my favorite trope is someone loving someone so much they become feral and bestial and they want to destroy them or destroy themselves or bury themselves alive with them and they just start tearing each other apart and anything and anyone that has the misfortune of being within any proximity to their depraved unhinged unbridled primal passions is also at risk for being torn apart and ruined in unspeakable ways :)

you know what boils my blood.

over the last 2 weeks, i've seen countless patients walk into my urgent care center, symptomatic for so many things, refusing to get tested for covid and flu, citing that they don't want to knowingly bring it to their holiday tables. i had a patient tell me, verbatim, "i don't want to test for covid, because i don't want to be the asshole who brings it on a plane."

i understand that - i understand that holidays are times where people look forward to meeting loved ones that they might only see once a year, or where they get a break from the hectic back and forth of their lives.

but here's the thing - whether they get tested or not, they will bring whatever they have to their holiday tables. it's pure recklessness to know that you're sick, and walk into someone else's house spreading the disease.

today, january 2, i saw 91 patients, many of them who have tested positive for covid and flu. many of these patients are the same ones who didn't want testing 3 days ago, until their events were over, and now, they will have to reach out to everyone they know to let them know that they were positive because they were showing symptoms well before their event.

the next week or two? we're going to see many, many more, all people with symptoms that started around christmas. these are the only two viruses we test for rapidly in our office, but they are potent and can be fatal in many people.

so here's why i wrote this post, and maybe it's a little late, but - if you care about your loved ones, please get tested if you know you're sick. it doesn't have to be at a clinic if you don't want it to, because the over-the-counter tests work just fine too (if you test within 5-7 days of symptom onset). just...please don't try to run from the knowledge that you might have covid, because immunocompromised people, elderly people, people with co-morbidities like asthma, pregnancy, diabetes, etc...many of them may not recover. and they may not be sitting at your holiday table in the future because of it.

Aro 👉👈

I DIDN'T HAVE MY TWILIGHT STAGE IN TIME, OKAY?!? Now I watch the films while dying from laughter most of the time, their faces I can't-

MICHAEL SHEEN >>>>> 🛐🛐🛐🛐🛐

It's always "Shou and Ritsu need to blow stuff up with their minds for mental health reasons" or Ritsu and Teru or even Shou and Teru!

But what about Mob? When does he get to blow stuff up with his mind for funsies? For shits and giggles? He didn't go through all of those meltdowns and character development for nothing, let him go ham on a junkyard car or something smh

I believe in Mob's narrative given right to fuck shit up sometimes

So glad for your latest post about zosan because I started 1pc FULLY expecting to be bowled over by their interactions for how prevalent the ship is in the fandom and I’ve just….. been so confused about it… and wondering if I’m missing something…. like it’s not enemies to lovers, they’re not even rivals, they’re just like. Irritable coworkers who sometimes get in each other’s way…. Anyway ur so right about sansopp 🙏🙏

I didn't know ANYTHING about one piece when I watched opla (I didn't even know they were pirates) so I def didn't know about zsn. I walked away from the live action thinking 'damn the captain and first mate are NOT normal about each other' and 'luffy is sanji's little meow meow <3". I didn't even consider zoro and sanji as a dynamic outside of 'they're both trying to be the prettiest belle at the ball so that luffy will look at them'..... but I didn't really actively ship either. not even zolu (surprising I know)

upon learning about zsn I thought ok. this is clearly because I haven't watched the anime / read the manga. obviously there's something i'm missing. I read 400 chapters of the manga and am currently 450 episodes into the anime. there is obviously still something i'm missing because like you said, i'm seeing irritable coworkers. i'm not denying that they respect each other & care for each other as nakama but like...................like..................LIKE??

I'm never been a hate shipper, nor am I predisposed to ship things bc 'hot'. nothing against people who do obviously but my track record of otps is the exact opposite of the zsn dynamic. and going into the series not even knowing they were a popular ship. I have tried to see it (and obvi in the hate ship hot sex way I can see it) but other than that I have accepted that I will never get it. luffy x zoro & sanji x usopp on the other hand.....

the worst trait of me and my family is probably this: we never learned to say the word sorry.

i) my best friend and i, we are no people. knives? maybe. liars? definitely. but people? i’m not so sure.

knives were never forged to be tender (what a shame, what a shame) and we too, fall and slay what we meant to protect. him and i, we go for the throat when we clash. we hurt and bleed and oh, i should be terrified, i should be running for my life, but all i am is tired and a bit lonely and would really like his arms around me.

( “can we please stop fighting now.”

