partly because of iz*one that i’ve pushed myself to do all of those things. it’s hard esp since it’s easier to just write smth like this on tumblr than actually do it, but the girls and their music were part of the reason why 2020 wasn’t a complete dumpster fire for me.

most of all, i wanted to write this because i wanted to shout-out the amazing folks at @izonetwork. i joined super late in the game, but the convos i’ve had, the laughs we’ve had on discord/among us, etc i’ll never forget it. meeting all of you was one of THE highlights of an otherwise shitty year and i’ll always credit you as one of the reasons why i wasn’t completely emotionally distant during such a dark time. all of you keep me grounded and i’m forever grateful. super honored to call you guys my friends. <3

so yeah, thank you iz*one. thank you, eunbi, sakura, hyewon, yena, chaeyeon, chaewon, minju, nako, hitomi, yuri, yujin, and wonyoung. i don’t speak korean or japanese, but know i’m eternally grateful for all the joy, strength and bops you gave me in the past 2.5 years. i’m even more grateful for the friends i’ve met thru my own fandom of the group. i’m excited to see what every single one of you does next regardless of what it may be.

now if you’ll excuse me, i have to go catch up on all the enozis i’ve missed.

❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

#izone #kpop #be quiet drea

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soliverse · 3 years

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SAY YOU LOVE ME - PART 4

rockstar!taeyongxjournalist!reader

genre: angst, suggestive, romance

warnings: mentions of emotional abuse and manipulation, panic attacks, stalker behavior, and cussing

1 ⭒ 2 ⭒ 3 ⭒ 4 ⭒ 5 ⭒ finale pt 1

Length: 3k

ps: if you are not comfortable with that sort of stuff, I will insert a warning within the story so you can skip it.

Also: the story is fictional and is no way related to NCT and its brand, especially Yuta. These are all a part of my imagination and I felt like it was needed to push the story further. Again, happy reading! - Ellie

The boys of 1:27 made a detour on a small BBQ shop on their way home to celebrate their successful performance for that night. Charlie promised them that she’ll pay for dinner and so they are stopped at the BBQ shack that they passed by on their way home. Everyone excitedly stepped out from the minivan with their arms around each other.

At this time of the night, they were the only ones inside the place. They took it as a go signal to be loud and did as they please. On a respectable manner, of course.

On one side, Johnny was filming a vlog with Mark and Doyoung. They talked about how they had fun at the performance and they wished that they can do more stuff like that in the future. Meanwhile, Taeyong helped Charlie decide what and how much to order.

The pair came out alongside the staff to help them in carrying their massive order. They brought out about five trays of barbeque and side dishes which almost didn’t fit the small rectangular table that they have. They thank the staff for their troubles and started gobbling marinated meat right away.

The staff then came out with another tray. This time, it was filled by glasses containing amber-tinted liquid.

The boys cheered as Charlie went around the table and gave each one a glass. Mark was the first one that was handed the drink and so he took a sip right away. He then started laughing uncontrollably as he takes a sip once again from the glass.

“Dude, it’s apple juice.”

Charlie went back to her seat smiling smugly.

“Of course, it’s apple juice. I’m not going to baby your drunk asses off when we get home.”

The table went quiet, filling the room with sounds of chewing and utensils clanking over plates. Doyoung tried to lighten the mood up and started sharing stories about the miniconcert that they were invited in. They also got along well with the other performers and started taking pictures with them as well.

Charlie whipped out her phone and showed everybody pictures and videos that she captured while they are performing. They can all hear the cheers and screams coming from the videos. The loudest was definitely Charlie. Everyone was excitedly jumping up and down and singing their song with them. They got all hot and sweaty from the humid weather and moving around the stage. That didn’t stop them from interacting and hyping up the audience. She even argued that it made them even more appealing, especially to the young ladies watching. Some of them even tried to get the boys’ number but they all politely declined and just settled for selfies instead.

They also played games that night which resorted to Mark paying almost half the bill as they left. The guys thanked the owners for not kicking them out for being so noisy and promised that they’ll be back to eat there again. They hopped inside one by one and passed out as soon as their bodies touched the seats.

Taeyong stayed up for a bit and waited until everyone was asleep. He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and leaned on the glass window, making a tired peace sign. He sent you the pic and typed a message right after.

Taeyong: We did well today. I’m almost home. Missed u.

His thumb hovered over the send button for a while. He cringed at the last sentence and erased it before sending it to you and popped in his eyemask and headphones to sleep.

///

“Any more questions about your assignments for this month?”

Everyone remained quiet and just shook their heads in response. The team meeting took longer than expected and it is already past lunch time. You were impatiently scribbling on the notes that you took earlier. A little trick that you do so you will look like you’re busy doing something productive. Your thoughts are now clouded by hunger and boredom and and you kept looking at the clock ticking. You are silently praying that no one will ask a question and extend the meeting any further.

“Okay then.”

The supervisor, an old guy in his early fifties, finally closes the presentation and started closing the tabs in his windows. He shut the laptop down and slammed it close.

“We’ll see each other again same time next month. Remember to stick to your deadlines.”

Finally.

The room rattled as everyone tries to pack up their stuff and get out as fast as they can. You stood up from your chair. You did a bunch of weird poses to stretch your aching body from sitting down too long as you waited for the crown to dissipate before walking away from the room.

You grabbed your handbag from beside you and dug through tons of your unorganized stuff before you were finally to fish your phone out to do a time check. Instead, you were met by tons of photos and videos sent by Charlie that morning. They were mostly pictures of them rehearsing and goofing around the area. A slight curved on your lips as saved all of them in your phone and made your way into the breakroom.

Things are going well for the past couple of weeks. You and Taeyong barely talked before the event because he was busy practicing but at least you can finally look him in the eyes. Greetings are also once again exchanged, you even sent him off on their way to the event. With that out of the way, you’re finally able to catch up on to your prior commitments and saved yourself from being fired that week.

You bolted to the breakroom because you can now hear your stomach complaining. You politely bowed at everyone inside and snaked your way through a bunch of your coworkers. Today’s hot topic was them complaining about how long the meeting was and that Mr. Supervisor purposely stretched the meeting out because he wanted to spite all of you. None of that mattered to you though. The croquette that you made last night for lunch was the only thing on your mind. Upon reaching the fridge of the tiny breakroom, you microwaved your lunch for a few seconds before to your cubicle to eat in peace.

You greeted the one sitting beside you before you took a seat. The stacks of folders and papers were set aside to make way for your lunch bag. You carefully took the contents and dived right in to calm down your growling stomach. At the same time, you decided to pop in an earphone and listened to some of 1:27 recordings while eating. A ding! interrupted the music so you absent-mindedly opened the messages without seeing who it’s from.

Abby: Hey boo.

The text intrigued you. She wasn’t the type to text someone unless it’s an emergency.

You: Oh hey. What’s up?”

Abby: Don’t freak out, okay?

Abby: I think I saw Yuta in the mall today.

You felt a lump on your throat, and it wasn’t your lunch. You felt as if someone threw a bucket of iced water at you. You’ve set your lunch down and immediately pressed reply.

