#wrote this in about five minutes

[jfleamont]

“And in the end

the love you take

is equal to the love you make.”

The Beatles, 'The End'

The sounds coming from the kitchen are her favourite. Shortly after Harry was born, she wondered if she would ever grow accustomed to her baby boy's laughter.

Now, she's sure she'll never grow tired of it.

As she enters the kitchen, her gaze falls on the other boy that occupies her thoughts all day, every day.

“— and there he is, Potter, heading for the hoops and it looks like he's going to score!” as he says this, Harry opens his mouth eagerly and eats the last of his dinner from the spoon his dad is holding. James cheers, and Harry joins him, squealing jumping in his seat.

Lily watches the scene from the door: James is sitting in front of the little boy, who is flailing his arms happily at the sound, and Lily can't help but laugh. At this, James turns to her and he beams. “He wasn't cooperating, so I had to intervene,” he explains.

She walks up to them, gently caressing Harry's head. “James, I'm pretty sure your son was doing it on purpose.”

“He did say 'kiwitch', which, in hindsight, must have meant that he wanted to hear my Quidditch commentary. I'm afraid I've been manipulated.”

“Oh, poor you,” she leans down to kiss James and he reacts immediately, automatically wrapping his hands around her waist to draw her closer.

When she pulls away, James' eyes are still closed, and Lily presses a soft kiss to each eyelid, his lashes tickling her lips. She pulls away and his eyes flutter open, and Lily notices how tired he looks.

Tired, but happy.

She sighs and, after pecking him one last time, she disentangles from him and turns to Harry, who, instead, looks quite awake and excited, smiling at her, green eyes wide and playful.

“Come on, it's late, boys. Party's over,” she announces. It's not actually late, but it has been a long day and she needs rest just as much as her husband.

James gets up and hugs her from behind, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.

“Hey, happy Halloween,” he whispers against her ear.

“Happy Halloween, love.”

Read it on AO3

#wrote this in about five minutes #just in time #happy Jily death day guys 🙃 #jily #jple #james potter #lily evans #harry potter #marauders #jfleamont rambles #Jilytober

[pencildragons]

still insanely funny to me that ortus nigenad has canonically written 18 volumes of epic poetry about a bodyguard who was, in fact, Just Some Guy, and regularly quotes himself out loud in conversations on the regular. man had to die at the start of gtn because he was too fucking powerful to live

#ive been sitting here for like. a solid five fucking minutes trying to come up with a good comparison irl and i Cannot #like imagine if your bodyguard wrote what is basically a huge love song to your great great x10 grandparent's bodyguard and then #he just kept quoting himself in conversations #and then in the weird heaven afterlife you're using as the backdrop of a hallucinated memory sequence to justify the brain surgery you gave #yourself so you could forget the most important person in your life bc she killed herself for you #and you Cannot Conceive Of A Universe Without Her In It #and the dude the bodyguard wrote love songs about in question turns up and is like 'well i was kinda average actually #but thanks to the power of YOUR love songs i can now bend the rules of this liminal space to my will and beat this eldritch monster' #like dude what the fuck #ortus nigenad #harrowhark nonagesimus #tlt #tlt spoilers #htn spoilers #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #griddlehark #it wasnt in the post but i had griddlehark Feelings in the tags so #words of wyrm

[tcfactory]

Please consider: Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu role-swap

[LiuJiu, 2300 words]

After the fire, Shen Jiu doesn't sit around, he's aiming straight for Cang Qiong. Wu Yanzi tempts him, but if he is to ever find out what happened to Qi-ge then he can't play around with rogue cultivators, so he ditches the man before Wu Yanzi could take him as a disciple.

He arrives to the sect at a year when they are not doing the disciple selection - the women at the Warm Red Pavilion say it's because the Sect Leader is busy monitoring his cursed head disciple and if the Sect Leader doesn't take part then the rest of the sect has to wait too - but he's tipped off that Bai Zhan is always open to those who are determined enough to climb the mountain and demand admittance.

