#my own LORE punches me in my mental health

[lord-of-snrland]

My own drawing keeps punching me in my mental health but idc I'm finishing it anyway

#my own LORE punches me in my mental health #nobody can know that. nobody can know I feel bad for them too and want them to be all happy and friends in the end. #THEY WILL NEVER BE HAPPY AAAAAARRRRRRR NEVEEEEEEER #they have to be a reflexion of life and life is SAD! #my dumbfucks

[iris-writesx]

the rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me | stede x ed x izzy

read it here or read it on ao3 <3

i’ve spent about a week writing down details and plans for this au that i’m starting, and i planned to introduce it with a fluffy christmas fic, but i had a bad mental health day and projected my heart and soul into stede and this is the result. i’m sorry if this was a rambled mess or if some of it doesn’t make sense, most of it is based on my own experience. sending love to anybody who can relate <3

but first au!!! yay!!! i love these guys with my whole heart and the idea of them in love and living together is just *chef’s kiss*

let me know if you like it! and if you want to see other things! i feel like this isn’t the best opener to the au as things i have planned are more lore heavy but i kinda like this so here you go akdnwkf

title is from “peace” by taylor swift x

4.6k words — modern day au, hurt-comfort, anxiety, dissociation, panic attacks

more from this au; and now i see daylight

༶•┈┈୨♡୧┈┈•༶

Stede didn’t know why.

He didn’t know why it happened — why sometimes, the pit inside of him opened up wide enough to swallow him whole. Didn’t know what caused it, why he felt that way, he just… did.

And he hated it. He hated not being able to talk to people, zoning out, barely able to do anything other than listen to music and cry. He forced himself through the motions of the day — breakfast, drive himself and Izzy to work, do work, eat lunch, go home, have dinner, shower, sleep — but on days when he didn’t feel good, it seemed mechanical. Like following instructions. Not like… not like life.

He could tell when he woke up to an empty bed that it was a bad day. Stede was usually the first one awake, and unless he’d been up late the previous night or sick — and he was neither — then it was going to be a bad day.

He was zoned out as he sat up, pulling on one of Ed’s shirts and his joggers, barely focused on anything as he sipped from the water he kept by the bed. His head felt like it was underwater, a little numb and a little thick, and by the time he had made it to the kitchen he felt like a puppet on strings.

The first gut punch of the day was that Ed had already left for work.

Usually, they all woke up together and had about an hour until Ed had to leave first, as the garage he worked at opened at eight o’clock. Stede knew that people wouldn’t be going to a library that early, so he chose not to open his shop — his shop, would have usually made him smile, but it did nothing to cut through the fuzz in his head — and instead opened closer to ten o’clock. Though, he and Izzy got there an hour earlier to set up for the day.

Stede stopped in the doorway of the living room, blinking. Izzy — already dressed and sipping his morning coffee — was in his armchair, and the spot where Ed would usually be was empty.

Part of Stede was upset that he hadn’t come to say goodbye, or Izzy hadn’t woken him up, but he knew they wanted him to get enough sleep. Probably just thought he was tired.

“Stede?”

Stede blinked, eyes back on Izzy, face a little flushed when he realised he must’ve zoned out. He cleared his throat and put on a smile, one that didn’t even feel convincing. “Morning, darling. When did Ed leave?”

“About ten minutes ago. Was just about to come wake you up, are you okay?” Izzy had that look — the one he got when he was worried, looking for whatever was wrong.

Stede put more effort into his smile that time and nodded, forced himself to walk further into the room and over to his partner. “I’m perfect, was just a little tired last night,” he leaned down to kiss Izzy, felt his partner’s hand squeezing his waist lightly. “Did you sleep well, love?”

—

Stede mechanically followed through the rest of his morning.

He had a tea with Izzy, before he went to get dressed in the first clothes he could find, didn’t spend half an hour putting an outfit together like he usually would. If Izzy noticed he was quick, he didn’t mention it.

He skipped breakfast, told Izzy he just fancied a pastry from the café tucked away at the back of his library — the café that Izzy worked at, so really, it was a terrible lie because he’d know if Stede didn’t eat anything. The thought of eating made his stomach turn, he didn’t want anything.

He got his bag for work, made sure Izzy had everything he needed, before going out to the car and drove them there.

He unlocked his shop, and busied himself getting set up; put new books out, organised shelves, greeted the staff as they all showed to work. He let Lucius talk away to him behind the counter about his date with Pete — who coincidentally worked at the garage with Ed — but Stede couldn’t really recall much from the conversation. He hadn’t really been listening.

It was a Sunday, so the saving grace there was that they could get out early, and Ed would be home before them for once since he got off work at lunch time. But they barely had many customers on Sundays, people preferred to be cozy at home.

That’s where Stede wanted to be. Curled up in bed, not thinking, not conscious.

The morning dragged, and by the time twelve o’clock rolled around Stede couldn’t take the silence of the store anymore. The lack of customers and the silence meant that he had time to think — about how much of a failure he was, and how Izzy and Ed probably preferred each other over him, and how he couldn’t be normal, how he couldn’t, he just-

Stede put the stack of books down that he had been carrying and dug into his pockets, pulled out his phone, and his other hand searched for his earbuds.

On days like that, he learned that music helped a little. And a little was enough to keep him sane enough until he could go home.

But his other pocket was empty.

“Lucius?” Stede looked over at him, forced a smile. “Could you stay by the desk for a minute? I need to go out back for something.”

Once Lucius had waved him off he quickly walked through the door behind the desk and into the staff room, searching for where he had put his bag. He found it next to Izzy’s, and every moment that passed as he rooted through it and didn’t find his earbuds, the more worked up he got.

He even resorted to digging through Izzy’s bag, just in case he had dropped them in there by accident, but he couldn’t find them.

He hadn’t brought them.

It was such a silly thing, but it was enough for Stede’s eyes to well with tears, huffed out breaths as he leant against the wall and tried to keep from crying.

But he was so… so strung out, and tired, and overwhelmed, and he couldn’t even stop his stupid brain from overthinking he just-

He choked on a sob and, mortified, covered his mouth with his hands in the hopes that Lucius hadn’t heard him.

Once the damn had broken he had no hope of mending it again, so he stood like a child in the corner of his office and cried.

On days like that Stede wished he could just… stop existing. Disappear. Not have to deal with- with whatever this was.

He was still trying to muffle his crying into his hands when the door opened, and his eyes widened when he looked up to see who had walked in, expecting Lucius or Frenchie — the two who predominantly worked in the library section of his shop with him — but it was Izzy.

He looked just as shocked as Stede did, he clearly hadn’t been expecting to see Stede breaking down in the staff room.

“Stede?” Izzy pushed the rest of the way into the room, shut the door behind him, and wasted no time in going over to hold Stede’s shoulders.

He couldn’t tell if he was more comforted by Izzy’s presence or embarrassed.

“S-sorry-” he sniffled, looked anywhere but at Izzy’s face. “I- god I’m okay, I just- fuck I’m sorry, Iz- Izzy-”

“Stede,” Izzy squeezed his shoulders, his voice hard and grounding. “Take it easy, okay?”

But he couldn’t, not now that he had opened the barrier. Stede all but fell apart, choking on his tears and mumbled apologies and just- he couldn’t help it. He felt so embarrassed and stupid and ugly, and there was nothing he could do.

He only registered the familiar ache in his chest when he felt Izzy’s grip tighten, and he shook him a little, and it was only then that Stede realised that Izzy was talking to him, he just hadn’t been focusing enough to hear it.

The only thing he could focus on was the drumming of his heart against his rib cage, the ache in his chest that was there because-

Oh god he couldn’t breathe.

Izzy shook him again, a little more violently, and Stede blinked at him, eyes wide and choking on his sobs and not getting enough air in-

Izzy grasped one of his hands and pulled it forwards, laid it upon his chest. And though his drumming heartbeat and the buzzing in his ears stopped him from hearing Izzy, he could see what he was doing — he had exaggerated his breaths and kept Stede’s hands firmly planted on his chest, allowed him to feel the steady rise and fall, to let him copy it.

It took a little bit of time for him to fall into the rhythm of it. By the time he had stopped crying heavily enough to actually make a decent effort, he had both hands planted on Izzy’s chest and his eyes screwed shut, just let himself focus on the rise and fall of his chest.

Rise, inhale, fall, exhale; over and over and over.

Stede couldn’t tell if they had been at it for minutes or hours, but eventually he had calmed enough to breathe steadily. The tears were still falling but they were merely silent streams, nothing as- as dramatic as before.

Stede’s hands slipped from Izzy’s chest, and with what little energy he had drained, he opened his eyes to look at Izzy. And the expression he had on his face was so… so mortified. He hadn’t meant to worry him, or freak him out. Just the thought that he had upset him made his eyes brim with more tears.

Izzy sighed, and didn’t say anything as he took Stede into his arms, let him melt against his body. His arms held Stede tightly, and despite himself he felt good. Izzy had always been a firm presence, a stronghold for Stede. Where Ed tended to be better with words, Izzy made him feel safe.

He stood there for a while longer. Felt Izzy’s hands as they dragged up the length of his back and back down rhythmically, like they weren’t both missing their shifts by being shut away in the staff room.

Stede was the one to pull away, and the next time he looked at Izzy he still looked just as worried.

“Sorry,” his voice was hoarse as he lifted his hands to wipe at his eyes, took a deep shaking breath. “Sorry, Iz- thank you, you didn’t need to- that was very nice of you.”

Izzy frowned. “You want to tell me what has you so tightly wound?”

“It-” Stede hesitated. He’d never really… vocalised how he got on those days to Izzy and Ed. They knew he had anxiety, and that sometimes he had bad days, but he’d never told them what it was like, what to look for. And, in the middle of both of their shifts, it certainly wasn’t the time to get into that discussion, so he settled on, “I left my earbuds at home,” Stede paused, suddenly embarrassed at how silly he sounded. “I know that sounds stupid, I’m not- I mean, I’m okay I just- I think I’m a little stressed and I just wanted to listen to music but without the buds I, well, can’t.”

“That’s not stupid,” Izzy shook his head, like he knew something else was wrong. “But you won’t need them anymore.”

Stede frowned. “Well I- I mean, we’re working until four so I hardly think I’ll survive the shift without them,” he exhaled deeply, wiped his eyes again, before looking back at Izzy. “Do I look okay? I don’t want customers to tell I’ve been crying.”

“Are you fucking insane?” Izzy scowled. “You aren’t going back to work, Stede, you almost just fucking collapsed.”

“…that’s a bit of an overstatement.”

Izzy glared at him. “We’re going home. Come on.” He left no room for argument as he stepped around Stede and collected both of their bags, tossed Stede’s jacket at him, and hung his own over his arm, before he was shepherding Stede back out of the office and into the library.

“We’re going home,” Izzy announced to Lucius as they walked by, and Stede made sure not to look up at him so he couldn’t see the tears on his face. “Stede feels unwell.”

“What?” Lucius groaned. “That leaves four of us to run this whole shebang, Iz.”

“This place is fucking empty, shut the shop. Go home early.” Izzy didn’t let Lucius add anything else as he just pushed Stede out of the shop and out towards the car park.

The cold air felt nice on his tear stained face, and Stede made sure to take some more deep breaths as they walked to the car. He didn’t even ask to drive — just let Izzy direct him to the passenger seat, where he got all buckled up and just let himself sit.

Izzy got into the drivers side and connected his phone to the car’s Bluetooth — which had taken literally months for Stede to teach him how to do it — and once they were driving he called Ed.

“Izzy,” Ed’s voice came through the car’s speakers. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“We’re on our way back now,” Izzy informed him. “Stede had a panic attack…”

Stede let himself zone out as he watched out of the window at the cars and trees that whipped past.

It was sat in his own thoughts that Stede realised how truly embarrassing the past hour had been. He was an adult, why did he need music playing to keep it together? Why had he gone into a panic attack over it? And Izzy… he’d probably made him so worried. He made him shut the store for him, all because he couldn’t keep it together.

Nothing was even wrong it was just… just his fucking mind, if anything was wrong it was him, him and his stupid thoughts and his-

There was a tight squeeze on his thigh and Stede jumped, startled, and whipped his head around to see Izzy looking at him.

“Sorry,” Izzy winced at his scare. “We’re home now.”

Stede looked back out of the window, actually focused, to see that they really were back home. The front door opened and he watched as Ed walked outside, giving a wave to the car, and by the look on his face — the poorly masked worry — Stede could only wonder what Izzy had said to him on the phone when he had zoned out.

Izzy took the bags again, so when he got out of the car Stede only had to grab his jacket. All of his movements, again, felt mechanical. Didn’t feel natural.

The only thing that did feel a little closer to normal were Ed’s arms around him once he was out of the car.

“Hey love,” Ed breathed into his hair, and Stede just sunk himself into his embrace. Ed was warm and familiar, it felt like hugging Izzy; good. “Iz said you had a bit of a moment at work. All okay?”

Stede clenched his jaw and nodded. A familiar feeling had built up in his throat, and he knew that if he spoke then he’d just cry.

“I made you some tea, that herbal shit you like. It’s in the living room. Thought you might wanna wear something comfy, too, so I got some clothes out for you to change into, that jumper of mine you can’t keep your hands off of-”

Ed cut himself off when Stede sobbed. He didn’t even know why he was crying at this point. It was just… his partners were so kind. He didn’t deserve it.

“Oh babe,” Ed squeezed him tight, rubbed his back. “Let’s get you inside, okay? We’ll get you all cozy, you’ll be okay.”

Stede nodded — he couldn’t say anything because he couldn’t stop crying — so he let Ed tighten his arm around his shoulders before he led him into the house, just behind Izzy who, Stede realised, had been waiting by the door worriedly. Between the two of them they got Stede over the threshold and into the house, where he was guided to just sit on the sofa in the living room. The change of clothes could wait — Stede didn’t even know if he had the energy to change.

He felt like he had been awake for a week straight. He felt like he wasn’t really there.

Ed had planted himself on the sofa right beside him, and when Stede focused on it he realised that he was rubbing his back, long firm. He let himself focus on that, dragging in breaths in time with the movement.

“You’re alright, mate,” Ed murmured beside him, pressed kisses to Stede’s shoulder in between his words. “We’ve got you, you’re okay.”

“Stede,” he only looked up when he heard Izzy’s voice in front of him, and realised he had a mug in his hand — the tea that Ed had promised. “Here.”

Stede forced a tearful smile as he took the mug in his hands, blinked through the blurriness of his vision as he sipped from the drink.

He wasn’t even sure if he was tasting it.

Instead of taking up his usual seat in his armchair, Izzy sat himself on the coffee table in front of the sofa, in front of Ed and Stede.

“What do you need, love?” Ed murmured from his side, voice soft, and to be completely honest Stede just wanted to stop being so useless. But he knew Ed wouldn't take well to hearing those words.

Stede shrugged, glanced between Ed and Izzy, but when he felt his face burning from the shame of his actions that day he just shrugged and locked his eyes onto his tea. “I don’t know,” he whispered, sniffled through his tears. “I- I’m sorry I don’t- I’m okay I just- it’s silly-”

“If you fucking say that one more time-” Izzy started grumbling in front of him, but shut himself up when Ed gave a swift nudge to his leg.

“What Izzy means to say,” Ed rubbed his back again. “Was that it’s not silly, mate. You’re having a bad day.”

Stede nodded, though didn’t look up nor did he speak. He just sipped his drink slowly, let the embarrassment swallow him whole.

It really was shameful, the whole thing. He was a grown man, he shouldn’t have days where he was so out of control of his own emotions — toddlers had days like that, not- not men. If his father could see him he’d be even more disappointed than usual—

His heart was thumping in his chest again; he could feel it as it sped up, drumming loudly and too fast and almost too forcefully—

What made it worse was that it clearly had such an effect on Izzy and Ed, and Stede hated that; hated that Izzy had to calm him down from a panic attack over nothing, that he had to leave work early, that Ed had to worry and make him a drink and lay clothes out for him like a child. He knew, he knew, that they cared — Stede had never felt so cared for in his whole life, he truly felt like it was the first time he had people who saw him. But that didn’t mean he had to make them worry, had to burden them. Their lives couldn’t revolve around him—

He could feel his heartbeat in his head, in his ears, against his rib cage—

Stede just needed to grow up, needed to-

“Stede-”

He flinched when his cup was wrenched from his hands, tea slopped over the side of the mug, and his eyes were wide as he just stared at Izzy, who was just staring back, holding the mug.

“I-” Stede inhaled, his hands started to shake. “I was- I was going to drink it, Iz, I’m sure it’s lovely-”

“You almost dropped it,” Ed supplied from his side. “You just- fuck, man, you were just staring at the floor for a while and then I thought you were gonna fuckin’ pass out on us.”

He looked at Ed — Ed, who was usually so cheery and smiley, who looked almost gaunt with his worry — and at Izzy — Izzy, who had that look on his face again — and Stede had to swallow through the sudden nausea that clenched in his stomach.

He was being too much for them. He didn’t need to bother them.

