yes yes characters doomed by the narrative always slap BUT what about characters saved by the narrative? characters who have already given up hope and don't know they have a happy ending? characters who believe they are a lost cause, characters who feel irredeemable, characters who think there's nothing left for them, but the narrative does provide a way out? what about the characters who don't expect anything good, who don't even remember how to wish for it anymore, who get the things they need anyway? what about the characters who actively run from being saved getting saved in a way they can't stop or control. what about being saved by the narrative!!!

Warlock and familiar 🫶, by Zencultist.

thank you all for booping the 7ft/2.13m tall four armed skeleton

The legacies people leave behind in you.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.

i just hope that no matter how many times this world tries to harden me and turn me into a cold person, i hope i remain soft. may i still be compassionate. may i still be full of love. may i still be soft and sees hope in everything. and to never become something that once broke me.

So we all like the “if you die then I’ll burn down the world” trope but there’s something so powerful and beautiful about living on with their memory instead. It’s not “because you’re dead the world has nothing worth saving in it” but “everyday something in this world reminds me of you and I’m glad for it even if it hurts”.

It’s “I’ll bring your kindness with me wherever I go and someone will remember it even if they’ll never know I borrowed it from you.”

It’s “This is what you would do.”

It’s “I’ll remember you for you and not for what the people hail you as.”

And it’s so painfully beautiful.

There is something so beautiful about reaching out to the monstrous with intent to touch it gently. To risk the sharp teeth and the lethal claws, to defy fear and revulsion, and choose to be delicate with something that can be, and often is, incredibly brutal.

Magnus Enckell (Finnish, 1870-1925) - Death's Walk (1896)

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

— Mark Twain

Cemetiri de Montjuïc / Barcelona / Spain

what is hidden [cmm, character belongs to Calamarty]

The Gentle Death 🥀 [commission for amazing Calamarty]

have you eroticized the repulsive today? have you applied an element of carnality to what is considered by most to be gruesome, grotesque, and/or monstrous today?

Illustration By Gustave Doré for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”— (1883) x

Chance Encounter pt. 2 by zencultist/(NSFT acct).

Link to full NSFT here. (warning: Ovi)