So that's exactly what he does. The Peak Lord sets him against one of his junior disciples and tells him there are no rules, if he can beat them he's in. It's a test he's not supposed to win, to see his determination and his reaction to failure, as a malnourished slave boy should be no match to someone in good health who has two years of training under his belt. But Shen Jiu doesn't know this, he has come too far to give up now and unlike the scrappy, but well-fed farmer's son he's set up against, he fights dirty.

He sets the basis of his future nickname - The Rabid Wolf of Bai Zhan - that day when he claws the boy's eye out and forces him to yield. His rise among the disciples is almost as meteoric as Yue Qi's and people are on the lookout for when the upstart slave boy will plummet back to the earth, but he never does. When the year is up and the sect is abuzz that Lingxi caves are finally opening again because they are letting the cursed disciple out, he's there in the front row among the curious onlookers and throws himself in his Qi-ge's arms as soon as the other boy steps foot into the light again.

Shen Qingqiu grows up tall and willowy and unpredictable, an unconventional physical cultivator that bends with the wind, but never breaks. With Yue Qingyuan's support as an unshakeable mountain behind his back, he is untouchable. He never bothers to hide what he is, not his scars or his sharp edges or the slave brand burned into the meat of his shoulder, often bared to the world by his choice of outfit; he stands as testament that even the lowest wretches can claw their way up to stand among giants.

Liu Mingqu yields to his rich family and allows himself to be enrolled into Qing Jing. He is not as suited for spiritual cultivation and he has no head for arts, but he is still a prodigy and a really hard working one at that. He learns all there is to learn for a scholar and doesn't rest until he perfects them all - music, calligraphy, painting, poetry - and even if he's ever uninspired about pursuing them, the Peerless Beauty of Qing Jing is a competent teacher who stands head and shoulders over his peers. He masters his temper and his manners and takes to hiding his face behind a fan or sometimes a veil like his sister to discourage people from staring at him.

Their roles may be different, but their nature remains the same. Shen Jiu has always been more clever than he was strong and nothing changed about that now that he's essentially a spiritual cultivator playing at star athlete. He plants a bamboo forest on his mountain - for meditation and ambush practice, he says, but everyone knows he just needed a bubble of calm for himself in the endless war zone of Bai Zhan - and mercilessly beats any disciple who dares to damage the forest. In the serene calm of his little house he hoards books and maps and all the culture he can get his calloused hands on, always thirsty to know more, an endless pit his Qi-ge happily pours obscure knowledge into. He uses the standing feud between Bai Zhan and Qing Jing to spy on them, learn their cultivation methods by sight and listen to the senior disciples do ad hoc concerts, so he can practice music in the brothel or under a silencing array just behind his house.

It's during one of these trips when he discovers Liu Qingge behind the Qing Jing Peak Lord's manor, restlessly shuffling through the steps of a formal dance. Liu Qingge yearns to move, he yearns for the exertion of his wild youth, but there are only so many acceptable options for a scholar and as a cultivator he can't channel his restlessness into hunting or horse riding. That leaves dancing, but Liu Qingge is not a creative person. He sticks to the dances he half-remembers learning as a rich young master and maybe asks his sister for some more, but that's where his resourcefulness runs out on this venture.

Shen Qingqiu watches him go through the steps of the same dozen dances, swap to a few rounds of sword forms - perfectly executed and ethereal, an immortal beauty that earthbound Shen Qingqiu will never be able to replicate - and then swap back to the dances, increasingly frustrated and restless.

"If Peak Lord Qingge wants to learn some better dances, this shidi can introduce you to someone." Liu Qingge startles and almost turns him into a pincushion with a barrage of bamboo leaves.

"What do you want?!" They are secure in their respective positions, but they still don't like each other.

"Peace, shixiong. I'm just looking out for the sect. How would it reflect on me if I let my fellow Peak Lord work himself into a qi deviation and didn't step in?" Shen Qingqiu shrugs and smiles with an easy, predatory grace that makes Liu Qingge wish he had fangs to match the Wolf of Bai Zhan, but there's no malice in the offer. "Come now, shixiong. There's nobody else here. We don't need to do this stupid game of social posturing. Tell you what, as a sign of my goodwill I'm going to teach you a meditation technique to calm your qi after exercise, free of charge."

