obsessed, quite frankly, with how katniss resents love, resents how deeply she loves. she was completely traumatized by her mom’s emotional withdrawal after the death of her father, and made the decision pretty much thereafter to never love someone else that way. and the fact that she goes through the trilogy absolutely refusing to call what she feels for peeta love, even when it absolutely, 1000% is, because she refuses to acknowledge that vulnerability within herself… oh it’s so good. it’s so good. the fact that recognizing love within herself is equivalent to shoving a knife in her eye is so good. i love this character

Lackadaisy Enrichment

Oh he's absolutely adorable

New lestappen child unlocked 👀👀👀

Happy birthday TRIGUN STAMPEDE!! 🎉

a few days ago my brain demanded i draw polywitchlight RIGHT NOW and who am i to refuse

original and closeups under the cut

original/template is from “Go For It Nakamura!” by Syundei which i have not read actually

+ closeups; feel free to use as icons with credit smile

So in love with the Bdubs narrative...

"I stopped trusting Impulse, my secret girlfriend, ages ago because he's flirting with everyone, so it makes sense to side with the guy who's offering me a truce in the form of a clock."

"You can't kick me out of the base just because I'm on my red life. I built this place and I will simply not leave."

/neglects to mention he's still boogeyman when Tango brings him back. Like. why didn't you ride out the boogey curse until next episode and THEN ask to come back, you dummy (affectionate)

"It's fine to kill a teammate because he just set his spawn point in this room and all his stuff will be right here <3"

"Yeah I'll kill my fellow red ally because you promised me a life."

"Impulse, you would never kill me, right?" "... We're soulmates. We share hearts this season... Same team, Bdubs."

"When it was my turn to murder, I targeted the only guy who'd already died (a few minutes ago) because he was already on the way down emotionally; anyone else would have experienced an emotional roller coaster."

"It's okay that I stole from you a while back because NOW I'm coming with useful information. My morality is in the clear."

"I would turn on both my Day 1 allies so fast."

/crying over getting backstabbed, "What have I EVER done to SWEET IMPULSE??"

The entire rest of the episode snarking about how it's no fun to be backstabbed and Tango just "🙃 Thoughts and prayers, that must really suck. it must be the worst to get betrayed by someone you trusted. oh wow. oh man. who would do that? that's awful."

"I'm shooting my mom but it's just a prank."

"I won't defend you from Dad but I might try to stop you two from fighting."

All his allies like "I've just accepted the fact that I can't trust you while Etho's around because you'll betray me for him." / "Yeah, that's fair." They continue to let Bdubs stay in their base. He brags about how Etho lets him play pool in his basement and eat ice cream for breakfast. He would die for this man.

The fact that it's considered predictable that "of course Impulse gave you a clock again" so Cleo just sighs and asks to see it. Yeah of course Impulse clonked Bdubs on the head with that thing for another season, driving home I have not forgotten with every part of his being...

Nobody can trust this greasy little man and yet they adore him. He's just a sweetheart. Cinnamon roll. Everybody's angel. Haha he'll slam a sword through your stomach, loot your body, and walk off. He's never done anything wrong in his life btw.

I love the way Bdubs plays.

I am once again reiterating that Leo could and should be a figure skater because what are ice skates if not twin blades? What is dual blade swordsmanship if not a dance-like performance? Using the skates as blades themselves could let Leo make portals be his ice rink no? I rest my case. ⛸️

I DONT KNOW WHY, but bewitched by laufey awfully reminds me of knight ghost with princess reader

except the song would be ghost's pov

abso-fucking-lutely you're right on all of that. Here's the bewitching:

If you'd told Ghost that he'd be called on to be the crown princess's personal guard, he would've laughed. He would've told you he was hardly interested in such an "honor" and that he's sure her most royal brattiness must have better prospects to scare off. Surely you must have been such a petty handful that the other knights offered the position had declined, leaving him next in the long line.

Although, it was flattering to hear he was even in consideration. He'd sure worked his ass off to be the best of the best. Making something out of nothing but a failing title thanks to his father's- Well, the man was a better father 6ft underground than he'd ever been in life, and that's all he really needed to say on it. Ghost didn't think much of the summons. He couldn't ignore it, of course, but that didn't mean he had to take it seriously. He could run a little late.

Ghost's pace is slow as he walks through the castle. Admiring the architecture, he told his escort, who looked far less than pleased with that answer. He did his best to stall, hopefully the princess would be fuming by the time he arrived and he could be dismissed easily. No muss, no fuss.

