#calling this

It's also the date of Mardi Gras, the last day of Carnival, a festivity that predates Christianity and has its roots in Greco-Roman festivals, but eventually blended into the Christian timeline. Carnival is a time of public celebrations, parades, entertainment and street parties, often blending elements of a circus. It is a time of role-reversal, as common folks wear masks to hide their identity and behave in ways they wouldn't normally be allowed, erasing social boundaries. It is a time of satire, to mock and highlight society's contradictions and promote change.

The Carnival of Venice is tied to Commedia dell'Arte, a form of theatre that utilises standardised archetypical characters, shared across all productions and identified via their names, costumes, and functions in the comedy. The characters are masked and usually represent fixed social types and stock characters. These archetypal characters are common in carnivals and street games to this day.

(Note poppy is trans and transitions during the story, so since it’s from their perspective they use he/him pronouns and their deadname for themself for the first third or so, in case anyone is confused about the “he”s in the snippets below. Also they tend to deadname/misgender themself when dissociating or under stress because thats a thing i do and im projecting)

(Also i put a stupid amount of thought into their deadname [not depicted here], because theyre a billionaire celebrity’s child, of course their birth name is gonna be just stupid and pompous and oh my god steve what were you thinkinggg and also i did some research into steve jobs’s actual children and sort of made poppy a bit of a parallel to lisa brennan-jobs while still fitting how i think cobs would have raised them based on the scenes from mine your own business? So yea shoutout behindthename and the transcript of this one interview lisa did lol)

Close ups

Now I want to make a VSMP Pokémon AU

(I have way too many AUs)

so i've had the idea of jake being able to use that ability to heal/save people but it being something with repercussions/consequences - like being permanently bound to the person he saved and maybe losing some years off his own life as the price to pay for extending someone else's. not to mention, binding a part of your soul to another living person who stays alive afterwards (unlike apep) could include other things like potentially a telepathic and empathic bond (like vulcan bonds for example)

because of all of this, i have had a mental image in my head for the past few years of ezekiel taking a bullet for jake and jake holding his dying body in his arms. ezekiel, who has already died so many times before, calmly trying to tell jake its going to be okay before jake says fuck it and grabs ezekiel's hand in his and pours his very soul into him to keep him alive because he can't lose him again the emotional fallout as they now share both ink on their skin and a bond in their souls that makes it harder than ever to pretend around each other than it was before. the potential angst of ezekiel feeling violated and horrified by the idea of a telepathic/empathetic bond and jake feeling guilty for forcing something like that on ezekiel when all he wanted to do was save his life. jake trying so hard to hold back from crossing the border between their souls and minds because he doesn't want to cross ezekiel's boundaries anymore than he was already forced to, but at the same time leaving no barriers around his own mind in case ezekiel wants to look. jake knowing how important control over how people perceive him is to ezekiel, but also wanting to let ezekiel know that jake isnt going to hide anything from him. ezekiel struggling with his absolutely paralyzing fear of being truly known in entirety with no deceptions or omissions. ezekiel realizing that jake also spent his entire life hiding behinds masks to protect himself but once he came to the library he started to drop them all and truly open up.