Almost everything with Shen Qingqiu is a transaction, so Liu Qingge knows better than to pass up the chance to get something from his shidi for free - and the meditation does help settle his roiling qi.

"What do you want in return, then?" It's almost terrifying how intensely Shen Qingqiu's eyes light up.

"That trick with the leaves - teach me how to do it."

Liu Qingge doesn't bother to point out that it's a spiritual technique. It's an unspoken secret that they would be better suited to each other's cultivation styles than that of their own peaks. Shen Qingqiu has a storm of razor sharp leaves dancing in the air before Liu Qingge is even done explaining.

He almost regrets agreeing when Shen Qingqiu takes him down to the brothel, but the women his shidi introduces him to are truly masters of dance - they were stars of an imperial dance troupe before their owner was executed for offending the Emperor and they were sold to the brothel. They take him to the back and teach him dances he could never have imagined, dances that make his heart soar and his blood rush hot in his veins, while Shen Qingqiu lightly dozes among the women in the main reception area, his very presence frightening all but the most unruly patrons into behaving.

Liu Qingge is an honest man and he knows, deep down, that he got much more out of this exchange than his shidi. He’s on the lookout to see how he could repay him, but Shen Qingqiu seems to want for nothing. What he can’t get on his own Yue Qingyuan gifts to him, doting relentlessly on his sharp-edged little brother. So when he hears that Shen Qingqiu is to set out to assist in a night hunt against a particularly dangerous demonic beast that made its way over the to the far shore of the sea, he hops to the opportunity to compile a scroll of all the unspoken rules and etiquette of the island, as well as a short history on the ninja clan that asked for their aid. It’s all information that Shen Qingqiu has no way of learning otherwise, but should ease his time on the hunt.

When he can’t find Shen Qingqiu at the bamboo house he goes looking for him and that’s when he finds the silencing array, that’s when he sees his shidi sitting with his guqin in a clearing, composing music. Liu Qingge’s mouth goes dry, his heart skips a beat - his shidi is like a vision from the heavens and for the first time since he started this scholarly lifestyle, Liu Qingge wants to paint. He wants to etch this scene in his heart and condense it into a poem.

He slinks away before his shidi can notice him and leaves the scroll in the bamboo house. In the three years Shen Qingqiu is gone, hunting that elusive monster that decimates one village after another, he becomes a man possessed - or more accurately, a tender hearted young maiden yearning for her first love. He paints picture after picture, sometimes of a wolf stalking among the bamboo, sometimes of Qingqiu with his guqin as the scene lives in his memory. Rarely he paints his shidi stretched out on a couch in the brothel, languid with feigned sleep and one eye opened a crack as he vigilantly watches over his sisters - he gifts one of those to the brothel, much to the ladies’ delight. He starts writing poetry, yearning, horrible poetry his sister mocks relentlessly, but slowly he finds his words and his latest attempts are almost good. He is the first to hound Zhangmen-shixiong for news on Shen shidi and learns every word of every letter by heart, no matter how short or impersonal the progress reports are.

Liu Qingge knows that his martial siblings are not blind to his obsession - he has caught Shang shidi muttering “bro, really?!” under his breath more than once. He’s not familiar with the expression, but he can understand the sentiment. Yue Qingyuan watches him with patient exasperation, but he knows that the man doesn’t disapprove from the mild comment about how Shen Jiu will need a new ceremonial robe for his return celebration because his old one is ten years out of fashion.

Embroidery is, technically, within the skill set of the Qing Jing Peak Lord. He hounds An Ding until someone supplies him with Shen Qingqiu’s measurements and the finest materials he can bully Shang shidi into acquiring - “That’s the same stuff demon royalty wears, try not to waste it, my contact had to go through the royal seamstress of the northern kingdom to get it in that color.” - and sets to work. Bai Zhan’s color is steel blue, but that never fit his shidi, so he picks greens instead to match his striking green eyes. He creates a design that accentuates the deceptive slimness of Qingqiu, then embroiders the robes with bamboo patterns and a wolf on the hunt and when they are done he crafts a matching fan - Shen shidi hides from nothing and nobody, but Liu Qingge thinks he might enjoy being a little mysterious.