“I’m sorry, I’m- I’m sorry, loves, I didn’t- didn’t mean to worry you-” Stede breathed, before his bottom lip trembled and he forced out, “I- I can go and stay at Lucius’, he w-won’t mind, I can just-”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Izzy blurted out. “Why would you- do you want to stay there?”

“No!” Stede choked out, his heartbeat quickening again. “No I- I want to be here but I’m just worrying you both because- because my mind is so stupid and won’t work today and I just-”

“Okay, okay, we get it, easy love,” Ed brought his arm around him and tucked Stede into the curve of his side, pressed his lips to the crown of his head. “You aren’t going anywhere, okay? We want you right here.”

Stede sniffled into Ed’s shirt, utterly exhausted. All he had been doing for what felt like the past few hours was just cry, and he wanted to just stop. His eyes squeezed shut, not quite sobbing, but he did huff out through his tears, mumbled, “I’m so tired.”

He felt a hand as it squeezed his knee, and he didn’t even look, knew it was Izzy. His hand dropped down to cover it with his own trembling fingers.

“What’s going on, hm?” Ed was just murmuring against his head, and it felt nice. His breath was something Stede could focus on, felt it as it hit his skin with every word. “Did something happen at work? Shitty customers? I’ll come down there, Stede, and feed them their fucking teeth I swear-”

“No,” Stede let out a quiet wet laugh, shook his head. “No, it’s not… it’s not anything, really.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing.” Izzy grumbled, squeezed his knee again.

“It’s…” Stede sighed, blinked through his tears and looked between the two of them. “It’s hard to explain. I’m sure you don’t want to be bored by my silly little story-”

“Hey,” Izzy squeezed his knee a little harsher than before and Stede jumped, looked up to meet his eyes. “If it’s causing you this much grief it’s not silly, okay? Stop downplaying this shit, Stede. It matters.”

Stede blinked at Izzy, swallowed the lump in his throat, and forced a nod. “Sorry,” he breathed. “I’m just…” he inhaled, unsure how to put it, and gestured between them all. “I’m not used to… to people caring.”

Both Izzy and Ed seemed to deflate, then, and Stede almost wished to take it back… but Ed kissed his temple and Izzy pulled his hand up and kissed his fingers, and maybe he didn’t need to take it back.

“Well we certainly care, so tell us what’s going on in that pretty little head of yours.” Ed punctuated his words with another kiss to his head.

Stede looked down at his lap, curled his fingers of his spare hand into the material of his sleeve. “So… um, so, you both know how I can sometimes maybe get… well, how I do get — quite often actually — um, anxious,” he watched as both of them nodded before he continued, “well, sometimes it… it really overwhelms me and it just… it sticks and doesn’t go away and I don’t know what causes it, but I just feel really detached, but at the same time overwhelmed, and- and there’s nothing that helps I just feel… I just feel really shitty.”

There was certainly a lot more that he could have said, explained it better, but from the looks on his partners faces they seemed to get the gist of it.

Stede was expecting one of them to say something, whether it was something good or something bad — realistically he knew that wouldn’t happen, but nothing about his thought process that day had been realistic — so he momentarily froze in shock when Izzy leaned forwards and kissed him. It took him a moment for his body to catch up with his brain and Stede reciprocated, felt a little lighter by the time Izzy pulled away.

“…that was very nice, dear.” Stede whispered, unsure of what to say.

“Stede,” Ed spoke, then, squeezed his side and didn’t continue until he met his eyes. “Nothing about that shit is silly, okay?” His hand cupped Stede’s cheek and he leant into the warmth. “It’s… it’s a lot, fuck man I’d be a mess if I dealt with that, so you’re already doing better than I could have.”

Stede shrugged, eyes dipped down. “It’s not really an appropriate reaction-”

“Hey,” Ed lightly pinched his cheek, startled him into looking back up. “It’s okay, you can’t help any of it, can you?”

Stede shook his head slowly, glancing at at Izzy before back at Ed. “Suppose not.”

“Right,” Ed nodded, stroked beneath his eye with his thumb, before he leaned in to kiss the spot gently. “It’s okay. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

For the first time that day Stede felt like he could finally breathe. He deflated a little, glanced between them again, murmured, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“Apologise again and I’ll chuck this tea over you,” Izzy threatened, and Stede laughed a little, and it felt nice. “You have nothing to be sorry for, just… when it gets like this, you can tell us.”

“Right, yes, you can,” Ed chimed in. “Or if you feel like you can’t say it then you can, I dunno, write us a note. Stick it to the fridge or something, I’ll see it.”

Izzy turned to glare at Ed. “You never read anything on the fridge.”

“Yes I do, thank you very much.”

“What about the shopping list?”

“…handwriting was too small-”

“Or the bills? Or the letter from your mother-”

Funnily enough, it was listening to them bicker that made Stede’s eyes fill with tears again. He just- he had been so frustrated over it, and so overwhelmed by the bulk of his anxiety, and now that they had talked the relief was emotional. He felt loved and cared for, and even if he didn’t feel alright in the slightest, he knew there wasn’t a better place for him.

Their bickering was cut off when Stede threw his arms around both of their shoulders, pulling them all into a hug. It was at a bit of an awkward angle with Izzy on the coffee table, but all of them tucked their arms around one another and they all fit nicely into place.

“I love you both,” Stede choked out softly. “Very, very much. Thank you, loves.”

He felt kisses against his head as their arms tightened around him, and maybe for the first time in his life, Stede truly believed that he might, in the end of it all, be okay.

༶•┈┈୨♡୧┈┈•༶

comments would mean the world <3 requests are open!

#our flag means death #our flag means death fanfic #our flag means fanfic #ofmd #ofmd fanfic #blackbeard ofmd #ofmd stede #ofmd izzy #steddyhands #blackbeard x stede #edward teach #edward teach x stede bonnet #stede bonnet #stede bonnet x edward teach #stede bonnet x edward teach x izzy hands #stede bonnet x izzy hands #izzy hands #edward teach x izzy hands

[many-gay-magpies]

alright bestie BUCKLE UP bc the concept film is a TRIP, but the members also have their own individual concept films! i think you’re right about yeonho- i don’t know too much about him myself but he’s usually shown tied up, in a chair, or related to electricity (he’s a pretty active member in the thunder mv, gets electric chaired in trigger, and for his concept film and the group one electricity and the gaming chair are there) as for yongseung, watching his individual film i get the vibe that he’s got his little special interests and gets bullied for them (collecting the globes) which explains why he’s always holding them, And why he’s so comfortable with his clone. he feels like no one understands him or the things he likes, only his other self would. gyehyeon’s greatest fear is losing people- in the individual film he’s playing bball with a friend who suddenly disappears, in the group video he pushes someone (dh i think?) out of harms way. gyehyeon actually does this a lot (clone gh pushing dh off of km in get away, gh smacking the pills out of mc’s hand in “O”) so i think that’s the core of gyehyeon’s character. kangmin is the youngest, right, the “baby,” i think he resents being babied (see how he gets carded in the “O” mv) and feels like he can handle himself. he may also be dealing w some mental health shit. but he kind of has this attitude of “if i kill myself at least this Thing goes down with me” about his clone okay this is a LOT i’m so sorry to your followers

-vrvr anon

my followers can deal with it this is fun as SHIT

im assuming from this ask that u saw the post i made about random vrvr lore thoughts but im gonna link it here just in case anyway . but now that thats over with i just gotta say fucking HELL bro

i rly need to watch their individual concept films lol... but from what ive seen in mvs and such gyehyeon's fear/dark side being losing people makes a lot of sense and also gives me a lot of feelings, with him knocking the pills out of minchan's hand in O, knocking dongheon out of the way of the car in the concept film... and so on (maybe his "dark side" is being obsessively controlling/overprotective of the people close to him to ensure he doesn't lose them?). yongseung's "dark side" being him being made fun of for his interests/looked down on by others for them also makes a shitton of sense-- i noticed in lay back that out of all the vrvr boys and their clones, he seemed the most intrigued by his? like they were a little competitive in the whole dancing scene but in a really friendly/playful way? esp with how the clone (?i think?) nodded at the original ys sort of in approval before doing his own little dance.

and YEAH kangmin... in undercover we do see all the guys fighting/going up against their clones in some way, but its mostly just physical fighting (punching, wrestling, etc) meanwhile kangmin full-on shoots himself AND his clone, killing/otherwise incapacitating them both. that brings to mind whatever the hell is going on with that gorgeous shot where both kangmins are floating in the sky between the two cities—from that, and also from all the other stuff weve seen with them (how kangmin's clone was the first to appear in tag tag tag and how it seems to be the most malicious/active of all the clones), it sort of seems to me like kangmin and his clone are the "link" between the two veriverys, and the ones that started the whole thing in the first place. maybe kangmin was the one to trigger the clones' appearance somehow? idk

okay im kind of just gonna be throwing paint at a wall now because i went back to my lore post and had some Thoughts. kangmin being the "link" between the two vrvrs would also make sense with the thunder mv in mind-- that mv seems sort of like a prequel to me, maybe going back in time slightly to whatever happens to kangmin to start all the clone shit-- either that or it shows the first time shit REALLY starts going down with the clones, ie: the first time the two vrvrs get really, irreversably linked (kangmin going missing could be something the kangmin clone is pulling on him, and i cant help but think that the lightning explosion that happens to him at the end of the mv is the "trigger" of sorts to the two vrvr's convergence). and now im gonna start REALLY throwing paint at a wall with no direction-- because im just thinking about what the "school kills" jacket in undercover could mean. maybe kangmin's whole thing is related to people around him (ie classmates, ie school) hurting him and making him hate himself? idk.

#asks #anon 📝 #vrvr anon #vv #vrvr lore #shits getting SPICY

[ramzawrites]

BigBrother!Dream and Reader - Answers

GN

Pairings: none

Characters included: Quackity, (mentioned) Dream

Warnings: spoilers for Quackity’s newest stream (The visit), blood mention, hinted at violence, cursing

Series: A small drabble since that stream didn’t let me sleep and it is my attempt to calm down my mind

Summary: Y/N found Quackity covered in blood near El Prapids and they needed to know what happened but he refuses to answer.

Words count: 1012

Authors Note: It’s just something really small and simple since that stream absolutely destroyed me, after this I will concentrate on requests again! I just needed a way to somehow deal with the new lore.

„What are you doing? “ Y/N’s voice was wavering. Barely audible between the hard pitter patter of the heavy rain.

Somewhere lightning struck, soon followed by thunder.

Quackity standing on a bridge. His clothes disheveled. Bloody. The only emotions readable on his face was that of determination. His eyes dark and filled with a kind of malice that made Y/N shiver.

He wasn’t looking at Y/N but instead was staring at the wet wood of the bridge. Continuing to watch as the water crashed onto the material.

Y/N was shivering. Was it the rain? The cold? Or was it the fear after all? Both of their hands firmly placed on their biceps. Fingers digging into the flesh, waiting for an answer from the other man.

But he wasn’t talking, nor was he moving. Quackity just continued to stare at the ground.

“Quackity. I know- I know you went into the prison. You visited him. You visited my brother. What- What happened? What are you doing?” Between clattering teeth their desperation came out. Tears running down their face, but it was barely visible beneath the rain.

Last time someone visited their brother, the visitor died.

And now Quackity stood here, covered in blood.

Their fear was that Dream did something horrible again. That he committed another atrocity.

For the longest time Dream managed to keep Y/N away from all the trouble of the SMP. Visiting them whenever he could but one day the visits suddenly stopped. So, they ventured out only to learn that their brother, their only family member whom they loved so much, was the most hated person among the people. A criminal locked up in the maximum prison cell. The residents cheering for his imprisonment.

The people immediately defaulted to distrusting Y/N after learning of their existence and after hearing what has happened over the years, they couldn’t fault them. They understood and yet they wept at night, missing their older brother who used to protect them. Together they built stupid nonsensical builds, trained together, ate together, they grew up alone together.

But after Tommy died and Dream revived him Y/N finally made a decision. They had to visit him. Confront him. Hear the truth from his own mouth.

Before this moment they were simply too scared, felt too hurt and betrayed to be able to stand in front of him. Not strong enough to meet his gaze.

Though after Tommy’s death something in Y/N’s mind changed and they concluded that maybe they could reach him after all. Perhaps they would be the only person to reach Dream. To do something! Anything really. Get to the ground of whatever is happening.

Then they heard that Quackity visited Dream from a very quiet and somber Sam. When he wouldn’t tell them more about it, Y/N ran around hoping to find him.

Which they finally did.

On a bridge next to a half broken down El Rapids.

More lightning followed by thunder that broke up the silence once again and Quackity still refused to talk.

Y/N stepped closer to him, hoping he would finally look at them, but he was steadfast with his gaze to the ground.

“Tell. Me.” While sadness was still audible in their voice, it was clear that this time it wasn’t a question anymore but a demand.

When Quackity still refused, Y/N slowly moved closer to him and one of their trembling hands flew towards his sleeve, trying to gain his attention this way.

As they stood closer to him, they inspected his clothes. Trying to find the wounds. The wounds where his blood was coming from. If Dream caused it, it was their duty to at least try to help him.

But something seemed off. It was a bit difficult to see since his shirt clung to his body due to the rain but there were no visible wounds. There was enough blood on there that it should have beeen visible a little bit, right?

“This-This is not your blood.” Y/N realized. A shocked gasp left their lips, and they took a step back again. Letting go of his sleeve in the process.

Finally, Quackity looked up. His expression hasn’t changed at all. Still determined accompanied by dark and empty eyes.

“You hurt him?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.” His voice was quiet but strong. Whatever he did, he didn’t feel remorse or sad about it. He sounded angry if anything.

It scared Y/N.

Y/N’s brother wasn’t a good person, but he was stuck in a prison. He was paying for his crimes and as far as they have heard his mental health seemed to be rapidly declining.

The idea that Quackity walked into the prison and hurt their brother? While he was in a state where he couldn’t defend himself?

This was unfair.

It was horrible.

Horrific.

After a few moments of shocked silence there was suddenly a soft thud. Followed by another.

Y/N’s fists softly collided with Quackity’s chest in a slow rhythm.

For a moment Quackity looked surprised only to return to his frown as Y/N continued thrumming on his chest with what he assumed were weak attempts of trying to punch him.

“You hurt him.” This time it was a statement.

The punches increased in strength but not by a lot.

“You hurt him!” Y/N cried out between sobs.

With a yell they slammed both their fists down and this time Quackity ended up taking a step back due to the power of it. It didn’t hurt but it was a surprise nonetheless.

“This is all so unfair!” Another soft punch. “Why is this happening” Another one. “Why did he have to do all this horrific shit?” And another “He is my only family! And you hurt him! Why would you do that? He can’t defend himself and I’m too weak to protect him! Why? Quackity, why? Why did it have to end up like this?”

The man took a deep breath in and took a second to look into Y/N’s crying face.

“Because he wouldn’t give me the information I needed. Simple as that.”

#mcyt x reader #mcyt reader insert #mcyt fanfiction #mcyt x Y/N #dream smp reader insert #dream smp fanfiction #dream smp x reader #dsmp reader insert #dsmp fanfiction #dsmp x reader #quackity dsmp #quackity #dreamwastaken dsmp #dreamwastaken #dreamwastaken smp #quackity smp #ramza writes

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

I'd love to hear more about What If…Sigyn Joined the Avengers!

Sorry it took me so long to get to this! I'm not taking any new request right now. This is just me clearing out my asks/drafts for my own mental health.

This is an answer to this post I made...oh God, back in October

So this is what I've got if Sigyn came down to Earth instead of Thor to bring Loki back to Asgard

First of all, grand entrance would have to change, she's not flying down onto the wing of a plane and yeeting Loki out of there without so much as an explanation

New entrance, great beam of light right into the middle of the fight in Germany knocking everyone back; Sigyn steps out of the Bifrost and Loki is immediately taken aback. Tony, Steve, and Natasha all kind of pause at the new arrival as she announces herself as Princess Sigyn of Asgard and she is there to take Loki back to Asgard to face trial for his crimes. Loki already feeling betrayed by her and sensing an opportunity loudly proclaims her as his wife which gets the rest of the Avengers immediately suspicious. Sigyn magically binds Loki, making sure he stays put as she tries to appease the rest of the team. Tony isn't having it and fires the first shot, starting an all out brawl between her and the rest of the team.

Ends in a stale mate with Steve acting as the middle man between Sigyn and Tony; Steve is able to see in the fight that Sigyn is pulling her punches while Tony and Natasha attack and sees she's not a threat

They all get on the plan to the helicarrier with Loki in tow, allowing time to talk things out somewhat

Sigyn takes the time to try and have a one on one conversation with Loki, but is hindered as Loki is trying to keep up a facade in front of Steve and Tony, not really allowing them to have an honest private conversation; all the same Sigyn tries to plead her case, telling him that she did mourn even if those around her thought her foolish to do so

Once they get to the helicarrier Sigyn gets an opportunity to talk with the rest of the Avengers

Tony still doesn't trust her, Steve is cautious, but more open, Natasha definitely doesn't trust her, and Bruce is in the same boat as Steve since she hasn't done anything to hurt the team

Either A) she's trying to help Tony and Bruce in the lab using her knowledge of Asgardian technology or B) she's trying to get Nick Fury to allow her to talk to Loki without the cameras on; "You're his audience and right now he's playing a very specific part and refuses to break character so long as he's on stage. Let me at least try to pull him off stage."

