Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.

All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.

For a moment, imagine yourself in Mithrun's brother shoes.

Your brother - stronger, prettier, more charismatic, but also distrustful and disdainful of everyone especially you - is to be sent to the Canaries. It is the rule, it is the duty of all noble houses. But you know what goes on there, Mithrun knows what happens there. Yet you see him off, bidding a temporary farewell as you do, because someone from the House has to go and it won't be definitely you. Mithrun knows this, you know this. And you wonder, very briefly, if Mithrun hates you now more than he does already.

Your brother - powerful, agile, a good soldier just as he is as an heir, if he could only be an heir - suddenly disappears. The unit he belonged to suddenly disappeared. And you're speechless because - how? why? No one wants to answer you; they will instead try to bring back a body, they promise to you. But that is not what you want. You grieve for your brother. but your own family doesn't grieve with you. Wasn't Mithrun family too?

Then you found out: MIthrun is alive.

Your brother - now weak, despondent, his eyes always looking for something that is not here nor there - is to be sent home where people can take care of him. It is not your first choice, you want him home. But he is - sick. Not quite there. He needs someone who can look after him and you look at yourself - your gait, your constitution - and you know it can't be you. So, you follow the advice of your family and pour out all your resources to find him the best of healers and caretakers. You ask yourself, almost daily, if Mithrun would ever return to who he once was.

Your brother - strong, pretty, uninterested of anything and anyone else aside from what he calls 'the demon' - is now better. He can walk on his own now, eats without throwing up on himself. The color on his skin is back and the scars of his injuries have faded into thick bumps and discolored skin. But he still isn't quite there; still needs help and probably will for the rest of his life. And you can live with that. You can provide that. Just as long as he comes home.

But doesn't. Your brother - now a husk of his former self, and you hate thinking of him that way, but you can't help yourself, the Mithrun you knew is gone - runs straight back to the Canaries. His mission is not over, he says. He doesn't care how long it takes, he says. And you see him off, again, because someone from the House has to go and it still can't be you. Mithrun knows this, you know this, and you can't help but wish, very briefly, if things would've been different if you went instead of him.

Sonic never speaking again if he loses Tails.

Tails’ eyes no longer shining if he loses Sonic.

Nearing the end of my HL replay and I just gotta say Anne and I are a different breed. If my brother was adamantly searching high and low in crumbling ruins, reading ancient texts, casting Crucio on his besties, and still making house calls while I was cursed and basically dying I would maybe not be such a huge wimp about it

everyday i think of the fact that the byers are 99,9% gonna stay at the wheelers....

jonathan will be staying in nancy's room obviously, and guess where will is gonna be staying? mike's room? bingo. there's no way in hell they'd tell will to sleep on the couch or mike's basement, karen loves will - she'd never send him to sleep on the couch in the living room or mike's basement when hey, he's mike's best friend, why not let him stay at mike's room? and ted doesn't really aknowledge or care about will's existence so he wouldn't even participate in the conversation. i can already see the image of mike literally struggling to breathe and going stiff the second will lays down on the same bed as him even if there's gonna be a distance between them. long story short - mike's gonna lose his shit once again

ALSO based on my previous post abt the mata going into elemental withdrawal. I think they wish each other to be caught in natural disasters as like a very genuine have-a-good-day-take-care alternative. Which on one hand yes it does come off as regular Sibling Behaviour but also it sometimes comes off as them fucking hating each others guts

"hope you get caught in a blizzard" "hope you walk into an open fire" "hope you fall into a cave" "hope you land in a stone pile" "hope a tornado catches you" "hope you get swept by a tsunami"

What they hear: i love youuu <3 <3 <3 :) :D

What everybody else hears: DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

How have we forgotten that Crosshair almost killed Hunter while freed from the chip’s influence?

“Hunter never wanted to go back for Crosshair, the audacityyy!”

Who in their right mind would want to go back for a sibling who tried to stab them to death. Honestly. In what real world scenario would that actually happen.

"He's spent the entire time being picked upon and bullied by the family. I think personally from where Juan stands he sees the hypocrisy in the family, how they can do one thing and say another. As far as Juan is concerned he's always had the best interests of the family at heart, however misguided that might be and doesn't quite comprehend why nobody understands that. Nobody seems to understand that what he does, he does for the betterment of the Borgia clan and never waivers from that. He does that in ways that perhaps aren't sanctioned by the church or sanctioned by family law."

omg sparrow fur just got confirmed to become the second leader of skyclan

Ok, that's good. I'll have to think of how to go foward from here.

