So much of Garak as a person starts to make sense once you know his childhood was a fucking gothic novel. His main playground was a graveyard and he'd play pretend by perfoming improv eulogies to an imagined audience. For a long time his main touchstone for most important figures from recent history is 'oh yeah I know about that guy my dad buried him. great flower arrangements for that one'. He finds out later his 'parents' are actually a brother and sister who had to get married to avoid the utter shame and social devastation of having a child born out of wedlock, and they live in the basement of his biological father's house. (the madwoman in the attic vs. the tiny elim in the basement.) His biological father calls himself his uncle and locks him in a closet whenever he fails to live up to his insane and unpredictable expectations and everyone just has to act like that's normal and expected, and his will hangs over everything at all times, unseen but always felt keener than anything else. The father who actually raised him grows the world's most beautiful (and as it turns out, most poisonous) orchids and keeps the mask of a god hidden in a box in his work shed. Everyone in the house is choking down secrets like it's the only air they know how to breathe anymore.

What I'm saying is that right from the get-go this guy never had the faintest shot at turning out normal, so I'm glad that by middle age he's found a way to get a bit silly with it as he continues to be deeply deeply not normal about anything ever <3

i... wrote a smol fic (っ´▽`*)っ

also!!!!! If you haven't seen it - shoutout to first ever published fic in Ninja Showdown/My Immortal Soul tags - Lustrous Red by @missadmyre !!!

And here it is, my macdennis brainworms compressed into a playlist, for anyone who wants to ingest them <3

This took actually 4 hours, 3 of them just trying to make the easy way work (spoiler alert - it fucking didn't), last hour I just gave up and fixed the textures manually.

Thank you to @hauntedbubbles for the models and plug-in to import them to Blender! You can find that on this post.

You might ask why... I spend 4 hours trying to make this fucker dance. And that's because I wanna see them be silly and Activision is not gonna give it to me, so I'm making it myself.

You know what we should bring back?

Older christianity. I mean the anti government, anti military, community based christianity. The one that cared the most about peace, equality, mercy, kindness, and radical love. The one with shared property. The one that didn't conform to society but instead existed mostly outside of it. The one where noone considered one sin worse than another because in the end, we are all sinners trying our best to be better.

i cannot stop thinking about anissa and marky though [COMIC SPOILERS]

how did he react when he learned what his mother did? just like mark, he lived a lie. he thought his mother was kind and nice — the only thing that is true is that she loved him, but now, he has no idea if he should believe it

and. you've grown up being conditioned to believe that violence is peace, and that kindness is a lie and a weakness. you hurt people. by hurting a person, by destroying him irreparably, you found the boy you love most: your son. and you don't regret it. you hope one day, once he sees him, he'll get it. but you still don't regret it. you can't say you're sorry

marky will grow up without his biological father, because when mark hugs him he can only remember his mother and what she did to him. your father can't love you the way your mom did. you can't love your mother the way your father loved his

the worst part is, that it she hadn't done it, you wouldn't have existed. you wouldn't be here. your father will grow to love you. you will grow to accept each other. but you tend to wonder — if he never sees you as anything else other than your mother's son, then who will you have when everyone else you know dies?

four months into getting to know each other, shouto finds him by touya-nii's shrine. his little brother gently sits down beside him and offers a small prayer.

"yumi-nee-san," natsuo wonders if his little brother will ever drop the second honorific, "said you were the closest to him," shouto says quietly.

after all these years and the use of past tense still makes his heart break. 'you are the closest to him' he wants to correct but that wouldn't make sense anymore. touya-nii hasn't been talked about in the present tense since before middle school. does shouto even remember a time before nii-san's dea-, disappearance?