You: You sure it’s him?

You: Guy might be visiting his sis. I’m sure it’s nothing.

Abby: You sure?

Abby: Would you like to stay at our place for a while? I’m sure big bro wouldn’t mind.

As much as you wanted to stay over at anyone’s house for tonight, the Li household wasn’t the best option either. The last time you slept over, he glared at you whenever you tried moving anything in the house by a small fraction.

This might be an overstatement but the only thing scarier than Yuta is judgmental Li Yongqin.

You: Yeah, it’s probably nothing. Don’t worry about me.

Abby: Just in case something happens, you have my number okay? Be safe.

You dropped your phone at your desk and you felt your body getting colder and your breaths getting shorter once again. Eating lunch didn’t feel right anymore so you placed the lid back on and slipped it back, exchanging it with the water bottle. You drank half of its content and took deep, long breathes to slow down your racing heart for a bit. You dizzily bobbed your head down and rested your head on your folded arms. People asked if you were okay but you just smiled weakly and insisted that you’ll just sit the day out until office hours was over

As the day ended, Abigail Li picked you up from work that day. She insisted that if you’re not staying over at their house, the least thing that she can do was to make sure that you get home safely.

“Are you sure that you don’t want to stay over? I’ll lock Yongqin in my closet upstairs if it makes you feel any better.” Abby knew what her brother did last time and she made Ten apologize for the glaring at her. He did some half-hearted apology before glaring one last time and shutting himself back to his room.

“Relax. I’ll be fine. It’s been years since we’ve last seen each other. He probably moved on already.”

A sigh left her mouth.

“Fine. Don’t forget to lock everything when you sleep, aight?”

///

The first thing you did as soon as you got home was to lock everything just like what Abby said. You said that you’ll be fine to assure Abby, but you know you couldn’t be too sure about Yuta. First thing you did was grab a few chips and a can of cat food for Felice. The bedroom was the most secure part of the house so you decided that the best thing to do was to camp in there until the morning comes.

You held Felice close and stroke her soft fur to calm yourself down. She had become your most loyal companion on your path to recovery when you shut yourself from everyone else. She snuggles into your chest and purred lightly, probably sensing your uneasiness.

You used all your willpower to sleep that night but your mind was restless. Even after you stuffed yourself full, drank room temperature milk and fiddled on some fancam videos, you just couldn’t your mind off of Nakamoto Yuta.

The last time that you saw him was when you were crying nonstop at the police station as Abby and Sophie held you in.

Everything played out in your head like a film in cinema.

Na Yuta.

Awesome performer.

Awful person.

(This part may be a trigger to some readers so if you wouldn’t be comfortable reading this, skip to the next ///)

Everyone knew that he’s a player. That’s the first thing that he told you when you met him. It made him look dangerous, something you just need in order to spice out your cookie cutter life. Your parents just went into divorce and your life was going downhill.

He’s just a perfect distraction.

It went well at first, you became his muse. He’d shower you with love and gifts. He made you feel things that you never felt before. That didn’t last very long though.

Not even a year later, fights became a common occurrence. You finally understood how someone can love and hate a person at the same time. As soon as you realized the kind of guy that he is, you couldn’t get out. You made excuses after excuses and still waited for the time that he will change.

He’d go on tours and you would hear stories about him being seen with other women. Plural. Witnesses gave you a different description at every story that you believed it was ridiculous. It’s probably a colleague. Or it was fan and hew was just doing a bit of fanservice. That’s what you believed because that’s what he’d tell you every time you would confront him about it.

At the few times that you did caught him, he’d lie blatantly as if he didn’t just get caught. You couldn’t also count the times that he’d turn the table around and find some guy to link you with. It tricked you into believing that it was your fault that he did it. That he regrets being with you.

You couldn’t also fathom that you cried yourself to sleep because of him. He wouldn’t respond at parties and it would take him days before responding. He made you feel that you are never good enough for him, damaging your self-esteem and confidence in the process. And then he would go full circle and be over the top with surprises and gifts. He starts to go all soft on you and made you weak against his touch and kisses. It’s reminder that only him can make you feel that good, even if he’s also the one who caused you pain.

You also turned your back against everyone. Nobody could contact you for months. It was mostly you, trying to keep your ego intact. You can already hear them mocking you and will remind you that they told you so. He also convinced you that nobody else will love you like he did. The absence of your friends and family made you lonely. It was like they didn’t even miss your presence. And so you clung unto him more.

But everyone has their breaking point. At that point, you’re numbed out. You didn’t even cry as you saw him bringing someone into your own home. It was the wakeup call that you needed to get away from him. You finally realized that you didn’t deserve to be treated like trash and broke things off with him right then and there.

He didn’t like that one bit. He saw you as his possession and no one can take you away from him easily. Yuta started following you around wherever you’ll go and asked you to talk things out with him. He’ll pop in at your office, at the club where you would drink your troubles away, or at any possible location where he knows that you would see him. He was switching back and forth from begging and reminding you the memories you both had into going full psycho and texting you that you’ll regret ever leaving him.

It made you so paranoid that you just flat out refused to go outside at the fear of meeting him. The girls wanted to do something about your condition, and decided that the best thing to get your mind off of things was to surprise you on your birthday.

They brought your favorite food with them and decorated the party with your favorite colors. It was unexpected and you even apologized to everyone for causing them trouble. The night made happy that night and finally be able to smile for the first time in months. All was going well until everyone decided to go outside and take a group photo. Yuta popped out of nowhere and started dragging you away. You were crying and begging him to let you go but he insisted that he needs to talk to you and it wouldn’t take a while.

All hell broke loose. The guys rushed outside to intervene. Sophie’s then boyfriend (now husband), was a big, strong man and was able to grab him by the collar and beat the living crap out of him right in front of you. The sudden violence made you cry harder than earlier. There was nothing that you can do besides watch as everything go down. Both the police and the paramedics came right after and disturbed the whole neighborhood.

That day was still, hands-down, the most awful day of your life. The memory was so horrifying that your birthday is doomed for life. Nobody ever tried to do something for your birthday again, as per your wishes.

You strike yourself as lucky that you don’t have to go to a psychiatrist or drink meds anymore to sleep. Flashbacks make you shake a little bit, but at least that’s manageable. You cannot say the same thing about meeting Yuta once again.

///

“Here’s your stop. I’m sorry I couldn’t drop you off by Y/N’s apartment. The street was small and it would be difficult to turn the van around.”

“It’s totally fine. Walking won’t hurt me.”

Taeyong grabbed his duffel bag and his guitar from the backseat and steps outside the vehicle. He waved at them goodbye before the van went back to the road. He adjusted the straps of his guitar case and duffel bag so he can carry them both comfortably as he begins to walk towards your place.

It was eerily quiet at that time and something just didn’t feel right. He tried to shake the feeling off and increasing his walking pace. It didn’t take long before he can see the building from a distance.

He didn’t know if he was just imagining things but he could’ve sworn that he saw a dark figure lurking in the darkness surrounding your apartment. He muttered a series of curses made a run for it.

