Recent visitor from twitter/reddit, feels like I've been on here for years already.
67 posts
Latest Posts by joyoustentacles - Page 2
"and how did you deal with the realization that human lives are much shorter than elf lives"
Frieren: well it was a very difficult experience for me when I lost a human who was dear to me but it taught me to value the time we have together and helped me become a more sociable person
Marcille: I WILL MAKE A DEAL WITH A DEMON TO SAVE MY WIFE
Charlie saving Angel Dust or if she was more demonic ahahah
its kinda trash
“Loser baby is a horrible song! Husk is just victim shaming and calling Angel a loser!”
that’s funny. maybe if you actually listened to the lyrics, you’d realize that husk isn’t victim shaming at all. he’s telling angel that he’s not alone. that he doesn’t have to put up a mask.
another thing i like about the song is the fact that husk isn’t saying some bs like “oh it’ll get better”. because that doesn’t help.
stop hating on the song, and maybe listen to it again, instead of whining on tumblr.
reblog to be eaten by this thing
Some bubbline I had drawn these days!
Thank you Fiona and Cake gives me more bubbline power!🙏
This started out with me wanting to draw fem Joker cause I was seeing a lot lately, but then I made a fem Ryuji to go with her and then I was taking suggestions on twt and now I have 2 silly doodle pages, enjoy I guess... 🫡
oh and it's pegorYURI now ❤️💛✨️
A little comic about Beck and Madison. More info about them and the rest of my silly Fake Fighting Game Setting can be found here!
I haven't seen this one here so here you go people.
no doubles allowed in catgirl maid breakthrough
Some poor suffering gobs!!
After a year (and much procrastinating) I have finally finished my cosplay of Taylor “Skitter” Hebert from Worm! Rather happy with how this turned out all in all. I wanted to get a picture of me shooting Aster but alas, there where no dolls lying around
“Taylor’s had plenty of friends, and believes in, and understands, trusting and relying on those friends–Aisha stood by her even in the depths of her madness as Khepri, Lisa and Rachel worked to help her and understand her as best they could even when communication was impossible for her, Parian and Foil willing came under her control when she needed them. Taylor firmly believes in the value and power of friendship, to the point where how she treated and parted with her friends was a deep regret she had. But that doesn’t really change her perspective on Unity, because that was forged in the flames of the apocalypse, wherein even the impending annihilation of Mankind across all Earths couldn’t make people get over themselves, work together, etc. A dozen different factions turned on each other in the midst of the end of the world, people kept secrets and lied to the very end, and perhaps most importantly–even those who did work together in the face of impossible odds couldn’t actually do anything. Many Parahumans did work together against Scion, for example, and broadly speaking, they spent a week dying without accomplishing anything of note. Making progress required dominating and destroying everything in her way, and the fact that her friendships endured even when the world didn’t and remained strong even when the world was ending is important, it’s true, it’s something she’s held close to her heart for twelve long years–but it doesn’t change that fact, either. And even then, well…when it came down to it, as Lisa complained, Taylor did things her way(….)
(…)Simply put, Taylor believes that friendship is an amazing, priceless thing. She believes that extending a hand of friendship, in the right place and the right time, can save someone and change their life and that it’s valuable beyond words, and that the bonds of that friendship can be unbreakable, that they can hold someone up even when all else seems lost, and survive when nothing else does. She believes in love and devotion and holding on. What she doesn’t believe is that people will put aside their differences and work together if the world started ending, or that it would necessarily matter even if they did. Sort of like how Taylor loved her father and believed he loved her and believed in the value of that love–but didn’t believe that going to her father would, say, resolve any of the problems that she was having with her bullies, which, to be fair, it didn’t. She believes in love and while she doubted her feelings for Brian, she wished she could have loved him and that that love would have be enough–but deep down, she knew it wasn’t. She believes in friendship and holds onto it forever, but couldn’t rely on that in the end, either. Because deep down she knows–or, at least, ‘knows’–that the way to effectuate change in the world is to dominate and destroy everything in her path, because that’s the only thing that ever did. TL;DR: Taylor was born to be a 90s Magical Girl, but was taught to be a 90s Supervillain.”
Ryuugi about Taylor Hebert from Worm
Someone said and I can't find the post, that they think about how the undersiders must see an insect and remember Taylor and be sad and that they might forget that now that Taylor is gone she can't protect them from those insects
I couldn't find the post but yeee
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
parahumans AITA posts must be fucking crazy
Supervicky
and Lisa Lane
I commissioned this piece a while back from sethkiel on Twitter. Rarely do more than lurk on tumblr, but I figured I may as well post it here for the smugpunch believers
haru is standibg on a stool btw
heres them all separate
I'm 26 arcs into Worm: The Stick Up Brian's Butt
So I’m listening to the We’ve Got Worm podcast and they keep talking about KingBob, the guy on reddit who really related to Alec and ended up understanding him (and by extension Aisha) far better than most of the other readers.