If Sparrow Heart had died before taking leadership, I was going to write that as her being INFURIATED by it. Remembered forever as Skystar's stooge, his general, his loyal servant, but never having power of her own. And, generations later, she'd grab for it in any way possible.

With her being Sparrowstar, I'm going to keep her ambition and desire for power, but she had a chance to enact her vision in life. She was the first cat to inherit 9 lives, even, with how BB!Skystar is the first leader to die. She continued his "legacy," not out of any actual love or respect to him, but because it's HER TURN.

All these years of groveling, of having to bend and bargain around the desire of stronger cats, now it's HERS. She is the one who bargains, who makes others grovel. No one will make her scared and powerless ever again.

It's going to continue the ferocious rivalry between SkyClan and ThunderClan, especially as Owlstar takes power. Sparrowstar is definitely gone by the time of the River Kingdom's succession crisis, though, she's too battle hungry to rule for so long.

Or maybe Sparrowstar will end up inventing some kitty war crimes and become one of the first Dark Forest cases. After all, it's very in-character of BB!Skystar to not officialize an heir, and force Sparrow Heart to have to carve a path through his bio-kits for the power she is owed...

(Mumbling to self: and then that makes a pretty interesting claim for SkyClan during the River Kingdom succession crisis... "we need no claim to your throne to take it from you")

We'll see!

My issue with Thor not ‘realizing’ why Loki was acting off in Avengers 1 isn’t that Thor didn’t recognise Loki was acting unlike himself—Thor did note that—or that Thor didn’t figure out what was wrong—he did try asking—it’s more along the lines of Thor giving up, and that he accepted Loki was bad now within two days while knowing something was off when Thor himself behaved just as bad for much longer before without any specific compromising event.

Thinking about S8 again and how Sam didn't wanna hunt alone and like...yeah. No shit. I think it's VERY fair that he doesn't want to hunt without Dean, especially considering his track record with it:

Mystery spot - Dean dies "for real" and for six months Sam is a a terrifying, cold, and robotic kind of unhinged killing machine. He still sets out two meals, lets hunting consume him completely, even cuts off contact with everyone unless they have info on the trickster.

Dean goes to hell: Sam hunts alone, tries to basically go out suicide by hunting. Ruby worms her way into his life by being Off Brand Dean Replacement and gets him addicted to demon blood. He's so consumed by the thought of revenge against Lilith for holding Dean's contract that he destroys himself (and helps start the apocalypse) in the process.

Dean's living his normal life with Lisa: Sam hunts alone and hurts a LOT of people. He's soulless during this time, but he DEFINITELY still blames himself for it. And to be honest, the only difference I see between Sam during the other times Dean isn't alive/around to hunt with him and his soulless era is that soulless Sam doesn't have the anger Sam did. But the actions, I could ABSOLUTELY see regular Sam committing them in an effort to save Dean if it came down to it.

(This one's in s9, but it still follows a very clear and fucked up pattern we see) Dean's a demon: Sam tortures demons in a way that makes them think he doesn't have a soul. He also leads a guy into a "fake" demon deal knowing full well he'll sell his soul and go to hell, all just to maybe find Dean.

Conclusion: Sam knows the kind of monster he turns into when he's hunting without Dean so he only wants to hunt if his big brother is there to keep him grounded.

Keith walking into the holding cell greeting all the regulars by name while Lance is sobbing lamenting that his life is over and his future is ruined (they were like. Trespassing or some shit he’s going to be fine)

lance: (actively dry heaving in the corner, on the verge of a panic attack as he imagines having a permanent record)(actually what does a permanent record even look like?)(omg is he going to have to go to COURT? like in JUDGE JUDY?)

keith: remy, this is lance. lance, this is remy, she’s my favorite alcoholic :)

It do be like that sometimes

TVDu was all 'family is really important to the Mikaelsons, they have a whole saying about it' only to turn around and be like oh yeah that only applies to three of the siblings though !?! what!!?! how dare you!!

