#titleleaf

listen it is FUCKED UP that Thingol wandered off for a minute and then came back 200 years later married to a forest and all his friends had popped off to a new continent populated by gods and glowing trees (his trees do not glow)

every time a story starts with Elric lying in a hole in the dirt going "out of meds again, guess i'll die" and then a god(?) literally will not let him die is sort of cosmically horrifying but also funny

when Feanor & co. invented intra-species murder and then hit the bricks (waves. whatever)

Finrod just walked into the middle of a bunch of guys' camp at night and started singing. like while glowing or something. and then he was like hi i promise im friendly

the way i was actually in the middle of a post that included this lol

mindscapes in the comics overall really fascinate me, in no small part bc telepath fave, but also bc it's such like. a big staple of a lot of x-stuff, considering the amount of prominent telepaths? we're going to see the inside of someone's mind, probably several times over in several different ways. even just flipping thru utopia & nation x, i saw at least namor, scott, diamond form emma, & the sentry, & the differences between people with tight control of their mind or experience, like namor or scott, compared to the wasteland of emma's mind when she's cut off from her emotions, to bob, having the most basic structures for his safety in a mind he can't fully control, just... gets me so good.

admittedly for quentin, i'm fond of the idea of the library & the view out the window really only being one part, & that the rest of the sprawl of that limitless mind is, at least in most respects, the school. xavier's as he knew it? the jgs? whatever they had going on in central park? yes. a little bit of all of them, stitched together in ways he can make appear utterly seamless. it gives him the space for the library as his focal point of more conscious thought, imo, the place where he's noting down observations & thoughts, keeping his records organized, as well as having the lawn to keep the eternally-burning brain damage on, but the rest of the school is... kind of a toss-up, whether stepping through a door gets you an actual, true-to-life recreation of whatever was there or something else. someone's classroom has been taken over to set up the relay for the psychic comms. opening certain dorm rooms slaps you in the face with vivid memories that have been twisted by quentin replaying the moment, again & again, & letting his feelings overshadow the reality of it. he's not exactly keen on letting anyone else read in the library, mind you, but that's the space people are first brought to bc they're the thoughts he's put, well, thought into - organization & cataloging & intent, usually, all wrapped up in neat leather bindings or stored on the jgs' nice computer systems in ways that are more presentable (ignore the brain damage out the window haha he'll just hide that).

things obscured... there's gotta be a jar in the basement, surely. a jar or a tank in hank's lab that glows a soft, eerie green from behind stacks of technical junk & half-finished constructs & chemistry sets. it being this sort of... nothingness, that he tries to keep pushed down. not just dissociation or zoning out but the straight up call of nonexistence that. hey we're not looking at! mccoy's lab is gross, nobody wants to see that, move along. don't look at the glowing green tub of suicidal ideation & fear of a loss of control. it's not spilling onto the floor.

there's also probably shit about his family, frankly - not necessarily the birth parent shit but. man he has repressed the fuck out of any & everything about his adopted parents. their names are smudged in the sparse record about them, things crossed out & edited & questioned with a vehemence you can feel in those psychic penstrokes, before there's long sections of empty pages only broken up by the occasional single line about them. that one even quentin can't really read, not emotionally but quite literally, it looks like it's been thru six ciphers even before quentin overlays it with the fun, familiar effect of "i literally cannot recognize letters or words right now even in my own hand" (shoutout migraine auras). it's collecting dust.

xavier is also probably a complicated one. he doesn't necessarily like admitting to himself, genuinely, he ever admired the man. doesn't want to think about the ways he's mirrored him or the teachings he took to heart. sure, it's a silly joke, the angel on his shoulder looks like charles, or a good thing to throw in chuck's face, i believed in you once - but actually letting himself think or feel like the man shaped his moral compass is far too damning to acknowledge. there's notes on the cover or the title page about revisions, new editions, but good luck getting his mind to procure the old ones to see the truth of anything. & the headmaster's office - charles' headmaster's office, specifically - is locked tight. the chair they tied him to still sits in the middle of the floor. the modified helmet rests on the seat. whether that's about pride or regret or both doesn't really matter if no one gets to see it.

