"His hand wraps around the handle of Techno’s heavy axe and it tears through the air with a harsh lurch, sinking through the surprised expression of Caribou with a sickening wet noise"
-Fanart for Hush Now (Chapter 45) by @corpse-art !! <3
I remember reading this and just being FLOORED bc wowza
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if you struggle with mental health, one piece of advice i would genuinely give you is learn to knit.
or crochet: something repetitive to do with your hands, assuming you're capable of it. if you're like me and learnt to knit as a kid but let it lie fallow for a long time, it may be that starting a large, simple project (for me it was a cloak, but a blanket could work too) gets you back into it. or maybe doing something smaller, idk. i personally found socks really hard for a while because they felt smaller than my cloak but weren't getting Done quick enough for me. as i've sped up i find it more interesting to knit socks.
regardless, a repetitive task is great for emotional regulation (also see: autistic stimming), and something that you can look at and go hey i've done something, unlike simply using a fidget toy, can also help to pick your mood up when the brain is being cruel.
it's also useful as a conversation starter or distracter if you don't know what to talk about. if you're wanting to talk to older people also you're more likely to reel them in with knitting (i work better with older people, and 99% of people who ask what i'm knitting are older than me). it also gives you the opportunity to not make eye contact because you're busy knitting, even if you're still carrying on a conversation. if you're absolutely stuck for conversation you can count your stitches and people might stop bothering you.
if you have trouble focusing without doing something with your hands, you can knit! i knit a lot in church, and it helps me to focus on what's being said.
i probably have more reasons you should pick up knitting, but i can't recall them right now, so yeah.
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I'm seeing lots of speculation in the wake of the unwanted guest about whether absorbing Loveday's soul is what made Cytherea snap and sure, I see the theory, but personally as a cancer survivor I have never ever questioned why Cytherea snapped
Cancer is an existentially terrifying, often debilitatingly painful and/or exhausting illness, that, if not cured, takes over your body bit by bit, gets into the highly essential bits which increases the suffering and/or fundamentally changes you as a person, makes you extremely vulnerable and dependent on others, and almost inevitably kills you unless you get it when you're old enough and die of old age first instead. Its treatment is often just as painful and exhausting as the illness, or even more so, and doesn't always work. When you have cancer, there are two ways out: being cured (preferable) or, when that is not an option, deciding for yourself when you have reached the point where the suffering is so bad and the outlook so non existent that you would rather die now rather than later after even more and worse suffering.
And John took both of those options away from Cytherea and from her entire line of descendants. When he had the option to cure them all all along. Idk about y'all but the revelation in Nona that John could cure cancer was the number one earth shattering realisation for me. He did this to her, and to the entire Seventh House, on purpose.
This is the first giant betrayal to me. For generation after generation, for TEN THOUSAND YEARS, this man let the heirs of the Seventh House be sick for functionally their entire lives, likely starting in childhood, go through an incalculable amount of painful and exhausting experimental treatments bc he didn't even bring modern medicine into his New Order, and die in their twenties or thirties at best, when he could have STOPPED THIS ALL ALONG with little more effort than snapping his fingers.
Second big betrayal is towards Cytherea herself, but basically the same point : he could have cured her at any time. Before she became Lyctor, possibly, since we're not sure how static Lyctor bodies are, but Mercy's powers, Harrow's lobotomy and Ianthe's arm suggest that it would have been an option afterwards too. And he didn't. He let her have cancer for TEN THOUSAND years without curing her. And he calls himself her friend. Absolutely fuck that bastard.
Third big betrayal is the same betrayal that he inflicts on all the other Lyctors, but imo worse bc of Cytherea's illness. It seems from the books that Lyctors are, if obv not functionally immortal, at least Very Difficult to kill. Consequently, John demands Cytherea's loyalty not only in the form of killing the person she loves the most in the world, but in the very same act, in the form of cutting off the One escape route she has left out of the suffering he's purposefully keeping her in. In short, he takes the one person away from her who she perhaps doesn't resent depending on and, in the same act, makes it A Lot more difficult for her to choose euthanasia. (There's meta in this about the deeply realistic and also Terrifying ableism of John "admits openly that he'll pay any price so the people he loves can't leave him" making his sick friend dependent on him by keeping her sick, taking away her (arguable) main caretaker and cutting her off from the option of leaving him by dying.)
