#shadylex

I wish to know more about Val, I love hearing about Val

oh boy that's a lot jafskdlsakjfdk (thanks,,)

🥀 A memory that still hurts

definitely when they broke up with vandorallen. he was very clearly ready to just be rid of them. nothing they could say would ever get to him anymore, so instead of insulting him one last time, they forced themselves to just... let it go.

another related memory is when vandorallen was forced to leave the battlespire after caecilius' death. people were probably expecting them to gloat about his sobbing. really, they were just LIVID because that was the most emotion they had ever seen from him, confirming that he never actually cared about them.

🎧 A song that fits them

oh god there's a lot. i'm picking this one since i've been listening to it a bunch lately:

it doesn't 100% fit them, but it makes me think about their complicated feelings over seeing vandorallen in exiled redoubt and then killing him.

🍓 Something they love

makeup! they're not super comfortable putting a lot of it on themselves anymore, but they still find the process relaxing. so naturally, they do amarie's makeup instead sometimes. can't let all that skill from their Straight Woman years go to waste

🧸 How they comfort someone they love

honestly.... just by being there. they're not really good at saying or doing anything else...

particularly with tanlorin after they were forced to kill wisteria. val genuinely just didn't know what to do, even if they had just gone through a similar situation not too long ago. but i think tan would've recognized that val was in the same boat as them and they would've been content with that.

💋 How they show affection

Commission for @shadylex ! They’re gossipin

Thank you for the question! And such a fun one, I love talking about animals!!!

Top two favorite (which I would say are tied) are gray wolves and aye-ayes. Honorable mentions to blue whales.

Wolves are a bit of a cliche answer, but my love for them is a mix of having been a Wolf Kid, thinking they are just gorgeous animals, being really interested in this social dynamics, and having done my undergraduate thesis on wolf reintroduction, so now I'm full blown invested in them. I'm happy to say I've gotten a chance to see them in the wild too!! Here's a fun fact: the alpha/beta/omega social dynamics are based on an old study that looked at a group of unrelated wolves in captivity. The team that did that study later published a study disproving the previous one, which revealed that pack dynamics in the wild are basically just family dynamics, with the "alpha" male and female being the matriarch and patriarch of their family.

Aye ayes are underrated imo. They are very weird animals (in appearance and evolutionarily). They are lemurs (and phylogenetically, the most basal species we know of) that are considered "mammalian woodpeckers" because they are one of two mammal species in the world that fills the same ecological niche as woodpeckers. They have very long hands, with a thin long middle finger that they tap on tree bark and use echolocation to locate cavities in the tree that might have bugs in them. They then peel away the bark and use their weird long finger to hook the grubs out of the tree. I wuv them

Zeno and Yera, professional bastards at large for @shadylex!!

This is why I hoard every piece of art/writing i make because i never know when i want to go back and read it again. It’s also part of the reason why my pet project lately is to write ALL my notebook stories into google drive so i can save them forever!…. it’s a long process

We’ve honestly seen a lot of evidence there’s an enduring connection here?

Lotor doesn’t speak to Acxa when she’s part of the hostage exchange, but when he attacks her, a friend of mine sold me pretty hard on the idea that was a fake hit- because first it’s completely unlike Acxa, who’s obviously completely uninjured afterwards, to just tamely go limp because Lotor effectively pushed her over. Second, the bayard form Lotor was using in that scene was the whip-sword, which we’ve seen Zarkon kill a druid with in one hit.

We know the generals are pretty tenacious and aggressive combatants in s3e6. What we see in s5e2 is they’re... really pulling their punches. It feels almost like malicious compliance to me that even after Lotor pushes her, Acxa, Ezor, and Zethrid never once make any move to intervene in the fight on Zarkon’s behalf. They just pick up Sam and get him to the shuttle and leave.