He is daydreaming about his shidi during the next Peak Lord meeting when the Sect Leader breaks the news: the beast has finally been slain and Shen Qingqiu will be on the next ship back home. Liu Qingge stays barely long enough to not be impolite at the end of the meeting before he rushes off to finish the last touches on the robes. He wants to leave it all set out for his shidi in the bamboo house.

In his haste he misses the look Shang Qinghua and Yue Qingyuan exchange behind his back.

“So, about those arrangements we made…”

“Yes, please. Let’s get Xiao Jiu home before Liu-shidi pines himself into a qi deviation.”

“Yeah, he’s down bad isn’t he?”

“Are you certain your prince doesn’t mind? If you are in any danger, shidi…”

“No! It’s fine, I’m fine, he already agreed to it! In fact, my Xuebao likes your brother so much I’m almost a little jealous.”

“Really now?”

“Zhangmen-shixiong, please stop looking like you are plotting murder. It’s not like that. As the Mobei prince, he really doesn’t have a lot of friends. Of course he misses A-Jiu.”

“If you say so, shidi.”

Liu Qingge is all jitters when he walks down the path to the bamboo house. He can’t understand why because Shen Qingiu won’t be back for months, but he still feels like a maiden on her way to ask out her love on the first date.

He almost drops the package with the robes when he opens the door and finds Shen Qingqiu standing there in the sunlit room. His shidi is too solid, too real to be an apparition, his clothes worn from travel, his heavy pack still unpacked by the table. He stands with a letter in one hand - Qingge recognizes his sister’s wobbly, childish handwriting - and with Qingge’s notebook in which he wrote all his stumbling, horrible poetry in the other and Liu Qingge wishes nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him whole.

“Are those my new robes?” Shen Qingqiu asks, as if they have only met this morning, as if that was a reasonable thing to ask when Qingge’s heart is about to explode from nerves. He can only mutely nod at his shidi. “You know shixiong, I can see that you have put enormous effort into courting me. I would have loved it if it happened when I was here to experience it.”

Shen Qingqiu sets the notebook and the letter down and stalks up to Liu Qingge, his eyes sharp with an emotion he can’t interpret, but it makes Liu Qingge want to bare his throat to his teeth and be devoured.

“So, Liu-shixiong. Are you going to help me try on my new robes?”

#svsss #liu qingge #shen jiu #shen qingqiu #liujiu #tc writes #I'm tempted to draw something for this ngl #not putting this under readmore bc there was no good spot to cut it and it doesn't feel that long... #LQG going 0 to 100 in love like the nerd he is #Bai Zhan SQQ takes a more direct approach to protecting the sect #so of course he found out about Moshang #and beat Mobei's ass when they were still teens for treating hamster-shidi too rough so he got promoted to best friend status #that's just enough context for airplane to remember what he wrote about violent demon bonding #and clean up that no humans don't find physical violence directed at them sexy #mobei is a security risk to the sect but a calculated one #no other sect has a way to go to japan and back in five minutes so he can live for now #they are still pretty young here btw #Mingyuan is just old enough to write #she's old enough to bully her big brother for being a really bad poet though #tough crowd

[aro-culture-is]

quick note - this blog is gonna be sparse again for at least this week. trying new medications and tbh initial side effects are not super pleasant + actual effects build up. as a result: currently as if unmedicated for mental health, with anxiety+ side effect, extra fatigue, dizziness, and fatigue. it's uh, sure something.

totally recognize that most of y'all know we're absent at times due to health things, just wanted to give a heads up that this one is at least anticipated.