“oh god yes please.”)

because time and time again, this man has held my heart in his hands and cleaned its festering wounds with cotton dipped in alcohol (always the healer, always the lover) and wrapped gauze around them with clinical precision. and i have walked through the maze of his head and tended to his withering garden, have dragged the sun and fresh air and all the oceans to the barren land to make it bloom (always the poet, always the lover).

him and i, we have never needed words because we are knives forged in the same fire and at the end of the day, we both know that he will be the one who wordlessly stitches my broken heart and i will be the one who sings him to sleep.

ii) let me paint you a picture:

blue that fades into red that fades into black that fades into blue that fades into red. loud, clashing and nonsensical. a pit in your stomach that was dug with desperation and blunt fingernails. how do you colour anger that is also pain, grief, hate, love, fear and truth? the smell of the paint is foul and clogs your windpipes. blunt fingernails and blue and black and madness. can you bear to look at what you created without flinching?

that’s what anger looks like on my father. a horror. a mottled bruise. a hellfire.

all his life, my father has been scorned, belittled, beaten, spat on. his mother didn’t love him right because her mother didn’t love her right. my dad loves like he hates. something is fucked in his head and heart and his words fade into black and blue and red and this shitshow always ends with me sobbing, bleeding, dying on the floor. my father watches with his hackles raised and his eyes red and wide and glowing. once wounded, an animal never sheathes its claws. it strikes the ones it loves and walks away with its head held high and hands trembling.

but here’s what happens when the curtains close: he pulls me into his arms and brings me tea. he wipes away my tears with hands that has moved mountains to make me smile. he kisses my forehead and tells me that his mom didn’t love him right. my grief is like anger and indignation and love. i wrap my arms around him and cry all the tears he never had the luxury to. who should say sorry, really? is it him or his mom or his mom’s mom or this stupid fucking world? my father has never said the word sorry. he never needed to. this is what love looks like on us. a horror. a mottled bruise. a hellfire.

iii) despite it all, i am not usually an angry person. i take after my father and my mother, after all. i rage like my mother (quick, loud, fire that burns out almost as quickly as it sparked to life) and fight like my father (aim, shoot, bullseye). my sister does something even mildly upsetting and before i know it, i’m cursing her to be miserable till she dies. not even an hour later i’m draping myself over her shoulder and bugging her till she rolls her eyes and smiles ever so slightly.

(“do you have no shame?”

“yeah no i don’t think so.”)

my family and i, we never learned to say the word sorry. because the word sorry never meant sorry, not to us. because at the end of the day, that’s all it is: a word. and it sticks to the back of my tongue and the dents of my molars and gets tangled in my mouth when i try to spit it out. so i grab it by its throat and thread it into my being. i find it so much easier to hide my pathetic inability to do one thing that doesn’t scream that there's something wrong with me with the truth of another three words:

“i love you”

and they are always echoed back to me, just a few million times more tender, in ways only we can understand.

“yeah, i know.”

“that’s great, but there’s no escaping dishes duty.”

“oh, shut up, you.”

“what’s that for?”

a pause and a hum.

“i love you too.”

me and my dad are like abed and jeff in the way that jeff always gets abeds references, theyre two characters that mirror eachother, they understand and relate to eachother in a way thats different from other characters relationships, but also in the way jeff fantasises about strangling abed, "you try to get him to do something normal without abusing him!", "youre a robot, abed". and still jeff goes in for two hugs before abed leaves.

Okay but my favorite GIR moments are ALWAYS the ones that imply he's just aware enough of what's going on to know that the thing he's doing will fuck up Zim's day, and he still does it anyway, possibly specifically for that purpose.

is there a ship name for coriolanus x sejanus that is being kept from my knowledge or does it really not exist??

Building off of what I wrote in my fic "Sparks," I'm really compelled by the idea of Ford genuinely no longer being interested in sailing around in a boat with Stan by the time they were seniors in high school.

I like the idea of it not being just a symptom of the resentment that had been building between them, nor it being a dream of Ford's that only paled in comparison to west coast tech, but it being a genuine loss of interest on Ford's end. I think it complicates things even further in some really juicy ways.

Like, imagine going through high school slowly losing more and more interest in the dream you've shared with your twin and only friend ever since you were little kids. How do you break it to him? How do you explain it to him without making it sound like a rejection of him? Without it making him hate you?

How do you explain it without it feeling like a spit in the face to all the hard work he's put into a plan that started out as a way of him comforting you by telling you "it doesn't matter what people say about you, you're going to be an adventurer who sails away into the sunset and never has to hear their mockery ever again, and there will be babes and treasure and heroism, and then they'll all see how cool you really are!"

