/give @a hugs 64

Thats a great cat right there

long enough that the time investment is a serious barrier to entry

irrevocably changes your personality

brings something genuinely unique to the table. there is no real substitute for reading/playing/watching it in its entirety

Fate/Stay Night is a Homestuck. Worm is a Homestuck. When They Cry is a Homestuck.

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

At first El's furious because she thinks they treated him like a hero his whole life when he's obviously a person. Only then it turns out he's never actually much acted like a person. And the only reason he became the boy she loves is because his mother taught him to use his mal-murdering impulses in heroic ways - in protection of others.

By the end of the book El finally correctly identifies the human boy Orion as having been shaped enormously POSITIVELY by wanting to be a hero. He DID want to be a hero. Not for the hero-worship, correct, because he doesn't care particularly for being around other humans, and because it doesn't feel right when it's an instinctive hunger, but because he's been shaped his whole life to want to be that, that protective weapon. Because: it allowed him to conceptualise his hunger as protectiveness. A mawmouth isn't a hero, or a protective weapon. Orion is. His mother made him the heroic boy El loves.

El doesn't want to see it, but Ophelia tried to make Orion as human as she possibly could. She offered him other interests, encouraged and even forced him to socialise, provided him love and care and what made him happy (killing mals), and impressed upon him not just basic manners but also the mental concept of 'protector' to apply to himself, AND the basic capacity to respond to El in a human way when she came along and triggered his interest in being a fully social being. She made sure the boy in and around the mawmouth absorbed enough that he really was a developed human.