in which zuko is still adjusting to the group dynamic, and katara's got jokes

if you're writing a charles fic, it must have some aspect of boyking. he must lean a little on the childgod side. he has to be revered a little bit, adored even. if people aren't talking about him like they wouldn't wash his feet and adorn it with perfume like mary magdalene washed and adorned jesus' feet, you're doing it wrong.

I was looking through some old google doc files, and came across this government structure I had created of the Mandalore post-Empire, for an AU I was working on at the time.

Basically Din in this AU had given the darksaber back to Luke when he went to give the gift to Grogu in TBOBF, because he had discovered that it originally was protected by the Jedi and that Vizla had stolen it from the Temple, basically saying “My Ancestor gave it to the Jedi, and now I’m here to do the same”.

I mean, this was actually a really small part of the AU, but it was fun to create, so if anyone is curious here it is:

There are two Governors on the planet

They are chosen with an election, and are voted by only the citizen of age.

Their tenure lasts ten years.

But if the Assembly does not like one or both of them, with a unanimous vote they can take away their position of power.

The Assembly is formed by eighteen elements, and with the Governors they are twenty

Their tenure lasts twenty years.

A lot of the members are from the historical families of Mandalore, or at least the few that survived, but there are also members elected from less famous other clans

To be part of the Assembly you must be at least 25 years old and maximum 60. Obviously the non-human species that have different life spans will have different rules, with their years who can equate to the human ones. 

The Council is made up of six elders with tenure for life.

To be part of it you need to be at least 60 years old.

The members are chosen by the Assembly through a vote.

Often they are former members of the Assembly, who cannot be re-elected there, and so they are given this position.

There are cases in which some were elected even if they never held political tenure, but they are rare.

The Council doesn’t actually have political power, they are there just to give advice to the Governors and the Assembly.

They can suggest reforms or make proposals, but their vote on them is not valid, only the Assembly can decide.

It’s more of an honorary position than anything else.

Then there are the Mandalorian citizens.

To be considered of age, and have the right to vote, you have to complete the Verd’goten and/or follow the Resol’nare. 

All of it depends on when the citizen became a Mandalorian, if they were a child or already an adult.

It’s their role to vote for the members of the Assembly and for the Governors, but not for the Council.

They can also make requests in front of the Assembly.

okay halloween is over but all saints' wake is NOT!! so please enjoy this gpose of O'ravi and Aymeric as Vex'ahlia and Percy de Rolo from Critical Role/Legend of Vox Machina! Bonus closeups under the cut!

Apparently you can actually pose the bangs of this hairstyle independently, and there are like 4 separate pieces to it

Aymeric is absurdly cute with the glasses, actually????

my parence got a new fiber internet connection "for free" and although they're quite tech savvy they're also at an age now where people think they can take advantage of them 😤 so after the phone company installed the access point in the basement "for free", they then wanted to charge them 200€ for the in-house hookup (i.e. to run a cable from the basement to the terminal upstairs 👹)

so in my youthful hubris i instead decided to buy a 20m cable and do it myself, and it only took me *checks time* six hours and an insane amount of macgyvering to feed that delicate little thang through the old phone line hole in the ceiling

tbh there was a point in the afternoon when i was ripping apart my mom's floorboards where i would have been more than happy to give someone 200€ just to put me out of my misery... but in the end it all worked out. sometimes even simple tasks take time

i think about the droid/automaton temple guardians a lot. like--

they aren't alive, but they aren't not alive, either. they have varying degrees of sentience. they remember the jedi, some of them outlive the purge, knowing the jedi are gone save for whatever knowledge they've squirreled away in their memory banks.

cator, the droid guarding the jedi temple archives with jocasta nu, had a personality. he was serious about protecting and sheltering the jedi's knowledge and their history, so dedicated that he stood up to darth vader in an attempt to keep the list of force-sensitive children safe. sure, it was in his protocol to guard the archives, but he didn't have to care, or love it, or want to do this; we see many droids across star wars who do not give a single shit about their programmed duties, while still executing them.

but cator works hard, diligently and carefully, because cator loved his work, and he loved the jedi.