And all through high school you think to yourself, "he's going to move on to more realistic dreams any day now, and then I won't have to say anything about it!" But no matter how many times you mention something else he could do with his life that he seems interested in, or bring up the challenging logistics of traveling around long-term in a boat, he sounds just as committed to the childhood dream as ever, and completely oblivious to how apprehensive you sound.

So resentment grows, little by little. Because that's easier than confronting the soul-crushing levels of guilt that are building up inside of you, every time you don't take an opportunity to tell him you don't want to do the plan anymore. You don't have a single person in your life who modeled how to have difficult conversations for you. As far as you know, having this conversation with Stan would crush him into tiny little pieces and then he would hate you forever, and you can't stand the idea of losing the only friend you've ever had.

So tensions grow. A lack of interest turns into a bitter resentment that, if you were really being honest with yourself, is directed more at yourself than it is at Stan.

And then the falling-out happens, and it seems like you were proven right. Stan hates you now, and he's never going to forgive you for giving up on his dream. But two can play that game, so you try to hate him too. Because if you hate him too, then maybe it won't hurt as much that he never came back. That he never even turned up at school, or by the boat, or in through your bedroom window in the middle of the night. He knows what dad's like, and how he says impulsive exaggerated things when he's angry, and haven't you both dealt with his harsh words countless times before and been able to dust yourselves off and joke about it later? So why isn't he back at home, joking with you about how absurd your dad acted that night, being impossible and belligerent about ruining your dream, but at least now you're even, because you've ruined his dream too.

-

And now imagine you find out he risked the lives of everyone in existence to bring you back, right after you had accepted your fate was to die killing Bill. It would be terrifying and confusing and infuriating. If he cared so much, why didn't he do something to reconnect with you sooner? Why did he ignore you in favor of trying to make it big without you? Why didn't he take the infinitely safer and simpler action of reaching out to you without you having to track down his address and send a desperate plea for help? You were convinced that he didn't care enough to bother with you unless you had an important enough reason for him to come. But even then, he thought your plans were stupid. He didn't want anything to do with you, not even with the world at stake.

Did he save your life out of guilt? Does he pity you that much? It doesn't add up with what he did in the decade leading up to shoving you into the portal. And the dissonance between the version of him in your head that hates you, and the man who held out his arms to welcome you back to your home dimension, is so strong that you feel like you're being lied to again, like you're back in the depths of gaslighting and manipulation that Bill put you through, even though there's no way that's what Stan is trying to do... right? You can't figure it out, so you run away from it. You don't want to know the answer to whether or not Stan hates you, because you don't know which answer would hurt more, so you try to make him hate you more than ever, because at least then you would know for sure how he feels.

And in the end, after he sacrifices his memories for you, and for the world, things seem clearer. The layers upon layers of confusion and anger and hurt seem to have washed away like drawings in the sand, leaving behind the simple truth: that you two had an argument, and didn't move past it for forty years, and despite everything you put each other through, you both still want to re-connect.

So you sail away in a boat together.

And at first, it's wonderful. It's exactly what you want. It feels like an apology to Stan, and a thank-you for saving the world, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to heal the rift between you two, and it's good to be back on earth, and you wonder why you ever doubted the dream you two once had.

But then, after the first long journey you spend on the sea together, when you get back home to dry land, Stan is already talking about planning your next adventure out on the open sea. He recaps every adventure you had on the first trip, over and over again, and he wants to chat with you all through the morning and long into the night, and you don't have the words to explain to yourself that you don't have enough social battery for this, and suddenly you're slipping back into the horrifyingly familiar feeling of Stan being overbearing and needing space from him and how could you think that? How could you think that about him after everything he's done for you and everything he's forgiven you for? But the longer this goes on, the more you realize that you still don't want to spend the rest of your life sailing around with Stan. It's great fun in moderation, but the idea of your whole life revolving around Stan and going on adventures with Stan and being in a boat with Stan with no time to be by yourself thinking about your own things and figuring out your own dreams makes your skin crawl with a claustrophobic kind of panic that you still don't know how to put into words forty years after the first time this feeling grabbed you by the throat and ruined your friendship with Stanley.

But the first time this happened, it nearly ruined his life forever. You can't let yourself feel this. You don't feel this. You're happy to spend the rest of your life fulfilling Stan's lifelong dream, and making up for the time you crushed his dream, and sure, maybe he crushed your dream once too, and maybe it would be nice for him to support your dreams like you're now doing for him, but you can't say that. He saved the universe, and it would be horrible and ungrateful and cruel for you to try to voice these feelings, especially when you don't know how to voice your feelings without it making other people feel like you twisted a knife into their gut. So you try to pretend the feeling isn't there.