///

Your thoughts were interrupted when you thought you heard footsteps coming from outside your house. You were jolted awake and started going into panic. Your heart pounded so much that you can hear it ringing through your ears. You forced yourself to not mind the sound and convinced yourself that you’re just imagining it.

You felt your heart drop as you heard the front door opening and swung slowly. You can definitely hear footsteps just right outside your door. That’s impossible. You locked every single entrance that night. Mind is getting a bit hazy at this point from hyperventilating. Despite this, you grabbed anything that you can get your hands on and decided to face the intruder head on.

You opened your bedroom door just started wielding the thing you are holding at whoever it is that’s outside. You heard a loud thud at the ground and a guy squirming in place.

“Oh shit.”

You quickly realized who it is and threw the blunt object away, now realizing that it’s a tripod. You kneeled down right in front of him and started panicking again. This time, it’s for a whole other reason.

“Oh my god, Taeyong. Are you okay?”

---

#nct au #nct imagines #nct scenarios #nct 127 #nct u x reader #nct taeyong #nct fic #lee taeyong #taeyong imagines #taeyong scenarios #rockstar au #journalist au #yuta nakamoto #johnny suh #mark lee #kim doyoung #nctcreations

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andromeda1023 · 3 years

Photo

Pic:

On the left, what Rubin expected to see: stars orbiting the outskirts of a galaxy moving slower than those near the center. On the right, what was observed: the stars on the outside moving at the same speed as the center.

Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is.

If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe.

The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown.

I’ve been thinking about this feeling — the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small — while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a new Vox podcast pilot you can listen to below.

It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered.

Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is.

“I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility — that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.”

The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained.

It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know.

This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It doesn’t win Nobel Prizes. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. And that’s a start.

But how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found.

To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown.

Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88.

Flash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars.

This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. With one observation, Hubble doubled the size of the known universe.

By 1960, scientists were still asking basic questions in the wake of this discovery. Like: How do galaxies move?

Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford were at the observatory doing this basic science, charting how stars are moving at the edge of Andromeda. “I guess I wanted to confirm Newton’s laws,” Rubin said in an archival interview with science historian David DeVorkin.

Per Newton’s equations, the stars in the galaxy ought to move like the planets in our solar system do. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, orbits very quickly, propelled by the sun’s gravity to a speed of around 106,000 mph. Neptune, far from the sun, and less influenced by its gravity, moves much slower, at around 12,000 mph.

The same thing ought to happen in galaxies too: Stars near the dense, gravity-rich centers of galaxies ought to move faster than the stars along the edges.

But that wasn’t what Rubin and Ford observed. Instead, they saw that the stars along the edge of Andromeda were going the same speed as the stars in the interior. “I think it was kind of like a ‘what the fuck’ moment,” Yeager says. “It was just so different than what everyone had expected.”

The data pointed to an enormous problem: The stars couldn’t just be moving that fast on their own. At those speeds, the galaxy should be ripping itself apart like an accelerating merry-go-round with the brake turned off. To explain why this wasn’t happening, these stars needed some kind of extra gravity out there acting like an engine. There had to be a source of mass for all that extra gravity. (For a refresher: Physicists consider gravity to be a consequence of mass. The more mass in an area, the stronger the gravitational pull.)

The data suggested that there was a staggering amount of mass in the galaxy that astronomers simply couldn’t see. “As they’re looking out there, they just can’t seem to find any kind of evidence that it’s some normal type of matter,” Yeager says. It wasn’t black holes; it wasn’t dead stars. It was something else generating the gravity needed to both hold the galaxy together and propel those outer stars to such fast speeds.

“I mean, when you first see it, I think you’re afraid of being … you’re afraid of making a dumb mistake, you know, that there’s just some simple explanation,” Rubin later recounted. Other scientists might have immediately announced a dramatic conclusion based on this limited data. But not Rubin. She and her collaborators dug in and decided to do a systematic review of the star speeds in galaxies.

Rubin and Ford weren’t the first group to make an observation of stars moving fast at the edge of a galaxy. But what Rubin and her collaborators are famous for is verifying the finding across the universe. “She [studied] 20 galaxies, and then 40 and then 60, and they all show this bizarre behavior of stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast,” Yeager explains.

This is why people say Rubin ought to have won a Nobel Prize (the prizes are only awarded to living recipients, so she will never win one). She didn’t “discover” dark matter. But the data she collected over her career made it so the astronomy community had to reckon with the idea that most of the mass in the universe is unknown.

By 1985, Rubin was confident enough in her observations to declare something of an anti-eureka: announcing not a discovery, but a huge absence in our collective knowledge. “Nature has played a trick on astronomers,” she’s paraphrased as saying at an International Astronomical Union conference in 1985, “who thought we were studying the universe. We now know that we were studying only a small fraction of it.”

To this day, no one has “discovered” dark matter. But Rubin did something incredibly important: She told the scientific world about what they were missing.

In the decades since this anti-eureka, other scientists have been trying to fill in the void Rubin pointed to. Their work isn’t complete. But what they’ve been learning about dark matter is that it’s incredibly important to the very structure of our universe, and that it’s deeply, deeply weird.

Since Rubin’s WTF moment in the Arizona desert, more and more evidence has accumulated that dark matter is real, and weird, and accounts for most of the mass in the universe.

“Even though we can’t see it, we can still infer that dark matter is there,” Kathryn Zurek, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains. “Even if we couldn’t see the moon with our eyes, we would still know that it was there because it pulls the oceans in different directions — and it’s really very similar with dark matter.”

Scientists can’t see dark matter directly. But they can see its influence on the space and light around it. The biggest piece of indirect evidence: Dark matter, like all matter that accumulates in large quantities, has the ability to warp the very fabric of space.

“You can visualize dark matter as these lumps of matter that create little potholes in space-time,” Natarajan says. “All the matter in the universe is pockmarked with dark matter.”

When light falls into one of these potholes, it bends like light does in a lens. In this way, we can’t “see” dark matter, but we can “see” the distortions it produces in astronomers’ views of the cosmos. From this, we know dark matter forms a spherical cocoon around galaxies, lending them more mass, which allows their stars to move faster than what Newton’s laws would otherwise suggest.

Continue reading, pictures: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/21537034/dark-matter-unexplainable-podcast

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beautyinthediss0nance · 3 years

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Tales From the Ex-Crypt Vol. 9

Wow.. volume 9.. I'm going to wrap it up with this one because I really don't want to live in the past or think about any of these people any more. I'm happy, even if Mr HTG is still not officially mine, I only want to look forward and these crypts will be closed. There are definitely more stories than the ones I've written here.. but this is the one that people are like "NO.. that only happens in movies!"

So, I was minding my own business at work when one of my regular customers walked in with a friend. They had been at a dinner party, and started talking about winter tires, and my customer said that the friend had to come see me for tires, and proceeded to bring him in. His friend wasn't someone who really stood out to me, there was nothing remarkable to me about him. He was nice enough, mild mannered, tall, blue eyes, great smile (I'm a sucker for eyes and smiles) and we went over some tire options. I sent them on their way with the friend having his quotes in hand.