Things go to shit as Clint attacks the ship

Either A) Sigyn goes off to try and take care of the Hulk, attempting to put him to sleep with her magic. She is successful for the most part until either SHIELD agents or some of Clint's guys come in shooting, waking Hulk's anger once more leading to the Hulk jumping out of the ship and crash landing. Sigyn then goes below to try and keep Loki from escaping. They battle, each trying to get the other back into the cell. Loki gets the upper hand, pushing her in, but notably doesn't try to go for the release button, instead warning her to stay put. (First hint we get that Loki doesn't actually want her dead)

Or B) Sigyn tries to lore the Hulk down below to Loki's cell, using illusions and magic to get him to follow her. She's successful and even pulls Loki out in order to get the Hulk in. For a brief moment they work together. Once he's in there is a pause before Sigyn magics a pair of cuffs to one of the poles and a fight between her and Loki begin while Hulk rages in his cage. At some point in the fight the button gets pushed and Hulk is thrown out. In the confusion Sigyn also starts falling. Loki reaches out to grab her, but misses and we get the first look that he's actually worried about her.

If we go with option A) Sigyn is there for the first bit of the final battle with Tony and Steve, if B) Hulk catches her mid fall and they both crash land, leading to her and Bruce having a moment before taking a motorcycle into the city (she can't fly so it'll have to do)

Either way, Sigyn knows she will have to fight Loki, but still want to try one final time to talk to him

Big battle ensues; Sigyn eventually makes it to the top of Stark tower for a final show down with Loki

They circle each other, Sigyn trying one final time to talk Loki to stop what he's doing

"You could run," Sigyn pleaded. "Shut down the portal. They'll be too distracted to see where you've gone. I'll say you knocked me unconscious. There will be questions, but I'll find you and we'll go."

"Where?"

"Anywhere," she promised. "Anywhere you want. We'll find a place where nobody knows our names and start over. Please. If you have any love for me left..."

"I do love you, but I've gone to far to do anything else."

Final fight between them ensues ending with Sigyn temporarily tied up while Loki makes a retreat

Rest of the movie happens, Sigyn gets some chances to fight with the rest of the Avengers, portal closes, Loki is captured and they both head back to Asgard

And that's all I got. If any of you are interested if what she might do in the other Avengers movies with this set up, let me know!

#sigyn #loki #logyn #loki x sigyn #marvel #mcu #the avengers #avengers (2012)

[smol-nevi]

I don't generally make this kind of thing a habit, but I think if you happen to be on the Crystal RP Discord, aka @crystal-rp-ffxiv, you should probably be aware of this kind of behavior, so here goes.

If you're on Crystal RP and the admin team decides they don't like you, you're going to be living under a microscope while they wait for you to mess up, if not bait you, probably while making up conspiracies about you as well. As for how I know this, I was a moderator for about a week's duration and saw it first-hand.

Unapologetically lengthy post. Receipts in the link above, long version below the cut.

From the first time I looked in the mod chat I knew something was wrong. I read backwards in the channel, thinking I'd acclimate myself and see what kind of rules precedents had been set and that sort of thing. I mostly just found out that they had it out for a particular member (at the time using the name Jericho) for not much reason. They'd spent a troubling amount of time over the past few months watching him and another member like vultures, believing them to be the same person and waiting for them to make some kind of mistake that would justify banning both of them...despite keeping different schedules, having different personalities and typing habits, and visibly being two different people. The admin team had come to the conclusion that Jericho was a troll who wanted to make them look bad, and anything he said or did was scrutinized to a ridiculous degree for evidence that would corroborate their belief.

Except none of the things they believed at all were true: he'd had a minor argument via DM with the head admin Benjimir Thursby's wife, Tessariel Aerlinn, who had made an overly broad statement about anime and Asian culture. Jericho had told her that overgeneralization about 'Asian culture' is potentially racist, and she became extremely angry, saying that because she's Asian, she can't be racist against Asians. After that, it seemed that Jericho was considered fair game for whatever retaliatory actions the two of them could justify.

Even a cursory glance at actual racism in Asia pokes Tessariel's statement entirely full of holes, and having personally read the conversation I didn't see anything actually inaccurate in his statement even if she believed it didn't apply to her. I asked what he had done that would merit such a response, because it felt very disproportionate to anything I'd ever seen him do publicly, and that was what I was told. The exchange via DMs had been screencapped and kept in a channel for evidence, and while I didn't get a copy of it, I did read it, and I said that I thought it sounded awfully one-sided and punitive and would have been much better as an actual conversation. I also expressed that I was concerned how much of the channel had been solely devoted to what was basically a witch hunt, considering that some of the server members had over the course of the past couple of months commented that the admins' behavior towards Jericho seemed biased.

I basically got a pat on the head and told that my opinion was "valued" but wrong. This would happen a lot over the course of the week.

Shit continued to escalate. Their favorite punching bag, who was acutely aware of the grudge by now and probably trying to be nice and discuss something that he thought they could all talk about, brought up some articles that stated that LOTRO might be having a graphical overhaul. This actually ended in him being put into some kind of time-out mute, because "everyone knows those articles are debunked already" despite them still being hosted on reputable games news sites. Back-channel, the admin consensus was that he was in fact trying to bait Benjimir and Tessariel into somehow looking stupid in public, because [paraphrasing] 'he knows how important LOTRO is to them.'

Benjimir in fact went off publicly about how he knows the dev team and they sent him 'personalized swag' for 'being himself' and that everyone should just listen to him because he's right. Someone else made a reasonable request for sources on statements that Benjimir made about the LOTRO improvements not happening, and they immediately became the team's private #2 punching bag.

The whole time I reiterated that this was really uncomfortable and I had serious concerns about the way they were handling Jericho. And as always I received a pat on the head and was told to not worry about it, there were really good reasons for it, really. He was 'bringing down the quality of discourse' on the server somehow. Benjimir decided that the only way he would unmute Jericho is if Jericho talked directly to him, and that Jericho tried to talk to any of the more level-headed members of the team first was taken as obvious evidence that he wanted to evade rules and create problems. I asked when we planned to unmute him, and Tessariel immediately jumped to the conclusion that he had messaged me, which wasn't incorrect but the way she worded it felt highly accusatory and I was beginning to feel that I was also in trouble somehow for not agreeing with the rest of the team.

Things came to a head quickly when I woke up and looked at the mod chat and they were having an animated conversation that started with Benjimir asking if it was 'bad that he was laughing at Jericho' and most of the rest of the team talking about how he was stupid, uninformed, a troll, etc. for the sin of having some misgivings about cryptocurrency, of all the things. One of the mods self-described their behavior as bullying. I said that this was extremely unprofessional and that I thought they should keep conversation to actual moderation matters, and if they had a personal disagreement with a server member they should handle it in a personal venue, not via official server moderation channels.

I was, for the final time, patted on the head, and told that this was not something they would consider, because the moderation team 'needs to be able to vent for their mental health' (never mind that the job was not stressful except for the rest of the team committing worse behavior than the server members) and that maybe I was in fact too sensitive for the job. Benjimir heavily implied that I had become too close to Jericho and was being manipulated, managed to misgender me somehow despite my having used solely male or neutral pronouns the entire time I'd been on the server, and after relating a story in which a couple of years ago a well-liked moderator left after having the same complaints as I did (which he saw nothing at all troubling about), suggested that I should be demoted to babysitting the lore channel.

So I took some time to collect receipts, which are linked at the top of the post, and told him where to shove it.

Since that time, things have actually somehow gotten worse on Crystal RP. Benjimir posted an entire page screed vaguely talking about "rampant negativity" that stated anyone with questions should DM him.

Upon DMing him with questions, Jericho was banned, the only reason given being that he was a 'poor fit' for the server in some vague way. I was immediately banned afterwards for calling out this decision as being driven by a personal vendetta in the feedback channel and let him know afterwards via DMs in no uncertain terms that I had logged everything I needed and would be building my case (and that he is an asshole). Jericho was reinstated, though I'm not sure what the conditions of his return were as that was after my ban and I didn't ask since I didn't want to stress him out further. Benjimir also reprimanded someone for discussing asexuality, stating in a DM to them that the conversation was somehow ERP related. I called him out on this via DM as well. Tessariel was not much later caught posting my last DMs to Benjimir in an entirely unrelated server, though she didn't include the part after that where I brought up his aphobia (during Pride Month, in a server with a rainbow icon no less). Benjimir for some reason decided to suddenly start following my FC's Tumblr well after our falling-out.

And as of today (6/24), Crystal RP now has seven pages of draconian rules, because it wasn't micromanaged hard enough before or something. Notably, a lot of these rules describe behaviors that they wanted to punish Jericho for but couldn't at the time justify, or that they'd like to punish me for but have nothing they can do to me. Or they exist to justify their own behavior, as now seen in the very beginning of the channel:

"This approach also provides our volunteers with leeway to act in good faith without the burden befitting a professional occupation."

"So we afford them the means to speak openly, vent, lament, candidly and yes, sometimes crassly and raw about everything and one."

Not only did they behave unprofessionally and shit-talk before, they have now encoded in the rules that this is acceptable and even good moderator behavior, because they saw someone else do it so it's fine (a lot of this wording is very similar to what I was told when I protested it). So rather than address anything I ever said past or present, Benjimir is choosing to double down and giving himself and his team explicit permission to be shitty, right in the opening paragraphs where you'd have expected a mission statement or at least some sort of welcome.

Which is about all you need to know about that server and its owners, in my estimation. I'd considered not even posting to Tumblr about it, but given that it's only getting worse, I think it should be generally known that this is how you can expect to potentially be treated.

#FFXIV #FFXIV RP #Crystal Data Center #Crystal RP #Balmung RP #Mateus RP #on one hand it's drama on the other I can and will call a spade a spade or in this case a douchebag a douchebag #this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows me even a little

[lnterjection]

Sleepy Bois Inc and DSMP Fanfic Recs

Uhhh I realized I have a ton of stuff in my bookmarks list and might as well compile a list of favorites because I’m always looking for good fanfics, and this might help some people. Most of these are SBI, though a few focus on things other than their dynamic with each other. Nothing explicit here. Feel free to suggest more recs. 

Fics set in DSMP universe/about DSMP (One-shots first, then longer fics):

One-shots and series of one-shots-

therein lies the madness by sapphicist - 2095 words. Currently says it’s one chapter out of three complete, but can be read as a standalone one-shot. Nice introspective fic on Tommy’s exile and his parallels with Theseus. In 2nd person, but it’s actually done nicely. Mostly angsty, can have hopeful interpretation depending on how you look at it. 

crazy how life goes on without me (2090 words, one-shot) by itisjosh - What if Ghostbur did remember everything, and just pretended to be clueless and vapid? Made me cry. It’s so good. Tortured my heart. 

the inner mechanism of a black box (13521 words, one-shot) by Bee_4 - only work of a series called “system theory”. “Technoblade lets himself get imprisoned for Philza’s sake. He doesn’t plan on being there long. Unfortunately, he’s underestimated Pandora’s Vault. There are things that will make even the Blade fall apart in due time, as it turns out.” Yeah so Techno’s mental health goes out the window in this one and its written brilliantly. There’s comfort at the end, if it helps? 

A State For One Man Is No State At All (5247 words, two-shot) by angstfortheangstgod - “A different version of the festival, in which Dream shows up unarmed, the Community House is left intact, a traitor is executed, and Tommy doesn't betray Technoblade.” Ranboo centric. Angst and comfort. 

All the Kings Men series by MollyPollyKinz - “After Ghostbur's suggestion to do Lads on Tour, Tommy finds himself reunited with his family. However, escaping from Dream is going to be harder than anyone previously thought.” A connected series of one-shots and short fics about Tommy, his exile, his family, and escaping Dream. Well written, good characterization, great studies into the characters themselves.

ad astra per aspera series by cacowhistle - Collection of one-shots that start with Tommy’s exile and expand to be about SBI and their dynamic with each other, including a resurrected Wilbur. Really, really well written and probably my favorite of the “Tommy exile fic groups”. 

the fall of a hero series by cracklesnaple - “After being threatened with being exiled yet again, Tommy takes the decision into his own hands. If those around him can't see that he's given up everything to make this nation what it is, then he's not sure he can stay in L'Manburg any longer.” Series about SBI and mainly Tommy, eventually crossing over into Mianite territory in a way some might enjoy and some might now. Writing’s good, though, which is what I care about.

Longer fics-

Rewind (101002 words, 25 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by Anonymous - Best time travel fix-it fic I’ve ever read period. Tubbo and Tommy travel 10 years back from a very messed up future to the first L’Manberg election. Concept may seen a bit weird at first but trust me, holy fuck this is amazing. 

second chances (hurt the most) (8841 words, 4 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by Anonymous - “Wilbur wakes up alone in a bloody room, and has to come to terms with living again. (How can he go on, knowing who's blood is on his hands?)”. Amazing fic where resurrection requires someone else’s life as sacrifice. Phil is dead. Wilbur struggles to come to terms with his father’s decision, and his second chance. 

all scotch, no soda (47466 words, 43 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 14 2021) by fishstixx - “Vulnerability meant trust, though, and trust was a thing not so easily given. Post-exile and canon divergent, follows the consequences of Tommy’s isolation. Expect chases, heists, bloodshed, and the mending of a family.” Features raccon hybrid Tommy being badass, and I live for it. I really, really love this one. 

DON’T FORGET THAT ICARUS FLEW. (16426 words, 6/10 chapters, last updated Jan 1. 2021) by orpheusaki - “The day before and the days that follow Tommy's exile; told through the eyes of The Blood God.” Techno (and Dream) is a god, and gods often forget how the intricacies of the minds of mortals. He’s trying to get better, however. 

what do you fall for? (16374 words, complete) by tablrcloth - Ranboo centric fic with Techno, Phil and Tommy. Ranboo realizes that playing L’Manberg’s politics is less than ideal for him. What can I say, it’s just really good. 

Breathing’s Just a Rhythm (12631 words, 6 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by MollyPollyKinz - “Tommy, Tubbo, Jschlatt, and Dream all end up in the past. (Oh, and the Chat comes too).” Great time travel fic. 

What World Have We Inherited? (73635 words, 12 chapters, unfinished and last updated on Dec 22 2020) by Anonymous (this one has a series with all their works, and they’re all AMAZING). Holy fuck this one is probably one of my favorite fics in the fandom so far. “Wilbur blows everything to hell on the day of the Manburg festival, just like he wanted. When the ashes settle, it's just Tommy and Technoblade. It's not good, but it's better than nothing. It's just them, healing up in a world that never wanted them.” Amazing characterization, worldbuilding, everyone’s internal thoughts are portrayed and written so well. Even if it never updates again I would keep coming back to it. I rec this Anon’s works so much. 

In June, I Changed My Tune (29489 words, 6 chapters, unfinished and last updated on Jan 6 2021) by KryOnBlock - Eret runs away and eventually becomes friends with Techno. Nice cottagecore aesthetic. I have mixed feelings about this one - the writing’s good, descriptions and characterizations are really good. Just that there’s consistent punctuation mistakes and it takes me out of the world a bit. Everything else is good enough for me to continue reading, however. 

stay with him (24353 words, 12 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 9 2021) by junipersand - I especially rec the first chapter, which can be read (and originally was) a standalone fic with the summary “Every ghost had a purpose to fulfill. So what was Tommy’s?” Utterly heartwrenching, probably the most emotionally gut-punching bit of writing I’ve ever read in this fandom. It continues with other lore stuff afterwards that eventually branch off from just SBI and Tommy, but man. I don’t think I can ever forget that first chapter. 

I’m not angry at you, well, sometimes I am (52801 words, 16 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 14 2021) by sircantus - After Tommy is exiled, he runs away to Techno’s house instead of going off with Dream. SBI decide some revenge and “world domination” is in order. 

Fics set in AUs outside DSMP happenings:

One-shots and series of one-shots-

Empty Crowns AU by UnderUrsa - the SBI + Tubbo are gods, and a family. Series of one-shots. Nicely written, what can I say? Some angst, some fluff.

Secure, Contain, Protect AU by blue000jay - Amazingly written SCP AU. Knowledge of the SCP universe would help with understanding some more meta things, but is not needed to understand most of it. Some angst, disturbing themes around memories but nothing terribly gory.

CLASSIFIEDS. (13804 words, finished). SCP pages on SBI, short stories and audio transcriptions as well as files, lots of good lorebuilding here. Features an escape, + Tubbo!

CONFIDENTIALS. (13232 words, finished). Centers on Dream Team.

ARCHIVES. (1270 words, one-shot). What happened after SBI and Tubbo’s escape from the SCP foundation.

old gods (new gods) AU by WriterWinged - the relatively well known SBI gods AU. Amazingly written, great character interpretations. 

the gods are cruel (none crueler then you) (1394 words, one-shot) - As much the grammatical mistake in the title hurts me it’s no doubt one of the best pieces of work in the fandom. 

and yet they find kindness (and so do you) (2/4 chapters posted) - continuation of “the gods are cruel”. 

there’s a risk to the world (but the kindest are strongest) (2/3 chapters posted) - continuation of “the gods are cruel”. 