"yeah, i was," he says, eyes never leaving the photo. it's the one nii-san took for sixth-grade picture day. kaa-san had got him all dressed up and he had hated it. somedays he thinks if he looks close enough, he'll see the displeased pout on nii-san face. "why?"

his little brother says nothing for a long time, back ramrod straight. natsuo has no idea what's going on in that head of his. shouto has so few tells that he's practically a blank slate. natsuo hates his father.

then slowly and so quietly, he has to strain his ears to catch it, shouto stammers out, "do-, do you think he would have liked me?"

natsuo's immediate reaction is to say 'yes'. yes, of course, touya-nii would've loved you. yes, of course, touya-nii would've crossed the heavens for you. yes, of course, he would've loved you shouto; you're his precious younger brother.

but he remembers the way nii-san used to spit out shouto's name when he was a kid. the way his brother's mouth wrapped around it, the face he made, like he had just eaten something disgusting. he remembers the way touya-nii had become almost crazed by the end, hellbent on proving himself the rightful heir to their shitty father's legacy. he remembers the way touya-nii had said, "i just need to prove that i'm better than him,"; the 'him' said with such bitterness and contempt.

he knows instantly that touya-nii would not have liked shouto. that this house and his father would have twisted any ounce of love, nii-san would've held towards shouto, into jealousy and hatred.

(this house may have ruined all of them but it only ever broke two of them.)

natsuo can't say any of that to shouto. his kind little brother who forgave him for not being there. his amazing little brother who falls in love with every cat he sees. his wonderful little brother who has a wickedly dry sense of humor. his soft baby brother who loves him and yumi-nee with a passion. his tender-hearted baby brother who still worries if his long-gone older brother would've liked him.

no, natsuo can't tell shouto that nii-san wouldn't have like him. shouto will internalize it like he does with everything else that hurts him. and there is already so much that hurts shouto, he will not add to that list. his baby brother smiles these days, nothing big like his green-haired friend, but quiet, lovely, ones all the same. shouto talks more these days. they have dinner together when natsuo is home. his baby brother laughs now. it's a miracle like nothing else in this world.

shouto is the best thing to come out of their house and natsuo will die before he ever hurts his little brother. so instead, he curls an arm around shouto's shoulders and pulls him into a loose side-hug.

"of course!" he lies cheerfully, ignoring the ache in his chest, "touya-nii would've loved you. you're his — and our —precious little brother after all. there is no universe in which he wouldn't have loved you."

the tips of his baby brother's ears go red and his pleased little answering smile makes the ache of lie go away. natsuo will tell a thousand more lies if it means shouto never stops smiling like that.

what's the buzz, tell me what's a-happening ???

thinking about william bell’s “i forgot to be your lover” and joeltess. joel never getting to really tell tess how much he loved her. tess loving him with her entirety while somehow never asking too much of him. how the only way he could make it up to her was to honor her wish to take care of ellie. was he thinking of tess, too, when he decided to save ellie in the hospital?

me: MY HAIRLINE IS RECEDING OH NO OH FUCK

also me: full time student (worth noting i wrote stupid here at first without realizing), 20-30 hours in customer service every week, teaching myself 3/4 classes, teaching myself advanced algebra with a teacher (basically just a proctor) who shuts down any/all asks for help, juggling college financial woes, navigating dying relationships/people abandoning and/or attacking me bc i don't have time for things i used to anymore, none of my hobbies are making me happy when and if i have time for them,, i have no time for myself, i'm on my second all-nighter this week, i'm perpetually exhausted in a way sleep isn't fixing, my body aches because i'm so tired, and i'm barely able to stay asleep when i do get the chance bc the anxiety wakes me up

my hairline: two hops this time!

Im watching a second episode of udg because there was no V3 video last week, and oh my god silly times are over I think we're starting to get to That part of the game now.

That cutscene with Masaru in the killoseum... jesus christ. It is compelling in a way but it just makes me feel a bit sick that he's what, like 12? It's pretty damn upsetting, and I don't even think this is as bad as it's gonna get

watching that british guy who plays buck talk about being bisexual on television with my silly little supernatural brain with its supernatural thoughts:

i finished the 2.2 update in one sitting and it was so much longer than i was expecting it to be and i had to go to bed to properly absorb the insanity of it all and here is a concrete summary of my thoughts:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!! AAA AAA A A A A A A A A A A A AA AAAA A AA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA A AA AA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!@!@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !A AA

A

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

aaaaAaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!£

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"I don’t actually think Theo has any offensive preferences, because he’s not really a fighter. That human instinct to fight back was trained out of him very young… so."

i have a lot of thoughts on minos in relation to pasiphae and the minotaur (both greek mythological and in ultrakill) but i dont really want to make a lot of posts abt it considering. the topic is generally hard to talk about.