What Color Does Your Love Feel Like?

Vax - deep staining red

Ripped out confessions, warm velvety whispers and a heart like an open wound. Your love flows out like dripping blood, beautiful, flawed and twisted. It's gut wrenching, the type of painfully dramatic feeling that makes you clutch your chest, picturing dramatic monologues about love and loving and big screen over the top scenes of sobbing into your pillow until you fall asleep. It rips out of you, clawing it's way up your throat more so than tumbling out. Sticky words that just need to be let out, feelings so big they don't fit inside you. Your love isn't easy, it's a true bloody mess, dripping and staining everything it touches in a desperate attempt to be seen, to be felt, to be loved back. And you, you love so hard, so deeply, so much for someone who carries all that pain. Atlas holding up the world, how are you? Is your love still flowing? Is your heart still open? Still pumping and bleeding and dripping with blood and tears? Still painting your beautiful pictures and writing your love letters in deeply personal red ink? Because I see them, I read them, I love them and you, you, you, you. Clench your chest, scream your love, cry it out. Spill your words of loving, keep your heart beating, keep your love coming and paint the entire world red with it. Make it in your image, keep going, it's okay. Maybe one day the whole world can be red and loved and beautiful just like you.

I haven't stopped thinking about zolu after wano bc isn't it crazy that zoro, as enma's new wielder, has declared he might as well become the king of hell and it turns out he's a descendant of the shimotsuki/frost moon family line, making him a descendant of shimotsuki ryuma the god of the blade whom he resembles physically, whose sword zoro earned after defeating his zombie in thriller bark and who's considered a hero of wano that's only rivaled now by joy boy - luffy's sun god nika the warrior of liberation and joy. that both zoro's presence and luffy's df awakening as nika/joy boy in wano were considered the "work of fate". how zoro was luffy's first crewmate, one he actively sought after learning just his name and fearsome reputation. the whole pirate king and greatest swordsman business. their parallels to roger and ray. how they both have the will of kings/conquerors. I feel insane

Clone High as Tarot Cards

Today: Christopher Columbus as The Hanged Man & The Devil

"If there's a Judgement card, then there's someone being judged"

in the span of one (1) chapter, we see dantes unabashedly calling guda "my destiny" "my radiant one" "my one good thing (in this life)" "my star" like. i know he has never been tsundere and is completely open about his affections but im used to his vagueness so when he literally????? outright says these things??????????????? how can you survive the impact of these words??????????????

(Looking through my friend's seed collection for things i want to plant this year)

(Stops on a flower packet)

Oh... this one kinda reminds me of yakumo ☺️...

(Pause.)

I, someone who has never liked flowers, grimacing at myself: what the fuckkindabullshit

Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel III. spring song, wr. Hiyama Akira (transcript; own tr.)

Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires

Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel III. spring song, wr. Hiyama Akira (transcript; own tr.)

Mom, I'm tired

Can I sleep in your house tonight?

Mom, is it alright

If I stay for a year or two?

Mom, I'll be quiet

It would be just to sleep at night

And I'll leave once I figure out

How to pay for my own life too

Mom, would you wash my back?

This once, and then we can forget

And I'll leave what I'm chasing

For the other girls to pursue

Mom, am I still young?

Can I dream for a few months more?

as i've rewatched seasons 1 and 2 of supernatural i've been pondering and hypothesizing reasons why john was so adamant on not letting sam know about his destiny. why he was so intent on keeping this secret, why he didn't want sam knowing about monsters, why his role in their hunts appeared to be research-oriented and thus away from the action. my perspective on ignorance and censorship is that it enables further harm, so if john were going to effectively protect sam, it would stand to reason that sam should have a comprehensive understanding of his destiny and what he's up against: give him the tools to fight.

this is obviously not the route john went, so then i have to question why that is—what about censorship was so appealing to him that he thought it not only the best way to keep sam safe, but perhaps even the only way to keep him safe, based on how he begged even dean to keep sam's fate a secret from him in his final words?

so i got to thinking. namely, about the fact that azazel wants sam to be hunting: he killed jessica with the intent to drag him back into the life, which implies that if sam is hunting, he is going down the path azazel wants him to go—he's following his destiny. this aligns with the everpresent theme throughout season 1 that hunting is a monstrous lifestyle, that hunting turns people into monsters. if sam is destined to become a monster, then hunting is the most sure-fire way to get him there.

if azazel wants sam to hunt, then john would need to take the logical opposition and keep sam out of hunting—so, he wouldn't tell sam about monsters until he has to, he'd give sam more passive roles once sam is participating in hunts, he'd train sam in self-defense but not explain why. and importantly, he wouldn't talk about mary, who is the root cause of this lifestyle, the impetus for their revenge quest, more than he has to. if the goal is to keep sam as far away from hunting as possible, and if john is someone who thinks ignorance keeps someone safe, then this more or less explains most of how sam was raised: on the fringes of the family, excluded and sheltered.

but weirdly enough, it wasn't until i was reading east of eden the other night that i finally understood the perspective being presented: late in the novel, the character lee says "when the first innocence is gone, you can't stop."

