Very normal ck3 playthrough

- marries lady bc I need an heir

- Byzantine empress seduces me after I petition my liege for a seat on his council

- falls in love with wife

- 9 months later I have a son (with wife) and daughter (with empress)

- life is normal. I become a king. Have a mental break over my sins after wife dies to a plague and need my family near me

- I betroth my son with my daughter (from the affair) and become allies with the emperor

- I die (haunted by ghosts) after finally getting to meet daughter

- new ruler (my son) has no idea his wife is his half-sister. Also he’s a witch somehow.

- all the emperor’s sons have been killing each other and I (a witch) am now 2nd in line to inherit the Byzantine empire 👍

I absolutely love (Zukka or not) fanfics in which Zuko has very dubious talents like lockpicking or pickpocketing or shady bargaining and being generally good with boats and where he doesn’t always live the lavish lifestyle of a prince and where Sokka is the one who can put shit together in nature and who can actually hunt and know what to eat and whatnot and is super good at geography and-

fourteen's small kiss on donna's hand while reassuring her is making me feral btw. like yes, yes, character development. they're showing physical and verbal affection towards those that they love now after years of being a sopping wet, piney, closed off motherfucker. but i still can't get my mind off that one tweet i saw that said that that small gesture really seals the deal in making u see the remnants of their impactful experiences in recent regenerations. this isn't ten all over again. the physical action is so late eleven/twelveclara experience coded with the added benefit of them being consistently verbally vulnerable, honest, and caring (which is something they lacked in in the past in general).

I get where people are coming from when they say Diaspro in Winx lost the plot for the sake of being turned into a minor villain and that's all once Valtor enabled her to do what she did in S3, but I feel like that was a reasonable narrative choice. It's only a love potion at that point (while I could go on all day about the ethics of love potions, of course, a later season has her straight up trying to do direct murder). She's a noble, guards will do her dirty work, and I understand that she would feel like getting revenge on Bloom while getting back together with Sky. She was promised a position — romantic AND political — she nearly had and then it was taken from under her by a random fairy who wasn't even "supposed" to be in the running. I don't think what she did was nice, but it makes sense for the story and for her character for her to want to reclaim her position in the way she did. Sky's love was an accessory, in part, to her political ascension, and thus he is again rendered accessory and accomplice by the love spell. And, sending guards after threats seems to be the thing to do in the magical universe if you're a disgruntled noble, so it's probably not unfamiliar for Diaspro to have seen occur before or want to do. It's not a uniquely rotten response any more than Radius' behaviour towards the monster (who, he didn't know it, was Stella). If we fault her for this action rather than only the intention behind it, we need to examine how the worlds in Winx Club deal with threats to their monarchs in general, which sounds interesting but I frankly don't have time for tonight. Diaspro did wrong, but she didn't do uniquely wrong there, and Eraklyon has the punitive security structures in place to have enabled that.

Diaspro's later appearances seem to flatten her motives and the symbolism behind why her relationship with Sky was important and what she does about it (who cares what Diaspro's political aims are and how her status might reflect how she deals with problems, the audience needs to see Bloom thrown into fire I guess), but I feel like seasons 4-8 weren't really that good anyway, so I can't even claim this as a fault of the writers doing Diaspro specifically wrong instead of them just doing the whole show wrong at that point. It might be related, and it might be a coincidence, but a lot of the writing choices seemed to become more flat to me right around when the art shifted to that lifeless godawful Flash simulacrum of S1-3's art.

Also like... idk but if some long-haired hottie wizard in a sick coat and contemplative eyeshadow told me he could help me get my promised chance at both romantic and political success back, I'd at least hear him out, yknow, see what he had to say (<- don't trust me I simp for Valtor)

sometimes i pause a little and remember the doctor literally had a whole family. like they had KIDS. a wife. CHILDREN!!!

the hollow nonviolence but nevertheless heavily palpable longing and empty vastness of daisuke's heart. post

oh my GOD i deleted my rant by accident im gonna cry lemme try to remember what i wrote but tl;dr not really a theory but me trying to arrange my understanding of albrecht and tmitw

i title this: wallbrecht is everything everywhere all at once

also i wrote this at 5-6am and didnt sleep so shit's probably messy

ok so a major theme in warframe that recurrs in warframe is the loss of identity or sense of self. natah/lotus/margulis, erra becoming pazuul, teshin being controlled by the worm queens, the operator dissociating and believing they're our warframe, then the operator losing themselves to the worm queen and the operator (+rell) confusing ourselves with tmitw himself , the drifter in duviri, warframes themselves losing their sense of self (umbra at some point, and potentially arthur and aoi down the line), albrecht worrying who really left the void dimension, the remaining entrati family themselves!. we're also told many times that the void gives but it also takes, and that it's heavily influenced by strong emotions

in cosmic horror stories usually the horror is a representation of something else. in lovecraft's works it's often his disgust with people of colour, viewing them as something completely alien. in bloodborne part of it is the fears of pregnancy and dealing with offspring. i haven't played darkest dungeon but i've heard that it's about trauma and how the overwhelming traumatic events become too much to bear that people go mad. in the lighthouse, part of the horror is that people will fight and kill just to know the truth, or what they believe to be salvation

so i think albrecht's horror was his fear of losing his identity. we knew from the clock's archives that his experiments hadn't been going well prior to the bell incident. he was losing respect as an archimedian, maybe he lost respect as a father and husband too. i think a lot of us theorise already that albrecht IS the man in the wall, not a doppelganger like tmitw literally was with the operator. but tmitw being omnipresent means that they can freely simultaneously be and not be other people, the paradox of eternalism. albrecht is now the void, he knows every timeline and every outcome and potentially every person (except operator/drifter because they're already void in multiple senses of the word) but he is also still one human. the human mind can't reconcile knowing everything, that's just madness. lucky that kids aren't as self aware as adults!

