you asked for lore questions so. do you have any particular starhab Thoughts today

HI I MISSED THIS SOMEHOW but yes the answer to this question is always yes. i always have Them thots

recently, i’ve mostly been rotating what i’ve been uncreatively calling Good AU (AU where Starbuck actually Talks To ahab and they have a proper conversation and convinces him to turn around but not before at least 3 therapy sessions which may or may not involve passive-to-active suicidality on both their parts wahoo)

which is generally the AU i’m always rotating; @coulson-is-an-avenger have been talking abt it for literally 9+ months (n they have made some related fics before me, bc i’m slow <3 /positive) — but right now specifically, since i’ve finally started Actually writing it in the past couple weeks, i’m thinking a lot abt the beginning/setup of the au, which is aforementioned conversations/therapy sessions/breakdowns

more specifically, i’m thinking lots about how melville writes both ahab and starbuck as such deeply, intrinsically lonely people in different ways, and about how some of that loneliness is self inflicted and some of it isn’t. w starbuck especially… (i’ve talked abt this in the comments of a comic page before but) there’s the obvious element of loneliness that comes from losing most of his family to whaling, and having to be away from his wife and child for so long, and being seemingly the only person for a while on this boat who thinks there might be something wrong with ahab, but there is also an element of self-inflicted loneliness too: in Dusk, he specifically mentions the “heathen crew” and how much he feels apart from them. “Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon.” his whiteness (and racism) and christianity is an element of isolation for him.

melville very regularly and deliberately highlights whiteness as a tool of isolation. ishmael only heals and becomes less lonely when he eschews christian “kindness” — “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” ahab is excluded and isolated from this world, for various untold reasons, though we can infer that some of them result from his disability (and, if you’re like me, an argument for reading ahab as nonwhite): “socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.”

and starbuck—starbuck is of this world, this world of hollow courtesy and alienation, this world of nantucket quakers, which ishmael so poignantly describes as stifling and insular and strict. it is this — this whiteness, this hollow christianity, this learned racism — which prevents Starbuck from meaningfully emotionally connecting with his ‘pagan’ / ‘heathen’ crew, even as we know he is generally in other ways good to them. it is also this worldview which prevents him from meaningfully getting through to ahab.

like, ahab is obviously a traumatized specimen of a man (affectionate), but starbuck is also so deeply entrenched in his hyper specific worldview, just as much as ahab is. he can't connect with ahab more because he's so entrenched in seventeen layers of protestant guilt & conditioning, which is partially just the gay thing, but also like. being unable of conceiving ahab's pain through another framework. bc xtianity and protestantism and whiteness and all these things so wildly distort your concepts of what suffering is and who experiences it and who even has the Right to it, and what the right and wrong ways to experience pain are.

all his reasoning for why ahab giving himself so wholly to vengeance and eschewing all human connection is like… “bc god said it’s bad.” in all the times starbuck (in some ways rightly) gets at ahab for what he's doing, he doesn't ever really get to the point of trying to understand why it's happening? or where ahab is coming from? when what ahab needs is to be met where he’s at, in all his messy ugly pain and trauma

so w/ these conversations in the au it's like. part of it is starbuck letting go of this moral judgment and just coming to ahab with a genuine desire to understand hey. why are you doing this. tell me why this is so important to you. why this whale. why so hard. what is driving you to this. and like. understanding the very real amount of pain that ahab is in. the very real mess of a world that is constantly traumatizing and retraumatizing him. a world of whiteness and christianity and capitalism that has so thoroughly abandoned him to his trauma and his pain that he legitimately sees no other way out, no other alternative for alleviating that pain, than this quest.

basically in order to cure ahab’s loneliness starbuck needs to break his own. he cannot break down the walls around ahab without first reaching out beyond his own. and that’s why he fucking doesn’t in canon and tdjdhdhshdjwhdsjdhsj this is why i am so fucking mentally unwell about these two gay losers hfhehdhdhdhehddh

PSA: i keep seeing posts about staying cool in extreme heat that include advice like "gatorade is bad actually!" and "don't drink fruit juice it'll just dehydrate you!" and neither of these are true!

regarding fruit juice: there's apparently a misconception that Any Sugar At All will dehydrate you, and that's simply not true. yes, sugar will make you pee more when consumed in large amounts, but 1) the natural sugar in fruits won't do this to you 2) great news! a lot of fruit juices exist without any added sugar in them! 3) honestly even having a glass of the fruit juice with added sugar won't completely dehydrate you as long as you're also drinking water throughout the day. if its hot you deserve a cold treat of a drink!!! can't go wrong with fruit juice!!!

regarding gatorade: maybe this isn't an every day drink, but guess what: if it's 110F/40C or hotter outside, and you don't have AC, or you're moving around a lot outside of the AC, and you're sweating buckets: that's when you drink a gatorade.

gatorade exists to replenish all the electrolytes (salt) and glucose (sugar) that you sweat out. YES it is meant for athletes to drink during intensive work outs and not necessarily for people who aren't doing that kind of exercise. BUT GUESS WHAT! when you're sweating buckets because you had to walk to the bus in extreme heat, that's intensive exercise. please feel free to drink a gatorade after that! that's its intended use case!!!!

no: neither of these drinks should be a total replacement for water. but drinking a lot of water and then treating yourself to a fruit juice with lunch is a good idea!!! drinking a gatorade becuase you just had to walk for 20 minutes in the heat is a good idea!!!