#fun fact sometimes condensing meds just means poorer treatment of some conditions #this is a re-expansion + new thing #so that instead of poorly treating my mental health and using an unusually high dose SNRI for another (physical) condition #i will hopefully both be in less pain AND not depressed af AND also have an appetite again #i doubt i will be lucky and not have a fucked stomach due to meds but one can hope that an appetite will allow me to eat foods that upset #my stomach a lot less #my health is forever a massive balancing act #every time a medical thing is like 'so what meds do u take' i'm like here i wrote it down for u #and they're like 'oh. ooookay. let me just...' *five minutes of typing and clicking later* #'so! what did you come in for again? uhuh. you said you experience pain daily? with your chronic pain thing? hm. have you tried yoga?' #/gen #like. straight up every time i say 'i am in pain all the time due to fibromyalgia' they are like 'ooh studies say regular exercise helps' #and like. theoretically yes! but also. i would be lying if i said the fibromyalgia studies i've skimmed don't set off general 'bad science' #alarm bells in my brain #like... cool you performed a fibromyalgia study with... all male lab rats? mhmm? so are you aware fibromyalgia appears to occur #overwhelmingly in women? like. data seems to suggest between 70-85%? #(not that the data can't still indicate things but it certainly makes male rats a poor choice of model for tests on it) #also just... idk i've looked at some metaanalysis and been like 'okay cool theory and for all i know about human bio or bio in general that #sounds more or less correct BUT. you never discussed that one study on this subject that did NOT support your conclusion. #and that's 1) interesting when it was the most diverse group of subjects and the exceptions often teach just as much as the 'rule' #2) just shitty science. tell me how your theory is still credible when some evidence doesn't fit the model. #like... 'given that all other studies were primarily conducted on white american women in their 30s to 40s it is possible that this model #only explains (the early effects of fibro since that's a typical onset period) / (a possible genetic link primarily found in white women) / #(a possible sign of bias in diagnosis that demonstrates the possibility that there are different causes) / combinations of all of those #like... idk a paper that just throws out things that don't support it is a pretty big red flag #it doesn't mean the conclusion is entirely incorrect but it is often important to understand the context in which it applies #like... it's very easy to jump to an incorrect conclusion if you used something in the wrong context #ie: thumbs up is a good job / positive thing in a lot of western civilizations. teenage kee once went to china and discovered it to be #neutral to offensive in many areas outside of major tourist locations that were used to it #anyways i gotta sleep

[cephalog0d]

I keep accidentally referring to Beast World as Beast Wars (a thing I know exactly nothing about besides the title and it's something to do with Transformers?) and odds are good that's going to continue forever at this point so that's just where we are. Sorry in advance.

#I think because we JUST finished Gotham War and now it's Beast World and I keep blending the titles in my head #Who's wildly ambivalent about the next big comic event? #Who wishes they could go five fucking minutes and actually give characters a moment to exist without introducing ANOTHER giant event? #I guess it could be worse. They could've called it Beast Crisis. #Crisis of Infinite Beasts #Countdown to BEASTS #My phone wrote basta instead of beasts so apparently even it is done with this

[dovahkiining]

He asks me when I fell in love with him, and I'm too much of a coward to say that it was the first time I saw him. Too little, too late, with blood staining his hands and his blood staining mine. Maybe the love could've saved us. Maybe it doomed us. I tell him I realized after I had left. I tell him absence made the heart grow fonder. I don't tell him that it was his sickly-sweet childhood hands holding mine. I don't tell him it was the laugh that haunted me far past the first time I heard it. Maybe the love could have saved us, tangled twins in a town too small and too large. Maybe a world beyond ours exist where it did. Where our teen years aren't filled with ill-hidden repression and growing fights and stark sudden silence. Maybe there's a world where I say goodbye. Maybe there's a world where I mean it. He asks me when I fell in love with him, and I say right now, I say always, I say never, I say I wish I could've. They all taste like lies. There's still his blood on my hands, sticky and sweet and aching.