10. worst part of fanon Okay so I'm barely in Good Omens fandom anymore but I still hate, more than any more recent fanon I've encountered, the idea that Crowley from Good Omens is the Archangel Raphael. It's not that I have never read it done well but it comes with a whole suite of glurgey tropes about him being a ~selfless healing angel~ before he Fell and comes with a lot of implications that of course some demons deserved to Fall but not Crowley because he is Better, and also I just like it when the people who took it upon themselves to save the world against their higher-ups' orders are not important or powerful. Like I feel like a big part of the point of the original novel was that ordinary people are important and their lives are worth more than these two superpowers scheming to declare themselves as having won before the smoking ruins of Earth have cooled, and to that end I hate fics about how Crowley's Big Secret Is That He's An Important Powerful Guy. And don't tell me he must be one because of that computer password; don't tell me none of the Archangels have done the angel equivalent of leaving their password sticky-noted to the monitor.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them Hmm. I don't think any of my current faves are unpopular within their current fandoms, but more people who are into Minecraft YouTube narratives should watch Daskalos' Ancient Greek Skyblock series, where he plays as an Ancient Greek man with a surprisingly thorough knowledge of architecture, and survives on a skyblock island, building temples to the various gods (based on real temples) out of his homemade cobblestone, and, having done his best to live virtuously and piously, he is able to figure out why they've trapped him on an island in an endless void in the sky. It is charming and often funny and sometimes genuinely touching!

14. that one thing you see in fics all the time So there's this trope in my corner of Minecraft YouTube where there are these eldritch godlike beings called Watchers. (They are canon to one SMP and semi-canon to another series but only for one player.) I enjoy an eldritch godlike being, but the one player who brought them into the Life Series was really into "they require others' pain to live" and because one of my faves at one point Became A Watcher in another SMP he gets a lot of angst involving him needing to suffer and hating himself for this. And I have a few issues with this:

the Watchers were meant to be a metaphor for YouTube viewers and I don't think were meant to be super sadistic initially (although admittedly I have watched very little of Evo)

if they're obligate... dolorovores? this makes them feel a lot less evil to me tbh

if we're going for actual super-sadistic Watchers I really want some fragment of acknowledgement in the story that they are no longer YouTube viewers, they are whump authors and readers

do you have a collection of anything?

Sort of sewing machines, but that's like ...it doesn't truly feel like a collection because there's only a few. It's just that they take up a lot of space. It's probably more true to say that I collect books! I have multiple full bookcases and yet still full boxes of books in storage.

what's the best job you've ever had?

*hundred yard stare* Have I had a good job ever? Okay, technically my current job is probably the best one I've ever had, because I have a pretty good amount of autonomy even if there are a lot of toxic elements to the environment. The biggest issue for me with all the jobs I've had in my life is the presence of managers being sticklers even when there are no customers, which isn't on the table here, largely because I got out of the food service/retail zone.

what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?

A mahogany empire sofa from the 1820s-1830s. I got it at the local flea market to replace the big ugly couch the people I bought my house from left, and it cost less than buying new. I think some of the upholstery is hot glued on, which is a ridiculous thing for someone to have done to an antique like this.

what's your favourite beverage?

Brown sugar milk tea with boba :3 I never get to have it anymore because the local boba/ramen shop closed, so whenever I travel to a city I'm like hang on, let's stop for boba! When I walked from Ham House to Strawberry Hill, I managed to stop and get a boba and a bubble waffle to eat along the way and it was wonderful.

Agh, very annoying how the tungle dot com does that!

Oh man, I hadn’t even thought of this one!  It probably falls on ‘don’t ship it’, but I would be interested in reading fanfiction for it!

Why don’t you ship it? I guess Peter Cushing is very old and fragile at that point in his life so while I still love him, I don’t think of him all that sexually.  (I do kinda sorta ship him with Vader, though, because of him holding his leash and also Vader seeming to support him in Rogue One.)

What would have made you like it? If it had been Peter Cushing circa Frankenstein Created Woman (his peak Silver Fox era), almost certainly.  Maybe if I’d read any of the Tarkin novels and knew more about his personality.

so here's the thing. i haven't actually used bath oils. i keep thinking maybe I should, because bath bombs being single-use is a pain and they all seem overpriced. however, I do love bath bombs, so I agree that they're good. 

Here’s a bit from the forthcoming sequel to “I’ll Be Your Mirror”!

*

More surprising than the unexplained bacon, however, is the giggling. Not that Henry would put it past Richard to just make bacon sandwiches and giggle, but there's someone else who is also giggling, and it sounds like a woman and that is surprising.

Henry drops his backpack by the front door and goes to the kitchen to investigate, and there's Richard, frying up some bacon, wearing nothing but his boxers, which, again, is pretty standard for Richard, except for the part where there's a girl behind him, wearing only knickers and a t-shirt, with her arms wrapped around his waist.

"Get off," Richard says, but he's laughing. "I'm going to burn myself!"

The girl is also giggling. "Then you should have worn a shirt," she says. She sounds foreign—Polish, maybe.

"You're wearing my shirt," Richard says.