finally watched all of Hazbin, definitely cried a bit at Episode 7 and sent Morgana a tearful message

I saw something a while ago about paranormal romance/why choose books being basically trad wife fantasies, and I have so many thoughts about that

@esper-aroon has enabled me, so here let me scream at y'all about The Imperial Uncle.

Okay, so I recently read The Imperial Uncle (Huang Shu) by Da Feng Gua Guo from Peach Flower House and I really loved it??? It's first person pov, mlm, about the Emperor's uncle Jing Chengjun, who is mistrusted by everyone simply because of who his parents were and his position, and so he's basically given up on trying to convince people that he's actually a nice, decent person without ulterior motives. He's super trapped by his position, and there's so much he can't say and do, and he's also a hopeless romantic, like, from his own mouth all he really wants is to sleep beside and wake up next to someone who actually gives a shit about him, and even that is basically out of reach in his life. Like, the book starts with his wife (who he has never once had sex with) storming into a meeting he's having and announcing he's a cuckold and she's pregnant.

But also, this poor bastard really thinks he knows what's going on and his very smart. Very unreliable narrator. He's actually kinda a hilarious, impulsive himbo. But the TL:DR is that his loneliness and isolation and the extent to which he's politically trapped routinely lead him to make absolutely terrible decisions.

E. Danglar's translation is absolutely gorgeous, too, and... idk, if you love political plots, melodramatic idiot main characters, a dose of pining, and a slow burn that eventually pays off, come take a look??? (some people think it's a love triangle??? idk, I never really got that vibe, I never felt it was really in doubt which of the two potential dudes he'd end up with, but maybe I only feel that way because I got it right, lmao).

Anyway, I can't stop thinking about how these two idiots end up finally finding each other and getting together, and I have an entire AU in my head (a modern corporate one) and part of another (canon divergent from like a decade before the book starts), and I just want people to love this book as much as I did and scream with me about it.

I like to think that the northern tribes are actually relatively normal and it's just York that acts this way & everyone let's him because he's very large and very strong

I forget how much of a little asshole Giorno is at the start of Vento Aureo. My friend watched the beginning and told me she didn't really like Giorno because he was "kind of a dick" and I see why. I guess it's like Josuke being a delinquent and Jotaro getting into fights and stuff

My darling blorbos from the niche kids book series 🪰

[Image description: A short comic of Ruby and Hitch from the Ruby Redfort book series, featuring dialogue from the final book.

Hitch, a man in a suit with dark hair, looks down skeptically at Ruby and asks, "Just how old do you think I am?'. In the next panel, Ruby, a teenage girl with glasses, glaces up at him, saying nonchalantly, "I don't know, fifty-five... fifty-seven."

The next two panels are extremely wide shots, showing the two drawn as simple figures and standing in silence. Their speach bubbles only contain ellipses.

Hitch breaks the silence by saying "Kid, I'm forty-two."

The final panels zoom in again and Hitch turns away, looking exasperated. He continues "Boy, never ask a child to guess your age; they'll always have you pegged just shy of decrepit."

Ruby, affronted, follows him and replies "Didn't mean to offend." /End image description]

you asked for inspo so here:

"loneliness, habitually looking at your side and finding an empty space, late nights, missed calls, nostalgia"

(don't ask who hurt me lol)

i dream of him every day, you know? it’s been a year and two months since the last time we talked properly. more than 10 months since i saw his face. it’s summer of 2024 and i don’t know who i am to you. hell, i don’t know what i am to me, either. but when i close my eyes, i am in highschool and our shoulders are touching and i laugh at every stupid thing he says because of course i do. and his eyes always lit up when i did. in my dreams, he says that he loves me and that he’s sorry. but here’s the catch: i always know i’m dreaming.