Uneven footsteps race down the hall behind him as he and his escort turn the corner. He pays it no mind, likely a maid, no reason to pay them mind. Until they slam into his back and bounce off. He turns, wide eyed, in time to see you fall on the floor, landing hard on your ass with a pained expression. It doesn't fit such a pretty face. Your chest heaves as you try to catch your breath, and Ghost has to shake himself out of staring at you. His escort has already scurried ahead to see about buying him some time.

"You alright?" Ghost asks, helping you to your feet. You wobble a little, he keeps hold of your hand to keep you steady. "You broken?" He tries, brow furrowing at your changing height as you shift on your feet. He doesn't know you, he certainly wouldn't be here if he did.

"No," You lift your foot, and Ghost glances down, one of your feet already in just a sock, "but, I'm afraid I'm running terribly late." You tell him, glancing behind you and pushing your hair out of your face as you unlace your remaining shoe.

"Maybe I can help you, where-" Ghost watches as you tug your shoe off and shove it against chest.

"Hold that please," He blinks, and takes the heel from you, judging by your clothes you must be of high status. He's never seen a lady running around barefoot before. "Now if you'll excuse me, Sir Knight, I really am in a rush, and I have a baron hot on my tail attempting to hold me hostage another hour still."

Another glance behind you, one Ghost leans to check for as well. You must be quick to have outrun a man he can't even see the sweat of. He wonders if you lost your other shoe somewhere along the way or if you, perhaps, threw it at the baron to buy yourself some time. That look in your eyes is wickedly clever when it meets his again. You nod to him once and slip around him to take off running again.

"Wait, I'm-" Ghost stops, and sighs watching you slide around another corner. "The fuck am I supposed to do with this?" He grumbles to himself, tossing your shoe to his other hand as he walks. He'll pass it off to his escort once he meets up with him again. He's pretty sure he went the same way you did.

The escort looks rather harried when he spots him in front of the reception chamber's doors. Big fancy things that have guards waiting to open them on either side. His escort enters to tell the King and Queen that the newest guard candidate has arrived. Ghost tries not to eavesdrop.

"I haven't needed an escort since I was a little girl I'm-"

"A flight risk," The Queen says firmly

"I'd hardly call running from a daft old man a flight risk," The King grumbles. Ghost chuckles a little to himself. His escort slips back out of the throne room to tell him they're not quite ready for him. Which seems strange considering how much time they've had to prepare.

A maid exits one of the nearby rooms with a pair of slippers and something clicks in Ghost's head. Despite his escort's best attempts at stopping him, Ghost enters the throne room with the maid, and watches your sweet face fall as silence covers the royal family. The maid too, it seems, doesn't know what to do.

"Sir Simon Riley," Ghost announces himself, "I was called about being her highness's personal guard."

"It seems you've already run into each other," The Queen's lips purse, eyes on the heeled shoe in Ghost's hands. He offers the offending shoe to the maid, and takes the slippers.

"This is really-" You whisper to him, Ghost hums, slips the silk slipper onto your foot. You swallow, try again, "I'm sorry to have troubled you, I can't imagine how you must think of me."

"Briefly," He tells her. You're still standing at the bottom of the steps to the throne; apparently having had time only to argue with your parents, not take your seat, in the time between bumping into him and getting here.

"Sir Riley," you start.

"Ghost," he corrects you, "if I'm going to be your guard, I'd like you to call me Ghost."

"Ghost," you start again, not even a hint of annoyance in your voice. Actually, you sound a little embarrassed. It's cute. He likes how easily you give in to him. "I'm sure you'd find this position terribly boring, and a waste of your many talents."

Ghost drops to one knee, and pats his thigh, you quickly raise your foot to settle on him.

"I mean, I'm really not the flight risk my mother thinks I am, and I hardly think you want to accompany me on diplomatic excursions-" he holds your ankle to slip the new house shoe on "-or trips into town. Wouldn't you rather be off, I don't know, fighting marauders and dragons?"

"What do you think knights do, princess?" He smiles, setting your foot on the floor and prompting you for the other one. "It's my privilege to serve you, one I'm enjoying so far."

You feel heat brust over your cheeks, finally taking in the man in front of you. This man is a trained combatant and yet here he is helping you put your shoes on. Christ, you'd literally run into him, and now he was. Why was he treating you so nicely, he should be laughing at the idea of serving you.