#spiff keeperschampion posting jesus christ #spiff rambles #i wrote this shit in five minutes dont say SHIT. to me #im just thinking about them #sighs wistfully #do i maintag this. no i dont care enough mutuals exclusive i suppose

[magentagalaxies]

in an unexpected turn of events i'm having to edit down the content in my aubrey monologues so that i can actually fit all four of them in my final performance for my standup class and on the one hand it sucks bc i really love some of the jokes i have to cut but on the other hand someday i'll be able to write more monologues and possibly expand upon this cut material so i can get a whole monologue on a topic that would've just been an aside

#the actual standups in my class who have only ever done a tight five having to stretch their new material to fit the 20 minute final #vs me‚ an extremely extra fag who's used to writing full-length scripts‚ realizing the 3 monologues i've timed already add up to 20 min #and i'm working on a fourth one that works better as an opener than any of the existing pieces so it has to get in #(it'll be short tho i'm making sure of it. it's just like ''here's some material about aubrey's relationship to zir mom!'') #(then immediate segue into the uncle reg bit) #got the catcalling monologue down to 5 minutes and 30 seconds when the first draft was nine minutes #(tbh i'm fine with most of those cuts i think they were mostly filler) #(there's a bit about androgyny that i liked that i cut but tbh it doesn't work as just one paragraph it needs more nuance) #the uncle reg monologue is having the ''dumped at the pride parade'' thing trimmed down which is funny bc that was the original premise #tbh i could probably stretch my toronto pride material ft. uncle reg to a full 20 minutes bc the first stream of consciousness was so long #i wrote it right after i myself got back from toronto pride and tbh i actually wrote it as the outline for a sitcom episode #so the monologue version is very reduced down bc there were so many details that didn't fit in #and i'm realizing the material about the person who dumped aubrey should be its own monologue that i'll do another time #and maybe even add in the rest of the sitcom-style story at some point bc tbh that's some of my favorite aubrey material i've come up with #and the cishetman monologue is getting the intro part about facetime trimmed a bit bc it meanders #and the ''sugar and spice and everything nice'' joke is being cut even tho i like it bc i actually have a ton more material in my notebook #that's just me riffing on how weird those expressions are. and the material isn't polished but i could make it something later #the song isn't being trimmed bc it has a very specific run time and imo is the strongest. so that's my closer #anyway thank you to everyone reading my aubrey updates i'll be sure to post the final 20-minute-special on youtube #and i hope i get to do more monologues soon so i can put the other ideas mentioned here (as well as some i haven't) out into the world

[suchaehwas]

open to: all! plot: that one plot of muse a meeting muse b, a celeb in a convenience store or smth where muse a works, and since muse a has no idea who the other is and doesn't care about celebrity culture and muse b just keeps lying and pretending as a normal person because this newfound friendship is too pure and good to be tainted with anything else

"hey there, how're you holding up? it's been a while since i last saw you." he greets good naturedly as he wanders in to the other's workplace for the first time in at least a few weeks. work keeps ryeowoon busy enough that there's barely enough time to sleep at times, but as far as the other's concerned, he's just returned from a business trip as a marketer. "as for me, i think i'm still jetlagged, so now you have to keep me awake." he jokes, a grin already spreading.

#open starter #indie starter #wrote this in five minutes so it's shitty but it's smth #t: seok ryeowoon #many thoughts about him since last night so

[whostolemygoldfish]

Hahha perks of being a pretty talented musician is that I can write songs about this one specific guy I hate so fucking much and just yell about it but with a sick bass line in the back

#also yes he ends up being kinda like a metaphor for all of the shitty young andrew tate wannabes BUT THAT'S BECAUSE HE'S A WALKING EXAMPLE #GODDAMN I HATE THIS GUY SO FUCKING MUCH HE THINKS HE'S SO SMART AND HE QUOTES BREAKING BAD EVERY FIVE MINUTES AND WATCHES FUCKING SOUTH PARK #AND HE LISTENS TO NIRVANA BUT JUST FOR THE AESTHETIC AND IT'S LIKE THEY WROTE A FUCKING SONG ABOUT YOU OR SOMETHING #HE'S BEEN THE EXACT SAME SHITTY WHITE GUY CUBS FOOTBALL COACH FOR EVERY HALLOWEEN SINCE HE WAS LIKE SEVEN #UNFORTUNATELY I'VE KNOWN HIM SINCE WE WERE IN PRESCHOOL AND SINCE I'M FROM A REALLY SMALL TOWN THERE IS NO ESCAPE #HE SAYS THE MOST HOMOPHOBIC TRANSPHOBIC AND MISOGYNISTIC THINGS SO FUCKING CASUALLY AND ALL OF THE LAME ASS GUYS THINK HE'S COOL #okay sorry I'm done now he's just infuriating :)