SBI Antarctic Princes AU by ScripWriter -  One of several Antarctic Empire AUs, this one just has these two preliminary one-shots but they’re nice bits of fun and neatly written. All fluff and mild hurt with lots of comfort so far. 

Younger Holding On Another (1781 words, one-shot). Techno is a good brother and reassures and newly adopted Tommy. 

But Oh, Don’t You Know How It Goes (2511 words. one-shot). Tommy, Techno, and Wilbur have some “fun” at a boring gala. Phil is very exasperated. 

Antarctic Princes ‘verse AU by BirchWrites - AU where Techno, Tommy, and Wilbur are princes of the Antarctic Empire (well, Techno’s technically the emperor now), but this time the events of DSMP still happen (at least up to the 1st season).

Homeward bound for the arctic ground (10562 words, one-shot). Wilbur and Tommy travel to the Antarctic Empire in person to ask Techno for help in fighting Schlatt. Good worldbuilding and acknowledges Wilbur’s beginnings of insanity while still being rather light.

Surprise Hugs (2542 words, one-shot). Dream doesn’t realize Tommy is Techno’s brother and thinks he’s going to get killed for tackling the infamous Blood God.

Family Reunions (1396 words, one-shot). Fundy never realized he’s loyalty and Techno informs him unexpectedly.

Longer fics-

leave me your starlight (14620 words, 4 chapters, unfinished and last updated Jan 11 2021) by findingkairos - “Once upon a time, Philza Minecraft is the only person who does not shy away from the bloody teen that regularly turns the tide of war. This cements a friendship that will last wars, empires, worlds, and lifetimes.“ Amazing backstory fic on Phil and Techno’s relationships, one of my absolute personal favorites. Very well written and really digs into the intricacies of Techno’s character (or an interpretation of it, but hey, that’s what all fanfiction is).

I was a kid in a village, doing alright, then I became a prince overnight (21736 words, 5 chapters, last updated Jan 13 2021) by sircantus - another Antarctic princes AU, this time centering on 16 year old Tommy catching the attention of Phil, Techno, and Wilbur after thwarting an assassination attempt. Really well written. Actually, I rec all of sircantus’ SBI stuff because they do amazing work.

antarctic adage (26591 words, 4/7 chapters posted, last updated Jan 13 2021) by blue000jay - Another very well written Antarctic princes AU with Emperor/ruler Phil. Are we seeing a pattern yet? blue000jay is another writer I’d rec, with really great SBI stuff.

a renewal of faith, and of family (56684 words, 31 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 13 2021) by SolivangantStories - One of the only fics here that doesn’t feature SBI, this one is Tubbo and Dream centered. Basically, the DSMP!Tubbo is executed by Schlatt and wakes up in a world where Manhunt!Dream is trying not to die and is also actually a nice person, to Tubbo’s surprise and confusion. Not SBI and technically not even DSMP, but it’s really good so I’ve decided to rec it anyway.

#dream smp #sleepy bois inc #sbi #fanfiction #fanfic recs #dsmp #technoblade #wilbur soot #philza #tommyinnit #tubbo #dream #ranboo #feel free to suggest more recs #sbi fanfic recs #sbi fanfic

[honey-sunsets]

I posted 4,360 times in 2021

121 posts created (3%)

4239 posts reblogged (97%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 35.0 posts.

I added 1,994 tags in 2021

#ranboo fanart - 441 posts

#tubbo fanart - 295 posts

#tommyinnit fanart - 246 posts

#philza fanart - 175 posts

#wilbur fanart - 174 posts

#technofanart - 156 posts

#visual wiggle time tag - 149 posts

#quackity fanart - 128 posts

#bee duo - 120 posts

#watch later - 110 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#there’s not one clip nor bit of a stream i’ve caught that i’ve watched and thought ‘oh he’s just building something for shits and giggles’

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Dream SMP lore things that feel very overlooked:

When Techno was shooting fireworks at Tommy during the Doomsday war, Tubbo jumped in front of Tommy and punched at the fireworks momentarily before they both died.

An untitled book reading “Careful. Remember what happened last time?” was left in Tubbo’s mailbox outside his Snowchester house. It’s still unknown who wrote the book or what they were referring to. Ranboo found it on February 24, right before he was approached by Techno, Phil, and Niki to join the Syndicate. This book was a major motivator for Ranboo joining the Syndicate.

Karl voluntarily lost a canon life in a planned explosion set up by El Rapids in an attempt to get recognized as a country and to frame Eret as an unfit ruler (as George and Sapnap were both upset by George’s dethronement).

Jack Manifold was able to continue living for roughly an hour after his third canon death before falling through the prime path into Hell (in game, this was a glitch that caused him to fall out of the world) and being revived with all three canon lives renewed.

Eret was at one point involved in the Karlnapity polycule, as they were engaged to Karl and Quackity.

It appears Karl was the one who ratted out Eret, informing Dream that they were in support of Pogtopia and thus causing Dream to confront and dethrone them. However, I couldn’t find enough information on this to say with any confidence if that’s really what happened.

The day after the Manberg Festival, Wilbur led Tommy and Quackity to his button room and threatened to detonate the TNT then and there. Tommy and Quackity tried to talk him down, break the button, and create a barricade, all to no avail. Tommy then sealed off the exit to the button room and told Wilbur that if he detonated the TNT now, all three of them would go down with Manberg. Wilbur finally yielded, as he didn’t want to hurt Tommy or Quackity.

Wilbur’s mental health appears to have been poor even before the L’Manberg Independence War, and was on the decline long before he lost the election. During his presidency, he claimed to scream and cry into his pillow, displayed trust issues, and appeared to have been deeply changed by his experiences in war.

Before his time on the SMP, Ant was in a romantic relationship with Red, who is now deceased. Ant was motivated to become and remain loyal to the Egg by it promising to give him Red back. The empty seat next to Ponk at the Red Banquet with a cake in an item frame was a reference to Red.

Punz is responsible for two of Wilbur’s canon deaths, killing him in the Final Control Room and again on Schlatt’s orders after the announcement of the election results.

Despite travel to the End realm being prohibited on the server, Quackity was shown to be in possession of an elytra when he first encountered Slimecicle on May 22. We do not know how or when he obtained it.

Bad invited Sapnap, his son, to the Red Banquet, telling him at the end of their brief meeting in Kinoko Kingdom that it would be “a party to die for”. Given this and the events that transpired at the Banquet, it can be assumed Bad may have been planning to kill his own son as a sacrifice to the Egg.

231 notes • Posted 2021-07-06 19:02:39 GMT

#4

Shoutout to the one time I tried tell my dad a story about me stimming but I didn’t want to use the word “stimming” so my brain graciously supplied the phrase “my body declared it wiggle time.”

So now whenever I stim, I know that my body has once again declared

✨wiggle time✨

256 notes • Posted 2021-01-16 21:07:51 GMT

#3

Ranboo and Tubbo together in MCC are either going to have some awe-inspiring telepathic communication and skillfully power through the tournament or they’re going downhill fast and taking the team with them in the most entertaining way possible and I’ve got no idea which it’ll be.

271 notes • Posted 2021-07-14 18:44:32 GMT

#2

I’ve concluded that the Sanders Sides fandom is a bunch of fuckin cicadas.

I go months without seeing a single post, or even a mention, a glimpse of content. The whole fandom just ceases to exist like it was never even there in the first place.

Then one video comes out and the Sanders Sides tag is number one on trending.

374 notes • Posted 2021-11-15 05:01:25 GMT

#1

I was under mild peer pressure to post this.

(This is not meant to be Sanders Sides or Thomas Sanders hate)

561 notes • Posted 2021-02-12 16:34:44 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #year in review #here I am complaining every day that there isn’t enough Quackity fanart out there and yet I got 128 of them suckers #I’m very proud of my collection of stim posts (visual wiggle time) #anyway I guess you could say I’m a bench trio enthusiast

[orange-waterfalls]

Reader w/wings hc's p.2: lesser- known egos/egos i just didn’t wanna put in the last one

ty @fancybootm for the request!

A/N: IT’S BEEN A WHOLE ASS MONTH SINCE I GOT THIS I AM SO FUCKING SORRY. school is suck. anyways. my brain convinced itself that I had to have the same amount of egos in this one as the last one so shit's long again. I had a bit of trouble but scrounged up enough of them. uhhh I don't... we don't really know a lot? about the personalities of these ones? so I just went with what I thought. for Heistiplier, I like to think Mark in AHWM and ADWM is a completely separate person from Actor. Like until we get to the Actor timeline he is a separate person altogether. Night Guard Mark is like mark from the fnaf musical because i can and fuck you. the egos are very random and from many lesser known videos so uh. you might not know all of them. I didn’t even know all of them at first. some of these fuckers annoy me to no end so I had to make them more likable for my own sanity cjfufydy. I only skimmed through after I wrote so it might suck lol. Uh rated T for cursing. Mentions of religion and mental health. Enjoy!

Y/N(reader) w/ wings headcanons p.2

Ed Edgar saw you as a profiting opportunity.

Bastard only uses you for commercials at first

Wings sell shit, don’t they? Kids are into wings these days?

One day you get pissed and just punch him

He respects you after that…

He’s very loud, of course, and your ears tend to be sensitive

He tries to quiet down when he sees you make a face

It’s difficult because that… that’s just his normal volume

He talks about his son sometimes. Not to you specifically

He gets sad… you still don’t completely understand what happened.

Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t either

You instinctively wrap your wings around him for Safety and Comfort

He is a MAN who DOES NOT CRY but goddammit, he was close 

He enjoys your company

The Silver Shepherd thought he was gonna rescue you

He’s a superhero, he HAS to save you, right?

Nah, you’re the one saving him more often than not

He tries not to be jealous, but goddamn

Your wings are just. So big. And pretty

He’ll complain to you about his girlfriend “cheating” on him

You know the bullshit he pulls, but you listen because why not

He appreciates that you at least pay a little bit of attention

He doesn’t do a whole lot of hero work, but he usually brings you along

Just for a bit of extra support

More often than not, you’re doing most of the work

You let him believe he did something, though

You boost his very low ego, and so you get along

Derek Derekson was a little bitch

Also saw you as a profiting opportunity

Yelled sometimes when you messed up

You took deep breaths and tried to stay calm the first few times

Then you snapped, calling him a variety of... words...

He stopped yelling at you, but not much else changed

You got along well with Eric, and he appreciated you for that

He does care about his only living son, at least a little

You two don’t… talk a lot

He’ll watch you from afar, occasionally

You constantly encourage him to TALK TO HIS CHILD and GO TO THERAPY

You still don’t like him, and he feels the same way

But he’s… trying

Randall Voorhees thought you were badass

He wasn’t as used to magic and weird shit as the others

You were absolutely awesome to him

He’d never seen an angel before!

Even though he didn’t really KNOW that you were an angel

He just assumed and refused to change his mind

Harder to hide you wings in crowded cities, like where he lives

You spend a lot of your time with him cooped up in his apartment

He felt bad, so he rents a mountain cabin up in Albany whenever you visit

You two ski and snowboard look me in the eyes and tell me the bitch isn’t a snowboarder

He’s a construction worker, so he’s usually busy

You visit him on his lunch break sometimes.

The other workers claim to see you, but he’ll always deny it

He buys a pizza whenever you visit and you eat it together

You two are so cute it’s sickening

Yandereplier claimed you as their new senpai

They saw you, you had wings, you were nice

And now you are Senpai

You aren’t sure why you get a weird feeling whenever they call you this

Luckily, you don’t have many friends, at least none that they could kill…

They showed you their weapon collection to impress you

You were scared and also impressed

They take you to a cherry blossom tree near their house

You talk and hang out and eat lunch

They don’t call you senpai anymore and they talk to you normally

And you no longer stare at the blood on their uniform

Night Guard Mark prayed you wouldn’t try to kill him

He might have PTSD from Freddy Fazbear’s

Those animatronics left a mark…

It took a little while for him to trust you not to harm him

When he did, HOO BOY is he a chatterbox

He has so many theories about the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Chain

Dark’s told you not to talk about the actual lore. It might break his spirit

You get very worried sometimes

He looks like that one picture of Charlie Day. You know the one.

Sometimes he gets panic attacks

You wrap him in a cocoon of your limbs and wings to ground him

He likes you for that

You hang out, playing games and watching movies. No horror. Absolutely NONE

You can handle him, and he likes you

Dr. Plier was curious about you

He wondered how you felt about… everything

He asked if you were ok one day and you broke down

He felt guilty and bought you ice cream

He sees you as a sort of… psychological experiment

Like he asks you very strange and slightly personal questions

Ok, very personal, but he’s a therapist, what can you do

He eventually stopped the interrogation and talked to you normally

You get along fine, but it’s kind of the same situation as Dr. Iplier

Chef Iplier wasn’t really all that phased

You were surprised by this because… well… wings

But he just… treats you normal, for the most part.

Sometimes he’ll pet your wings, but only if you let him

He loves how soft your feathers are

He doesn’t make that his entire perception of you

It’s a nice change of pace

He tries to cook for you sometimes, but uh. It doesn’t go well

You’re still confused as to how someone can set a glass of water on fire

You mostly just order take out

You hang out like normal people

Which neither of you are, but you’re both fine with that

Paranormal Investigator Mark is obsessed with figuring you out

Nearly had a panic attack when he first saw you

He wanted to prove the supernatural exists, but he didn’t have a lot of evidence before

And then your mystical-ass came along

Like the Jims, he tried to get pictures, and they all ended up blurry

He threw a fit over it, and you felt kinda bad

You tried to take the picture yourself but it came out the same

He gave up after a while

He info dumps about paranormal stuff to you

It can last from 5 minutes to 5 hours

You do pay attention though, and that makes him happy

He takes you on investigations sometimes

You don’t do much except break shit with those giant wings of yours

He stopped taking you on investigations

Cooliplier is not sure what to think

You have wings! Great! There’s absolutely nothing he can do about that

Not the most normal, but not the weirdest either

He tends to put on a tough-guy persona around new people

You were a lil intimidated

Then you became friends and mans did a full 180 around you

Went from “Your daughter calls me daddy too” to “I’ll have her home by 9 sir”

His personality is sort of a mix of the two

Catch you both screaming the lyrics to Mr. Brightside at 12:00 am

Took you to a mosh pit once

You got kicked out cause of the wings

He felt bad, but you had fun

He teaches you how to dance and roller skate

You also go for rides on his motorcycle

Once you just started flying while he was driving and it was the most fun shit ever

You’re “buds”, as he often tells you

Goopiplier likes you a lot

They like having another not-completely-human creature to talk to

I mean, some of the others aren’t exactly human…

But they’re not the best conversationalists…

Then again, neither is goop.

They mention the Dark Gods ONCE and suddenly no one wants to talk to them…

But you do!! Yay!!!

You mostly just hang out, do whatever

Watch movies, play games, or just talk

They like to draw you

They’re not very good, but you keep them all anyways

Sometimes they do… rituals. While you’re around

You are… a little scared, but that’s okay!

You have sleepovers and act like teenagers

You mock the others and then giggle, getting louder as you go

They’re not that funny, but you had to be there

Elder Jeremiah is terrified of you

He nearly pissed his pants when he saw you

He thought he was finally going to have to pay for his sins

He started crying, and you panicked

Why the FUCK was this 20-something-year-old well-dressed man crying at you???

He dropped his bike and fell to his fucking knees and begged for forgiveness

You felt very uncomfortable with the whole situation

You told him to get up bc he was dirtying up his pants

He eventually stopped crying and you told him you were not an angel

Also not a demon, as you said when he asked

He avoids you, mostly, still thinking you’re gonna drag him down to hell

He stopped the uh. The stealing since you came around

He will hang around/with you sometimes to see if you “reveal your true form”

You haven’t yet, and never will, BUT WHEN YOU DO, HE’LL BE THERE

He does think you’re very nice, though

Preistiplier thinks you’re an angel sent to assist him

He is doing holy work, it only makes sense that He would send a helper

He was disappointed, to say the least

He then came to the conclusion that you lost your memory of being an angel

You couldn’t exactly dispute it, since you don’t remember

So, he takes you on hunts

You don’t do much except make a bunch of fucking NOISE with your WINGS

He’d hoped you’d smite the demons

Or at least scare them, but they know you’re not an angel

He still takes you on hunts because, he’d never admit it, but he… gets scared

You promised not to tell a soul

You confess your sins to him sometimes

They’re usually not what he considers sins, but he listens anyways

He thinks you are a good person, and he enjoys conversations with you

Heistiplier was just normal around you

Well… as normal as he can be

You’d enjoy his company a lot more if he didn’t have such a god complex

You still like him a lot

He likes you too

Even if you did refuse to rob a bank with him

He’s a very… exciting person

Though you don’t really want to be around him when he gets upset

The entire world literally seems to revolve around what he does

He’s a drama queen, and completely feral

It’s worrying at times

You two are normal friends

Playing video games, watching youtube, etc. etc.