You go out on a boat with Stan again. You planned out another incredible journey together, and this should be fun, and you should be happy about this, but the unspoken feeling you shoved as far down in yourself as it could possibly go is eating you alive. The worst part? Stan is starting to notice. You have never been good at hiding your emotions. The trick to it has always been to convince yourself you don't feel it at all, and not think about it, and that has always worked like a charm. But whenever the emotion claws its way back up to the forefront of your mind, you can tell Stan knows something is wrong. So you can't even give him the happy ending he deserves. You can't even convince him that you want to be here on the open seas forever with him, like he deserves. And you keep trying and trying to hide it, but Stan keeps asking in roundabout ways, like "You're being awfully quiet, sixer," and "whats that look on your face?" and eventually it comes exploding out of you like a shaken-up soda bottle dropped on its cap.

And then it's like you're back at home in New Jersey again, standing in the living room while dad grabs Stanley by the shirt. It all comes pouring out of you, in the worst possible way, with the worst possible phrasing, like a pandora's box of monstrousness, and Stan tries to fight back against the sting of your words, but you're made out of acid and you're burning through him and you can see it on his face, and there's never any coming back from this, not this time, you'll just have to either jump into the ocean or become a monster forever, so Stan can hate you more easily again, and-

-and at the end of the outburst, you're still on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the ocean with your brother, in dangerous waters, and you have things to do to keep the boat running smoothly.

You can't run away from him. He can't run away from you. You're stuck here for at least a couple more weeks, even if you turned around and sailed back towards shore right away.

-

And the thing that compels me so much here, despite how unbelievably angsty it all is, is that it sets up a situation wherein the Stans might end up forced to actually address the decades of resentment and confusion and wanting-to-reconnect-throughout-it-all that they thought they could gloss over and heal with enough time spent adventuring together on a boat. They might end up forced to actually address the crux of the issue that drove them apart in the first place: Ford wanting a little more space to feel like his own person, and to feel like he's able to have his own dreams, too.

It wouldn't happen easily, nor right away, but if they were stuck together on a little boat in the middle of nowhere surrounded by magical creatures they have to protect each other from in order to make it back home alive, then after they had one fight where they brought up all the things they silently agreed to never bring up again, it would probably happen many more times, and each time it would leave them both angrier at each other than ever, until eventually something honest slipped through amidst all the saying-anything-except-what-they-mean bickering. And once enough of these honest moments slipped through, then they would have a thread to tug on to start to unravel the gargantuan knot of their decades of unresolved conflicts.

And then, eventually, maybe Stan could learn that he can have a good friendship with his brother without needing to be glued to him at the hip, and Ford needing a certain amount of alone time doesn't mean he dislikes him or wants to abandon him, and Ford could learn that he can be honest and have a meaningful connection with someone without it driving them away and making them hate him.

hi it's nyx here once again to talk about lark vs henry and what that meant for sparrow because i swear every episode that shows even a Little bit of sparrow's actual personality is controversial.

"nyx what do you mean by this" well it's a very blatant fact that sparrow does not get much nuance in the fandom: this is especially prevalent when examining hero's conversation with normal where she explicitly calls out lark and rebecca alongside sparrow and yet sparrow is solely blamed. because of this, every time we do see sparrow be his genuine self in the show - from talking to scary and shielding her from violence to taking charge of grant and lark and wanting to help the teens to the most recent episode's case of him not believing in animal captivity - i've noticed people quickly jumping on him for being hypocritical but nobody asking why he would be hypocritical, or why he's made choices that clearly do not reflect his actual beliefs.

so let's talk about that, shall we?

i know i've talked about this before but it bears repeating: sparrow is complacent. he has consistently made decisions that go against his own beliefs, bottling up his actual thoughts on the matter in order to "keep the peace". we know this, this is a canon fact, he said as much about lark and rebecca's affair!

why does he do this? well to me, what makes the most logical sense is that this stems all the way to lark and henry's conflict. if the rogue card is only predicting anger and not enforcing it, that means there is more to lark's anger than just what happened with walter. part of that is his fear of being unable to protect the people he cares about, being helpless in situations where he could've done something, yes, but i do believe there's another root cause to his anger, one that would fuel him for decades: sparrow.