Please Stop Spreading Misinformation About Drinks!!! It's fine if you drink things that aren't water!!!! Yes you should probably always be drinking water but drinking something else As Well isn't going to hurt you!!!! okay!!!! its fine!!!!!!

honestly so long as you are consistently getting Any (non-alcoholic) fluids in you, you're doing great!!!!!! okay!!!! i love you stay safe <3

these two are so interesting to me

characters belong to @canisalbus

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

Laios's three Boy Best Friends. And yes, they hate him.

A couple of Chaos Theory and Camp Cretaceous doodles I did a while back as requests before the show released

I’d share all of them but I can only put 10 pics lmao

you ever read a fic so good that every few paragraphs (or hell- every few SENTENCES) you have to go to another app or tab while walking laps cause it’s making you go nuts? yeah

Chilchuck analysis speedrun: As a hardworking half-foot who grew up poor and discriminated against and had his gullibility taken advantage of multiple times in his early adventuring days, Chilchuck thinks optimism is a dangerous flaw. He’s stressed and strict all the time because his job is noticing details like traps that could get everyone killed before anyone knows it, he takes the lives of everyone to be on his shoulders, and with the way he speaks about it that probably partly reflects how he felt about taking it upon himself to provide for his family too. His life’s always been pretty centered around work and has become even moreso now that his wife left and everyone is independent, and due to past events he’s very iffy with bonding with coworkers. He thinks feelings and job are a disaster mix. Like with his wife or with parties hiring him as sacrifice, being open or having good faith is vulnerability which can get you hurt, so he processes and shows all his stress as anger instead of worry. Doing strict dieting probably isn’t helping the irritability what with hunger, and on top of being a hunger suppressant alcohol might be the main stress reliever he has.

His grey hairs are so earned

October 1981 — July 1993.

Moshang sketch cause i have brainrot

why are they like this

cannot believe nobody asked u starhab. im asking. either one or both :3

I CANT EITHER anyway here u go blue is starb red is ahab :3 starb is definitely way more babygirl but ahab can be a little bit as a treat . starbuck also has so much weird gender going on but i’m not gender envious of him bc she needs to figure her shit out first

silly old men <3

I think I'm finally happy with their designs

It still amazes me the number of people who see the juxtaposition between Nami and Usopp during Wano and their fight against Ulti as "Nami's devotion to Luffy is unmatched, unlike Usopp's" when she isn't able to say he won't be the king of the pirates but Usopp is telling her to lie.

I think most people don't have in mind, either, that Usopp isn't the one being directly asked. He is looking out for Nami and begging her to lie to keep her alive because he is scared to death they might lose her for something as insignificant as lying. For him, lying is a form of survival and it is not that big of a deal because he trusts Luffy enough to tell Nami to lie about her feelings. It is something that will only stay between them because he knows it is better to lie than to die and Luffy would want it that way too.

And that doesn't mean he isn't loyal to Luffy or his dream. He is just looking out for Nami's safety. And as I said-- He isn't being asked directly, either. It is easier to tell others to lie about something of the sort than to do it yourself, and if the roles were reversed I personally think he'd have the most awful of times with it too.

Nami refuses to say Luffy won't become the king of the pirates because for her, even if lying has gotten her out of messes, she puts her trust and loyalty in Luffy before her own instincts of survival because lying is what got her to push them away when they first met and this is the one thing she can't lie about because it would hurt more than death.

Then again, I think she would do the same exact thing Usopp did if she wasn't being the one asked. It is the whole point of the scene, actually. They both know the most rational thing is to lie so the one witnessing the scene will always be cold-headed about it, but the one having to lie is the one suffering the bitter realization of how lying about this and saying it out loud is way harder than it seems from an outsider's perspective.

So I am tired of seeing people criticizing Usopp for his decision during the fight against Ulti as if it were that easy for him to see Nami being about to get killed if she doesn't lie. Sorry for the guy to actually want to protect the people he loves instead of letting her be reckless and basically kill herself freely for telling a truth even Luffy would tell her to lie about if it meant living.

Alternative form of 'Hitting Wangxian with a Catboyification beam'

The Split