You listen to his stories and wonder how he's not dead yet

But you can admit, he's really fucking funny

#markiplier egos #markiplier alter egos #ed edgar #silver shepard #derek derekson #randall voorhees #yandereplier #fnaf mark #night guard mark #dr plier #chef iplier #paranormal investigator mark #cooliplier #goopiplier #elder jeremiah #preistiplier #heistiplier #dateiplier #x reader headcanons #x reader

[ryttu3k]

Part 2 of my season 12 reaction posts! Find part 1 (Resolution of the Daleks to Fugitive of the Judoon) here!

Praxeus

Thoughts on Doctor Who - Praxeus!

OKAY FIRST. THANK YOU, SHOW, FOR FIXING A BIG ISSUE I HAD WITH THE FIRST SEASON. So they were doing a thing where they’d introduce incidentally queer characters, have a female character mention her wife, stuff like that, only for them to die. This episode had Jake and Adam, married/separated/it’s complicated couple, who face huge amounts of danger, who both come close to dying, but who survive! And have a Big Damn Kiss! And walk off together holding hands! They survived!!

Plotwise, I enjoyed it a ton while watching, although in retrospect it did feel a bit free of danger. The companions were never in true peril because the Doctor can home in on them automatically, and we never got the true scale of the risk of infection, since the only people we saw get infected were in isolated areas. I would have liked to see, for instance, the threat of Praxeus spreading beyond just the very Hitchcockian birds; all of the peril was on an individual level.

Good message, if unsubtle. Mind you, that’s kind of Doctor Who’s thing, and it pisses off conservatives, so all for it, really XD (They must have loved the core relationship in this episode, too!) Like. Subtle doesn’t work. There are literally climate change deniers that exist. Sometimes you actually do have to tell a message with all the finesse of a sledgehammer because .

(Side note, I was deeply concerned when I saw the cowriter was the guy who did the hot mess that was Kerblam!, so at least this was just an unsubtle and kind of questionably written story instead of an actively harmful one.)

The companions: Ryan seems a fair bit more confident on his own? His initial scenes with Gabriela showed that he’s starting to work well even without backup, and picking up the bird proved to be a damn good call. Yaz and Graham were a fun pair, and Yaz got a lot to do when she and Gabriela (again!) got to explore, and I can definitely understand the conflict between curiosity/doing what’s right and safety when it came to the teleport scene. She does seem to be bordering on the reckless. Intriguing!

Minor plot snag - Graham knows how to set up an IV, presumably because of the shitload of time he spent in hospital! …And yet he doesn’t know what a pathogen is?

Friend note!

“fun fact about graham seemingly not knowing what a pathogen is! in my reading of the scene, i saw it as graham knowing what one was. with "Well, I’m glad you asked that…!” he seems like he’s actually sort of pleased with himself, like he’s about to launch into an explanation, and then IIRC there’s a very brief shot at Ryan giving him a Look and Graham immediately changes tone to “…cause I didn’t want to look stupid.” he immediately changes from boosting his own ego to bolstering ryans and im love"

In which case, good shit gooood shit.

SFX - the infection was creepy as shit. The very obviously puppet bird near the lab was hilariously bad.

Apparently the filming was tricky because it was super windy so all the shorts of Thirteen with her hair Like That weren’t planned, it just kind of happened. Love a fluffy ruffled Thirteen.

So anyway. People calling for more plot focus - literally this is the Doctor trying to distract herself and not focus on the plot! This is her avoidance tactic! Emotional honesty? Who’s she? She’ll get back to it eventually, but for now she needs a distraction after being punched in the emotions. Give her that for one episode, c'mon.

Ryan: “…I do a lot of running.”

Graham: “Whatever is giving off those weird readings… is on the other side of that wall!” Yaz: *silently turns scanner around* Graham, not skipping a beat: “…is on the other side of that door!”

Yaz: “I don’t want you to panic, but… we followed one of those things through a teleport and now I think we’re on an alien planet.” Thirteen: “…well, you don’t do things by halves!”

Thirteen: “That’s why you smell of dead bird! I thought you’d changed your shower gel.”

Thirteen: “I’m having half a thought. Ooh, this one tickles!”

Thirteen: “What can I say? I’m a romantic~”

In conclusion, Doctor Who said gay rights.

-

Can You Hear Me?

Thoughts on Doctor Who - Can You Hear Me?

Trigger warning for discussion of depression and suicide.

You know you're in for a wild ride when iView warns for horror themes instead of science fiction themes.

Overall: at first impression, it felt sort of mashed together? There's 14th century Aleppo, and there's 21st century Sheffield, and there's a deep space station, and there's creepy monsters and dream villains; I do kind of wonder why Zellin targeted a random girl in Aleppo as source for his pet monster, although targeting people like Ryan's best friend makes sense if he's deliberately trying to lure the Doctor to him.

The theme, on the other hand, of mental health resiliance and reaching out, was done incredibly well. Oh yeah there'll be more comments about it - the Guardian described it as 'adventures in Wokeness' - but damn, sometimes you need to hear it. I loved getting more of Yaz' backstory, about being a desperate teenage runaway at the point of being suicidal, and her reunion with the older woman legitimately made me tear up.

But like, goddamn. Her nightmare - she's still hearing that. She's still hearing her sister saying that she should "do it right this time" and that this time she won't call and that no one is coming and holy fuck. God this makes so many of Yaz' scenes incredibly painful in retrospect, knowing that she was at that point only three years before and that she's still dreaming that shit! It makes her recklessness terrifying!

Ryan's nightmare, and his experience with Tibo - it's quite reflective of the Doctor, too. She wasn't there, and Gallifrey burnt. And Ryan is realising this now, and really thinking about the potential future in Orphan 55. I think this is absolutely foreshadowing Ryan leaving at the end of the season (there's been a lot of speculation given Tosin's new TV role), and I think Ryan and Yaz' discussion at the end of the episode was a definite hint in the direction of Ryan choosing to going back to Earth.

Would have really liked Graham, during his talk with the Doctor, to gently remind her that she can talk about her own problems, although I can understand the narrative choice on why she didn't (although, yeah, would have been good for Graham to ask). Because, yeah, if anyone needs a sympathetic ear (...sans fingers) or a shoulder to lean on, it's her!! The entire theme of this episode was like... reaching out. Conquering your fears with the help of others. Sharing your fears to lessen them. Getting help. And the Doctor deliberately... not doing that makes it into an actual Thing that I think is going to seriously be addressed by the end of the season.

It's been such an ongoing theme. A bunch of episodes have started with an obviously depressed Doctor. The Fam has tried to raise the issue multiple times and have discussed it amongst themselves even more. Scenes like Yaz' reaction after being abducted in Spyfall (...which makes her, "I thought I was dead" part even more worrying) and being comforted by Ryan, not the Doctor... her whole reaction to Graham being like, "I'm glad you talked to me but I literally can't do the same in return" - if it's not addressed by the end of this season, it's at least going to have to be an ongoing theme, because it's becoming very deliberate now.

An interesting note: the actor who played Zellin (an immortal manipulator of nightmares) also voiced the Remnants (who were the first to mention the Timeless Child in The Ghost Monument). Coincidence or deliberate?

Assorted thoughts:

"I'm still quite socially awkward." There's socially awkward and there's emotionally repressed... (I saw a description of it on Tumblr as 'weaponised dissociation' and... yeah. And also yikes.) Also the way she was so closed in on herself, basically hugging her arms to her body! On a semi-related note, talking to herself in Aleppo was a bit depressing. Like it's continuing the theme of The Doctor Does Not Like Being Alone.

The finger thing - ew ew ew ew it's in their EARS ewww D:

Stylistic comment: the traditionally-styled animation for the Immortals' game was gorgeous.

"Try not freak out, yeah, but you're on a floating space platform trapped in a gravitational pull between two colliding planets."

"Thanks for lending a helping hand!" Companions just being, "...Doctor p l s."

On an old lore note, loved the callback to Eternals, Guardians, and the Toymaker! On a concerning note, man, the Doctor has so many issues with immortals. They abandoned Jack, there was the punishment they gave the Family of Blood, they had those Issues with Ashildr (from what I've read), now this, an eternal punishment with no chance of redemption, perhaps because she knows what immortality does? Parallels with the Doctor as quasi-immortal too, which Zellin even pointed out.

"You're wrong about humans. They're not pathetic. They're magnificent. They live with their fears, doubts, guilt. They face them down everyday and they prevail. That's not weakness. That's strength. That's what humanity is."

(Contrast: "That's what humanity is." The Doctor isn't human. She's not prevailing against her fears, doubts, and guilt.)

In conclusion, literally everyone but the creepy immortals needs a hug.

-

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

Thoughts on Doctor Who - The Haunting Of Villa Diodati!

tfw you think you're just going to get a nice spoopy historical and instead get major plot?

Overall impression: Well, Jack is going to be pretty miffed, given that the Doctor had to do precisely what he didn't want to happen - giving the Lone Cyberman what it wanted. To save Shelley, and also to save the future, although that does bring up the question on if the death of one person can rewrite the future, why doesn't that apply to literally everyone? Fletcher the valet and Elise the nurse died too, do their deaths have the same impact? Either way, the Doctor takes the Cyberium for herself - then realises that the Cybermen are inevitable, and returns it. And now she's trying to go and stop them. So... a bit conflicting in the message there, I think.

Yeah. Bit of a Trolley Problem there.

The characters were really fun. I did enjoy seeing Mary's sense of morbidness, but also her kindness and sympathy towards the Cyberman; you can see the foundations of Frankenstein there. I'm seeing some criticism of how Byron was portrayed as a coward, but eh. Nice little callback to Ada. Also I love how one of the rules was 'no one snog Byron'. Put that dirty boy back, you don't know where he's been! Glad Claire realised that too, although historically, she was already pregnant with his daughter at that point (and that didn't go well at all)... Either way. Good display of all these bright young reckless things.

(And yes, they were young. Byron was the eldest at 28. Shelley was 23, Polidori was 20, Mary and Claire were just 18. And while Claire lived to 80 and Mary to her 50s, the three men all died young, too - Byron at 36, Shelley at 29 - yes, from drowning, Polidori at just 25. Also wasn't mentioned that Polidori also created something on that Dark And Stormy Night along with Mary's Frankenstein - he wrote The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story!)

The Lone Cyberman (and I am deliberately using that instead of 'Ashad') - creepy as shit. Not just the whole Frankenstein look, but the way he acted! Not emotionless and blank, but actively manipulative and sadistic! Mary showed empathy and he actively threw it back in her face! I mean, yikes.

House was terrific and also spooky as hell. (Am lowkey miffed that no one went "VIBE CHECK!") The jumbled layout was quite Castrovalva, and I actually really dig that Graham got to see some actual ghosts. Ghostly sandwiches!

I think we got actual confirmation here that Yaz does have feelings for the Doctor? (Bleeding Cool News is pretty sure that it was for Ryan, but... lmao no.) BBCA twitter certainly thinks so!

Claire: "His answers only increase the enigma." Yaz: "I know someone like that." Claire: "This enigmatic person of yours... would you trade them for reliable and dull?" Yaz: "My person's a bit different..."

I MEAN.

(It got deleted. So. There is that.)

Thirteen: "Hmm. Fourteenth... no. Fifteenth century... touch more umami." (Doctor, have you been playing Detroit: Become Human again?)

Mary: "I don't think they're really from the colonies!" Byron: "No, she... is from somewhere much, much stranger." Polidori: "The North."

Thirteen: "YOU HAD ONE JOB."

Cyberman: "You appear courageous. But your vital signs betray a heightened state of anxiety." Thirteen: "Or as I like to call it... Tuesday."

Thirteen: "Yeah, 'cause sometimes this team structure isn't flat. It's mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere, alone. Left to choose. Save the poet, save the universe. Watch people burn now, or tomorrow. Sometimes even I can't win."

Claire: "You pursued Mrs Doctor without a care for my presence, belittled my thoughts and opinions... and then proceeded to use my person as a human shield." Byron: "...And?" Claire: "And the spell is broken... my lord." Polidori's face: "haha you fucked up dude"

Next week: Shit Hits The Fan.

-

Ascension of the Cybermen

In lieu of a proper post for Ascension of the Cybermen, here are a list of questions we need an answer for.

Will Graham and Yaz survive, on a giant carrier full of Cybermen?

Who is Brendan, and what is his relevance to the story?

What is the Boundary?

How is Gallifrey in the Boundary?

How was the Master in Gallifrey, and not trapped by the Kasaavin?

Who is Ko Sharmus and why am I getting Yana vibes?

Who is Ashad and what is his story? (And why is his theme such a literal banger?)

Is he an actual Cyberman? Because I'm totally getting this impression he's human in armour?

How did Brendan survive being shot, and why did his non-ageing father and mentor do that?

Why did it look like a chameleon arch?

Is Ethan's tech-savvy just warzone familiarity or something more sinister?

Are there any other large human populations left?

Was I detecting a hint of romantic tension between Graham and Ravio?

What's up with Yaz?

Why did the Cyberium get sent to that time period?

Who or what is this alliance Jack is a part of?

How do the Time Lords and the lie of the Timeless Child come into it?

WHO THE FUCK IS BRENDAN?

-

The Timeless Children

WELL THEN.

While I gather proper thoughts on The Timeless Children, here are the questions I had from Ascension of the Cybermen, now with answers!

Will Graham and Yaz survive, on a giant carrier full of Cybermen?

Yup! Disguises for the win!

Who is Brendan, and what is his relevance to the story?

Brendan is a filtered overlay memory of one of the Doctor's former lives.

What is the Boundary?

An anomaly, as far as I can tell.

How is Gallifrey in the Boundary?

No idea!

How was the Master in Gallifrey, and not trapped by the Kasaavin?

No idea!

Who is Ko Sharmus and why am I getting Yana vibes?

A big damn hero.

Who is Ashad and what is his story? (And why is his theme such a literal banger?)

We're still not actually sure. Either way, he's an action figure now.

Is he an actual Cyberman? Because I'm totally getting this impression he's human in armour?

Yeah, sort of.

How did Brendan survive being shot, and why did his non-ageing father and mentor do that?

Because Time Lords.

Why did it look like a chameleon arch?

It's probably related technology! If the chameleon arch rewrites memories, this one just wipes them.

Is Ethan's tech-savvy just warzone familiarity or something more sinister?

Just warzone familiarity. Poor li'l bean.

Are there any other large human populations left?

Possibly! If the Boundary really did send them to random places, there still could be surviving pockets elsewhere in the universe.

Was I detecting a hint of romantic tension between Graham and Ravio?

Maybe a bit XD And now they're all on Earth, who knows?

What's up with Yaz?

Who knows?

Why did the Cyberium get sent to that time period?

Ko Sharmus sent it. Didn't send it far enough.

Who or what is this alliance Jack is a part of?

Same organisation Ko Sharmus is part of. Also, young!Ko Sharmus/Jack please.

How do the Time Lords and the lie of the Timeless Child come into it?

In so many ways.

WHO THE FUCK IS BRENDAN?

The Doctor!

More thoughts later!

-

Thoughts on Doctor Who - The Timeless Children.

...Actually, first thought is the title. Timeless Children? Hmm.

Anyway. That is... sure a literally mind-blowing revelation for the Doctor, yes! Like, damn, the discovery that you're not even the species you thought you were, that your adoptive parent spent lifetimes abusing and experimenting on you, that your memories were routinely erased by people you thought you could trust (including your adoptive parent), that you're literally the progenitor for your entire species, that you've lost who knows how much time and who knows how many memories... yeah. Damn.

What's an appropriate birthday present for someone turning ten million?

Also, huh. Amidst all the old lore and casual mentions (like Borusa!) that got mentioned - were they taking hints from the Cartmel master plan? About the Doctor being some kind of founding figure for Gallifrey? Not exactly written as Cartmel had it, but that big main concept of the Doctor as a sort of... foundation piece of Time Lord culture was still actually there.

Brain of Morbius Doctors confirmed, I guess. I guess even Four was going, "...the fuck?"

Cybermen = still scary. Regenerating Cybermen = felt somehow obscene. Like, no, that's just fundamentally not right. Like the TARDIS responding to Jack by noping the fuck out kind of not right. God. And the Master was completely and utterly magnificently batshit, like, more than usual, come on, dude, you know they'd kill or convert you the second you turned your back.

Still. Deeply, deeply entertaining to watch just from a villain perspective, completely Chaotic, and like... I do understand where he was coming from? His entire life is a lie. His entire life is because of the Doctor, who, I think it's fair to say, he has Complicated Feelings regarding. (Their entire interaction this episode was a giant power play. Like damn guys just get into BDSM and leave the would-be genocide and universal takeover.)

Tecteun = Rassilon, I'm assuming. Goddamn. Like they were a pompous abusive asshole from the outset, this just kind of makes it worse. I also wonder if Rassilon chose the Master specifically to get the drums because he was friends with the Doctor? That actually may have been something the Master worked out himself, too. I mean, I'd be pissed off as well :-\

Also, how many people know about this? I assume Gat knew, since she was implied to be responsible for the mind wipes, but was it like... a super tightly-held secret or was it something a lot of higher-ups knew? Because that's fucked up tbh

Thought on the Master. Okay, he's hugely furious that he's been lied to, that the entire origin of his people is based on a lie, that his greatest friendrivalloveenemy is incredibly special and that a part of her is in him and not in the fun way, but like... I'm also wondering if he's looking at the Time Lords, the way they turned him into their puppet, how they drove him insane for their own purposes, then looked at the Doctor - someone who has also been used, abused, experimented on, manipulated, controlled, and went, "No. This is an injustice and the Time Lords need to be punished for it."

