The Line Between Devotion And Obsession Is Marked By Ink (Ink Is Reminiscent Of Blood, Is It Not?)

A small piece inspired by @flokali and their works. I hope you enjoy!

Your presence was a miracle

Every touch was a blessing

Something they surely did not deserve

They were not worthy 

Yet you gifted them such precious things

Indulged in their filthy desires

Allowed them so close

Adorned them with such pretty words

It drew them closer to devotion

And deeper into madness

There was nothing they would not do

Should you command them 

The countries they swore themselves to

The friends they promised to never betray

It would all burn to ashes 

They would stain themselves with blood

Taint their soul with sin 

As long as you approved 

If you smiled and praised and petted

Then they would be content

Even if the world were to crumble

And no one were to survive 

As long as you were happy

There would no greater honor

Than to die in your name

So don't fret too much

Command them as you please

They would want nothing more 

Than to be yours and yours alone

[It was nothing.]

No. It was everything.

actually thats one thing i respect so much about bdubs and etho. bdubs is considered one of the best builders on hermitcraft (and in general) and etho is considered one of the best redstoners of all time. bdubs used his building expertise to come up with a really inventive and uncustomary way to do redstone (prettystone) and etho used his redstone expertise to come up with a really wacky and creative way to build (the monstrosity). it's why they're so good at what they do—they take the conventions of what they've already mastered and use their experience flip it on its head entirely. they don't stop at mastery and are constantly learning and trying to inject their creativity into other areas of minecraft and i find that so cool....

ummm. my fic is done.

so in the past I have made themed gifts for people who have helped me* and it's been a little weird but like. Understandable to the person I am gifting the thing to weird? My current problem is that I want to make something for my endocrinologist because he has improved my quality of life hugely** but endocrinology doesn't have an easily themed gift and my endocrinologist reminds me very very strongly of like a sad greyhound or a whippet but I cannot explain to this very nice, very normal man that "hey I made you a plushie of a dog because I wanted to thank you for the steroids and you remind me of a dog. In a good way!" *like teeth plushies for the dentist who helped me figure out I have to have dental anesthetic without epinephrine in it, or a chicken plushie for the people at the chicken restaurant that went the extra mile to get their ingredients list that were the reason I figured out I'm allergic to coconut **I had what would have been a severe allergic reaction and it wasn't pleasant but I didn't end up in the hospital and I didn't take like a week minimum to recover and

finally finished koisenu futari

I’m gonna say something that’s probably not going to be well received in certain circles so let me start by saying this: I believe, with only a few rare exceptions, that you should be able to ship whatever speaks to you the most. And just because I don’t ship something doesn’t mean it’s wrong for anyone else to ship it, and the same for things I do ship, no one else has to ship it too. Who you do or don’t ship will never be a reason I pass judgment on you, ever. Live your best life.

That being said, I want to talk about Horikoshi and straight ships.

(And bakudeku.)

Here’s the thing: Hori has written straight ships into MHA and he’s done it so masterfully that it’s made me ship them without even realizing it. I don’t know if we can call them canon because as far as I know no ship is actually canon yet, but what is canon is the care Hori put into building these relationships.

Kirimina. Hori wrote in a backstory that parallels bkdk that I just adore. There is something about Kiri looking up to Mina and being so inspired by her bravery that it shapes the hero he becomes that is such good content. They’ve had multiple mid-battle moments of protecting and helping each other. I ship Kirimina so hard because of the canon Hori gave us.

I am a low key Denki/Hitoshi shipper but season six kinda hit me in the face with whatever we’re calling Kyouka/Denki these days and now I guess I’m a multi-shipper???? That is how hard Hori hit me with the Kyouka/Denki feels. And he did it the same way as Kirimina, because we have years of content of Kyouka teasing Denki mercilessly, plus the cultural festival band, so when they’re separated in Season 6 and Denki has this intense moment of realization that she’s who he needs to be brave for and it actually works??? I’m a goner.

Heck, I ship todomomo too you guys though I can’t blame Hori for that one, that’s just me being me. The point is that I ship it because the characters Hori gave me struck a chord inside.

But there is one straight ship Hori never once made me ship.

Every time izu*cha showed up I just kinda endured it? It just wasn’t for me. I didn’t see two kids with chemistry, I saw two kids who didn’t know who they were or what they wanted fumbling their way through a will they/won’t they without either of them seeming all that invested in it.

In six seasons and nearly 400 chapters and multiple times revisiting the story I have never once felt any inclination to ship izu*cha

Hori can write straight ships. Hori made me ship his secondary straight ships nearly effortlessly. So if izu*cha was meant to be canon why have I never once felt the chemistry?

You know who has the chemistry? Bakudeku. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t thinking about Katsuki as a possible love interest for Izuku the first time I watched the entire story. I honestly wasn’t paying much attention to him at all, he was everything I didn’t like on the surface so I more or less ignored him despite Izuku holding onto him for dear life. Katsuki never once colored my opinion of izu*cha, they did that all on their own.

It wasn’t until after my first watch through, when I was hungry for more and trolling around tumblr, that I realized people shipped Katsuki and Izuku and it was literally like something out of alignment popped into place in my head.

Oh. Duh. That’s the ship.

I went from zero to a million in a handful of seconds because the chemistry was there, the backstory was there, and boy are Izuku and Katsuki loud about how obsessed they are with each other. Just like Kirimina, just like Denki and Kyouka, Hori planted the seeds throughout the entire series so that when it was brought to my attention everything about the narrative and character development supported it.

And I have to take a moment to explain my dislike of Katsuki at first: I honestly fell for the surface-level interpretation of his character and then kinda wrote him off without much more thought. Which is insane to think about because you can’t really understand MHA without Katsuki, he is so integral to the story as a whole that any version of it without him is skewed so far out of alignment that it’s not even the same story anymore. But I just saw angry boy who yells for no reason and put Katsuki in a box and left it at that.