...well, more specifically, how henry changed sparrow.

we know that lark wasn't the happiest about the lovewolf split. after the lord of chaos arc, sparrow starts very slowly developing a separate personality, enough so that he and lark aren't necessarily the same kid, one unit, the same person twice. sparrow tried to teach lark his new philosophy, it was ultimately rejected. lark doesn't understand it! but he loves sparrow regardless. that disappointment, that resentment of how sparrow had changed... it goes back to henry, to henry giving sparrow that speech and reinforcing those beliefs!

we also know that originally, sparrow didn't want to pick a side. he wanted them both to get along! to reconcile! and we know that lark didn't tell him about what he saw on the throne, which has me believing that there were, perhaps, other things that lark didn't tell sparrow in crucial moments: such as his decision to release the doodler, since we really don't know if sparrow knew. sparrow would've been happy to reconcile the two, and it makes sense if this was something he didn't know but something that shakes his perspective: aka, what happens if lark doesn't confide in him. to get lark back on his side, he has to be on lark's side irrevocably, which means abandoning his peacekeeping and mediation to choose lark wholeheartedly.

so by the time the ep23 flashback happens... sparrow has lost that bit of personality he had started to form in s1. he's lark's other half again, helping him with plans, sharing his ideas. he has... you could say, lost his confidence in being a lovewolf, because despite his best efforts, it only brought more strife to his family and he doesn't want to lose lark. we know this! he doesn't want to lose lark!

and then, they find out the prophecy, that one of the twins will have a kid who will save the world. think about everything we know about lark, how stubbornly persistent he was on fixing things Himself since he puts the weight of the world on his shoulders alone. lark doesn't blame sparrow or henry, he only blames himself. would he jump at having a family to fix his mistakes? no.

but sparrow would.

so sparrow takes that burden from him. sparrow has hero when he is twenty, and lark gets to be the cool uncle who helps around the house and hero blames both twins equally so we know they did this together. sparrow doesn't want to lose lark again, he doesn't want to be himself, he adapts to rebecca's views because it's easier than admitting that maybe he shares some of the same- definitely makes him marrying a vegan centrist make sense, right? he can use rebecca as a scapegoat and it Works. his own personality gets shafted in favor of being the same man twice with lark, he bottles everything up, he disapproves but never says as much.

and he fucked up with hero. clearly, he knows that. hero has a regular life now at a private school with a job and an internship and she's a massive dweeb and i don't think any one of you could look me in the eye and say that lark approved that. it was sparrow's decision! and we know what lark thinks about sparrow's parenting: i need every one of yall who truly believes that lark would be a better father to normal to go and relisten to normal's introduction scene in ep1 and then to the end of ep24 again where lark explicitly tells normal that being the mascot is a waste of his time when he could be learning "actually useful" skills (like hunting and survival- and yall still think sparrow was the one having hero kill deer?) and that he's too soft-hearted and naive and that is sparrow's fault for being too nice. normal would not be the same kid if lark was raising him and that is NOT a good thing lmao

all of this to say. i am so tired of people understanding lark's nuance and understanding grant's nuance and understanding the s1 dads and their nuance and how their trauma fucked up their relationships with their kids and yet sparrow is the one yall bash every other week repeatedly without ever wondering like. huh. maybe it is strange that his actions now don't hold up against his actions in the past. maybe there's something else going on that is consistent with literally every other aspect of his character. it is so tiring to go into his tag and see the same things over and over and over again repeated on loop every time we see sparrow's actual personality slip out beyond him perpetuating the "same man twice" persona. he's nuanced! they're all nuanced! and that's a good thing!

sparrow's biggest issues are his complacency, the way he upholds decisions that might not really be the best decisions because it's easier. his love for lark and his desire to fix things clouds his judgement and yeah, that means he goes against his own morals frequently; or at least, he did. so far in the season though, with how he's treated normal being in the line of fire and getting into his mess, he's definitely already realized this and is putting in the work to ensure that normal doesn't go through what hero did- something that lark is not doing. sparrow's also been the best towards the other teens consistently, the most willing to listen and change his perspective (as demonstrated again in ep24- really i just think people need to relisten to ep24!) and he's definitely not the best dad but that can be said not just about all the kiddads but also about literally every dad in this podcast, because that's what this podcast is about. thank you for reading and i hope i don't have to make this post again in a few weeks <3

Hey, squeaker! (/affectionate /p)

I don't normally do stuff like this but I saw you liked Aizetsu and Gyutaro as a QPR and I have shipped them in secret since before I saw that. So it made my day to find. As an aro-spec person, I don't really see QPRs talked about much either and most people kind of just don't care about them as a result.