Oh, saw a nice theory regarding the TARDISes - Ruth!Doctor had the original busted police box TARDIS. When she was eventually taken in to be mind-erased, they sent the TARDIS off to storage to be eventually repaired. The Doctor manages to steal that one, goes to Earth, and it immediately gets stuck again because it's still broken. Explains how Ruth!Doctor can have the police box while also being pre-everything.

I really want the Doctor and Jack to sit down and have a nice chat about being timeless undying constants of the universe. Also for Jack to get one of the spare TARDISes around. Be kinda funny if he got the Master's old one, given the Year That Never Was, but it really is just sitting there. (Poor TARDIS stuck as a tree on a random wartorn planet in the far future, though!)

Also, Jodie was fucking magnificent in this episode. The hurt, the absolute fury, the almost glee when she's telling the Master he can't break her, her refusal to press the button at the end (so much like Nine's "coward or killer?" moment!)... just... so good.

Beautiful post I saw here on Tumblr - the Doctor as the Timeless Child, making the choice to help.

Amazing post here on Tumblr about abuse and repressed memories. Even if the Doctor doesn't remember it all, the abuse they underwent at the hands of a beloved parent figure still informs a hell of a lot of their behaviour, but it doesn't define them. The Doctor's need to run = informed by abuse. The Doctor's desire to help crying children = informed by abuse. The Doctor being an inherently good person = being their own person, no matter what their upbringing, no matter what their past was. They made the choice to be the Doctor, and that's a hell of an important thing.

Extremely painful post I saw on Tumblr about the Doctor being 'hip with the kids' by calling her companions her Fam but hell if they're not more family to her than her actual adoptive mother ow my heart.

Also, the scene between Yaz and Graham was so sweet <3 I do want to see Yaz, at some point, admit that sometimes she's so terrified she can barely move, and to tell him what she came so close to doing when she was sixteen, and Graham to just go, "Yeah, but you keep going." Also I'm trying not to think about how Yaz would respond to the Doctor going off on a suicide mission when Yaz was suicidal just three years earlier because ow my heart. She knows that Ko Sharmus went after her, she knows the Doctor might be alive, but either way, she's just seen someone she loves leave with the intention of dying (and Ko Sharmus too, actually). Someone please give her a hug. Actually please just let the Fam have a big group hug in general.

"Have you ever been limited by who you were before?" "Huh. Now that does sound like me talking."

So, remaining questions to be answered next season!

What actually is the Doctor? Since they were found near the Boundary, they could be from anywhere. It's fair to say they now are recognised genetically as a Time Lord, but what were they originally, why were they abandoned in the first place, and are there any more of their original people out there?

How do the Remnants know about the Timeless Child, or were they just picking up on that unconscious knowledge from the Doctor's own mind?

Like... we're generally under agreement that the Master, the eternal cockroach, survived, right? Despite definitely being lowkey suicidal like oh, was hoping the Death Particle would kill me? Like the Death Particle was made by the Cyberium, it could have gone, "Nah, keeping this one."

What's going on with the Kasaavin? Remember them? Still out there, stationed all through time and space? And are we going to see Daniel Barton again?

Is something going on with Yaz?

Will the Fam stay on? (I personally think Ryan will elect to stay on Earth to account for Tosin Cole's new TV role, and if Graham and Ravio enter a relationship, he might too.)

When will we see Jack again? If he was connected to the Lone Cyberman arc, that seems... pretty conclusively finished, unless we're going to learn more about it?

Is it Christmas yet?

............so the Christmas/NY special is going to start with Jack using his vortex manipulator to bust the Doctor out of prison and get back to the Fam and it'll never be mentioned again, right.

"At least buy me diNNER!!"

#doctor who #companion love #best enemies #long post

[tfw-no-tennis]

mtmte liveblog issue 19

it’s 2021 now!! time for more transformers 

we start off w/a flashback showing tyrest retrieving ultra magnus’s body from the ship - and we get a look at magnus’s spark, which is the green color of a 0.1%er [eyes emoji]

tyrest punching magnus..... grrrrr leave my dad alone bastard man

‘the divided self’ what a good title 

rodimus is like listen man this is a lot for my poor thot brain to take in

in flashback land, we see tyrest immediately launch into a crazy person spiel about how he can and will edit the law as he sees fit to conform to the situation, because that doesn't seem like a blatant abuse of power or a huge conflict of interest or anything 

oooh the screen in the corner that says ‘thought warfare,’ I see that

oof, poor magnus. its gotta be rough to hear your boss rant about how bad at your job you are....especially bc this is right after overlord called magnus a joke and nearly killed him

its especially brutal bc as magnus says, his job is his life 

augh, I love the panel where the armor is falling off around minimus, and then the one where he’s holding the ultra magnus head...poetic 

its fascinating that there was an ‘original’ magnus who was an actual guy, and then tyrest chose to make him into this legacy symbol - I'm assuming the OG magnus had no say in this, and probably didn't even know that he was gonna become this lawman legacy figure

I do wanna know though - obviously everyone thought that ultra magnus was one dude, but how did the different guys wearing the armor deal w/that? like, did minimus have people coming up to him like ‘hey ultra magnus old buddy! remember when we fought those guys in that one place? good times!’ like, do they have to study up on the lives of the past armor wearers to prepare for the role of ultra magnus?

augh poor minimus, of course he’s been wondering about what happened with overlord after he was KO’d

oof, drift...I feel like minimus looks surprised and a little skeptical at the idea that drift was the one behind the entire overlord thing - which is interesting bc as we saw at the beginning of the story, he doesn't exactly trust drift, but it’s still pretty far-fetched that one person orchestrated the entire thing

tailgate :(

the concept of a load-bearer is SUPER cool, I love it so much

it also puts a much-needed limit on things - as in, there IS a limit to how much weight/mass a normal cybertronian frame can carry, which is why you don't see everybody upgrading to be Massive - bc they actually CANT

oof, the worst part is that tyrest is RIGHT, minimus essentially DID have a nervous breakdown after the war ended bc of the rigid way he views the world

mental health support is clearly in shambles for cybertronians, yikes. they literally have 1 therapist for their entire race, and he’s not even licensed anymore due to hipaa violations. what a mess

the ‘attention deflectors’ thing is so cool and clever and also a great explanation as to why ratchet or anyone else never said ‘hey wait a minute, you're actually a much smaller dude in a trench coat’ 

I love tailgate knowing all the stuff about the autobot code bc of magnus...my BOY

and THATS why minimus was asking about skids specifically earlier!

oh minimus, please don't put so much stock in tyrest being stable and resonable...

aaaand there's skids and swerve! brainstorm says it best - ‘because something unexpected hasn't happened for at least nine seconds.’ lmao ily brainstorm 

finally checking in w/whirl and cyclonus - god I love that. whirl asking cyclonus how many cons he killed and cyc is like psh I wasn't keeping count....................ok it was six

hhhhh cyclonus IS looking for a cure for tailgate, even though he told tg that there wasn’t anything to hope for....excuse me as I go be emo 

and now we flash over to the unethical medical conduct hell zone, where pharma is being weird and horny and ratchet is appropriately horrified 

I seriously love how unhinged pharma looks, the art & colors do such a good job conveying his feral energy 

ratchet has some massive dick energy for taunting pharma when he’s currently just a head and pharma has dual chainsaws for hands 

ugh, I love whirls speech about anger...and I feel like he really does see cyclonus as a peer, despite cyclonus wanting to kill him, which is why he tells cyclonus all of this 

I fuckgin love that cyclonus’s reaction to very suddenly getting stabbed thru the abdomen is to just glance down at the sword, looking mildly inconvenienced 

back over to ratchet - and at first its like oh wow I can’t believe pharma was stupid enough to let ratchet goad him into this contest....but then you see first aid and ambulon and its like UH OH this is gonna be BAD

the idea that getting sliced in half is no big deal for a cybertronian is wild

‘you're gonna let doctor djd cut us in half?’ yeahhhh that's an appropriate reaction, yikes

FUCKING LENGTHWAYS GOD

pharma you piece of shit

poor ambulon :( :( :( that's fucking brutal. amazing panel but....jesus

and like, to further my point from last issue’s liveblog - the fact that this very gore-y panel is okay, but swearing isn't...that's really funny honestly. I guess robo-gore is acceptable, while I'm guessing regular ole run of the mill human gore wouldn't be

then back to cyclonus, who is still looking only vaguely put out by the sword stuck right thru him

and then cyclonus just pulls it right out, which is a very bad idea for humans but probably not as big of a deal for big near-immortal alien robots

circle of light stuck in capitalistic urban hellscape cubicals 

poor skids, being asked to stand trial while having no idea what his crime is due to Big Amnesia 

OH SHITTTT I totally forgot that getaway shows up here

that is super clever though, with chromedome confusing the name ‘getaway’ with the concept ‘needing to escape’

cant believe tyrest is really dumb enough to tell minimus all his evil plans

BUT that means its time for some very important forged vs constructed cold lore

jro spelling ‘program’ as ‘programme’ made me remember when he said that he considers everyone on the lost light to be british, which is perhaps the least valid thing he’s ever said vhbghjsdbfjkhasbjk

the idea that they used the matrix - which is portrayed as kind of a holy object - in reproductive experiments is really interesting

AUGHHHHH this is all so good and interesting...im really fascinated w/this particular brand of like, alien robot racism/constructism/whatever you wanna call it - I feel like it does such a good job as a plot device, where many other ‘fantasy racism’ concepts from other franchises fail, bc there's not really a ‘human metaphor’ being used here (as far as I know/can tell) - as in, this isn't a thinly veiled metaphor for something that happened/could happen in human history

in fact, this type of bigotry (or w/e you wanna call it) isn't something that is even really possible in humans - I guess if there was a stigma against being born via ivf or something...? but there isn't, so there's no obvious real-world equivalent, which I take as a sign of good writing and worldbuilding - it makes the cybertronians feel more Real, bc of course they would have their own types of bigotry based off of completely different things than humans 

additionally - and this is crucial - tyrest is wrong: there’s no like, inherent moral corruption in cold constructed bots. there's no difference at all, other than method of construction. fantasy racism plotlines often flounder here, with the oppressors having a ‘valid reason’ for oppressing the oppressed, but tyrest is just operated on religious zealot bs and some biased science

like, dude, did you ever think that maybe there are other reasons why your trials only condemned cold constructed bots? like, maybe the trial itself was biased? or societal conditions were to blame? correlation is not causation, my dude, especially when the conclusion is ‘cold constructed bots are inherently SINNERS’ lmao 

like, tyrest rlly said ‘FUCK separation of church and state,’ huh

anyways I just think the whole cold construction vs forged thing is really interesting and well-done, and serves as a good precursor to the more fleshed-out functionism stuff we see later 

so tyrest is clearly off his rockers w/the whole drilling thing - dude, you accidentally gave yourself a lobotomy, okay - but I find it kinda funny that he’s right about a lot of that stuff he said at the end, about primus and the guiding hand and stuff being real 

cyclonus saying ‘tailgate and the others’...I see you, man, I see you

also cyclonus looks fine now??? didn't he just get stabbed??? 

ah, tyrest sprinkling a little light genocide onto his plan to find salvation. nice, dude!

MINIMUS NOOOOOOOOO

‘fully deserved’ SHUT UP BIIIIITCH

poor minimus is taking a lot of Ls this arc, geez

oof, great issue! again, as usual....I loved the lore we got this issue, its so interesting...and some good character stuff too. I love minimus, I feel like he’s gonna be my fav this readthru; my first read my fav was brainstorm, second readthru was whirl, and I feel like its minimus/magnus this time. I just love his character arc...

hype af for more B) 

#lj rereads mtmte

[theharellan]

101 DRAGON AGE QUESTIONS | not accepting

for the sake of reducing the number of ooc posts i’m answering these all in one and just @ing the people who asked the questions! thank you for them all!

if you sent me one of these btw and rbed this meme yourself and i didn’t send you something, please let me know! i want to send you things back and must have missed you reblogging the meme. this includes non-mutuals.

1. How did you get into Dragon Age? | asked by @kaaras-adaar & @dreamerlavellan​

Sort of by accident, actually. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in university (2011) and summertime is generally a time of inactivity and depression because I cannot tolerate the weather here. My dad happened to own Origins and I picked it up because??? Fantasy? RPG?

Starting the game I saw you could play as a dwarf, who have been my favourites in fantasy since a child as The Hobbit is among my favourite books. Then after that I fell in love with the worldbuilding for dwarves and Gorim, my first actual Dragon Age love. I was more or less hooked after that. DA was actually not my first Bioware game, I was obsessed with Jade Empire as a kid so like Origins appealed to me immediately despite being far less fun to play than literally any other Bioware game I’ve ever played. The characters and world more than made up for it.

I beat it relatively quickly and my dad bought Dragon Age II which had come out earlier that day, actually against my suggestion because I’d heard it wasn’t good. And in this instance my dad forgetting something I said turned out for the best because I ended up enjoying DAII more in some respects. While it took me a while to join the fandom as a content producer I was a consumer and certified DA trash from then on.

2. Have you finished all three games? | asked by @kaaras-adaar

Kskjdfs yes. I’ve beaten each at least 4 times, but probably more like 8. The only thing I haven’t played are some of the Origins DLC because as much as I enjoy my replays I am so ready to be out by the end of the game (and I have the worst luck with Awakening bugs) and I also don’t have Sebastians DLC b/c his never goes on sale individually and I refuse to spend more than like $4 on him.

3. How long did it take you to finish the series? | asked by @kaaras-adaar

I honestly don’t know. I think it took me like a week to beat Inquisition without 100%ing it, I’d say my first playthroughs all probably took about that long. I tend not to do everything in my first playthrough. Like shard collecting didn’t happen until round two, etc.

7. Favorite DA:O backstory? | asked by @dreamerlavellan & @fatefaulted

I’ve played through all of them and I enjoy them all except Cousland, but my favourite is Aeducan. I enjoy the politics, the culture, the aesthetic of Orzammar. I love Gorim Saelac and the surprising amount of depth to this character who is designed to be thrown away after the prologue. I love how it ties you to the Darkspawn threat in a bigger way than any of the origins accomplish. I love how it ties you to the Orzammar plot later in the game, and playing Aeducan first is probably one reason why I adore that branch of the game. It’s a good origin that establishes its world really well and has great characters to boot.

11. Share a pic of your favorite OC from any DA game. | asked by @dreamerlavellan

I just want to share pics of my girl and Solas’ future husband.

Ian Lavellan, non-Inquisitor written by @theshirallen

Thora Cadash, dwarven Inquisitor and default Inquisitor for this blog written by... me lmao.

22. Favorite DA2 party combo? | asked by @fatefaulted

My main Hawke is a mage Hawke, so this party is horrendously imbalanced, but: Varric, Merrill, Isabela. They all just like each other and I think that’s neat. Although in act one my favourite is probably Carver, Merrill, Isabela / Varric. Unfortunately the game doesn’t want me to have a warrior in my party.

24. Favorite main-story quest from DA:I? | asked by @kaaras-adaar

It’s hard to pick between In Hushed Whispers and In Your Heart Shall Burn. I love seeing the red lyrium’d companions and the dark future of Thedas, and speculating on what happened in the intervening year. I love reflecting on what it must do for the Inquisitor to see that and have it be undone. I think it sets up the rest of the game really well, and in ways Champions of the Just doesn’t do quite as well.

In Your Heart Shall burn is a simpler quest but I think the power and emotions in the quest are so raw. Playing this the first time was riveting and I was on the edge of my seat. The triumph of closing the Breach, the strangeness of your first encounter with Cole (whose appearance at the gates is another reason I prefer IHW tbh, I think it’s more tension building than Dorian’s), Corypheus, crawling through the snow. Capping it off with The Dawn Will Come and the journey to Skyhold idk, it’s just such an emotional high point in the series that every time I replay I get goosebumps.

25. Favorite DA:I place? | asked by @fatefaulted

It’s a tie between the Frostback Basin and the Emerald Graves. I love the lore in both, as elf trash I prefer the lore in the graves especially if I can include the Din’an Hanin into that category. But the Avvar lore and Ameridan is also Very Good, and while I adore the giant trees of the graves the Frostback Basin clearly was able to have more resources poured into its design, and as a result the different sections of the map have so much more character.

A close runner-up is the Hinterlands, as I think the quests there are fun and it feels like home. I enjoy returning to it. Which is good, b/c I’ve played through it... a lot... I think loving it might be a coping mechanism, but also I love the vibe of the early game that’s best captured in the Hinterlands.

32. Favorite DLC mission overall? | asked by @fatefaulted

Trespasser is up there with Shivering Isles as my favourite DLC ever produced. Its hits every emotional beat I think it needed to hit, set up the next game with greater detail and intrigue than the initial epilogue, and I’m honestly dying to get to replay it again on Thora despite what it does to my nerves. The first time I played it I could feel my heart beating faster like wtf me.