to dream and know you’re dreaming is the greatest curse of them all. because it’s there, it’s right there, happiness that’s cotton candy sweet melting on your tongue it’s there it’s there but you know it’s not true. because you’ve never had cotton candy before and your mom has always told you girls with rotten teeth don’t deserve sweets. because he says he loves you. because he’s smiling and it’s not crooked and he says he loves you. because you’re thinking of him with a feather-light chest and not weeping into your best friend’s arms. because he says he loves you and your teeth is not rotten.

but i wake up and don’t cry. i miss him, but i don’t cry. i don’t even remember his face right but i miss him. but i don’t cry. when i do, it's always the stupidest things that set it off.

it's 11:30pm and i should be sleeping but here i am, staring at the tears staining my pillow and telling myself, "stop. stop crying. stop. why are you crying?"

it's all so incredibly stupid.

i can't play fight with my friends anymore because i'm afraid they'll just leave. i can't be mean for shits and giggles. because what if that's the breaking point? what if someone gets bored of my clown fuckery there and decides to give up on me. what will i do with my red nose and jester's hat and bleeding smile? what will i do?

i don't know if I miss you or miss who i was before you anymore. i don't remember what it felt like, to be so sure that i am loved. because i am, i know i am! but now with that knowledge comes a creeping whisper, "what's the price you have to pay to make them stay?"

i don't know. it terrifies me.

calls pile up on my phone and i hate that sometimes i can’t even care enough to be guilty about it. my friends text me often, “are you even alive? please call me back.” and i don’t know what to tell them. i don’t know who i am. can you come over? i’m afraid i’ll forget your face. can you come over? i’m afraid you’ll forget my face. can you come over? i am so lonely. can you come over? i can’t stop dreaming and nostalgia feels like a knife to my throat and i keep twisting it in deeper and deeper and deeper and-

can you come over? i don’t know why i can’t forget your laugh. i don’t know if i can ever stop screaming.

i look at my side and find it’s empty. i look for your photos in my gallery and come up empty because i deleted the last one a week ago. but it doesn’t matter, because they all look wrong, anyway. none of them know how you smile. none of them are real. none of them know you like i do. i can’t stop dreaming. i am a liar who knows he’s a liar and the knife twists deeper and why didn’t you look back? why can’t i stop dreaming?

georgenotfound could never do one of those ‘celebrities read thirst comments’ videos because he’d peel back the little paper and it would just say shit like i wanna wring him out like a wet towel or i wanna shrink him down to the size of a pin and tuck him into a little acorn bed like what the fuck does that MEAN

ouh i NEEED to know 22 (their own little way (or ways) to say ‘i love you’.) for the women or else i'll die... don't let me die...

YAYYY WOMEN YAYY okay don't die I'll do it. Gay ass inventors being gay under the cut because this got longer than I anticipated LMAO

ROXAFABBYLARIS / TRIPLE THREAT: 22. their own little way (or ways) to say ‘i love you’. [from here]

I feel like...all of them being creatives (in a sense), they'd give each other little trinkets and gifts and such. Some of them may be purely functional, but for the most part they're decorative, symbolic, and unique. There's some aesthetic choices that makes it obvious who made what, and each of them really enjoy those little differences. Solaris leans more into the straightforward functional side, Prism's has a lot of moving mechanical parts, and Fabby's little creations are the most stylistic (both for little engineering projects and fashionable gifts). And I think each of them would know each other Really Well that they know exactly what they want to do for them. You know that phrase "I loved you to the point of invention"? One of my favorite dang quotes, literally them full stop.

For other little ways...

Solaris isn't much for obvious tells of affection, but she's very fond of spending time with the people she loves. She likes spending time doing whatever, even if they're just chilling, working on something together, generally just doing stuff together. I'd think she's the type to be very attentive to her partner's needs (as in, physical needs...she's still working on picking up emotional and romantic ones). Part of it is because of her experience post Death Engine--all that physical pain is something she wouldn't want to happen to the people she cares about. She tries to get her workaholic girl friends something to eat (she's trying her best to not burn everything she makes...)