And at the same time that the other Lyctors realise John's betrayal re: their cavaliers, Cytherea potentially realises ALL OF THIS. TEN THOUSAND years of suffering, of seeing her House suffer, on top of losing the person she cares about the most, and ALL OF IT was avoidable, and not just avoidable but EASY TO AVOID? Is it any wonder she went on a rampage to bring down John and everything he cared about and had worked towards, and that she didn't care about dying at the end (or, perhaps, was even counting on that outcome)? I had cancer (as an aware adult) for a year in the best imaginable circumstances and am still fucked up about almost a decade later. After TEN THOUSAND YEARS and learning there had been another option all along, I'd have done WAY WORSE than Cytherea. I really don't think she needed to absorb anyone's soul to get there. It is, in my opinion, a deeply understandable and realistic reaction.
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pluvi begging you to expand on gojo not wanting what happened to his mother to happen to you 🙏
warnings: it’s all a dream so nothing is real aside from the flashback stuff but pregnancy as horror, (sewing) needles, implied gore/eye trauma, implied child harm, gojo is messed up yo!!! and its bc of his mama!!!
he dreams about her.
it’s an odd thing, really. gojo isn’t much of a dreamer—not much of a sleeper, all things considered, but it’s difficult not to give in when you drag him to bed and curl up in his arms. the soft rise and fall of your chest, the steady thump of your heart, the sound of your breath; it soothes him into slumber.
and he dreams about her. she was always young. he’s older now than she ever got to be. frail, thin; borderline skeletal, robes hanging from her body like webbing. she sits in a chair facing a window, swathed in moonlight, the silver of her embroidery needle glinting with each stab. her face is veiled. her stomach is swollen with child.
she doesn’t turn to him, but she beckons without noise. his feet take him easily to her, and he kneels at her side as she sets aside the embroidery hoop to let him place his head on her knees.
her hand is cold as it threads through his hair. it’s gentle, at first. then harsher a moment later. she grips firm, tugs him up by those electric white threads, stares down at him through all that elaborate lace.
he imagines she’s weeping beneath it. his mother never wept before him, but she was pretty in the aftermath, eyes puffy and pink and shining. they were a cold kind of loving when they regarded him. she must have been beautiful once, elegant and lithe and willowy, cruel like the heartless sea and sharp like a brilliant diamond, but whatever was there is long gone. he thinks all sons must empty their mothers, bleed them dry from within, because his was always a shell.
she trails her hand down the side of his face, and he turns into the palm and closes his eyes, and she is silent as she sets down her embroidery to lift her veil. she is silent and hollow and eidolic as her fingers brush down his jaw and tilt his head up to look at her.
but it’s your face that he sees when he opens his eyes.
it’s your hand against his cheek, your eyes pink and puffy and pretty, your stomach bulging by his own doing. it’s your fingers that pluck up the needle, still attached to a thread of brilliant cerulean, and raise it to his eye.
his mother never was able to pierce him with that needle. she stopped herself, each and every time, dropping it and tugging him close in shame. she never doted, never was kind, but she never did manage to harm him.
you do. he lets you. it’s only fair. whatever thing is in your stomach can’t be human—whether god or demon what does it matter, at the end of the day—and didn’t he put it in you himself? if his mother never got the satisfaction of spilling his blood, shouldn’t you?
but he wakes just as the tip pierces his iris, and you hold him in your lap, eyes wide with concern and not puffy from weeping, and you hold no child within you. your hands thread through his hair and they’re warm, your lips plush when you bend to press a kiss to his brow.
he turns inward to press his face into your (empty, blissfully vacant) abdomen. the wetness he leaves there, falling from his so very coveted eyes, is colorless.
he thinks it ought to be brilliant crimson.
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