Sometimes I remember that Scott Westerfeld as an author exists and no one appreciates him enough and I just get sad about it

Fucked up looking dog you got there

We could have had it all...

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[ID: SVSSS fanart of Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge. It's the scene from volume 1 where Liu Qingge is having a qi deviation. He's on the floor, face and clothes splattered with blood. Shen Qingqiu has a hand on his shoulder, and smiles as he says, "You're too hot- I mean too young to die. We should be friends now." Liu Qingge scowls at him, angry and confused, thinking "wtf" repeatedly and with question marks floating around his head. /end ID]

this is basically what happened i think

I did try to make friends. But I couldn't let people in without giving myself away...

Ok my first reaction was I didn’t like how the dragons disobeyed their riders like that, but after thinking about it I think it’s kinda brilliant when it comes to the behaviors of dragons.

First, both Arrax and Luke were really young and had absolutely zero combat experience. As soon as they saw Vhagar, it’s very obvious they simultaneously became a lot more tense. Then after Luke had his encounter with Aemond and left you can see Arrax looking in the direction of where Vhagar was in clear distress and Luke does the same thing before mounting. Luke realized their anxiety was high and he did his best to calm Arrax down before taking flight, but that all went out the window as soon as Vhagar gave chase. Now you have a child and a very young and small dragon that are bonded together in a very scary situation: being chased down by a behemoth in the middle of a raging storm (poor Arrax was flapping his wings as hard as he could) I personally think Arrax went on the offense to try and protect both himself and Luke, if only to give them a chance to escape. Both of them did the best they could.

Then you have Vhagar, an extremely old, massive, experienced dragon that is bonded to an inexperienced rider who is feeling a lot of unhinged rage and resentment. They were flying in attack maneuvers ffs I doubt she thought it was a game. And then this little dragon has the audacity to breathe fire in her face. Of course she’s not going to deal with that shit, as utterly tragic as her response is.

At the end of the day, dragons are not mindless war machines that will obey every command. They’re very powerful animals. No matter how trained or bonded with their owners they are, very powerful animals can and will do what they want.

hey i feel like we're really sleeping on that time Danny possessed Vlad & framed him for assaulting a minor

Editing with the clip because people don't believe me. Episode is 41: Eye for an Eye.

Your exploration of the building rooftop has led you to an unexpected encounter with the wing villain Hawks!! What will you do?

the thing that is the most terrifying about ketheric thorm's introduction is not the visceral bloody horror of it but how it establishes from the jump that this guy truly does not care, at all, about ANY of the major plot points he's surrounded by.

none of what happens during the cutscene where you first meet him suggests ketheric thorm is a zealot like any of the other people you've meet in moonrise. He doesn't seem remotely interested in the goblins, what you say or even the words coming out of his OWN mouth, and you think that disinterest is a predictable kind of arrogance up until he invites the goblin that just speared him in the heart to "try again", stands there placidly waiting for the goblin to take his head off, heals from death again, and then kills the goblin almost as an afterthought.

That's when you understand intimately that ketheric thorm could care less about the absolute. He could care less about the moonrise, the grand mysterious plan, the lives of anybody around him, including his own. He has his own (at this point unknowable) purpose that's keeping him going and he honestly seems tired of even that. He's been hollowed out by that purpose to the point that there's not even ashes left and yet he's going to keep going toward that purpose anyway, by rote, until he succeeds or until his invulnerable, immortal body finally gives out, and he doesn't seem to care which happens first.

It's a bloodchilling introduction and just yet another reminder of how much love and attention everyone in this game put in to building out every single character.

shoutout to this loser. whats up with him

alright I’m bored so here’s my extremely optimistic crack theory: assuming katsuki seeing a vestige means we’ll see him in the vestige realm, when kudo sorted through izuku’s memories he put his forehead on the wall right??

what if izuku is having a crisis about being left quirkless again and vestige katsuki needs to touch foreheads with izuku to show him all his memories of izuku being heroic without a quirk and he tells him “you never needed a quirk. you were always a hero” or something like that because it’s what izuku always needed to hear

u know how people (rightfully) leap to wei wuxian’s defense when someone tries to say that he’s stupid because 1) he is a quite literally a genius and 2) there is no reason for him to have assumed that lan wangji wanted to be more than friends. well i’m abt to do the same for shen qingqiu. he’s not stupid for not figuring out how to con the system, he’s not stupid for not realizing what was going on with binghe, and for all intents and purposes him acting out of assumption because of the plot of pidw was not an act of stupidity, but survival. the tragedy of scum villain is that shen qingqiu couldn’t have known better (like the book literally says “in this world, there is no ‘if only i had known’”). the tragedy of scum villain is that he assumes he knows what the plot is. the tragedy of scum villain is that the system is a neutral yet vague force that leads shen qingqiu to doing what he does. u just can’t suspend ur disbelief enough to see that shen qingqiu doesn’t know he’s in a genre subversion romance novel; he thinks he’s in a survival horror novel.

I'm sorry I let down my guard.

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Evil Rides Tonight

so...John’s planning on pulling the plug on the world, right? Like that’s what he’s doing here?

I’ve just been turning these bits of ntn over and over in my head and tbh I can’t stop thinking about the description of 10,000 years of civilization as a first draft. John’s first resurrection didn’t quite end up how he wanted -- closest friends all dead, turned traitor, or both, fighting a war on multiple fronts, his only allies the corpse of his accidental bastard daughter and a twenty-something princess with cannibalistic tendencies whom he canonized as part of a failed attempt to revitalize his polycule-- but hey, it doesn’t matter, because he can just start over. All of NTN he’s in this depression spiral; he’s falling apart, he’s having orgy parties with his senior staff, he’s got at least part of his subconscious camped out in the comatose mind of a half-dead nineteen year old he tried to have murdered, treating it like a confessional booth; because right there, in the background of his mind through all of this, is the off switch. He can have his breakdown, and then just...let Alecto out. Erase it all, start fresh, and this time he’s got one attempt under his belt, he’s got notes for what to do differently, and so let it all fall to shit! Nobody else is gonna remember any of this anyway. Two worlds, now, that only John will remember. Maybe three, later; maybe four, what’s to stop him from redoing it over and over til it’s just right? 

The issue with that, of course, is there’s really no way to treat the world like this and still care about it in the way other people do. You’d lose your ability to be affected by life’s events after a couple reboots and then what’s there to get emotionally invested in? When you’ve turned a person off and back on two, three, four times and you know you’ll probably do it again the next time something happens you don’t quite vibe with, how can you possibly look at them as a real person? Are they a real person, if they only know what you want them to know and do what you want them to do? And once you reach that point, once people aren’t people but project components for you to edit, what are you even bothering with all this for?? John started down this path because he so loved the world; what happens when he reduces the world to something he can no longer afford to love? Might as well pull that plug for good, yeah? 

Anyway. I’m fascinated by the way John’s shitty mental state is dooming the world and it’s everyone else’s bad luck. The rest of the cast is out there fighting for their lives and he’s like *sigh* let’s try that again. take two, everyone!