Fabricator would be the more physically affectionate one, everybody knows this...On very rare occasions (read: Solaris and Prism ONLY) she uses her affection to comfort someone if they're feeling down. There's also a specific change in the tone of her voice that she only reserves for partners (again, Solary and Primmy) to show her genuine affection for them. Any show of vulnerability for Fabby is a whole fuss for herself, but when it comes to supporting her partners or letting them know she loves them genuinely, it's all worth it. Usually she also does small acts of service for them too.

It's very easy for Prism to put her love in her words I think. She's very vocally supportive and she likes giving praise to her favorite people, and she could usually phrase it in a way that the other two could find meaningful. Whether it's in awe of a cool project or personal achievements, she likes celebrating the little things with them. When she's not knee-deep in a project, she would also do acts of service for her partners... making their fave drinks when they're feeling down, helping them with their own projects.

nah but like

they're "seiros lapdogs" because they're fighting back against the people who attacked them completely unprovoked??? also because it so happens that thales is at garreg mach so they have to go there to reclaim the area to defeat him???

i just hate this because it's just perpetuating things about faerghus and its people that just aren't true. it frames it like they jumped into the war willingly for the church and that they're only here for the church. like nah buddy, it's not faerghus' fault you're out here fighting to protect thales and ludwig.

it also is batshit to me how he and leopold are fighting to stop faerghus from advancing but like... they know what's happening to the empire and that edelgard isn't even calling the shots anymore, yet they still stupidly fight for the very person who is literally razing their country and burning their villages. they know the empire is in shambles and that the kingdom isn't targeting them and is specifically aiming for gm to get it back from who? thales; who, mind, at this point is in his real form and not posing as arundel anymore. everything is laid out plainly, but they still act like faerghus is the bad guy.

but yeah, okay. faerghus BaD for defending themselves, fighting back, finding out who is behind all the puppeteering and heading to take him out. sure, that makes them seiros lapdogs. like what are you, an agarthan mouthpiece??? may as well be like yeah you go retreat and leave you agarthan lapdog. if they don't realize it's Someone Else in charge of course, then ludwig lapdog works fine too.

and it sucks because other than this shit, i like waldemar just fine as a character. it's just like, it feels like they forced someone to have to stick in that final faerghus BaD insult before the grand finale so they just randomly picked someone to remind us that faerghus is Always Wrong as long as they continue to fight back and prevent being attacked in the future.

waldemar here is just basically ag caspar. fighting and risking his life for thales, who is destroying the empire and basically holding the emperor hostage. if the writing here had any decent plot points, they would've all stopped and have been like hey wait, shouldn't we be fighting to get our emperor back? why are we stopping these guys from killing the people who are destroying this country?

and like, they literally went from siding with ludwig during the insurrection to siding with edelgard in this timeline to... jumping immediately back to ludwig as soon as he was at the top of the food chain (thales notwithstanding). as soon as the person in charge changes, they jump ship immediately; then of course get mad that the people they attacked are coming after them... and fighting them as they defend the very people who are letting adrestia become a literal, physical ruin.

it really just tells me that these people don't care about adrestia itself, but status, power and wealth. they don't care about the country itself as long as they're doing well. that's like, the only thing i can get from still fighting with/for ludwig/thales. the fact that they just fight for ludwig again as soon as edelgard is out of commission is also pretty gross to me. they have no loyalty at all.

and it's like, i want to like waldermar and leopold, but they come across as just selfish, entitled and only there for their own asses to be covered. and i get that - that is a realistic take on politicians, but the fact that the game regularly loops back around to faerghus BaD despite that and despite portraying these people as opportunistically selfish is like... what are they even trying to write??