[rentfreeinmyskull]

led me to the floor even though i’m not a dancer!! ask me all the questions that your parents wouldn’t answer!! how could i deny a diamond in the rough!! YOU LET ME IN YOUR WORLD UNTIL YOU HAD ENOUGH !!!!! you knew that i wanted you to bend the rules!! how did i believe i had a hold on you???!!!

#can’t believe lucy dacus wrote hot and heavy about mai and nat #i’m having a moment here in the five minutes before i start work #oc: mai #oc: natila #otp: we scraped our bones together

[purrfectlycontent]

you breathe into me,

sculpting a body of space dust.

complementary binary stars locked in a gravitational embrace.

we push and pull until both cease to exist,

two halves of a soul reunited.

you pull me closer, caress my cheek,

and claim you’re trying to keep us afloat;

i close my eyes and let your deceit wash away the decay.

but oh, darling, i can’t shake the feeling

that maybe we’re drowning.

#gon writes poems #i watched another melodysheep video and it got me thinking about space #do i know what’s going on here? definitely not #i wrote this in like… five minutes so. yeah #posting this right before i go to sleep so i can wake up tomorrow morning and forget about it

[shcherbatskayas]

reading all the wacky conspiracy theories on tiktok like a disgruntled old man grumbling at his morning newspaper

#'people tried to convince us 666 was evil bc melanin has 6 neutrons 6 protons and 6 electrons' uhhh #the people who wrote the bible didn't know about neutrons bc they didn't have microscopes #those guys didn't even know what australia was #please think about things and be serious for five minutes

[agentravensong]

so, fun story: the playwriting professor i had this past year, my senior year of college, and really liked -- the one i quoted in this r & g are dead post -- has written some plays themself (not a surprise, i'm sure).

i asked them a while back for a copy of the script of what is, as far as i know, their only full two-act play, to read, for funsies. they finally sent the most recent draft to me a couple of days ago, and i just sat down and read it. i knew going in that it would be about two women in the modern day trying to discover what happened to the crew of a ship that disappeared in the artic in the 1840s, with one of the women being a young musician and the other being an older and more jaded scientist.

i did not know that in the half of the play set in the past, the two main guys would be a ros and guil duo. a love and rhetoric duo. in way over their heads, constantly getting on their crewmates' nerves and often wounding each other but, at the end of the day, reliant on each other and only each other. playing silly games to pass the time and keep their wits sharp. stuck on a boat, together, even. and, spoilers, but, they don't get a happy ending in this one either. doomed by the narrative, as it were.

which is to say: i knew i was going to like it, but, man. i cried.

(and to be clear, the stuff with the two women in the present was great too. there are even parallels to draw between the two sets of protagonists, because that's good writing for you.)

the even crazier thing is, i looked up this professor online after my first class with them in fall 2022, which is when i not only originally found out about this play, but also learned that marian call had written music for it. marian call being an indie musician i learned about back in 2020, whose ep Swears! specifically hit hard for me back during my Fail Semester (don't ask).

what a fucking coincidence, right?

anyway, i listened to the song on her bandcamp that she wrote for the show after finishing the script, and let me tell you: that song already slapped (i've listened to it plenty since first finding it), but with the full context? fuck me.

the worst part of all this is that there is literally no one else i can talk about this play with. other than my professor, whom i shall be emailing shortly with my brain worms thoughts.

...though i suppose i've said enough in this post that other people could probably do some digging and at least find the song, if they wanted to.