it made me remember that sam picks. he is a character who wants to understand the world around him and his place in it. if something is bothering him, he turns it over in his head until it consumes him. dean places doubt in sam's head in 2x10 and it obliterates him by 2x11. he's convinced he's going to become some horrible monster because he never stops thinking and trying to figure things out. when his memory is wiped in 4x17 and normal guy sam wesson finds out his coworker is the guy from his weird dreams, he pursues him relentlessly until they're back hunting. when he discovers the wall death put in his mind to keep his hell trauma out in season 6, he pushes and can't stop until it starts crumbling around him. he's intelligent and clever and he wants to know everything. and when he doesn't know, he picks.

and the only way to stop a person like that from picking is to not let them know that there's something to pick at in the first place. that's what the quote from east of eden means: once you catch wind of something, you want to pursue it until you're satisfied. curiosity kills the cat.

and what john is up against is fate itself. something that isn't supposed to be messed with, something that's supposed to be unavoidable. so trying to thwart it is tricky business. he has to be careful.

i think working under that logic his response makes sense, even if it wound up being a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway—sam was always going to find out, and sam was always going to pick. there was nothing john could do in the end to stop it, and trying to keep sam ignorant only made him that much more desperate to know. but that's the great tragedy of it all: john was given an impossible choice, and he's a deeply flawed character. he did what he thought was best, and it only made things worse.

i like this interpretation because it ties all of john's choices together really well; it explains a lot about his character and gives a nuanced and rather reasonable explanation for why he did what he did: a dad who wants the best for his kid does what he believes will set him up on the path to success. when the first innocence is gone, you can't stop—so john does his damnedest to keep sam innocent, even to his dying breath.

the problem comes down to that someone's damnedest isn't always good enough, and that sometimes someone's damnedest ends up benefiting the enemy instead.

related to other polls and also discussions I've seen among huevitos

Fucked up by how no life in The Twice-Dead King is insignificant. No one is only an obstacle, only useless, or evil for the pure sake of evil; it's a statistics gamble just to get the simplest soldier replaced, and defeating an antagonist doesn't necessarily improve the situation, since the void they leave continues to haunt the remainder of the text.

Neth isn't just broken and useless, Denet didn't forget the monoliths for nothing. Oltyx would never have returned to his authentic life without Hemiun, the duel with Duamehht was fated and deserved, in terms of Oltyx's pain as much as hers. Lysikor's probably the individual closest to a true villain, in that he's self-concerned, murderous, treacherous, and ultimately aims to harm Oltyx; yet it's all softened by the fact that he appears to have a metafictional awareness of his archetype, rendering his actions more of a stage role than an existential threat. The only true evil in TDK's narrative is ideology (fascism) - and the few times individuals break off from it to clash with the main characters, those encounters have serious consequences for Oltyx and his court. No life, acknowledged as a life, has no effect on the fabric of this duology.

And that's ironic as all hell, given that necrons willingly live in a Hobbesian nightmare of a world where life is nasty and brutish, if not particularly short. Even before biotransference, their militaristic ventures and a strict hierarchy ensured that lives were poor and expendable, and not much has changed on that front. Any level of compassion for a living being is unusual for a necron noble to have, let alone prove true - in fact, most of the tragedy in TDK occurs because the world around Oltyx did its best to beat his compassion out of him, when he was blessed enough to have it from the very beginning. Ever more the twist of the knife, then, that Oltyx and his court ultimately accept the celebration of life-as-they-are (the Flayers) and life-as-it-used-to-be (their lived experiences and desires as necrontyr) through partaking in the lives-that-they-took (flesh from various sources). It needs to be flesh, presumably, because flesh is material proof of something that was organic and living and deserving of that life. If they didn't care about the life part they would just be Destroyers. Sorry I'm just rambling now. This novel has taken over my brain

doing close reading of the titans curse to study for a time travel au and augh. auguuuagh

Bhima Ascension art

Bless pako. That's all.

AU where Velaryons are the greatest sailors in history, therefore they’re inherently immune to the siren’s song/lures but, Lucerys Velaryon is not for obvious reasons. Aemond is the siren that calls for him.

The bit in Doubt Comes In where the fates go "doubt comes in / and meets a stranger / walking on a road alone" goes crazy because not only does calling Orpheus a stranger highlight the isolation and unfamiliarity of his trial but he's also literally a stranger to doubt. He had never experienced the type of real tangible failure that losing Eurydice was, and he took a valuable lesson on pragmatism from it but he also learned FEAR, that things can and will go wrong. So when he encounters doubt for the first time he can't maintain his formerly unchallenged optimism, because he never had to persist fully aware of the possibility of failure before.

you can try to change, but all you've done is put yourself in a new box.

(png versions below the cut)

i think my personal favourite of them is the newspaper! none of the boxes are really straight because i eyeballed everything, but i did abuse the colour picker on my reference photos rest assured

guys i think i'm in love with ursula bonadeo like...she's stunningly beautiful, often helps the poor and a girl's girl...idk that's pookie