T0-B1 loved his jedi master so much! and his master loved him so much that he powered T0-B1 with the kyber crystal from his lightsaber! of course jedi wants to be a jedi. of course he wants to fight and protect and preserve life, not because he was programmed for it, because he wasn't, but because he wants to honor the man who gave his life to save him -- him, a "meaningless droid"!

then there are the tomb guardians on zeffo.

thousands upon thousands of years they've stood guard over the secrets of their creators, a species so powerful and gifted with the force that they were their own undoing. do the guardians know they're guarding tombs, or do they believe their masters will return some day from the other side of the veil, and the guardians will be there, waiting, stalwart sentinels ready to welcome them home? if they do know, did they mourn? could they have walked away from their posts but instead chose to stay, to keep the zeffo graves from being desecrated, because they'd rather the world forget their masters than allow them to suffer indignity?

did the guardians love the zeffo? surely they must have, without question.

the real question is: did the zeffo who whispered metal ore from the stone and gave them shape, gave them sentience, gave them purpose, love them back? they must have, in the way we all love the work of our hands.

but perhaps the most pressing question is:

long after their circuitry should have degraded, their power cores cracked and dripped empty, their shiny metal carapaces rusted off like so much disease -- what could it be that keeps these machines moving but their love for those who no longer exist anywhere but their memory?

how could you not love and be loved by something that made you, purposefully, in its image?????????

Hi! I hope you’re doing good in life.

What do you think of a phantom hourglass remake? Tbh I don’t know how they could remake it without basically remaking it from the ground-up. It would probably play more like windwaker, which I see as a both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, if it was more like windwaker a lot more people would probably play and it would be more popular since I know the touch controls were a turn off for most people for both Spirit Tracks and Phantom hourglass. But on the other hand, remaking it to be more like windwaker would make the game lose some of it’s previous identity. Like, Phantom hourglass was so unique because of the touch controls and the puzzles you can make and solve by having two screens and touch controls. And it was so nifty and handy to be able to write notes on your map. Idk, I still would like it to be remade in general even if it ends up a basically different game, but I wouldn’t change the story or the characters, especially Linebeck. The only other change I would make is the music. Phantom hourglass had rather weak themes, mainly because they re-used the same theme for the islands and the dungeons. The only songs that were really good were the few orginal tracks made for the game, so Linebeck’s theme, Oshus’s theme, both Bellum boss battle themes and the and that music that plays when you first follow the Ghost Ship. But what would you want out of a phantom hourglass remake?

Hey, I’m doing good, and I hope you are too!

I’ve thought a bit about a possible Phantom Hourglass remake, but not too much recently. I don’t really know if I’d want one, since you’d lose a lot of what really makes it special, and you can still play it through other means. I’m personally fond of the graphics and the music- yes, even the dungeon theme has grown on me- so I don’t really want a remake too badly, especially since I fear any additions/changes they might make with story or characters in a remake. The touch controls make it, and playing it on pc recreates that feeling decently well, but I don't think it'll be just the same if you had to control it with joysticks or anything.

Not to mention, there's so much emphasis on having the two screens, too, not just for map stuff, but almost every single boss had a mechanic related to the top screen! I have no fucking clue how you'd replicate that very well on something like the switch without just fucking with the mechanics altogether.

I would kill to hear some of Phantom Hourglasses tracks be orchestrated or otherwise rearranged in a higher quality. I wouldn't want any of the more notable themes altered in any way, no adding or removing of melodies and only very very small changes to the instrumentation, but I think it'd be neat to see what could be done with dungeon themes. I think a while back I had a fleeting desire to write some short tracks for each dungeon, with some ideas like mostly using instruments heard in Bellum's themes for the dungeons while each individual one gets a leading instrument unique to and reflective of the dungeon, while the Ghost Ship maybe gets a song that's a bit of a expanded version of the fog theme, while the Temple of the Ocean King could have slightly different themes the further in you got, starting with instruments more common to Oshus's theme or the great sea theme, while the further in you got the more instruments from Bellum's theme would be heard, plus some harpsichord thrown in for the hell of it.

Leave the original dungeon theme for stuff like the minor pyramids and some larger cave areas, idk. It's grown on me.