"No," He murmurs back, "You can't imagine what I think of you." He stands as you settle your foot back on the ground, and takes your hand, bowing his head to kiss the back of it. "But, rest assured those thoughts are good, my lady."

YT Series Yellow Guy: *Idiotic ray of sunshine*

TV Series Yellow Guy: *A character who is seemingly split into two different people/personalities whom one only comes out when his batteries are replaced because he's a biomechanical being modeled after a woman's dead/absent son in order to cope with his loss and thus keeps him in an endless cycle of confusion and disturbing situations and he will not hesitate to smash his friends' face in with a shard of glass and threaten to kill said friend*

dabihawks are a perfect ship like they're a blue-red dynamic they're character foils one was the son of a hero and became a villain one was the son of a villain and became a hero they're heavy-handed societal extremes they're perfect opposites they're the exact same they're child soldiers they're animal motif coded there is so much there symbolically to justify the ship but if you asked me the real reason i enjoy them? they are insane. like they are both so freakishly mentally ill and they're dysfunctional and toxic and traumatised and they bug the fuck out of each other and they hate each other and they understand each other's morals better than anyone while still fundamentally opposing each other and i want nothing more than to put those two freaks in situations just to see who explodes the other first

Been catching up on g3 Monster High, and I'm not done yet, I think im only roughly halfway through, but

I'm so insane about them

If anyone spoils me about anything about them, I will personally eat your kneecaps

Making sense of love for love's sake: the game

Despite all the things i absolutely adore about how the plot unravels and expands in love by love's sake, upon first watch, there's some things i couldn't piece together, which @lurkingshan echoes in their post:

'The way the author was messing with Myungha and forcing cruel choices on him really does not track with a desire to help him find happiness.'

And to preface, this is not something i fully get yet either. I think i'll need a good month and a sizeable reading list of relevant resources to understand just what/who this author/sunbae is and what his role is and how he is associated with myungha. But as always with the best shows for meta (aka bad buddy), as a plot unfolds, you can always find a better understanding by looking backwards and re-contextualising what you've already seen. so i watched ep 1, specifically the scene between myungha and his sunbae at the bar. And i will talk about how everything said in this scene has a whole new meaning now we know the full story, but for now i wanna focus on that question that they keep coming back to; "Then... will you change it for him?".

When you watch the show for the first time, your brain follows the simplest, most obvious version of the story you're being told, one where myungha has been pulled into the world of his sunbae's novel that's being turned into a game and given the opportunity to fix the thing he didn't like about it; making yeowoon happy, and thus you just think the rules of the game are imposed by the author, and so when these cruel choices first come up, you see them as the difficult roadblocks that are nevertheless necessary to any kind of game, forcing the player to make an impossible choice so that the game can continue in a certain direction and its only after that you learn whether it was the right choice or not, or there is no right choice, it simply changes the game you are playing.

And when its revealed what this game actually is, at first i tried to interpret these cruel choices, namely the choice between yeonwoon and myungha's grandma, and at best i could come up with the concept of this being a choice between staying stuck to the past aka choosing his grandma, even though he knows that choice doesn't mean she's safe bc he knows the future where he loses here, its an inevitability, but thats the small happiness he knew before it was taken away and thus that happiness is known and safe, theres no risk, versus choosing to pursue a new happiness, a love of yeowoon and thus himself, which he doesn't know, he hasn't experienced yet, and could be risky. Its a happiness that isn't guaranteed like his grandma, but its a happiness that looks to the future and has hope in it that he can find a new happiness to pursue despite what has happened in his past.

And that fits nice, okayish. But then i watched ep 1 and heard that question "Then... will you change it for him?" And watching through the rest of the eps, we come back to this scene at the bar and each time we get a new run up to the author asking this question, either new dialogue is added or we hear a different piece of the conversation entirely. It starts at the beginning of ep 1 as:

"Because Cha Yeowoon is the only one who's miserable." "It can't be helped that some people's lives are like that" "The fact that some people are destined to live that kind of life is what's vile."

Then a bit later in ep 1 we go back and its expanded.

"It can't be helped that some people's lives are like that" "The fact that some people are destined to live that kind of life is what's vile." "Why? Do you think you'd write it differently?" "Yes, definately. Someone like Cha Yeowoon, or someone like me with an awful life, can also be happy."

And then all the way on in ep 6, we get this new dialogue.

