By the third lover, she had peeled so much skin she became a woman who
could walk on blood. She meant nothing to me. She is a house of red. A holy
assemblage. A city of nerve & dirt. nothing to me her skin survived every
summer. I don’t want you to leave she spoke to the jars. I want you to live
like a city that never rises live here cigarettes here aimed at god. No evidence
of life after death so she left that skin for good. Years later, she will remem-
ber the sound of her wife’s tires flexing against mud, the sound of stolen
glass jars ringing after her. By the third lover, she could finally walk on
blood, but even the saint had gone looking for more skin.
— Noʻu Revilla, from "In search of a different ending," Ask the Brindled
The bats were confused when Joker announced he gained a companion. His partner (or sidekick) is strong and has too many powers but looks sad. They tried to ask him if something was wrong but he remained silent. Joker liked to call him "The King", but he insisted that he was only "Phantom". The clown didn't care and continue with the nickname.
"King Phantom" tends to ignore when civilians are evacuated, feign ignorance when someone tries to escape, and has offered the bats bandages and medicine a couple of times. But when The Joker is present he becomes completely desperate and aggressive, as if he is fighting for something.
On the other hand, Joker got a completely new weapon, it was a green sphere that produced lightning but Phantom winced every time he saw him use it. On one occasion Tim swore he heard him whisper "Ellie".
Danny was scared, Ellie was unstable and anything he did could be fatal. When he arrived in Gotham looking for her missing core he didn't expect to find it in the hands of a clown. The clown realized that he had something to bribe him (although he didn't know how important it was) and began to order him around.
Danny hated it, he held back most of the time because he was fighting humans, not revealing many of his powers. And he would have killed the clown a thousand times if it weren't dangerous for Ellie. Joker would never break away from the core by saying it was "good luck", and would lock it in a ghost-proof cell, which is probably where he found it originally. The halfa just wanted his the girl back.
kai, an immortal whose body immediately and automatically heals itself, discovering that his own pain creates power he can use to fuel his magic: good news! i found an infinite clean source of energy. it's called STABBING MYSELF IN THE CHEST REPEATEDLY
kai: the best part is that emotional trauma counts too! including the emotional trauma incurred from being stabbed! bogo power source!
everyone:
[Image description: GIF of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss's character from "Veep" turning away from someone with a strained smile, looking disturbed. The caption says, "[Laughing nervously] What the fuck?" /end ID]
First of all, I love how these panels establish a clear difference between Hawks looking at Dabi and Hawks looking at Dabi. In the scene from 240, Hawks is looking at Dabi as he's thinking about completing his mission and contacting Endeavor for backup. Like dude? You're literally staring into Dabi's eyes and thinking about Endeavor and it never crossed your mind that they have the same eyes? Chapter 267 drives this point even further by putting a close-up of Dabi's eye after he reveals his identity to Hawks. You can clearly see Hawks having an "oh shit" moment after the reveal as he truly looks at Dabi and realizes that this one piece of crucial information has been right in his face the whole time.
And second of all, this just highlights how Dabi truly is Hawks' downfall during the raid.
The whole point of Hawks' mission was to gain intel on the League so that the heroes don't make any hasty decisions and have the upper hand in apprehending the villains for good. The fact that the HPSC president specifically told Hawks "we severely underestimated the enemy" and yet he did the same exact thing is, quite frankly, hilarious.
And in retrospect, given the knowledge that we have on Dabi's past from chapter 350, Hawks could have figured out who was behind the nomu, where they were kept, and so many other things about AFO's plan for a successor if he had paid more attention to Dabi.
taliesin and laura remain truly so fantastic at making characters who… don’t necessarily have something extremely and inherently in common but do have experiences that were caused by similar sources and that lead them to have quite different opinions/ideas about things but in ways that are typically very reconcilable? which is a lot of qualifiers but it’s a through line of vex/percy with nobility, jester & cad with loneliness (and also god stuff but in a different post maybe someday i’ll talk about how actually their god stuff is intensely related to their different experiences of loneliness), and now imogen & ashton with being left behind.
like vex was this character who technically had a claim to nobility due to her blood but at the same time was burdened because of that same claim. and percy who was born into and raised by nobility but that nobility ended up making his family the targets of a massacre. and then vex who lets down her walls and Do I Look Like I Come From Money? and percy giving her the title grand mistress of the grey hunt because it has nothing to do with blood, or his love for her, or anything aside from the fact that it’s something she can prove herself worthy of simply by virtue of who she Is, not who someone makes her. and percy and vex’s conversation about forgiveness and it’s necessity for growth as probably two of the characters most inclined to hold grudges.
and caduceus clay who gets left behind with nothing but his Belief while his family goes off into the world. and jester lavorre who gets shut inside with no company except her Belief as her mother protects her from the world. and they both get the burden of loneliness and the understanding of love’s nonmalicious imperfection. and caduceus having a panic attack on a ship and jester telling him that the world is a lot bigger than his cemetery and that means he has to break out of his comfort zone to find his path. and caduceus telling jester that he doesn’t think she gets as much credit as she ought to and she deserves more pastries. and jester thanking caduceus for showing her how cool it is to actually heal people and caduceus asking if she wants to use his shield while he doesn’t need it.