37. Blood magic: yes or no? | asked by @hopewrought​

Would I use it myself? No. Morally I think it can be reprehensible but also neutral, much like any other magic in the game. In certain characters I think even if used for good it may encourage unhealthy habits, but I think it can be learned to be engaged with in better ways.

59. Who was written really poorly? | asked by @theshirallen you can’t hide behind anon I know it was you

Oghren fucking Kondrat. When I think about the reasons Origins is my least favourite game he is among them. With Oghren there was a really good chance to portray an alcoholic abuse victim, suffering from severe mental health issues, and still mourning his wife, with the respect it deserves. Instead he just... is a gross sexist dwarf and his alcoholism is mostly played for jokes. And then he comes back in Awakening and... continues to be a gross sexist dwarf whose alcoholism is mostly played for jokes.

There could have been some really interesting stuff with Oghren, the Warrior caste of dwarves I think would suffer from issues similar to qunari warriors, where when they can no longer fill the purpose society has dictated they must serve, what then? They can’t do anything but fight. There could be comradery with Sten, or perhaps Zevran or Alistair, or any of the companions who have had the path their lives took dictated to them by societal forces they had no say in (even if they are happy with that direction). There are snippets of good stuff in here, the line “let us show them our hearts, Warden, and then show them theirs” is one of the best of the good-byes the game offers us imo. It’s a shame about what came before.

Like there are other characters, such as Sera, who I think were done dirty by their writers, but Sera at least got some growth in the DLC and there were attempts to address criticism of her character. Oghren in Awakening was just kind of a take two of an already poorly-done arc.

60. Who do you wish had been given more story? | asked by @hopewrought​

I wish Briala had more, like that she had some impact on the story in universes where Gaspard isn’t crowned with her as his puppetmaster. She and the elves reappears in that but not if you reunite her with Celene or exile her, and I think it would’ve been neat. I also wish she’d had a chance to interact with Solas in some small way given how many parallels were drawn by one of his own agents during Masked Empire.

I also wish we had more about dwarves in general in 2 and Inquisition. We get some great lore in Inquisition that was set up in 2, but with our only dwarf companion being Varric, who honestly has a relationship with his race that at times is comparable to Sera’s, it pulls a few of its punches. I really think they have dwarves set up to be important players in the next game, with their architecture featuring heavily in the dev diary, buuut no dwarves to be seen. So who knows. Just give me dwarves in the next game who aren’t Varric Bioware pls. Let me kiss one maybe.

61. Favorite NPC? | asked by @kaaras-adaar​

I’m not going to count advisors even though they kinda are NPCs and I’m going to answer one for each game so uhh...

Origins - Anora

DA2 - Feynriel

DA:I - Krem

Bonus - Lord Woolsley, the only unproblematic DA character

63. Best story moment? | asked by @ghilannainguideme

It’s a tie between the journey to Skyhold and the talk with Solas at the end of Trespasser and the resulting disbanding of the Inquisition (if you so choose). I really can’t separate them because I think the reason Trespasser works so well is how it calls back to the very beginning of Inquisition and that moment with Solas in the snow. It’s triumphant and sad, something’s ending, the fellowship is breaking, but you know all of you will continue to work towards a better world apart.

In DA:O I think it’d be saying good-bye before the final battle and in DA2 I think the moment where you can tell the Arishok he was right to take in the elves who killed that guardmen is good. Probably one of the reasons why I think Hawke-Arishok work so well as a protagonist-antagonist combination.

81. Favorite fanfic? | asked by @ghilannainguideme​

I don’t read a lot of fanfic, actually. Save what I read on here, which I do count, but idk if other people do.

My favourite writers to read are @theshirallen​, obviously. Joly wants to tweakIan’s personal quest but I think the version they have written now is still very good and you can find it here. I love reading Peace’s stuff and find their smut especially spicy in the best possible way, you can find a Merrill/f!Mahariel piece here! Gaia doesn’t write on Tumblr much these days, but she wrote a wonderful Tug/Sketch (the companions from Leliana’s Song) that you can find here.

I follow so many talented writers and I can’t list them all but here are a few I can fire off real fast: @theshirallen / @ghilannainguideme / @seahaloed / @sabraelin / @valorcorrupt / @mercysought / @hopewrought / @ofrevas / @skyheld have all moved me with their words at some point, be it in fic or rp.

82. Favorite fanart/fanartist? | asked by @ghilannainguideme

Again I just can’t choose jsdfks.

The easiest way is to just link my Solas fanart tag. Obviously this favours Solas artists, however, so also here’s a link to thedaswlw where there’s a boatload of amazing fanart all of wlw.

Of people I’m mutuals with I know @abracafockyou, @kaaras-adaar, @dalathin (currently inactive but I gotta link them), and @syntharts​ are all very talented artists.  I’m also a big fan of destinyapostacy, nipuni, elbenherzart, starscollected (on twitter), and many more.

97. What’s your favorite DA mod? | asked by @ghilannainguideme​ & @hopewrought​

I’ll chose one as many as I want to apparently from each game again, b/c why not?

DA:O - I have to admit I find this game hard to mod because nothing can really salvage the gameplay or look of the game. I need Better Dwarf Model so I don’t have to look at the odd dwarf proportions in the game (the women have arms for days). Mostly I have armour mods. I like Grey Wardens of Ferelden so I can match Alistair in the final batte and have everyone in uniforms in Awakening. I do like Kirkwall Exports because I can put Zevran in the robes of the notorious pirate tho. I haven’t used this mod yet but I also love this mod I retweeted this morning.

DA2 - Again, I don’t mod 2 very much. You could probably make some kind of chart for correlating my enjoyment of a game versus my urge to mod it, with the more I love a game means I want to mod it more. With 2 I enjoy the combat and overall design of the characters more so I mostly use a couple of tweaks, my favourite is Ishs Scarf for Merrill which just adds a cute blue scarf to Merrill and hides the fact that elves in this game have weirdly long necks. Oh and a mod to fix the weird hand dirt.

DA:I - Equal Opportunity Solas mod, I bought the game again on PC just to use it. Being able to play Solas/Ian for screencaps was everything tbh. Other mods I enjoy are More Banter, which while I have better luck with banter it is nice to be able to count on it. I installed it this latest pt and I have heard location comments that have never triggered before. Black Hair for Everyone has changed my life because finally Thora doesn’t have grey hair. No Dirt Buildup is also amazing, as the dirt can cause some really weird blotting on PCs that’s especially noticeable on dark-skinned Inquisitors.

99. Where would you live (Ferelden, Orlais, Free Marches etc?) | asked by @heysales​​

Probably Ferelden. It is fantasy England and hey if I make it past Inquisition maybe nothing will ever happen there again. Somewhere in the Free Marches might also be chill. Not Kirkwall. Maybe Starkhaven? Honestly tho I just want to live in the Frostback Basin. Have a spirit friend. Shake hands with nugs.

101. If you could meet your Warden/Hawke/Inquisitor, what would you say? | asked by @dreamerlavellan​

If I met Thora I’d tell her I’m proud of her. She’d be confused, but that’s ok.

#( munday meme ) #( ooc ) #( about me ) #( asks )

[hanalwayssolo]

I open at the close.

In some astrological lore, Saturn returns every 27 to 29 years or so to the same place in the sky the moment you were born—a cycle called Saturn Return—which, they say, marks a time when one gets a nudge towards a new stage in adulthood. A cosmic rite of passage of sorts, if you will. 

I’ve never been a firm believer of these things, but I found the concept to be intriguing. And mildly alarming. Because it is 2018 and this year, I turned 27. Not only did I get a nudge, but I was shoved right out of my comfort zone, catapulted straight into the heart of the most difficult year I’ve ever had the displeasure (and pleasure) to live.

It should be important to note that I’m never one to fully share the detailed account of my personal life. If I had been more brazen, I would have opted to post this on my main—but then I remember how that space is strictly curated for work, so here I am. Anyway. If you’ve ever read any of the things I’ve written thus far, best believe some of the stories I’ve shared are blatantly punched right out of my heart. Writing my experiences under the cover of fiction is what I do best; a form of cathartic release and a tourniquet for the pain. This time, however, I want to grant myself a moment to chronicle what this year felt like at its rawest. 

Let me start at the beginning of the end.

It is April, and after months of happily journeying from one city to the next, I am now quietly crying in front of the Colosseum. 

I wish I could tell the handsome stranger staring at me that I’m crying out of sheer joy of being in Rome, or how I’m just genuinely in awe of the architecture and other bullshit that will excuse the irrationality of my tears. 

But no, I’m crying because I just got a call from my boss—my last remaining moral compass at work—that she has decided to leave the firm. I know if I say that to anyone, I’ll sound completely pathetic. But I guess if I have to drill down every single reason why I’m crying, it’s because right then and there, in front of the Colosseum, I’m starting to realize that the only reason why I stayed in my job was because of my boss, and how she made it so bearable despite the misogynist and sexist behaviour of the people around us. I’m crying because it’s dawning on me how much I hated my job, that every single time before a presentation or meeting with the male seniors, I had to go to the bathroom to stop myself from crying out of rage; that at some point, I had spent hours thinking of ways I could kill myself, and I would emerge from the stall pretending I was okay. I was so good at pretending that I’m okay. Besides, in this economy, I should value that ability when I cannot afford to see a therapist. So yes, fuck me that I’m crying in this beautiful morning in front of the Colosseum, because I am spiraling and my mind has completely lost its brakes.

Because for more than five years, I had this routine: work, try not to kill self, sleep, repeat. I stayed in my job out of practicality and financial stability. I needed to make a living. But the sad thing about it is, I ended up not quite living. I was not living my life—life was living me.

It is April, and I draft my resignation letter on the plane en route to Manila. I have decided to finally leave my job to pursue my passions. My last few weeks in London, I have spent thinking of all the different permutations on how my decision would play out. I keep asking myself: if I stayed at this job at the cost of my mental health, is it worth it? How many times do I have to wake up every single morning contemplating on the possibility of death? I weighed in the pros, cons, checked the privileges available at my disposal. In the end, I stick to my gut.

To some degree, some may find this romantic, a coming-of-age act of defiance, sure—but it all honesty, it really isn’t. The act in and of itself is an upheaval of everything I have come to know for the past five years. I have to shed parts of myself that I thought I needed, have to rebuild myself from the rubble of my own undoing. From a girl who prided herself with having an exit strategy, I became the girl who was about to jump off the cliff with no safety net. 

I no longer recognize what I have become, that I felt completely, utterly lost.

It is July, and it has been a month without my usual corporate routine. My freelancing stints have somehow helped me get back bit by bit to things that I have always loved doing. Frankly, I have never felt so liberated in my life.

But still, the demons in my head beg to differ. I should not get used to this comfort. Life never gave me nice things without asking for anything in return. I know I shouldn’t listen to them, but as it turns out, soon enough, I will know that they are right.

Fast track to November, and I have to note how grateful I am for having my family as my support system. Eventually, I finally land an offer for a full time post on a role that I find quite promising. It is wonderful, and I feel like I’m getting back on some sense of normalcy. I submit my requirements, comply with the pre-employment medical tests.

Except my medical results came back with one interesting find. A mass on my left breast. A category 3, probably benign, should be no big deal. But the doctor then tells me that we need to have this monitored for a period of six months. If anything changes, we have to consider surgery. 

You know how scenes in those movies play out whenever they find out some bad news? How time slows down, every sound turns to static? It happened just like that. I was staring at my mammogram results. My doctor was still staying something but I can barely register a word. A large part of me wants to treat this with a huge bucket of hope and positivity. I can brave through this. I know I can.

But then, there’s part of me, the one responsible for governing the deepest pits of my depression, that one voice I have not entertained ever since I left my job, is a sharp thought in passing: At least this way, you don’t have to kill yourself. Life is going to do it for you.

See? I guess in a way, the gremlins in the back of my head knew one thing right.

It is November, and I cry on my way back home.

It is December. My best friend and I go out of town over the weekend. “You know, 2018 is such a fucked up year, so let’s make the most out of it,” she tells me as we sit together in the cramped van taking us to the mountains. “Fucked up is an understatement,” I tell her, and we both laugh. She knows everything about me; we have been inseparable since we were both in kindergarten, and when I told her about my diagnosis, she just gave me a firm look and said, “I need you to have hope, more than ever. I won’t let you not fight this.” 

And it’s people like her in my life that I find myself grateful. Her and my family and the small circle of close friends that help me soldier on despite how fragile my mental state could get, and for going through this ordeal with me with an outpouring of love and support. Where I come from, mental health is still a stilted discussion that needs more encouragement, and I find myself fortunate that my family has not shied away in opening themselves to that conversation—regardless of how difficult it could be.

So, yes. It is December, and 2018 crushed me so beautifully. But broken as I may be, somewhere in the cracks, I find gratefulness and kindness. Because in this brokenness, there is more space for me to give love. There is more room for me to grow.

#personal #like really really really personal

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 6: Echoes (Transcript) - 18th May 2015

tw: mental illness, abuse, rape, death, mistreatment of mentally ill people, lobotomies, body horror, medical procedures, ableist language - generally, be very careful with this one

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

The setting of a story is everything – it creates mood and atmosphere, it triggers memories, and helps our minds fill in the blanks, adding tension and suspense where there was only words and images. What would The Shining be like without the long hotel hallways of the Overlook, or The Legend of Hell House without the dusty bones of the old Belasco House, and how can anybody ever look at an old cabin in the woods without a chill running down their spine? Not me, that’s for sure. One of the most iconic and most visceral settings from any horror story, without a question, has always been the insane asylum. These days we refer to the institutions that treat mental disorders as psychiatric hospitals. They’re hard places to work – I know this first hand thanks to a colourful college internship that featured a double amputee who enjoyed streaking down the hallway on his knees. Mental health professionals do amazing work, but a lot more than just the name has changed than the name of these hospitals of the mind. In the late 1800s and through to the 1850s, asylums were a very different place. They were filled with sick people in need of help, but frequently they were only offered pain and suffering. When H. P. Lovecraft wrote The Thing on the Doorstep in 1933, he imagined a place that he called “Arkhum Sanitarium”. Arkhum is the seed, it’s the first of its kind; through it, Lovecraft brought the asylum into the horror genre, and others quickly caught on. The famous super-prison and mental hospital of the Batman universe, “Arkhum Asylum”, is a blatant and direct call-back to Lovecraft’s invention. Arkhum was a real place, though, known as the Danvers State Hospital. In fact, the remains of it stand just 8 miles from my front door, and even before construction began in 1874, the hospital’s story was already one of fear and suffering, a theme that continued unchecked well into the 20thcentury. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and the is Lore.

Before the days of institutional care for the mentally ill, the job was left largely to independent contractors – people who were hired by the state to look after others, but that was a system with far too many opportunities for failure. Patients were routinely placed in cages or stalls, and they were chained and beaten into submission. Violence, rape and death were everyday occurrences. Thankfully, people began to look for a better way, a more humane way of caring for these individuals, and those conversations led to the establishment of a new, state-of-the-art mental hospital. Plans started off on the wrong foot, though. The site that was chosen for the construction was the former homestead of John Hathorne, one of the nine magistrates who oversaw the witch trials of Salem in 1692. Hawthorne was known for his vicious, harsh attitude towards those who were accused of witchcraft, and he pushed hard for their execution. He was so well-known for his violent and hateful personality that his great-great-grandson, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, changed the spelling of his last name, adding the “w”, to distance himself from that reputation. And it was there, on Hathorne Hill, that the foundations of the hospital were laid. The chances are pretty high that no one made the comparisons at the time, but hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back over the last century and a half, it’s clear that Hathorne’s legacy lived on atop that hill.

The Danvers State Hospital was actually intended to be a beacon of hope. There was a specific plan behind its design, one that was based on the work of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. He designed the building with four radiating wings on each side of a central structure. His reason was simple: with more of the rooms exposed to sunlight and proper ventilation, more of the patients would experience recovery. All told, the hospital was designed to house 500 patients, covering a wide spectrum of mental illness, who were served by a team of roughly one dozen staff. When the doors finally opened in 1878, it was originally called the State Lunatic Hospital, and there was no other place like it in the country. It was set up to be a leader in the humane treatment of patients, and became the model for countless other facilities like it, and rightly so - this place was amazing. The ornate interiors, private rooms, sunny corridors, all connected to the central Kirkbride building. The patients were encouraged to exercise and participate in the community gardens outside. The small farm there even produced enough food for the hospital kitchen to feed the patients home-grown meals. Over time, though, the hospital expanded. There were separate Tuberculosis buildings, housing for staff, a machine shop, a medical building, and a pump house to pull water from the reservoir. All of these locations were connected underground by a network of dark, brick-lined tunnels, arranged in the shape of a wagon wheel to allow easy movement during the harsh New England winters. Bur the hospital campus wasn’t the only thing that was expanding.