I didn't really think anything more of it, it was busy (snow) season and I was plenty busy. A week or so later, the friend comes back, he had decided on some tires and steel wheels and put his deposit down on the order. I wrote up the order, and handed him his copy, when he asked "so when do I get to see you again?" and my smart ass responded with something to the effect of when he got his tires on.

I hadn't really paid any attention to him prior to that moment, and he wasn't my "type" at all. I went home, and something kept nagging at me about him, so I sent him a text after getting his number off his order slip. This is not something I generally do, but since he'd already asked me out, I didn't feel like I was overstepping. This was also 10 years ago.

I didn't hear anything back until the Monday, when I got a profuse apology for the delay, and the excuse that he had had his phone stolen while having lunch on a patio over the weekend in a busy tourist town.

We started talking regularly, he came in and got his snow tires in the meantime, and we hung out for our first "date". He told me he was on a joint task force for terrorist threats between the FBI and CSIS and had to travel often as the supervisor of his unit. He said he would try to see me as often as possible but that it wasn't always a lot of time. I didn't mind, as I was busy and we facetimed and talked by text and phone. I never felt neglected.

We dated for a year, our relationship was amazing, we got along so well, and he made me strive to be my best self. I lost a ton of weight, was eating well, and made an appointment with my doctor to get my mental health in check.

We never had sex, we just had incredibly hot makeout sessions. I always thought it was odd that he didn't want to go any further, but he said he had had a bad experience and wanted to wait until we were married. As he was on the smaller side, I figured that had something to do with it, but I was so absolutely in love by that point it didn't really matter.

He had all sorts of pics of him in his flack in his suits, in the cars, with the guns, or just in offices. I'd get a text or call saying he was flying in and was driving to see me, but would only have about an hour or two to spend with me before he had to get back to his team and back on the road. It kept things exciting, and I loved surprise visits when he'd text me at work that he was outside.

I wanted to see him more, of course, especially as things got more intense between us. But it was always a matter of time for him. No matter how awful other things in my life were going, whenever asked how things with him were, I would immediately brighten and say they were amazing.

My anxiety was getting to a very dysfunctional level, and I was struggling hardcore to manage it. I went to the doctor, he arranged for me to begin therapy. He was supportive when I told him. This was around our 1 year together. But the next time I got to see him, I got doused with ice water, when I gifted him with an expensive watch and he told me he wanted to take our relationship back a step because of his schedule. His reason was that I was amazing and I deserved to be able to pursue someone who could give me everything he wasn't able to due to his job. I was blindsided and devastated. Because I loved him so much, and was dumb, I agreed to try. I'm an absolutely all-in or all-out type of personality, there is no grey middle ground for me. It is why I do struggle with FWB and casual arrangements, unless I have mentally steeled myself to be all-out and just enjoy the moment without feelings.

My first year of therapy and into my second was almost fully dedicated to dealing with this trauma. I have never had a break up so devastating. I am pretty sure most of the damage came from the shock, but also from the "trying" to move forward with him flitting in and out of my life instead of just cutting clean ties.

I cried a lot.. I was so stressed my cortisol levels caused my body to produce more than double the healthy level of reverse T3, completely messing up my thyroid and metabolism, I gained weight, lost energy and all the other fall out. It took me years to recover, and moving to NS and stumbling upon a doctor who treated the thyroid issues (which seem to be back in working order now after some thyroid hormone therapy).

I have never ever let someone have so much impact on my life, and the only reason I can ever explain it with was just the depth of love I had for this man. I don't even know why or what sucked me in, beyond his confidence and charm. He was one of the many devil Aquarius that I dated, always trying to prove the zodiac/astrology stuff was absolutely wrong (because I am generally SO drawn to Aquarius and have dated that sign more than any other). The zodiac definitely kicked my ass with Aquarius to show me that I fucked around and found out the hard way for sure.

We did the on and off/casual thing for 6 months before it was too toxic and messed me up too badly and I cut him off. It was about 6 months later he crawled back, and we tried it again for about another 6 months before I broke again and cut him off permanently.

I tried to not think of him, and started trying to move on with dating. My longterm ex and I had become gaming friends again by this point, in a mostly healthy and functional way. He had asked me to get an app called Voxter so he could send me voice messages (pre-imsg) and I had. You have to make an account to use Voxter though, and then the app itself didn't pick up my soft voice so I deleted it. But the account remained.

One day, I get an email that I have a new suggested contact/friend on Voxter. I open the email, and low and behold, it is Mr Aquarius Devil... and I'm like "hmm.. I don't have any of his new contact information in my phone" so I go to my computer and open my gmail.. start typing in his name and up pops this picture:

The fucker was MARRIED... and had a KID.

I will say, that was the BEST closure ever.. I was INSTANTLY over his ass instead of lamenting WHY it hadn't worked and what I had possibly done wrong. What I had done wrong, was fall for a fucking dirtbag.

Now, I work with the public.. and I had lots of regular customers that would ask me how I was and what was going on with me, and share what was going on with them. I was angry, and I showed a few of them this pic and was like "look at this fucker, he has a WIFE and KID" and I think it got back to him.

Two weeks after I stumbled upon this picture on his gmail, I got a full confessional email from him.

Turns out, he had been married for 12 years, and his son was 7 at the time I found out. Not only that, but he wasn't in law enforcement, HE WAS A PASTOR.. He had also gotten busted for sleeping with two women in his congregation, and fooling around with two others. He had lost his congregation and his church was sending him out west to some rehab. His wife was staying with him, and moving out there with him. He basically said it was all a lie (everything) and that his therapist said he had to write apology letters and explain himself to his victims (like myself). He said it was an ego trip to compensate for low self esteem. So basically, I was just an ego boosting toy for him.

A year later, I received a random text message from a southern Alberta phone number. I am guessing it was his wife, as all it said was "Have you been in contact with J***?" and I was like "J*** who?" and never heard anything ever again. But I am sure he was already back to his old tricks.

#talesfromtheexcrypts #vol 9 #the last one I'm writing #Aquarius Devil

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arlakos · 4 years

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Marinette’s list of Parisian Warcrimes (Or why I need to vent about all the bad stuff Marinette has done)

Yeah, I’m doing this.

People be talking on Tumblr about why Marinette is the best character in the show and talking shit about every other character, from Adrien so I think I'll do what I do best and piss off people.

You want another Adrien salt Fic about why he’s a stalker to validate your sensitivity to everything that triggers you?

You want another AU where Chloe goes full-on villain and asshole mode so that you can be just another Astruc stan?

Do you want another Lukanette fanfic because Luka is the ‘Better Adrien’ even though all he does is play a guitar?

TOO BAD! THIS TIME WE BE DOING SOME MARINETTE SALT AND WE GOING IN HARD! WE ARE GONNA BE RUNNING THIS BLUE HAIRED GIRL INTO THE GROUND THE SAME WAY THE FANDOM TREATED THE OTHER CHARACTERS!

THIS IS PAYBACK FOR ALL THE SALT FICS THAT HAVE BEEN FORCED TO SEE THAT DON’T EVEN BOTHER TO USE NATURAL LOGIC!