It wasn’t until I was willing to give his character a second look that I started understanding him, and more importantly, his relationship with Izuku. And it helped that when bkdk was presented to me as a ship that my brain understood immediately why it worked. The canon source material supports bkdk at every possible moment.

I really don’t think it does the same for izu*cha.

So I'm finally reading Petty Treasons which is incredible and in many places adorable (Cliopher is an unparalleled genius, says His Radiancy, he is the smartest man I have ever met, he is definitely humming the treasonous song cycle that is banned on pain of immediate death and which my youthful alter-ego wrote on purpose. it's a sign. (it is a sign. it is a sign of how Cliopher cannot mind his face or his manners to in some cases literally save his life)) but also Was That A Sharknado??? A Fucking SHARKNADO?!?!?!

Biting the bars of my enclosure about autistic ford tonight. There's something about him using vocabulary and turns of phrase that seem "outdated" or "pretentious" that feels so painfully genuine to me. When people say he talks like that just to "try to sound smart" I wish I could explain what it's like to be so ostracized from your peers growing up that you spend all your time reading instead, to the point where you pick up your way of speaking from books instead of from people. And then what it's like for people to call you out for "talking weird" over and over again, not able to wrap their heads around why the fuck you would choose more archaic or technical or formal words than the simpler ones that surely come to everyone's minds first. What it's like to have to dedicate a sizable chunk of attention to filtering through every single word you say out loud in real time before you say it, to make absolutely sure that it isn't a word people will judge you for using or make fun of you for using, just so you'll have a chance of being taken seriously. Learning through trial and error how to filter out the words that other people don't think are normal or casual enough for the conversation, even though for you, the word choice that's "natural-sounding" enough for them is the third or fourth word you came up with when searching for the right way to phrase something in your head. I wish I could explain just how long it takes to say fucking anything after spending a lifetime doing that during every single conversation, and how repetitive and long-winded you end up being when you spend so long coming up with alternative ways of saying every little thing you ever think. And I wish people realized that, at the very least for autistic people and autistic-coded characters, speech that's seen as pretentious is really just the way they talk when they're not putting in the extra effort to filter through every word they say just so others will take the time to listen.

elaborate pls

If there's one thing that many people are split on it's Blood and Cheese(and just about everything else bc herd-mentality is a plague nowadays🙄)

Some people say it's fair because "an eye for an eye, a son for a son". Some people think it was a political move. Some people think it was an attack on Helaena in specific and some people are just confused abt it.

First off, Blood and Cheese was not actually personal for the Blacks in the way Lucerys' murder was for Aemond. Aemond killed Lucerys because he was psychotic and wanted revenge for his eye. If Blood and Cheese were personal, it would attack Aemond, not Aegon and Helaena.

Now, with this established you may think it was a political move, but it wasn't. If it was, it was incredibly stupid. Some people think Daemon had Aegon's son killed to get rid of his heir, but Daemon likely didn't specify which son he wanted dead. Not to mention that Aegon had more than one son and therefore more than one heir. Daemon didn't ask for the murder of both of Aegon's heirs.

Then, people say that it's revenge for the feast/banquet thingy Aegon held for his brother after he killed Lucerys, but there is nothing that implies this in the books.

I think that Blood and Cheese simply happened to push Aegon and Helaena's characters in the direction GRRM wanted.

The murder of Jaehaerys incapacitated Helaena and one of the Green dragons. Helaena was one of the least developed characters from either faction. For her character, that was the only purpose of B&C. To essentially sideline her.

As for Aegon, B&C was the first personal blow he received from the Blacks. Before the murder of his son, the war and the succession wasn't anything he had any real interest in. To him, he was crowned by his family for x, y, & z reasons. Rhaenyra was dangerous, she was gonna kill them all, etc. He didn't have any actual conviction. Then, his oldest son is dead at the hands of Rhaenyra's faction. He won't let the war end with an agreement. He needs to win and it'll have to end with blood.

Luke's death was similar to this with the exception that his murder was personal and since Rhaenyra was afraid of kinslaying, it served mostly to break her and push her into a full war that she needed to win one way or another. Another difference is that the war was personal for Rhaenyra from the very beginning since she was Viserys' lawful heir and had therefore been usurped by the Greens.

TLDR: B&C was a plot device to push the characters in the direction GRRM wanted.

My favourite part of Halsin's speech pattern are the deliberate pauses he takes when attempting to search for a word or phrase, but especially when you know he's doing the work to consider what he really wants to say, and then decide how to phrase that thing as delicately as he possibly can.

"I can't ENGAGE with you on this right now"

and if I said this is marriage foreshadowing :)

Thinking about how Buck always had a reputation as a womanizer when what Eddie is doing now is more fucked up than anything Buck ever did

What would you do on the surface if the barrier broke?

"WELL, MUCH OF THE SAME, OF COURSE! I CAN'T IMAGINE ANYTHING THAT WOULD CHANGE TOO MUCH, BESIDES GAINING AN EVEN LARGER LIST OF ADMIRERS."

"THOUGH, NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT... YOU DO HAVE FAR MORE SPECIES OF TREES UP THERE, DON'T YOU? NEARLY ALL OF THE ONES DOWN HERE ARE CONIFEROUS..."

"IT WOULD BE QUITE NICE TO BE ABLE TO WORK WITH FRESH, STURDIER MATERIAL LIKE CHERRY OR WALNUT, INSTEAD OF HAVING TO RECYCLE FROM WHATEVER WASHES DOWN HERE INTO THE DUMP..."

i'm goingf to grievously harm the coefficient of friction