drowned god the weak little beast you put on this earth to write fanfiction and like greyjoys has been neglecting homework in order to reread the affc ironborn chapters and have way too many opinions about the soggiest man in the world. i have Had Some Thoughts on aeron, theon, and names

it really is striking to me just how little people refer to aeron by his name. not just in conversation, but in the narrative itself, with the most notable example of this being aeron himself in his pov chapters constantly thinking of himself not as aeron but as damphair or just The Priest. he refers to himself as damphair or The Priest instead of aeron like twenty times throughout the prophet, to the point where it's used almost as frequently as his actual name. in the drowned man it's only like eight times (which i think is mostly because the vast majority of this chapter is given over to the kingsmoot, where aeron is mostly a spectator and the narrative focus is on the events taking place rather than his reaction to them). in the forsaken, it's ten times, though while aeron is actively imprisoned he mostly thinks of himself as aeron, with damphair being used four times in flashbacks to events that took place in the past, once during a conversation with euron while aeron is defying him, and then three times after he is freed and he can see the sea again

the consistency and frequency of aeron in his own mind thinking of himself as something other than his name reads to me almost like a foil to theon and reek. the identity of the damphair allows aeron to dissociate himself from the burden of his past weaknesses and sins: his pre-drowning frivolity and alcoholism and euron's sexual abuse. for aeron, being damphair is as empowering as being reek is degrading for theon. he is constantly affirming to himself that he is a loyal servant of the drowned god and that this makes him strong. it gives him status and purpose he never had as aeron the boy, who was the youngest and weakest of his brothers. aeron-the-priest cannot be frightened by any mortal man any more than he can be frightened by the dark or by memories. kill the boy to become the man -> drown the boy to become the damphair

(although, of course, when aeron tells himself all this about how god chose him and it makes him strong and special and immune to fear, he is deluding himself. the damphair is haunted incessantly by his brothers. aeron has the tendency to reconcile his lasting fear of euron with his special god-given immunity to such mortal flaws as feeling fear by believing that euron is ungodly/an avatar of the storm god/literally the devil, and therefore not really a mortal man in the same way that balon and victarion are

which is a really interesting parallel to how euron must see himself, what with the whole apotheosis god-king thing he's got going on by twow. in a way, euron is aeron's real god. it is euron's abuse that first connected aeron with faith, and it is faith that aeron uses to cope with and overcome the lasting psychological scars of that abuse and urri's death. aeron doesn't think of euron as a mere flesh and blood human being anymore. he's mythologized the crow's eye in his own mind: euron is not just his abuser, he's a boogeyman, a devil, quite literally the thing that goes bump in the night. and euron knows this, and delights in knowing it and in taking every chance he can to tear down aeron's faith and replace the drowned god with himself as the backbone of aeron's life. which he does not actually succeed in doing, as of the forsaken! aeron keeps his faith like theon keeps his name. it cannot be taken from them)

reek, meanwhile, is not an identity that theon chooses to assume to cope with his trauma. it is forced upon him in the middle of the trauma and he has no choice but to accept it for his own self-preservation. ramsay devastates theon physically: flaying him, starving him, beating him, removing his fingers and toes and teeth and genitals. imprisonment and violence are the tools he uses to take away theon's physical strength to resist him, but reek is how he gets to all the parts of theon that can't be bruised or cut. it's the psychological equivalent of a flaying knife. reek is the weapon he uses to attack theon's identity and sense of self and personhood. though it's important to me to note that those were things theon was already struggling with well before ramsay came on the scene, and that he has an absolutely unbelievably strong will that allows him to retain a degree of his original personality under ramsay and regain his own name later in adwd even after enduring all the torture and abuse. he is a greyjoy of pyke. his name is theon, and if he dies, he will die as theon, not as reek. when he leans into being reek, it is as a means of self-preservation and protection from harm. he basically says as much to jeyne when he tells her to be arya: he believes that serving ramsay and capitulating to his whim is the best way to stay safe. you have to know your name.

ultimately, theon is as relieved to be rid of the name reek as aeron is relieved to see the ocean again at the end of the forsaken. theon's name is a source of pride to him, something that he clings to after he has lost everything else, something that will always be his even after all that has been taken away from him. aeron's name is a source of shame, something that he is reduced to when he feels weak, something that he reverts to when he is powerless at the mercy of his abuser