(And I'm gonna love every bit of it)

So without further ado, Marinette is sentenced to be salted on the following charges:

Having a planner that tracks Adrien's every location/activity so she can stalk him at all times and actively uses (Stormy Weather).

Using her powers to prevent Adrien from dancing with another person (yes, even if that person is Chloe) (Bubbler)

Stealing Adrien's phone (Copycat)

Reading other peoples letters, even if they did throw it in the garbage (Dark Cupid)

Abandoning Paris (Ladybug Origins) (Yes I know people are going to be angry at me especially for this one, but if Everyone gives shit for Chat Noir for doing the same thing in Syren, then Ladybug gets it as well. No double standards on this post)

Literally destroying Max’s hopes and dreams by beating him in a game entering a tournament just so that she could be with Adrien. I don’t care who was better in the game or won, Marinette had no prior interest in the tournament and even knew how much Max wanted to enter, yet still done it anyway the second she realized Adrien was there. Yeah, others will say its cute that she wanted to be with Adrien, but if she really wanted to spend time with him, all she had to do was, you know, ASK LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!!! (Gamer)

Ladybug not listening to advice on where the akuma is all because she didn't like Chloe. who made a small lie before to her. Yeah Ladybug, someone making a little lie to save themselves embarrassment is really valid enough of a reason for their opinion and advice to be worth nothing. And it caused another akuma, good for you. (Antibug)

Oooh, a big one...Marinette stalked Lila and Adrien pretty much all day, under the guise of ‘not liking liars’ (yeah right) and once she had a ‘valid’ excuse to pretty much ruin Lila’s chances of wooing Adrien (whether or not she had an actual chance is irrelevant) she transformed into Ladybug and ABSOLUTELY EMBARRASSED HER AND HUMILIATED HER right in front of Adrien, when she could have just pulled her aside and just told her off in private and quietly so that she wouldn’t do it again. When Adrien questions her says she did it with the excuse of ‘not liking liars’. (Volpina)

Not telling Fu who the book belonged too when questioned on where she got it. I get that this was an excuse to prolong the shows run time, but if you were going to bring this up in the show and pretend that what Marinette did wasn’t a big deal, then they shouldn’t have added it in the first place. (The Collector)

Not bothering to tell her grandmother the truth and sneaking off to hang with her friends. (Befana)

Ladybug leading on Chat Noir. If she really didn't want to go, she could have just outright said No and be done with it, instead of just a ‘maybe’. (Glaciator)

Ladybug Literally not telling Chat Noir about the Guardian or where the hell all these heroes are coming from. There was literally no excuse, Adrien didn’t need to wait ‘until he was ready’, he literally became a hero the same time as Ladybug, it wasn’t like he was ‘the new guy’ and Ladybug was ‘the more experienced one’. I can give this to Fu as well, but I still feel that Ladybug should’ve told him regardless from the get go, she trusted a man she hadn’t properly met until 1 season later more than her own partner who stuck with her since day one. (Syren)

Taking pollen away from Chloe... yeah this really doesnt count. I just simply liked Chloe’s face in Malediktator when she saw Pollen again.

Talking shit about Chloe behind her back then acting all friendly to her as Ladybug when she needed her to become Queen Bee. Not really bad, it's just incredibly rude. (Maledictator)

Again, the same shit as Stormy Weather, instead of being punished for having the planner that details every bit of Adriens day to day activities, she gets rewarded by the writers. Not so much a Marinette crime as it is and ASS-truc crime. (Troublemaker)

Snooping through Marcs Private book, annoying him when he wanted to be isolated, and just straight up not having Marc give him the script himself. She could have tried just bringing Marc to Nathaniel and showing him the script together. (Reverser).

Making a lie about organizing a party when she definitely didn’t plan one. Yes, even if she was going to do it afterwards and planned to make the pastries herself for the party. She really is a hypocrite when she comes to lying, even though that’s a personality trait the writer's press is the reason why she hates Lila. (Season 2 Finale-Catalyst and Mayura).

Sabotaging Kagami’s attempts at being with Adrien. (Animaestro)

Marinette telling her Grandpa that rice bread is better than wheat bread. Anybody who has tasted bread would say otherwise. Although to be fair I blame Tom for this and this isn’t really as bad as the others (Bakerix)

Marinette throws Chat under the bus by pretending she loves him and leaving him to face Tom when the entire thing was her fault. I know she did it to protect her identity, but it still was an ass thing to do, and Chat found Marinette in her own house, Marinette could have used any excuse, including but not limited to, baked goods. (Weredad)

Marinette... LITERALLY... TRIED TO BREAK INTO ADRIEN’S HOME... ALL BECAUSE LILA WAS THERE...if the fireman was smarter than most other characters in the show he could’ve literally called the cops on her, leading to her getting arrested and Gabriel (or even Adrien) filing a restraining order against her. That and she steals Juleka’s bike. Not cool dude. (Oni-Chan)

Marinette not making it very clear to Chloe that she can’t get the miraculous back under any circumstances due to her exposed identity, especially after Chloe claims she’ll need them again. (Miraculer)

Marinette sneaks into the boy’s party despite wanting bro time, all because she wanted another botched attempt to confess to Adrien. (Party Crasher)

THAT CREEPY SCENE WITH THE ‘ADRIEN WAX STATUE’. I dont want to talk about it. You know which one I'm talking about. If you don’t, thank god, but IF YOU THINK THAT WAS CUTE IN ANY WAY OR THAT ITS ADRIEN FAULT BECAUSE HE STOOD STILL, YOU NEED TO GET YOUR HEAD CHECKED. (god i still have nightmares) (Puppeteer 2)

Not really a crime, but talking literally all the miraculi when you only needed a few. What would happen if she screwed up and Hawkmot got all the miraculous, or lost a few for the Akuma to obtain? (Kwamibuster)

Marinette (or Lady Noire) being an absolute dick to Misterbug during the entire time they were fighting Reflekdoll, insulting Misterbug for misusing his power when she does the same thing and claiming Misterbugs usual job is ‘easy’. Yeah...no. Fuck you Lady Noire, go eat a cataclysm to the face (Reflekdoll)

Marinette sabotaging Friendship day for Kagami just because she didnt want the latter to see Adrien.. at all. (Ikari Gozen)

Claiming Adrien is a good guitarist when Luka is an actual one. Not a crime, just dumb (Desperada)

Giving a Miraculous to Adrien when she can’t even control herself around him and could be distracted (Desperada)

Being too cute in that picture Marinette and Adrien sleeping together on the train. Yes i know this isn’t a crime, i do like some stuff about her, i just think the pic is really cute. (Startrain)

(Look at it, they’re adorkable. Awww....)

(Wait, aren’t I supposed to be salty?)

NOW, for the biggest crime of them all...

Literally not confessing to Adrien even once. Aside from the fact its turned the ‘romance part’ of the show into a joke, Marinette not telling Adrien the truth already or lying about her feelings is the reason we have the ‘Marinette is just a good friend meme’. No wonder he thinks you are ‘just a friend’. THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE BEEN TELLING HIM.