As with all good things, the bright days of the Danvers State Hospital didn’t last long. More and more patients were admitted each year, and the staff continued to struggle with keeping up. In addition, decreased state funding prevented them from hiring more help. By the 1920s, the population had grown to almost 2000 patients, four times what the facility was designed to hold. One eyewitness reported that in November of 1945, the evening shift at the hospital consisted of nine people, and they were expected to care for the needs of nearly 2300 patients. You’ll have to pardon the expression, but things at the Danvers State Hospital had begun to get crazy. Patients were frequently sick and filthy. It was not uncommon for some to die unnoticed, only to be found days later. It was nearly impossible for the staff to manage so many patients, and so they turned to the acceptable tools of their time: straight jackets, solitary confinement, even restraints. However barbaric they may seem to us today, were mild compared to some of the other methods used by the staff. Patients were regularly subjected to hydrotherapy and electro-shock therapy, and yet it somehow still managed to get worse, and that’s where the lobotomy enters this story.

First pioneered by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1936, the lobotomy was a complicated procedure. The surgeon would literally cut the patient’s brain, severing the connection between the frontal lobes and the thalamus. The goal was to reduce symptoms and make patients more manageable. The results were mixed. Some patients died as a result of the procedure, while others would commit suicide later. Freeman, though, quickly grew tired of how long it took to complete the procedure. He heard of a doctor in Italy who had operated on his patients through their eye sockets. Working without drilling or cutting presented an opportunity that Freeman simply couldn’t pass up. He called his technique the “transorbital lobotomy”. It’s fairly easy to describe, but its not for the faint of heart. Freeman discovered that the only surgical tool he really needed was an ice-pick. According to his son, Franklin Freeman, in a PBS interview in 2008, those first ice-picks came right out of their kitchen icebox, and they worked like a charm. By inserting the ice-pick into the inner corner of a patient’s eye, Freeman could punch through the skull to reach the brain. Then he would essentially, um, stir the frontal lobe until it was no longer functional. Oh, and one more thing: he did all of this without anaesthetic.

And he got good at it, so good, in fact, that he took his show on the road. He literally toured the nation in a van that he called the “lobotomobile”, stopping at mental institutions, where he would educate and train the staff in his own technique. While he was there, he would perform as many lobotomies as they needed for the low, low cost of just $25 per patient. It sounds like Freeman was delivering the solution to a desperate industry, but that was pretty far from the truth. His patients often lost the ability to feed themselves or use the bathroom unassisted, and those skills would have to be retaught, if it was even possible. While many patients recovered, about 15% died from the procedure. Relapses were common, and sometimes the lobotomy would have to be reattempted. Once, in 1951, at Iowa’s Cherokee Mental Health Institute, Freeman stopped in the middle of a lobotomy, ice-pick clutched in his hand, so that he could pose for a photograph. The instrument penetrated a bit too far and the patient died. He never wore gloves or a mask, and he apparently had no limits. In fact, of the 3500 lobotomies that he performed in 23 states, 19 of those patients were minors - one of them, a four-year-old child. Ironically, some people still don’t believe in monsters.

The horror of institutional lobotomy ended in 1954 when a new drug was brought to the market. Thorazine was marketed as a chemical lobotomy, and the need for the surgical procedure dropped dramatically. But the nightmare never really stopped at Danvers State Hospital. During the 1980s, reports began to filter out about missing teenage patients. One account I managed to find said that upwards of 115 patients had disappeared in the space of about three months. The hospital never spoke about it publicly because their closure was already looming on the horizon. They knew that it was happening. When the staff was questioned they all pointed toward a new doctor on staff. In each case, they said these patients had been assigned to this new doctor upon admission, and then vanished. Scraps of paper were found in several of the patients’ rooms that mentioned a tall man in the woods. Some were drawings of the man, and some were simply too illegible to make out at all. As the pieces were slowly put together, it became clear that this doctor had been taking patients outside of the building, without permission, for unknown reasons. Eventually the police were called, and when they arrived to take the man into custody, they found that he, too, was gone, and his patients were never found.

But this was just one more tragedy in a long string of bad news that had wrapped itself around the Danvers State Hospital, beginning in the 1960s. Massive budget cuts, building closings and structural damage had all conspired to slowly push the doors closed. By 1985, nearly every building on campus was abandoned, and the Kirkbride administrative building itself even closed in 1989. The last remaining patients were moved to the medical building onsite, but were all eventually moved to other facilities with the help of the national guard and 80 ambulances. The hospital was officially abandoned in the summer of 1992, and stood vacant and derelict for nearly a decade. The rooms that once played host to mindless victims of Dr. Freeman and his ice-pick became the home of homeless squatters. They built their lives around the decaying medical equipment, the wheelchairs, the bedframes… It’s probably the healthiest inmate population the building had known for decades. In 2005, the property was bought by a developer, and much of the campus was demolished to make way for a sprawling apartment complex. But they left the front façade of the Kirkbride building, with its soaring Gothic towers and intricate brickwork. But the hospital, it didn’t go quietly. In April of 2007, four of the apartment buildings, as well as a handful of construction trailers, mysteriously burnt down. It was a fire so big that it was visible from Boston, 17 miles to the south. There was an investigation, but it turned up no evidence other than webcam footage from the construction site, which inexplicably cut out just before the fire began.

The image of an asylum will forever hold a place in our hearts as something to be feared and avoided. Whether new and sunny, or ancient and decaying, the asylum is a setting that causes people to back away, a ball of terror rising in their stomachs. But why? On a rational level, these were places of hope for many people. Still, the very concept of a residential hospital for the mentally ill, complete with 19th century décor and equipment, is the stuff of nightmares. Perhaps what we really fear is losing control over ourselves. Restraints, locked rooms, medication and irreversible medical procedures represent for many of us the opposite of freedom. We fear losing our dignity, losing our well-being, losing our very minds. Death, however, is chasing all of us. The curse of mortality is that we are already handing those things over, day by day, until the time when there’s nothing left to give. Perhaps the stereotypical asylum simply reminds us of the inevitable truth that is our own death.

The Danvers State Hospital is nearly gone today, but reminders still linger of its presence. Besides the brick façade of the Kirkbride building, one of the roads there is even called “Kirkbride Drive”. The reservoir that provided the facility with its water can be found behind the apartment buildings, and that vast network of ancient tunnels is still there as well, snaking its way beneath the modern structures, and the people who live inside them. One final reminder awaits people who come for a visit, though. The old asylum cemetery. Its where the staff buried patients who died and went unclaimed by family. There are no tall tombstones, though. Instead, each grave is marked by a small, square stone with a number engraved on it, and there are hundreds of them. Anyone looking for the cemetery will know that they’ve found it when they see a large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there in recent past to explain why all those small, square stones are there. But it’s the message engraved on it, and not the grave markers themselves, that communicates everything we need to know. It simply reads: “The echoes they left behind”.

Lore is a biweekly podcast and was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find out more about this episode, including the background music, at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook at lorepodcast. Your ratings and reviews on ITunes make all the difference for this show, so please take a moment today to fill one out. You can find links to help you do that at lorepodcast.com/support. Oh, and if you enjoy scary stories, I happen to write them. You can find a full list of my supernatural thrillers, available in paperback and ebook formats, at aaronmahnke.com/novels. Thanks for listening.

Notes

1. I just wanted to note that the story of “the tall man in the woods” is in fact inaccurate, and based on an edit someone made to the Wikipedia page on Danvers State Hospital, which was based on a creepy pasta they had written. It was only up for a week, but that happened to be the week during which Aaron was researching.

#lore podcast #podcasts #aaron mahnke #danvers state hospital #asylum #asylum horror #h. p. lovecraft #lobotomy #icepick lobotomy #hauntings #transcripts #6

[arruerie-a]

* 01. 𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝑰𝒔 𝑨 𝒏 𝑨𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒓𝒐 𝑨𝒓𝒓𝒖𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒆 𝑹𝑷 𝑩𝒍𝒐𝒈, 𝑹𝒖𝒏 𝑩𝒚 𝑷𝒆𝒂𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒔

Selective / Mutuals-Only / Unaffiliated,  I only interact with mutual followers of this blog, this includes threads, plotting, asks + ask prompts, DM’s & any other form of role play. I do this primarily for my comfort, I prefer to keep a clean dash & I also find it difficult to keep up with too many blogs at once ! If we’re mutuals, I would love to interact + write with you, if we’re not, it’s nothing personal but if you message me anyways it will be ignored.

18+ Muns, Please ! I am 21+, it’s normal for anime to attract the teenage demographic, however, due to the content I produce I do not feel terribly comfortable interacting with individuals below the legal age. 

* 02. 𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝑷𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒚𝒂𝒍 𝑾𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝑩𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒏𝒐𝒏 𝑫𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒕 

Bleach & Tite Kubo’s canon are the basis, not the rule, I’ve roleplayed as A.aroniero for several years through various iterations & I’ve cultivated my own unique interpretation of the character that greatly expands on what little content Kubo provided. I will always be working on growing this portrayal which means I can’t always keep in line with strictly canon information, I will always be challenging the source material to facilitate growth of the character & if you try to simplify or contain my depiction of A.aroniero into the tight boundaries of his canon counterpart, I will drop interactions with you. 

In regard to the original ideas on this blog, Please don’t steal them ! The PSD, graphics & character lore will all be heavily edited by me to fit my specific view of A.aroniero in my portrayal & I will know if you do. If I suspect you might be taking from me, I will hard block you. No hard feelings here, but I don’t spend a lot of time deconstructing the character for others to use me as their source.

* 03. 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝑺𝒉𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈

This blog is multi-ship friendly, a lot of development & chemistry is still required to make this work but I keep an open mind. Don’t try to force anything though, while I’m open to suggestion, I’m also not a doormat, if I feel like you’re trying to impose a ship on me I will let you know how I feel about that. If you continue to do so, I will block you. I usually prefer to ship with muns I’m more familiar with as a general rule, so hopefully we can avoid this.

I only ship with one version of a character but platonic ships are endless ! I prefer to develop my ships with one particular mun & their depiction of the character, I do not romantically ship with dupes however I can still build platonic relationships !

I sparingly write NSFW & only with friends, I don’t enjoy writing NSFW with strangers in any capacity so if we haven’t spoken extensively on discord, please don’t expect me to write smut on the dash with you.

* 04. 𝑰 𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝑨𝒔𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑻𝒐𝒙𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒕𝒚

Don’t be a bully !  Tumblr is a platform for everyone, not just you, please be courteous of your fellow muns & remember that real people lead very real lives off the internet & are not here to be punching bags. I will not associate with bullies, I will not condone individuals who use gaslighting & manipulation to purposely hurt people without any care to how this can affect one’s mental health. If you expect other people to be a sponge for you toxicity, do not follow me, you are not welcome here.

Don’t be a creep on the internet, just because the internet allows you to write anything doesn’t mean you should, don’t sexualize minors, don’t fetishize r*pe, don’t perpetuate threads that ship adults with children, stop doing creepy nasty shit. No one wants that, it’s gross, & if you use the “ BUT ITS FICTION “ argument please leave your URL at the door so I can block & blacklist you. We don’t do that here.

#arruerie ( rules )

[nimitwinklesims]

Get to know me meme, and ramblings

Thank you @i-mi for thinking of me and tagging me! ♥

That notification actually got me in the Simming realm for a little while again :) And I like it. I never know how long I’ll be here and how long I’ll be gone... But do know that no news from me usually means good news: I’m quite enjoying my life, which has rather changed from what it used to be. Right now, after graduating last summer, I’m an entrepreneur musician (with my little harp and allll my knowledge of Celtic lore haha) and soon to be married (♥) so we’re settling down and preparing to start a family of our own! 

I feel so adult just typing this! Still a bit new for me :) But we’re both really going through giant and rapid transformations, and I trust that everything will be well.

A little note on my personal patterns and thoughts about tumblr:

I’ve noticed that I usually come back here when things get overwhelming in my real and now adult life, somewhat escapist I suppose, and I do consciously steer clear of the black hole when that happens. On one level, Simming is a perfectly harmless way of dealing with an overwhelming reality. It’s creative, I feel inspired, I share good vibes with others. But on another level, I wish there was a nicer platform than tumblr to use for this, and I do miss the old LJ days when everything was just a little slower and more thought-out and you could leave longer comments and easily reply to them. I felt more connected to others than I do now; the “likes” on a post are reduced to just a number where I smile if I see a familiar name from the old days... but conversely I am less inclined to reply to others’ posts and get to know them because I know what a hassle it is to reply and that I will probably not be able to start a conversation in that way. Also, it seems that many people using tumblr are struggling with anxiety or their mental health (it’s just something that I come across more often in this medium) and as someone who used to be struggling but has climbed out, it feels better not to be triggered by those kinds of messages all the time. I hesitated saying that, but if you are wondering “where’d she go” after a period of online activity it’s probably because I started feeling better again and decided to focus on my real life more. :)

------------------------------------------------

Okay, well, now for the meme:

1) Rules: Tag 9 people who you would like to know better. 

So while I don’t know who has already done this, I still like to give a little shout-out to some people to let them know I’m thinking of them. :) Feel free to take the invitation or leave it be!

♥s go to @eversims @keoni-chan @voleste @strangetomato @didilysims @w-sims @selenaq13 @niamh-sims @poppet-sims @justsimaround @blackdaisies @mmmork @sariadeea (yes, I know that’s more than 9, shhh.) 

Relationship Status: engaged (What :o Actually, when I read @i-mi‘s post where she tagged me, we had just got engaged in that week and it was all very new... so that was when I realised I’d now have to fill in something unusual for me here.) Last Song I Listened To: Album: Liberation’s Door by Snatam Kaur Last Book Read/Listened To: The Riddle by Alison Croggon (currently reading) Favorite Color: deep turquoise and dark red Top Three Shows: Pride and Prejudice 1995 (every time I watch it I am entranced by the detailed acting and the characters), Downton Abbey (currently watching, great show, does the same thing for me in terms of entrancement by great acting ^_^), NCIS (because of nostalgic reasons, I used to watch it with my mom on the couch together when I still lived with my parents). Top Three Characters: Cadvan of Lirigon from the Pellinor series by Alison Croggon, Hermione Granger (because I’m starting to realise that I might be more like her than I thought), and George (Georgina) from The Five by Enid Blyton (because she doesn’t care about what others think of her, she’s not afraid to protect those she loves or stand for what she believes in, and she has a heart of gold). All of them badass characters, haha! Top Three Ships: I’m rereading the Pellinor series right now, so of course I’m shipping Maerad/Cadvan in there. Other than that.... @strangetomato‘s JRO never fails to give me warm fuzzy feelings. Do I have to name three? I’m not really a shipping person most of the time, and I haven’t read a lot of fiction lately. Oh! I know. It’s easier when watching shows. In Downton Abbey I am totally shipping Anna and Mr. Bates, even though I can relate to Anna so much more and it makes me want to hit Mr. Bates sometimes because he won’t stand up for himself. ;)

2) Rules: BOLD the statements that are true for you!

APPEARANCE: (ha, nothing, how funny! I wear my hair long nowadays) I am 5'7" or taller I wear glasses I have at least one tattoo I have at least one piercing I have blonde hair I have brown eyes I have short hair My abs are at least somewhat defined I have or have had braces

PERSONALITY: I love meeting new people People tell me that I’m funny Helping others with their problems is a big priority for me (working on this one so it doesn’t take over my life anymore ^_^) I enjoy physical challenges I enjoy mental challenges I’m playfully rude with people I know well (this is something I’ve never understood) I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY: I can sing well I can play an instrument I can do over 30 pushups without stopping I’m a fast runner I can draw well (sometimes.) I have a good memory I’m good at doing math in my head I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute I have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling I know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch (scratch yo.) I know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES: I enjoy playing sports I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else I have learned a new song in the past week I work out at least once a week I’ve gone for runs at least once a week in the warmer months I have drawn something in the past month I enjoy writing FANDOMS ARE MY #1 PASSION I do or have done martial arts

EXPERIENCES: I have had my first kiss I have had alcohol I have scored the winning goal in a sports game I have watched an entire season of a TV show in one sitting I have been at an overnight event I have been in a taxi I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year I have beaten a video game in one day I have visited another country I have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

RELATIONSHIPS: I’m in a relationship I have a crush on a celebrity I have a crush on someone I know I have been in at least 3 relationships (if you count the super awkward mutual crush at age 12) (love you) I have never been in a relationship I have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them I get crushes easily I have had a crush on someone for over a year I have been in a relationship for at least a year I have had feelings for a friend

MY LIFE: I have at least one person I consider a “best friend” I live close to my school My parents are still together I have at least one sibling I live in the united states There is snow right now where I live I have hung out with a friend in the past month I have a smartphone (never bought one to this day though. my current phone was found in my parents’ newly bought house, half buried in the garden for at least 9 months. it has been working for over a year. *knocks on wood* although it’s starting to develop cranky habits. or is that only when I need to quit the electronics...?) I have at least 15 CD’s (no clue. possibly.) I share my room with someone (yes, my fiancé. we live with two other people in a shared house but the two of us share a bedroom and also a study.)

RANDOM SHIT: I have breakdanced I know a person named Jamie I have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce (depends on how hard to pronounce you think O’Flaithearta is :) Native Irish.) I have dyed my hair I’m listening to one song on repeat right now I have punched someone in the past week I know someone who has gone to jail

#personal #babble #meme #text post