Anyway,

-> the actual point of my submission is that you recently reblogged one of my arts with the tag "good luck charm" as you were denoting affection to it for helping to uplift your mood during difficult times. It really warmed my heart, so I wanted to make something intentionally for you in that vein of "good luck charm".

I know your original tags were in reference to an endouma doodle, but I wanted to toss you something for one of your rarer pairings. (I was shocked to see it in the wild!! /pos)

Hope your week gets better, man!

I COULD COMPLETELY BURST INTO TEARS,!!!!!!! THEYRE SUCH DORK ASSES I hope someone stuffs them both in lockers they probably already do it to eachother as some odd affection ritual. Weirdos. OBSESSED.. sincerely I do not have the words to describe how MUCH I appreciate this 😭😭😭! Since you sent this things have thankfully gotten better so thank you!! Your charm worked!! (Things are still scary and new! But im feeling much better :-})

actually I am drawing a little something right now for you .holdon.

they're stargazing :-}.. I have so many little things in my head of these two but I wanted to make something quick right this second in exchange because AGWAA!!IM GRATEFUL!! I'll keep them close to my heart for EVER💥💥💥💥💥💥💥

I could count the amount of original stories of mine that don't have horror elements on one hand and idk what that says about me

What the shit. Fighting a god in hand to hand combat as a gold dragon using immovable rods goes so fucking hard and it’s the backstory for a character that’s just in the main backstory???????? AMY???

You know how a lot of people, when making DND characters, make the mistake of having their level 1 PC have an elaborate backstory where they're super badass and already recognized as a hero?

When I made Ash I did the opposite. Her backstory is elaborate, yes, but in very mundane ways that inform her personality and how she perceives the world around her, and build up the logic of how she makes decisions.

I made everyone AROUND my PC a super powerful character who had done incredible things, and I gave Ash anxiety about it.

She feels, constantly, that she is inadequate by comparison. Her entire frame of reference is shaped by a bunch of women in her life that are outstandingly powerful, and she's just a quiet girl who makes leather goods and sells them for a living. She thinks of herself as the NPC in other people's more impressive lives.

Her mother, Lailah, is a nearly seven foot tall divine warrior created in Elysium to destroy Pit Fiends. She's an angel of lightning built like an MMA fighter, and she wields a weapon like piece of a lightning bolt (not stylized, I mean a real, glowing crackling arc of electricity that she holds like a staff and can be used like anything from a polearm to a spear to a whip, and when thrown it acts like a Lightning Bolt spell). She is built, both narratively and in game stats, to be an unkillable holy destroyer, capable of fighting MULTIPLE PIT FIENDS simultaneously, and winning. She's a CR 10+ magical creature (she's a homebrewed mix of Deva and Erinyes stat blocks with some unique flavor) with eighteen class levels, 16 in Zealot Barbarian and 2 in Fighter. She has a strength of 27 and a constitution of 25. She's designed to deal HUGE amounts of damage, tank unfathomable amounts in turn, NOT DROP WHEN SHE HITS ZERO HITPOINTS, and keep swinging until every devil in her way is a pile of dust, then use bonus action Second Wind to bring herself back above 0 so she doesn't incur the auto-death caveat on Zealot Barbarian's Rage Beyond Death ability. One of her attuned items is also the very simple uncommon item "Periapt of Wound Closure" which automatically stabilizes you at the start of your turn, thereby resetting the death saving throws she would theoretically have to make each time she gets hit below 0. Also, as an angel, she's innately immune to auto-death effects like Power Word Kill, which closes almost all loopholes that get around her build. She is UNSPEAKABLY badass. I ran a simulated round of combat with her once, and she could potentially one-shot a CR 15 Skittering Horror (228 HP) in a single turn. Her theoretical maximum damage output is like, 456 damage in a turn (granted this assumes all crits and rolling max damage).

So that's Ash's mom.