My evidence? EVERY SINGLE EPISODE!!!

...

Ahhhh. Much better.

Well, now that I have successfully gotten rid of all that anger and salt and manifested it into a physical memento of my anger for this show and its main character, I’m going to relax while people get mad and triggered that I insulted the ‘Perfect Marinette’ and leave me angry messages. For all those that listened and don’t hate me or even agree with what I have said, thanks for reading my large amount of vented writing. I hope you have a pleasant day.

Let's hope for season 4 of Miraculous to be better now that Zag is back. The fandom knows we don't need another salty season.

#Miraculous Ladybug #Season 1 to 3 #ML salt #A lot of salt #Marinette salt #Probably a lot of Marinette hate #AND FOR GOOD REASON #A bit of writer salt as well #A lot of ASS-truc Salt #Miraculous Ladybug salt

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tackyink · 3 years

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#tacky i want to hear your dig site anecdote ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE @cinnamonroyalty

In fact you’re going to receive way more than you bargained for because I keep remembering funny shit from that excavation where a dead person’s tooth fell in my hand.

It’s a summer from 10 years ago, back when I only hated the sunlight but it wasn’t trying to kill me yet. Yours truly and one of her best friends are trying to get our degrees and we sign up for an easy class: give up two weeks of your summer vacation to go to the dig site where of the uni’s professors is a director and get credit with top marks attached to it. Not many people do it, but we like archaeology and are desperate to finish our degrees ASAP because:

It’s our fourth year and we're extremely burnt out. We need out.

Government only gives money to poor people if they’re overachievers and long story short, I need to take that class or risk never finishing the degree.

First order of business is getting there, and public transportation isn’t an option. We don’t have cars and can’t drive, so we ask my parents to give us a ride to the village where the dig site is and drop us off.

The afternoon before the trip, a classmate that I haven’t seen in a year because he’d been spirited away to France by the Erasmus program calls, and says he saw my name and friend’s on the list of guinea pigs students for the class, and asks how we’re going to make the trip. Turns out he just returned to our country the night before and doesn’t have any means to get to Bumfuck, Nowhere, so we become the means. I am okay with this because we actually met in another excavation a year prior and he’s great.

During the trip, he tells us that this dig site has a bad reputation in archaeologist circles because supposedly it’s been investigated to hell and back for 30 years. It’s exhausted, but the director keeps milking it to get research funding.

The dig site in question has a history of human presence from pre-Roman times to sometime in the Middle Ages. The Medieval section is the one you can see in the pic of the post I linked above. The Iberian part is directly below that image and is just a field with no visible structures.

There’s only a handful of us plus the director when we get to the village, and she shows us the way to the dig site and gives us leaflets and a little introduction, telling us that under the remains of the church we see there’s an Iberian temple.

I need you to know that, at least at that point in time (it’s been ten years, but I don’t think this has changed), no one has ever been able to locate an Iberian temple. Ever. We don’t know how they looked like, if they were even constructions or just natural sites. Nothing.

Great Guy knows this because he has worked in Iberian dig sites several times and ancient history is his jam. Great Guy is also right behind the director as he hears her declaration, and he looks up from his leaflet to look at friend and I straight in the eyes, and lifts one single, dramatic eyebrow with incredulity. I am in awe of how much a lone arch of hair can convey.

The waves of skepticism radiating from him must’ve been so strong that they hit the director square in the back and she turns around at the speed of light to reassure him in particular that it is true that there’s a temple there, and the three of us are very spooked for the remainder of our stay because how the fuck did she do that.

Not satisfied with that, the director also says that Hannibal Barca was there on his way to cross the Pyrenees, so any inkling of respect we might had had towards her is gone with the wind.

Fast forward a few days and we choose to work on the Iberian silos instead of the Medieval area because silos are where the interesting stuff pops up. This proves to be a mistake for the most part. There’s only sun, very dry clay-like dirt, vicious insects, and very soon we learn that not only the staff, but also this place is indeed a joke for a variety of reasons that would warrant a different post. We’re bored and miserable and Great Guy starts to recount the many practical jokes you can play on newbies at a dig site, such as the infamous trick of taking a bristle from a broom, dropping it near your victim, and telling them when they find it that that’s a hair from one of Hannibal’s elephants and this is a huge discovery.

We laugh, but we can’t do that. The director’s underling is our supervisor and of all the human senses he sadly skipped class the day God distributed humor. No whacky hijinks under his watchful eye. UNLESS...

There is another classic. Great Guy steps to the side with a basket full of dirt and water and starts molding something out of it.

It is immediately clear that we’re looking at an impressively sized dick, so we all laugh because we’re all twenty and about to die of sunstroke.

And here’s the plan: we’re going to let it dry and, on the last day of the excavation, place it inside one of the silos and cover it with a loose coat of dirt so the next person that works on it finds it.

We get invested in the joke. We aren’t even going to see the results, but we don’t care. Just imagining the reaction of the staff if they find it is enough. We check every day, several times a day, that the dick is still there and hardening to fulfill its final purpose and no this wasn’t supposed to be a double entendre it’s just what clay does in the sun.

Still, we want to leave our signature, and we don’t want it to be mistaken for an actual artifact. It's an absurdly long shot, but the people working there are so weird that we don’t want to risk it. In another stroke of hilarity, we decide to make our own Rosetta Stone and to leave no doubt as to what its future discoverer will be looking at, we make two inscriptions on the dick: one in Latin, and another in Greek.

The first says “PHALLVS” - pretty self-explanatory

The second says “πολλων“ - which is an actual Greek word, but it’s also the phonetic transcription of the Spanish word “pollón,” which means “big cock.”

We never knew if they found it, but it’s nice to believe.

#forgive me for the typos but it's late and I'm not double checking this #when tacky was getting her degree

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tirorah · 3 years

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’Minna’s Sky’ is Road to Berlin’s Crowning Achievement

A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, three young girls met each other during a war: Minna, the caring leader; Gertrud, the stalwart defender; and Erica, the lazy prodigy who kept them smiling.

As the fighting continued, a friendship began to form. And now, years later, that friendship lies at the heart of something truly exceptional.

Minna’s Sky is the culmination of twelve-and-a-half years of relationship development, and it gives this special trio the sendoff it deserves. I was overcome with conflicting emotions while I watched this episode; when it finished, I was left shaken and almost lost for words.

…Which is why I wrote an essay on it! And that entire essay is contained under the cut, so you’d best buckle up and hold onto something, because today we’re diving into what I believe to be the pièce de résistance of Strike Witches.

In a previous post speculating on what Minna’s Sky could hold—which, by the way, was thoroughly proven wrong—I took a moment to outline my love for Minna and my frustration with her neglect. Initially, this trend continued in Road to Berlin: in episodes 6 and 8, the characters were faced with circumstances that would’ve been greatly helped by a Witch with Space Understanding magic. Of course, I understand why the writers chose to exclude Minna from these events; having Minna there would’ve negated the drama of Trude thinking Erica was dead, and of Sanya and Eila clashing over conflicting sensory reports.