and ashton who was left broken and dying on the ground and was given inescapable pain as their means of survival. and imogen who was left behind by the only person who could provide true understanding of the pain she’d one day come to feel. and ashton who’s a barbarian, who wields their rage casually and unapologetically and who sees the Shittiness of the world but is unrelenting in his version of optimism. and imogen who is weighed down by pessimism she doesn’t Want to have but hasn’t cracked how to undo and who doesn’t admit her anger until it comes up again and again and again and carries it like a burden or like guilt, who we only see really Grasp and feel Confidence about her anger being something good in front of others when she has those conversations with ashton. and like. ashton who looks at imogen and sees a superhero. imogen venturing through ashton’s mind and holding his bleeding and exhausted head and saying i’m sorry. i’m sorry. and imogen who looks at ashton and sees someone special. and fucking “we got him killed.” and “no, we didn’t. don’t you dare. […] we are not what fucking killed that man. […] we are his eventual victory. we are his fucking revenge.” and “i’ll be his revenge.” and “i have no fucking doubt.”
and in general rp wise they both tend to make some of my favourite characters (also typically the ones i find most frustrating) because they both tend to make flaws that are easy to hate and they make those flaws very central to their characters but i think that’s also what makes their character interactions so deeply compelling because so frequently it’s like. yes yes these two characters have like. a helix of things they have in common but also things they deeply disagree on but they’re going to spider-man point at the things that are the same and they’re going to honour their differences while doing so. and it’s just. i always enjoy it so much and i was psyched when i heard about an imogen and ashton side pit stop in last nights episode and i was not let down when i watched the episode today.
She sat near the bath-
room window & blew smoke at heaven, half-listening to the latest gospel,
half burning a hole in the sky: she’s just a white picket fence she makes me
feel #skinoritdidnthappen I didn’t mean life after betrayal. She remembered
St. Anthony. Patron saint of lost things. Come, collect this body, saint. I
smoked you a hole to fall through.
— Noʻu Revilla, from "In search of a different ending," Ask the Brindled
i am playing professor layton and the curious village on my ds. very fun!!!
I don't know if i'm very far in because most of the time spent in that game was me being confused and bad at puzzles. it's fun though.
!!! im glad to hear youre enjoying it!! its one of my fav titles and honestly such an underrated series, id love it if more ppl gave it a try!
the puzzles can be difficult but very rewarding!! i used to dread them as a kid but now i find them nice and challenging. the math ones are still hard, but if u speak to Flick at the cafe he'll give you chess puzzles which i think were my favorite ^_^
Could I ask what difference between transgender and transsexual is? I ask this as a trans person who wants to start using the term "transsexual," but I'm not sure if it denotes anything beyond what I've been using the term "transgender" for (i.e. not aligning with my birth sex/gender identity).
I like transsexual better as it's what our trans-cestors used, and it's a word that is so much "punchier" than transgender is, and I don't feel the same kind of "weird" when the label is applied to me. I'm just worried that these are "fake" reasons or something. Thank you, and sorry!
Honestly, I think there are more similarities between "transsexual" and "transgender" as transsexual as a term was introduced first, and then transgender replaced it
Transsexual has had a history of being used for people who were medically transitioning during a point where transness was heavily pathologized and medicalized... but I personally don't think that cis people should be allowed to sully words like that, and I really don't think that we need to stick by those ridged rules. Isn't the reason transness is so "scary" because we break those "ridged rules" so often? But I digress.
I think some people have different outlooks on their transition, and that's where the transsexual/transgender labels can help. For me, I identify as transsexual because I think it most accurately describes my relationship with my transition.
The most important thing is to not force people in or out of labels they identify with - which is why I want anybody who wants to ID as transsexual do so. So many people ID as such - trans elders, young trans people, people who are medically transitioning, people who aren't. I think a lot of why people are attracted to this word is because of political reclamation, as in reclaiming the word for political reasons, to show the word how viscerally human you are. That's part of the reason I decided to use it, at least.
mmm just character thoughts don't mind me. I was initially hesitant to give my Phoenix too much characteristics that make them more than what we see in the game. I wanted to stick to focusing on their present as this silly do-gooder protagonist with simple motivations (a la Mr. No-Backstory Phoenix Wright Aceattorney. THAT'SRIGHT!! I DIDN'T JUST STOP WITH THE HAIR WAHHA /j)
which is why I didn't want to give them an actual real name for a long time.. the moment I do that is the moment they're someone unique entirely. Which isn't a bad thing! For some reason I just wanted to stick it to the simplicity. But I guess making them half-asian working for a company that's (mainly? i assume?) based in the US in the 60's already entails a lot of implications. Also I was really proud of thinking up of a real name for them which is why I put it on that one art I did for them.
All that to say is ... I'm close to deciding on going all-in with my Phoenix's characterization, backstory and all. I could... PROBABLY manage to connect their weird talent of not dying to it but. It's silly for the sake of being silly so. probably not.
What I've got so far is that they're an overseas filipino worker who, after jumping across multiple jobs (none of them sticking too long), accidentally wanders into one of the buildings of the Agency. They somehow get accepted and it doesn't take long for them to realize that they're a spy now. Surprisingly, they like the thrill. They really Did Not Expect to suddenly be saving the world but it's fine. It's fine!