Aria is interesting. She was always strongly attuned to the forces of nature, and her magic grew quickly. Where Ash grew up with someone she knew would always be there to protect her from anything, Aria did NOT have that safety net, and spent her formative years learning to be more self-sufficient in terms of relying on her own power. So eventually she got sucked into an adventuring party consisting of herself (a tiefling Witch subclass with very strong druid flavor), a tiefling zealot barbarian, and a couple of elf twins who were an Arcana cleric and a Celestial Warlock. Sometime after they had made a name for themselves, they were tasked with stopping a suspected fledgling vampire who had been kidnapping girls and killing a bunch of people. When they arrived, they met Cass, who was very much NOT a new vampire. She was almost 150 years old and had been protecting women from abusers and overzealous debt collectors, and things had gotten a little messy with one or two of them, leading to a lot more attention than she normally got. They start off fighting Cass (Aria polymorphs herself into a dire wolf and lunges directly for the throat, which Cass found amusing and impressive) but realize in the banter that Cass wasn't the real problem, and she ends up being a sort of a lesson for the group in terms of whose word they trust and who they take jobs from (YES THE BACKSTORY'S BACKSTORY HAS NARRATIVE ARCS AND MORAL LESSONS THAT LEAD TO LONG TERM CHARACTER GROWTH OKAY I CAN'T HELP MYSELF). Cass, having a particular rapport with Aria, ends up joining their party as a dhampir Soulknife Rogue/Shadow Monk.

Yes, that's all backstory that I made up for an imaginary campaign that exists entirely as a set piece for Aria as one of Ash's story NPCs. This doesn't even touch on the fact that I liked Cass so much as a character that I gave HER an entire backstory of her own. I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM.

Anyway the team only makes a bigger name for themselves for handling things that other groups can't. Eventually, they just happen to be in the Tenth District when the War of the Spark happens (major established event in the MTG canon), and I basically added some extra "scenes" to it that didn't violate existing canon so I could have that be the climax of their imaginary campaign. One of Aria's partners was a new planeswalker at the time and her spark got harvested by the Dreadhorde, specifically by the god eternal Bontu.

Gods in Magic The Gathering aren't honestly that special? They don't seem to have THAT much power, all things considered. Ravnica's gods are mostly powerful magical animals, and in the most recent Magic Story one of their gods (Anzrag the Quake Mole) was captured in an "evidence capsule" (basically Magic's version of a Pokeball). The most powerful god in MTG is probably the Ur Dragon honestly, unless you count the Eldrazi, but that's a whole other conversation since neither of those actually have the "God" creature type.

Anyway, Bontu was one of the gods of Amonket (basically a plane based on ancient Egypt), which had been conquered by an Elder Dragon planeswalker named Nichol Bolas. HE was the one who actually killed all but one of Amonket's gods, and then another planeswalker named Liliana Vess (extremely powerful necromancer) raised them as zombies for his army, because Bolas had a ton of complicated leverage over her (magical contract that he could invoke to kill her if she betrayed him). So Bontu was a god zombie.

Here's a reference:

Well, Aria was a level 18 Witch at this point since this was the climax of their campaign, so she had access to the Shapechange spell, a 9th level transmutation that lets you become any creature with a challenge rating equal or lower than your character level. And the best candidate for that was an Adult Gold Dragon (CR 17). So Aria goes full berserk and stands up on her dragon hind legs and picks a fight with a dead god that she's determined to make deader, and has a Godzilla vs King Ghidorah standoff with her.

So how do you fight a god that can suck your soul out and instantly kill you with a single touch? You don't let it touch you.

What Aria did was basically inspired by this gif of a Wildebeest trying to charge at a lion:

Or this:

And to be clear, yes, I'm saying Aria was the lion in that situation. She basically did a big dragon threat display to get Bontu's attention, and used the Gold Dragon's weakening breath to give Bontu disadvantage on Strength checks and saves. Bontu charged at her, and at the last second Aria dropped to the ground and then shot back up, clamped her teeth around the god's throat, and used her weight to throw Bontu around and knock her off balance, and her superior strength to grab her by the wrists and wrestled her to the ground so she couldn't get a grip on Aria. She had every part of the god that could have killed her pinned, and used the claws of her wings to pull Bontu's armor apart and tear at everything she could reach while thrashing her around. It was Fen, the Arcana cleric, who thought to use Immovable rods to pin Bontu down so that even if Aria lost her grip, Bontu wouldn't be able to immediately one-shot any of them. So Athena (barbarian) and Cass (rogue/monk) as the two martial classes were the ones who got close enough to handle that while Fen and her sister (Gwen) used whatever holy magic they could to help from a distance.

Now CASS had a problem, because she's a DEX based martial class, not a strength based one. She needed a boost to be able to get this job done. So she drank some of Bontu's blood from one of the wounds Aria had left on her arm to give herself a burst of strength. Except. She had to get real close to do that. And Bontu managed to get a loose grip on her, and tried to suck out her soul.