the void isn't evil nor good. it gives and takes merely because that's the way the universe works, very vaguely dare i say the law of conservation in (a very sci-fi way) action. the void is in the grand scheme of things is just a natural phenomenon of the universe. but the overwhelming emotion present during the 10-0 accident (if that even was an accident) and albrecht's own experiment just happened to be fear, so the void literally embodied the concept of fear and became a person, vecause that's just what the void does. it became an unknowable being behind a veil just beyond our perceptive reality that understands the plights of humanity a little too well. it could have manifested into something friendly and offered us and albrecht a deal in a polite way if the circumstances were right but it wasn't. tmitw is a manifestation of the void so whether the man - albrecht - wanted to or not, he had to approach our operator in their greatest moment of fear. what he did have a choice in, though, was to offer a deal. and what better way to secure a time loop, multiple ones even, that will guarantee your becoming wally than to be a time-space hopping entity who can exploit a bunch of scared kids who didn't know any better.

i don't know what we'll be using the vessel for but i don't think we'll be using it to fight a giant wall (and if we are it won't be the climactic final fight). i don't think we'll ever overcome the void, and we don't need to. the void just is. but the man in the wall literally is just a man. and i know people dunk on bad cosmic horror when the spooky thing is actually just a person or has sympathetic motivations but i think here warframe may be able to pull it off well. it's a cosmic horror that's made life miserable over multiple lifetimes, but the horror simultaneously is just a victim partially of his own doing because the cosmic horror never was alien, it's just a person who's scared of losing himself, just like the lotus was and just like our operator was. the cosmic horror IS the person in the stories who faced the horrors, who faced themselves in the seriglass bell - all it took to differentiate us and albrecht was an *accident* (though at this point it was probably intentional)

we need to confront albrecht/the man in the wall and try to stop his madness. but like many cosmic horror stories go, i think he's trapped no matter what. he'll either overcome his fear of losing himself and become one with the void, leaving us for good, or he'll try to return to gomaitru. but the fact that he's not the same as he was before and neither is gomaitru, with what he's seen and experienced as tmitw will be so maddening that he'll have to leave for the void once again in a suicide mission if he still can't reconcile with *what he is* now. in true cosmic horror fashion we will probably never fully know his motivations till the end, being a greater being than our scope of thinking - and with eternalism in place, maybe albrecht reconciling with himself was what already happened back in the seriglass bell

Did anyone just wanna slap the fuck out of Dulcamara for how she was talking to Jude RIGHT after she got back from the Undersea like THATS MY BBY GIRL UR TALKING TO—

can we talk about the meep’s pronouns moment in the star beast again? i want to talk about the way it’s set up. in any other show, this would have been a joke. it would have been, “oh, look at this trans person getting so up in arms about the doctor assuming this alien’s pronouns. isn’t that an insane thing to care about?” and then that would be where it ended, the entire point being that asking for pronouns is ridiculous, that a trans person pointing it out is ridiculous, and we should be laughing at Rose for bringing it up.

but. it’s not. Rose says, “You’re assuming he as a pronoun?” in a tone of voice that, to me, at least, reads as someone who has been in this situation many, many times before and been laughed at for caring. who has been the butt of that joke. who starts this dialogue off from a defensive position because every time before she’s ever asked in earnest, she’s been shut down.

and then the Doctor says, “True. Yes. Sorry. Good point. Are you he or she or they?” The Doctor acknowledges Rose’s point, apologizes for glossing over it, and makes an effort to ask. Hell, the moment is even used to set up the Doctor connecting to the Meep more like he will when the Meep mentions having two hearts; they both share “the” as a pronoun as a pronoun.

(and I’m reading through the transcript right now to check, but as far as I can tell, yeah. The Doctor does then use “The Meep” to refer to the Meep for the rest of the episode, not any other pronoun.)

It’s a very brief moment, but it feels intentionally made to invoke those jokes, to take them and say, ‘no, why would this be a joke, we’ll take it seriously.’ Expectations subverted brilliantly. The Doctor says trans rights.

Oops my hand slipped..

Couldn’t sleep so sketched formal/ball!trouble from @shepherds-of-haven || view full size bc I don’t care to check ratios before I upload aaaa

the multiverse of immy

god that shuro and laios fight seemed. personal? like it felt like maybe kui has Been There... just guessing as an autistic girlie from a high context very socially oppressive culture it seemed so familiar to me the things that laios said

lvl8 assassin astarion just casually dealing 72 dmg to yurgir in a sneak attack. its actually so embarrassing for the rest of this party who are managing 40 dmg on an exceptional day 😐

The greatest thing about Genshin is that the lore is so freaking dark in so many ways, and it really helps me with various ideas of how I do world-building now.

Especially with all the horrific ways that children are:

•Abused

•Sacrificed

•Traumatized

• or all of the above but ALSO being stuck in a time loop for at least a thousand years replaying the same four days again and again and again because it got cursed by an angry bird ON TOP of the entire island’s memory network getting screwed over by a cosmic nail falling from the sky

nymeve! based on fire ants!

she actually knew halesia when they were both younger, but both parted ways and haven't seen each other for many years. nym has since integrated herself into noble society under a pseudonym and a carefully constructed backstory that is always just a breath away from going up in flames. She'd thought that her noble lady con would allow her greater resources to find her sister with, but no such luck....(yet!)