...and i suppose if any mutuals (or fellow r&g heads whom i've previously interacted with) wanted to read it and asked me for it... as long as the file wouldn't be too big for discord... what would be the harm in that?

#narrative nonsense #could i have predicted that the professor whom i knew loves ragad would have taken such a chunk from it for their original play? perhaps #i mean the 3rd of the five minute plays *i* wrote at college was also half an r&g fic (in a different way) #i even wrote in some direct r&g references explicitly hoping that my professor would catch them and see what i was going for and feel thing #and now they've gone and uno reversed me in the most spectacular fashion #i can't believe they didn't warn me. i can't believe they tricked me into this. (/j) #now i'm just remembering all the times we've talked about ragad together #in particular the time they proposed that it might have been even sadder if guil left first and ros was alone at the end #they really put their money where their mouth was with that one huh.

[athinakori]

I finally finished to read the blood of olympus and all i’m going to say is: definitely the weakest book of the entire series and not because it is “bad fan fiction” but it is too much hype to see the final battle against gaea and it just sucks and it ended way too quickly, five books to reach a point that literally just ends in a “poof” and the battle at the parthenon is way better than the final one.

I really didn’t like the fact that annabeth and percy got put aside right after a very traumatic event for them and i understand that rr wanted to focus on the others, but then again, he really didn’t know how to deal with too much characters and when he was suppose to focus on certain ones but he just ????? Idk i just feel the narrative was suppose to be very different like it was showed to us.

There are some very cool moments in the book, but once again, it doesn’t have the same intensity than the previous ones and also i still don’t understand why camp half blood doesn’t have some sort of city like new rome and why no one has thought about it and i also feel like annabeth and percy going to new rome is something very out of character.

#ooc / post. #( i never wrote this much about a book here before #but seriously i just needed to get this out of my chest #i still can’t fucking believe the final battle ended in like #what five minutes? i mean come on #we had battle of manhattan and the final battle against kronos is way better #and rick deliver us this????? i’m so pissed off #‘oh but would you write it better than rick?’ i wOULD I WILL #FUCKING PROVE IT IN MY CANON FOR THIS BLOG )

[ragsy]

my MOTW party and i made a collaborative google doc to get our lore ducks in a row and i think we've been given too much power

#ragsycon exclusive #monster of the week #i don't remember who wrote 'put him in a jar' but i think i laughed at that for a solid five minutes #i don't even remember who it's about

[burningthegallows]

tell us about the lltg fic! very curious and interested we need more fic in this fandom

seriously! im so parched for fic! it’s been so long since I’ve seen a het couple I care about. coming out the other side to see 17 fics on ao3… smh. I’m not the best writer and I don’t love doing it—but sometimes you just gotta write the fic if you wanna read it.

anyway, i love the persuasion trope of lovers parted and then reunited and stronger for it. the bitterness is very bitter until suddenly it’s all sweet. but between autumn ballad (which i had a very mixed reaction to) and lltg, i realized why the chinese form of this trope always irks me so much: all the healing happens off screen.

I would love to watch 5 years of pining. two lovers separated but trying to find a way back to one another?? Healing and hurting and forgiving and the relapsing on your forgiveness and hating yourself for willing to take him back. Yeah, I love a breakup/makeup story.

Especially when, at the end, it feels like there’s something to be salvaged from the wreckage of the hurt.

Genuinely, I think forgiveness is one of the more complicated and arduous mental odysseys, but I also think that just means we need more stories that explore the concept.

#plus I want ling buyi walk across the gobi #lltg #love like the galaxy #anon♥️ #there’s also a part of me that’s fine with the healing happening in the last five minutes #but that’s a lot of emotional whiplash #and so some catharthis is necessary #in the west #we do that with the long embrace #and fanfiction #i really would love to know the source for this trope #oh fuck i asked the question but it's just the cowherd and the weaver girl #the show is lit called lltgalaxy #the most famous story about the milky way.... #I’d love a bit more context #also I first opened your ask and wrote 1200 words on my reasoning #that was a bit ridiculous but a shorter history post is on the way #man guys do you think I might have some baggage oof