The magic that makes Cass what she is is very old and very powerful. It binds her soul to her body in a much stronger way than any living creature, fusing the two together to prevent her from dying (i.e. by having her soul separated from her body; Cass can recover from almost any conceivable physical injury as long as there's life energy, in the form of blood, for the magic that keeps her alive to feed on and maintain the seal between her body and her soul). BECAUSE SHE WAS FEEDING ON THE BLOOD OF A GOD AT THE TIME, the magic holding her together basically fought against the magic that was trying to rip her soul out, and it had enough fuel to hold on until Aria's thrashing forced Bontu to let go. So Cass survived the Elderspell thanks to a very weird and unrepeatable set of circumstances (which allows something narratively impressive and legendary to happen without being gamebreakingly overpowered and violating the established rules of the world).

Because of how her magic draws energy from other things, though, there was a side effect: she also accidentally took in one of the planeswalker sparks that Bontu had harvested. So when Cass had healed enough for her soul to no longer be dislocated, her spark activated and she became a Planeswalker. (I imagine a soul is connected to a body mostly through the nervous system, because that's how a brain holds consciousness in it, so a "dislocated" soul is like something glued to every nerve ending in your body being pulled on with an enormous amount of force, trying to sever that connection; imagine trying to pull yourself off the ground when every nerve ending in your body is superglued to the floor by something akin to the Strong Nuclear Force. It SUCKED.)

The team ended up being forced to retreat because of Cass' injuries, so Aria didn't actually manage to kill Bontu personally (or die trying, which in her grief-rage she was fully open to). Right about this time, my bottle scene ends and Magic canon comes back into play: Liliana betrays Bolas and turns the Dreadhorde against him, and Bontu ends up being the one who bites him and rips out HIS spark. Due to the enormous rush of energy of consuming all of Bolas' stolen Planeswalker sparks (tl;dr he was trying to become a god), and with the added bit of lore that it was Aria's team that heavily injured Bontu just prior to this, Bontu exploded in the process.

This resulted in Ravnica playing a game of telephone in the chaotic aftermath of the War. Aria fought a god. She's still alive and that god is dead. Rumors spread and now Aria is misremembered as the one who killed Bontu. Half the plane thinks of her as the "god killer." All she wanted was to avenge her lover or die trying.

Neither outcome happened, and now she's credited with the very thing she sees as her greatest failure. And that trauma has haunted her ever since.

Imagine that instead of dating them, MC basically takes up the job of being the Boys' Mom (regardless of MC's actual gender).

None of those men have ever had a mom (Dia never met his, the angels and former angels never had one, Solomon probably doesn't even remember his, and how the fuck was Barb even made??), but feel strangely comfortable with this human playing such role in their life.

Some of the Boys love it and fight over MC, others complain but secretly love how much the human cares for them, and others try to be the best son possible for their new human Mommy 🥰

So I don't know if it was ever revealed how Duncan felt when we killed Malistaire all three times but I'm wondering if maybe some part of him could hate us for that too. Like you hear that and you go "but why. Malistaire was terrible and even Duncan knew that(?). Why would he hate you for getting rid of him."

But like I think it's so....... interesting in a very, very, very sad way how Duncan so easily latches onto anyone who directly feeds into his delusions of grandeur. And that's no fault of his own that he was manipulated by the nasty Schism but when you think about how desperately clung to the idea that Malistaire, easily one of the greatest necromancers any of us had ever heard of (at that time), somehow actually recognized Duncan's talents (even when canon supports that Duncan wasn't all that talented, at least no more than the next necromancer) and then praised him for it so often that Duncan believed that he would be the next Death Professor is. I mean ☹️

So like with that mindset I unfortunately feel like it would be quite easy to twist even Malistaire's death as something that's horrible and awful and all our fault. ESPECIALLY if the Schism was feeding into Duncan's already broken mind and shattered ego and was constantly telling him that everything bad that ever happened to him ever in his life was Our Fault. That's like a realistic conclusion that someone like Duncan could come to

And like, at this point in time, are Malistaire's crimes even a factor in how he thinks????? Was Duncan ever able to separate Malistaire's talent and skills and prowess from the terrible and awful things he did? If Duncan wasn't able to consciously tell that distinction in the first place I can't imagine it would be any better during the years he was being manipulated and isolated and lied to

Like in Duncan's mind it probably isn't, "maybe I shouldn't idolize a national criminal, or idolize anyone at all for that matter, and aspire to be like someone so harmful when I can recognize my own talent and build from there" it's probably more like, "you (the wizard) permanently got rid of a brilliant mind, an innocent person who just made a few mistakes, and someone who believed in me no matter what just so that you could be the better than me and loved by everyone else" and that's! very sad actually!