"I don't like talking about destiny." "Why?" "Because it means everything is predestined." "Then do you not believe in fate?" "Fate and destiny are the same. My grandma likes to say that. She said life is like a written book, and how you'll live and die are written in it. (...)I don't like things like this. Even if fate is already destined, I think it can still be changed. Otherwise, there's no point in trying." "Really? Then Myungha..."

And while we don't hear the author ask the same question, I feel like him getting cut off like that insinuates that the conversation leads to that same ending point. All that is to say, every time we hear this question being asked, its like we learn more and more about what this whole thing is, what the game is, what myungha is saying he will do by agreeing to do what the author asks. And every time, we see myungha being more defiant against the idea of yeowoon being resigned to his miserable ending. He starts off thinking that kind of life is destined, and while it's miserable, its not something he can fight. Then he says he'd want to write the story differently, bc yeowoon, or even him, could be happy. He challenges the idea that yeowoon, and thus himself, is fated to be miserable, and opens up the possibility for happiness for them both, but doesn't yet have the means or resolve to do it, its like he knows its possible on a fundamental level, but doesn't see it as something he can actually achieve. But then we circle back to the idea of destiny and books, both of which came up in the previous quote, and seems incredibly pertinent seen as this whole thing is about a novel this author has written. Myungha talks about how he hates the idea that life is a book where everything written is predestined to happen, from the moment you live to the moment you die. He says "Even if fate is already destined, I think it can still be changed. Otherwise, there's no point in trying." That vile way of life he described before that he said was destined, he is now saying it can be changed, and that possibility is now something he's holding onto, its what he sees hope in so that he can keep trying, bc now he finally is trying, he has the resolve, he's trying to realise this thing, this impossibility of rewriting the life he thought was destined through the way he loves yeowoon.

And coming back to those cruel choices, given this fresh context, it made me think. bc this isn't actually a game that myungha has been put into where the rules are dictated by an author completely separate from him. He said himself, he'd rewrite it, he'd change things for yeowoon. And when you start to think of it less as him fighting against a rigid, removed system and more like him being a character in a story he is trying to rewrite himself, that has both the author and his own limitations, or just his own if you're in the school of thought that the author is some figment or part of myungha himself or his conciousness, then you can start to see where these cruel choices might come from. They could be myungha, the author making edits to this new story, imposing his own doubts and limitations on himself. When he says he has to pick between Yeowoon and his grandma, what if that's the new author myungha seeing this story unfold and thinking no this isn't right, he can't have it all, i'm not deserving of this much happiness.

And what makes me like this idea even more is that when we get that second choice between ending after 14 days or getting 100 days back at the cost of resetting Yeowoon's affection to 0, that whole conversation happens in what I think the bar actually is which is this frozen moment in time where myungha is in the water with this extension of a voice in his head that is talking through these things. That conversation in itself needs its own post, but when you look at it both as a decision to break up or not or a decision to hold onto life or not, you can see how the author is just this soundboard relaying the decisions myungha is going through in his head. The author's voice is his own, weighing up his decisions. And if he is the author here, it only reinforces that the person making the rules of this game is him. You can even extend it further to the idea of the debuffs, where he puts in place this thing that makes it so he causes harm to yeowoon when he's around, and its only by garnering affection that he can prevent it. He gives himself a reason from the get go to stay away from yeowoon and reason it as him doing it for yeowoon's safety, when in fact the only way to make yeowoon safe is to increase his affection, which he can only do by being near him. Its a system that at first gives myungha a reason to stay away aka not like himself, but ultimately says the only way you're going to make yeowoon like you, or the only way you can like yourself, is if you accept risk. And that in itself screams to me of a myungha writing in these game systems that are trying to encourage his own-self love while falling at the hurdle of his own lack of self-worth.

The idea is still messy in my head even for me, but i just really like the idea that myungha could be trying to fix this thing both as a character and game master, and that both these versions of him have these flaws that manifest in their different ways to cause the events we see. It kinda is the definition of being your own worst enemy, the idea that in order to work towards loving yourself, the biggest obstacle you have to encounter is yourself, bc we are the ones holding ourselves back, making all these rules that make it harder to like ourselves and pursue our own happiness. The voices in our head telling us that we aren't good enough and aren't deserving are our own, and while the things that happen to us can inform what they say, we're the one's reinforcing those words. And what this show teaches us is that, if we're the one holding that pen all along, we can choose to change what those words are. If we make the rules, you don't have to create a game with concrete ultimatums, you can create a game where rules don't control you. Instead, you make the decisions, and you can make the ones that make you happy.

They are like father and son to me