I think the only story rearranging I'd want is mayyyyybe unfridging Tetra? You could very easily shuffle some things around with her and just not damsel her for the whole game and honestly it'd still go off perfectly without a hitch. But you'd still have to deal with the World of the Ocean King being a whole other world, so either bring her and her crew in and have them as wandering ship npcs (the better idea) or just leave them out (not a good idea) but either way it's better than what they actually did. I just don't think I'd want it to switch to Tetra being a major reoccurring character tbh, the main character dynamics in PH are good as they are.

I think I like Phantom Hourglass too much as it is to really want a remake at all. I'd rather we get something like an anime adaptation. That's what I think about more. Give me animated Phantom Hourglass with some fun takes on the dungeons and fights and some fun slice of life stuff with the group between the islands what I want is a Phantom Hourglass anime

C.G. Jung, from The Red Book; Liber Secundus, “The Remains of Earlier Temples”

Nah cause when I read “sodium radium and potassium” my nerd ass self immediately put it together and just started yelling “HE CALLED HIM CUTE” over and over again

Jiang Wanyin and Lan Wangji both seem like people who aren’t necessarily *averse* to carrying out an insane revenge plot to get justice on behalf of a dead loved one, but crucially, at the moments in each of their lives when they might have finally snapped and done so, the universe handed them each a baby and said “your dead loved one would have wanted you to take care of this baby, so you can’t do insane revenge things bc you gotta be a father figure now”

So now I am thinking real hard about who Nie Huaisang would have become if somehow the universe had given him a baby that he knew his brother would have wanted him to take care of.

Certainly I don’t necessarily *want* this AU, as it could mean Huaisang never brings back WWX, but like. Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng both find themselves in a really similar position a few years apart, where they have just lost the last person they actually considered family, the last person in the world they considered themselves close to, maybe the last person in the world that they actually loved, except. Except the universe said “Actually, Jiang Wanyin, you do have one family member left, it’s your 3-month-old nephew. Take care of him and learn to love him.”

But not Nie Huaisang. Nie Huaisang did not acquire a baby and he remained alone, alone, alone and only got more alone as time went on.

haru/katara is a weirdly underrated ship imo. like ignoring the fact that he’s only really in one episode, he really is the perfect synthesis of what people want aang to bring to the table and what people want zuko to bring to the table in a relationship with katara.

like aang, he understands what it’s like to be persecuted by the fire nation, and aids her in her revolutionary praxis. they bond over being targeted for their bending and having their families ripped apart by the war. like zuko, he’s a cool older boy with beautiful flowing hair, who loves his mom, who’s angry but sensitive, etc etc. he thinks she’s the coolest, and is inspired by her courage, compassion, and conviction.

plus, he’s neither the avatar nor the firelord, he’s literally just some guy, so she’ll never feel overshadowed in their relationship, like she’s just some trophy to a man instead of a hero and a legend in her own right. haru can be the handsome little purse dog boy toy she always deserved to have, without any external factors getting in the way. not to mention his parents already love her, which is always a nice bonus.

so.........yeah. pretty crazy how powerful a single bad facial hair choice in your teens can be. let this be a lesson to men everywhere.

Did you guys know before I got cursed by the gods into this racoon form I used to be an axolotl pirate. Real story

Nintendo is stupid here's my new better timeline:

Skyward Sword

Legend of Zelda

Adventure of Link

Minish Cap

Four Sourds

and it's sequel Four Swords Adventures

A Link to the Past

Link's Awakening (edited, whoops)

A Link Between Worlds

Ocarina of Time

The Hero is Defeated Timeline: Oracle games and Triforce Heroes that's it.

Child Timeline: Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess, as usual, easy peasy, for once no notes Nintendo

Adult Timeline: Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks once again pretty easy, no notes

11. Breath of the Wild 12. Tears of the Kingdom

.

"and xiyao lived happily ever after...OR DID THEY. because chances are jgy is a scheming gold digger and Orchestrated everything, which is bad! have you thought about that, reader" no. and i never will. god be with ye

One of my life passions is spitting at iconic American tourist sites

using my bhaalspawn dark urge oc as my Arcana apprentice really was meant to be just an experimental deal but in hindsight it is fuckign hilarious that i'm playing a character who has had amnesia twice, and died no less than THREE times

like imagine trying to settle down on a different material plane, only to be subjected to the exact same shit. it is amazing