But Minna’s episode hit back hard. If RtB is Strike Witches’ magnum opus, then Minna’s Sky may well be RtB’s masterpiece among masterpieces. It combines the intensity and raw emotion of Hounds of Vengeance with a ticking time bomb that ratchets up the tension all the way through, finishing with a series of events that makes you feel like anything can happen.

Role Reversal

Minna’s Sky starts with a surprise right away. In episode 8, Minna and Trude expressed anxiety over losing their magic. At this point they’re just under three months removed from their 20th birthdays, where decay will certainly start to set in. But in this episode, we learn Minna’s already feelings the effects. At first this confused me, as their birthdays are only nine days apart, but I do recall seeing something about how Trude’s magical reserves are pretty large, second only to Yoshika’s. I can’t find my source for that, but this could be an explanation for Minna’s earlier decline.

Trude notices Minna’s flagging strength, and at that point, a switching of roles takes place.

Minna, who once held Mio at gunpoint for refusing to give up on flight, is now doing the same thing. She’s still herself, but she essentially slips into Mio’s previous role. She takes this burden upon herself and stops communicating with the others over it, even avoiding them during mealtime.

Last episode, we could see her mask starting to slip, and here, all her logic and serenity fades, replaced with a wholly emotional desire. She and her girls have worked so hard to get here, and she wants to uphold her vow of retaking Berlin, so she makes the decision to give this fight everything she has, despite the danger involved.

This puts her at odds with Trude, who slides into the calm and perceptive role Minna used to fill.

You know, Trude may be my favorite character of all time, but she hasn’t always been handled well. In Season 1, she was a great balance of the calm and quiet supporter, and the stern disciplinarian who thought yelling at Erica would make her get up earlier. In Season 2, this equilibrium was lost; it leaned much more into her anger, and there were precious few moments of Trude being the gentle and tender woman I know she can be. The movie had the same problem, as it had to reintroduce eleven characters in one sitting. Operation Victory Arrow worked hard to remedy this problem, focusing on smaller casts which gave them time to show different sides of themselves—like Minna and Trude having breakfast like a married couple. Ahem.

This is one reason why RtB has been so gratifying for me. It knows what it’s doing with Trude and while she’s certainly had some angry moments, RtB has built her up as a more mature, level-headed executive officer. Consequently, it feels natural for her to take up the position Minna would usually hold in this type of situation.

Even when she privately confronts Minna over her magic, there is no anger, only attempts to reason her friend out of her decision. But Minna doesn’t want Kiel to be lost, and at that moment, it’s made clear that she prioritizes Operation Southwind over her own well-being.

And this is entirely contradictory with what she usually tells her girls! Like I said before, the 501st is a circle of love, and while that love motivates them to fight for one another’s sakes, as Sanya did, it now leads Minna down a path of self-sacrifice that would’ve absolutely killed her if it was one of her girls doing it. Moreover, with Trude now filling Minna’s role, she’s the one pleading with Minna not to go, and like Minna once failed to stop Mio, Trude now fails to stop Minna.

This causes inner turmoil. Trude doesn’t want to lose Kiel, but if Minna perishes, she’d never forgive herself. Like she said in Hounds of Vengeance, when she thought Erica was dead, retaking Berlin would have no point if Minna wasn’t there to celebrate it with them.

It says something, then, that Trude chooses to go along with Minna’s wishes, and even keeps her waning magic a secret from the others. Instead of declaring Minna unfit for battle—which I imagine she has every right to do—she instead becomes Minna’s most ardent protector, immediately volunteering for the high-risk operation. When Minna becomes anxious and nearly makes a mistake, Trude is there to rein her in and calm her down. Minna even comments on how this would usually be the other way around.

Fortunately, Minna is better at this self-sacrificing stuff than Mio is. While she initially uses her desire to protect Kiel to justify her actions, a heartfelt campfire scene shows us that she’s aware of the ramifications her death would have. As Erica complains about their fake coffee, Minna promises to make her a proper batch when they return; Trude tells her not to make such promises, but Minna reassures her she’ll come back safe, and even proposes they go to a café together once Berlin is retaken. On the surface, they’re making plans for the future; but underneath, it’s an implied message to Trude: I understand. I’m not going out to die. I’ll come back.

Isn’t that first pic just the cutest Trude shot ever, by the way?

And Trude is pacified. She places her trust in Minna and continues to support her as best she can.

Of course, things are never that simple. Minna succeeds at her objective, and just when the episode seems to be steering to a happy conclusion, the Hive screeches and loads up all its rockets at the same time. As Trude once again begs her to stop, she does the unthinkable: she cuts the line and dives into a suicide run, breaking one promise to keep another.

The facial expressions and body language have been god-tier in RtB.

I must commend Tanaka Rie here. I’ve often complimented Sonozaki Mie (who voices Trude) for her impeccable delivery, but Tanaka Rie is equally excellent, possibly better in some departments (like range, just hear her role in Mai Otome for example). Here, as Negai no Tomoshibi starts playing in the background, the gravity of the scene rests entirely on Tanaka’s voice work. And boy, does she nail it! The exhaustion, the desperation, the sheer will, it’s all there. Her desperate pants and cries at the end are especially powerful, and they make this scene even more dramatic when she faints right after.

Trude manages to catch her—and only Trude was there, because 1: we only saw Trude catching her; 2: the hand we see is Minna’s left, and in the next shot, Trude is carrying her right arm instead; and 3: we only saw one blue dot in the Hive, and the episode previously established one dot was one Witch.

Ahem! Trude catches her and brings her back, and she…breaks down.

Wow. Trude doesn’t cry easily, you know. We’ve seen her depressed, despondent, even heard her sob as she told Yoshika to leave her behind, but until Hounds of Vengeance, we’d never seen Trude cry. While that one ended in a victorious moment, here the emotion is allowed to run its course, and it’s heartbreaking. Trude doesn’t just cry, she weeps, and as she yells and screams at Minna that she could never follow an order that would involve leaving Minna behind, her facial expressions convey just how terrified she truly was.

I said earlier that Minna switched to Mio’s role, and while that’s true, there’s something even more poetic at work here: this episode mirrors Season 1’s Episode 4 in some places, to the point that I feel like it has to be on purpose. That’s one reason why I made this photoset. Just look at this:

Oh look, more apologizing! These two are so emotionally responsible to one another. It’s always good to see.

The roles are shown as reversed, with Trude crying and reprimanding Minna, and Minna apologizing for her actions and agreeing on a better path forward.

Sexy Gal

I also need to devote some space to Erica here. She wasn’t as prominent—Minna and Trude’s bond took center stage—but this episode is probably the best showcase of Erica’s qualities. We already saw her surviving in the woods and rationing her chocolate three episodes prior, but here, it’s clear more than ever what her role is in the Karlsland Trio’s support structure: the morale boost.

In the “Erica Hartmann 1941” manga, we’re shown how Erica becomes a ray of hope for everyone, and especially Minna and Trude, whom she begins to develop a friendship with at that time. It’s this aspect which is finally on full display here: while she’s not as overt with her support as Trude is, she helps in her own way, and her easy-going personality consistently puts a smile on her friends’ faces. That’s why it’s so important that it’s Erica who makes Minna laugh—not once, but twice. In a group where the other two members have their fair share of baggage, Erica is a breath of fresh air and equally important.