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

sooo glad we live in the universe where twdgs4 was rewritten to be about saving the school instead of the original lis2-esque on the road each-episode-is-a-new-location plot. really dodged a bullet there

dont know if it was due to the cuts and collapsing work environment (no budget for all the assets needed) or what but the school plot is just like the perfect setting for her to end her story. and we really almost got a plot about her.... just trying to make it back to her original house? oof

The fandom has gotten really dark since you left.. certain shippers are really aggressive about their ships to the point of bullying. I kno you’ve dealt with stuff like that in the past and you handled it all so well I remember reading some anon asks.. any tips n’tricks?

OOF, WHELP -- not sure I'll be much help given that I have no idea what state the fandom is in. All I can really say is that you're going to find aggressive shippers no matter what fandom you're in. My method to dealing with people like that was to just block them and add them to my blacklist. The only times I ever engaged with them was if they came at me directly (which rarely happened -- the more aggressive they are, the more cowardly they were when it came to confrontation) or if they put a callout post about me directly in the main fandom tag. I always clapped back at those people just because like lol if you've got a problem with my fics or my decision to delete them all, okay cool, I don't care, but doing stuff like putting a long-winded complaint post in the main tag is so childish and stupid.

The best advice I think I can give for this is to just not care LOL I sure as hell never did and still don't. Never will! Shipping is supposed to be fun and the people who actively try and take that fun away from others are struggling with issues outside of fandom, but shipping is their outlet so that's where their aggression manifests. Happy people don't care about drama over fictional characters, so go be a happy person! Utilize that block option and live your best life!

I’m still thinking about the Book of Life because it’s such an obvious Chekhov’s gun. I don’t recall it ever being mentioned in S1, but in S2 it is highlighted twice as a very real, serious threat, and then it’s never brought up again. It can’t just hang indefinitely in the air like that, so I expect it will be used at some point in S3.

But in a way, this threat is kind of hollow when used towards Crowley, because Heaven can’t erase him from history, and they know they can’t. The Fall of Man is such a crucial point in the Great/Ineffable Plan that I doubt they would be willing to mess with that, as much as they hate him. He’s the literal Serpent of Eden! How can the Plan proceed if there’s no one to tempt Eve? The existence of The Serpent is such a core part of the Fall of Man (both in the GO universe and in biblical lore in general) that I think it would be simply too big a risk to take.

From our point of view, Aziraphale is also crucial for the history of humanity until this point. It’s not explicitly stated, but think about it for a moment: would Adam and Eve have survived, had Aziraphale not given them his sword? There’s beasts out there, and it’s cold, and she’s expecting already. We literally see Adam fight a lion with the sword mere moments after being exiled from Eden; I don’t think their odds would have been all that good without it. It’s at least likely that Humanity has managed to survive the Fall and thrive because of Aziraphale’s actions.

Here’s the thing, though: we know this, but Heaven doesn’t, because Aziraphale has been lying to them (and to God!!!) about this ever since the Beginning. What has he done of worth in the eyes of Heaven? Sure, he was guarding the Eastern Gate, he’s been on Earth thwarting demons and all that jazz, but as far as they know, he’s never had a pivotal role in the Plan (except for. You know. Stopping Armageddon. But they didn’t want him to have that role, and they still resent him for it). There’s no reason for them to hesitate, should they be threatened by his existence, because to them he’s not necessary to carry out the will of God (as opposed to Crowley).

So yeah. I think the Book of Life will make another appearance in S3. And, if it does, I think Aziraphale is the most likely candidate as its victim.

"no, our hands will never be clean but at least we can hold each other"

favourite things about the new genshin event

kaveh getting emotionally manipulated by stray desert foxes because he’s too nice for his own good

nahida admiting that she basically made scaramouche take part in the championship because she’s trying to domesticate him like a feral cat (it is not working)

alhaitham instinctively knowing that kaveh would save some leftovers from the restaurant for him

the second round of the championship, where faruzan says ‘yes I fell into a desert dungeon for a little while but I got out. don’t worry about it.’

kaveh never shutting the fuck up about alhaitham

as appropriate punishment for his crimes and atrocities nahida will be punishing scaramouche with a fate worse than death (making him study politics)