Rising Tension

Okay, with the character work out of the way, let’s look at the episode’s story. Because holy crap, I felt like I was watching a movie! At first, I was a little annoyed by some of the stiff animation (especially for RtB’s standards). I was afraid they were going to half-ass Minna’s episode. But as the episode proceeded and absolutely everything got better and better, I realized I was in for a very special ride.

I’ve always had the opinion that Strike Witches is at its best when it plays its war drama straight, but it’s not as simple as striking the serious tone and having the characters fight for their lives. Strike Witches isn’t a pure action show; the stakes in battle often revolve around the characters overcoming their flaws, struggling to protect the world and those they hold dear. Thus, Strike Witches relies on its lighter moments to develop the cast so that when danger comes to them, your emotional investment in the characters helps to create additional tension.

In general, RtB has been great at this, but for me personally, the most emotionally intense episode prior to Minna’s Sky was Episode 6: Hounds of Vengeance.

But that one was different. It started off with relatively low tension, then brought it up to full when Erica was left behind and Trude had a meltdown over it. But when it’s revealed that Trude isn’t just moping around, and that she’s working on a plan, the tension evens out. The central question goes from ‘Will Erica survive?’ to ‘How awesome will Trude be in this episode?’ The climactic action is triumphant, and although Trude’s reaction to Erica’s ‘body’ is heartbreakingly real, we as viewers know that Erica is fine; in fact, she hasn’t seemed that down at all, obviously having faith in her rescue.

Episode 9 doesn’t do that. It immediately confronts you with Minna’s magic issue and her hiding it from her friends, then pretends to be innocent for a while, with Patton being an idiot and Ursula introducing her helmet gun. (“It’s a helmet, with a gun on it.” NO, REALLY?) But as soon as the Komet is introduced, the pressure builds and it never lets up.

It all comes to a head when the trio (plus Ursula) reaches the launch point. Minna’s been dropping death flags all episode, and now things go haywire over and over. An hour left? Nope, the Neuroi spotted you and moved up the rocket’s launch. Barely enough time to intercept the rocket? Hey, there’s that Neuroi that beat the two top aces of the world in single combat, and it’s coming to stop you. Thirty seconds to go for the fuel? The Neuroi gets past Trude and Erica and nearly destroys the Komet, hurts Ursula and blows up one of their trucks. Trude and Erica get it away from there? Oh look, the Hive’s about to launch!

We then get an epic scene where Minna takes off, uses her magic, and destroys the rocket. Speaking of which, I didn’t say anything about this when I talked about episode 8, but I’m so happy we finally get to see some of the Witches’ magic from their point of view! Seeing Eila’s future sight was haunting, and Minna’s is awesome to see as well. Erica and Trude manage to finish off their quarry, showing their skill and adaptability; it seems their prior experience means they’re better prepared to deal with its unique movements this time around.

Erica asks for chocolate and grumbles when Trude tells her she’ll get some later. Minna laughs, but there’s still that tension because Minna’s fuel is almost up, and she’s hanging around that damn Hive.

And then the Hive loads up all its rockets at once, and all hell breaks loose. Trude loses control of the situation as Minna goes on a suicide run, and then the insert song starts playing. It’s difficult to explain the impact of that song without simply showing you the episode. The moment that piano hits, it feels as though a veneer of tragedy descends upon the scene. The Komet nearly stops working, and Minna is on her last legs, and she’s reduced to nothing but cries and gasps. She faints moments after she destroys the last rocket.

And then the music gets louder as Minna plummets into the Hive, red slowly filling the screen. We’re treated to a long shot of Minna falling into the swirling, angry clouds, her tiny form fading into its mass. And at that point I freaked the fuck out.

It was somewhere around Season 2’s finale and watching the movie that I realized Strike Witches doesn’t kill off characters. Let’s just say killing a beloved character probably wouldn’t work too well for future sales. (“Hey, look at this awesome figure of the girl who died! Don’t you just love her? We’ll accept your tears as interest.”) If Mio of all people can have plot armor rivaling the size of the planet, then Minna sure as hell won’t perish here.

And yet, for a fleeting moment, I was absolutely terrified she would. All because of the masterful tension of this episode, and this entire fight scene in particular.

Fortunately, Trude manages to locate Minna in the clouds and brings her back, and the viewer can finally breathe easier as we head to the happy ending they deserve.

…Oh right, the ending.

Yuri alert

Let me start off by saying this ending is complete bullshit. It feels shoehorned in—no, I don’t care what historical event it’s referencing—and it doesn’t fit the tone of the episode at all.

Having said that, as much as this made me laugh (even more than Trude’s literal asspull in Hounds of Vengeance) it did get one thing completely right: yes, Ursula, it IS very beautiful. The love between these three is great. What kind of love that exactly is, I’m not entirely sure anymore.

Yes, you’re going to roll your eyes at this—oh no, she’s going to rant about Minna x Trude again—but…I was watching this ending, right, and I could almost hear the gears in my brain turn as I tried to process this image. Emotionally, I felt like this ending was communicating love of a different sort.

Look, for all I know they’re just best buds who’ve come to deeply rely on one another for emotional and psychological stability, but my god, this ending definitely felt like a ‘oh by the way, the three of them are married to each other’ signal to me. I’m not joking!

Does that make Minna x Trude canon, even as part of an OT3? No. In fact, for all the delightful Minna x Trude subtext this episode had…

Deflection by way of flirtation. Oh là là~!

…Trude did all but confess to Erica in episode 6, and later this week, Mio might finally return in a big way and might have screen time with Minna. But my point is, in that moment, my ship felt realer than ever. In that respect, this episode gave me more than I ever thought I’d receive.

Insert clever ending header here

Right, so that’s my ramble on Minna’s Sky. I hope I’ve managed to get across why I believe it’s the best episode of the entire series. The character writing was top-notch, the tension was through the roof, the music was evocative and the animation was beautiful. Barring an absolutely spectacular final three episodes (and I wouldn’t put it past RtB to deliver that), I think this is as good as it gets. It’s not easy to beat emotional stakes that were established twelve years ago, after all.

Minna’s Sky was absolutely the episode Minna deserved, and I was very happy to see the Karlsland Trio getting its spot in the limelight as we gradually draw closer to the ending. It’s their home they’re trying to take back, after all. And while I have no doubt Minna will continue to fly until the end of the season (she seems to be fine in the preview), Operation Southwind will most likely be the bookend to Minna and Trude’s careers.

I can only hope this won’t be the last we see of Minna and Trude. I’d love it if we got to see their lives after Karlsland’s liberation, either as supporting members of the Wing or trying to live normal lives after fighting a war for nearly a decade. (Shameless plug: I have a Minna x Trude fanfic which explores the latter.)

But most of all, I don’t want Road to Berlin to end.

#strike witches #road to berlin #minna-dietlinde wilcke #gertrud barkhorn #erica hartmann #minna x trude #minna x trude x erica?#anime

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