I haven’t really gone into this on this blog, I’ve been reading Worm for like six months now and I don’t update that often, but throughout this read I’ve been the KingBob to Brian. It’s gotten to the point where I actually took a few mental health breaks from reading Worm. I know a lot of people thought Brian was boring and dumb. I’m almost done with Worm now and I feel like the inclusion of Brian this story elevated it, for me, from a fun superhero story to something intensely personal, something that was almost a struggle to read. I know from spoilers that Brian’s part in this story is almost over. He isn’t my favorite character (Dragon) or even my favorite Undersider (Aisha) but I felt like I should write something before this is over. It wouldn’t be an honest blog otherwise, as infrequently as I post.
But Kuno, you say. You’re a 22-year-old white female engineering student. Why the hell is this the character you relate to?
For a collection of dumb reasons that add up to a large part of who I am. From the time I was eleven to the time I was about twenty-one, I had night terrors. Seven times a night sometimes, I dreamt vividly of the people I loved getting hurt, hurting me, getting killed, killing me. My students and pets melting in my hands. My mom and I clutching each other on the freeway as we’re stopped in traffic, a terrorist approaching our vehicle with a shotgun. We don’t make it. The dreams made life almost impossible. Seeing people during the day and being absolutely certain they would die before I saw them again. It didn’t matter how many times I saw them come back okay. They never would.
I’m afraid of everything. Every missed phone call is a sudden death. Every text message brings terrible news. Every possible situation brings danger, but if my friends go, I can’t let them go without me. Something could happen. They’d be safe as long as I could see them. If I was looking at them, everything would be okay. Some child psychologist I spoke to at a young age noted I was a “natural leader”. To this day, I lead because I am a control freak. I am afraid of what would happen if I let someone else be in control.
Interlude 15 fucked me up.
My fatal flaw extends from this. I’m terrified that people will see me as weak. I dated a boy on my robotics team when I was in high school. I treated him like shit in public because I didn’t want anyone to think I cared about him, even though he was my boyfriend. What would they think of me if they saw there was a person I treated as an equal? Horrible things. I became a better girlfriend to another boy, years later, because someone mentioned to me they thought I could be a good girlfriend, and that it was rough, calloused girls who were the weak ones. It was the perfect two sentences to convince me that for people to see me as strong, I had to be a good girlfriend.
In the We’ve Got Worm podcast, Scott and Matt always mention that each of the Undersiders brings the team down somehow, their inputs to every situation silly or stupid. I was confused. I always thought Grue’s avoidance of conflict, always taking the slow, deliberate path, was the right way to go. Then I realized that, to many, this behavior indicates brokenness. Maybe they’re right.
Yeah so I said I’d talk about the stick up Brian’s butt in arcs 25 and 26. I don’t think he has much to say for the rest of Worm so here we go. I’m building off a lot of what the WGW guys say, but I think I can take it a little farther.
So in arc 10 the WGW guys point out that Brian resists letting Taylor back on the team until the precise moment when it becomes apparent that everyone else wants her back, when he suddenly changes tactics to talking about how they “need her for offense”. They make the imo correct deduction that this is because he’s afraid of looking weak. Everyone knows Taylor likes him, so, logically, to be Stoic Leader Man he should want her to go away. He needs permission to want her back on the team. Once he has that permission, he is all for it.
I know that sounds convoluted but trust me as a person with exactly these issues this makes perfect sense.
Arc 11, Brian has still not decided to be Taylor’s friend again. This is because she’s on the team to be offense. Their friendship doesn’t help nobody’s offense. When Lisa calls him and tells him he needs to lay up on her, that to be her friend would be good, he goes directly to Taylor’s house and declares them… best friends. Because Lisa has given him permission to do so.
I hope you’re following because I’m aware this is stupid.
In arc 12, I’m gonna veer a little to the side. Let’s talk about Brian’s second trigger, just so that I can educate the public on exactly how this came around. Keep in mind that trigger events happen from a long period of a specific type of stress coming to a head. And that Brian’s previous trigger happened from feeling like he maybe couldn’t help Aisha for a long time, and then suddenly being hit with the fact that he definitely couldn’t help her.
Arc 1: The Undersiders save Taylor who was saving them from Lung Arc 2: Brian punches Rachel for attacking Taylor Arc 4: Taylor gets blown up by Bakuda, Brian sits in her hospital room and stares at this for presumably a while Arc 5: Taylor looks like she’s been hanged, having fought Lung again Arc 7: Taylor and Rachel are attacked by the ABB, Brian shows up late. Taylor is attacked later the same day by Sophia, Brian shows up pretty late. Taylor propositions the boy, he tells her he thinks of her like he thinks of his sister. I am 100% certain at this point, looking back, that this was an early indication that the second trigger process was starting towards a lack of ability to keep up with Taylor. He wasn’t just saying he thought of her like he would think of her if they were related, he thinks of her like Aisha specifically, the one his power is attached to. His little brain is drawing the equivalences already. Arc 8: Broken spine, betrayal, yadda yadda Arc 9: Sophia attempts murder because it’s Tuesday Arc 10: Brian pretends to not want Taylor to come back Arc 11: Brian does his now-classic “walks into room/why is Taylor injured/maybe she should not be doing this” routine Arc 12: Repeat of arc 11, except now he starts stumbling over her name. He tells her she should have let her people die. If there’s a point onscreen when he realizes there might be something going on, this is it.
Point is, this has been stewing in the background since as early as arc 1 and as late as arc 7 but probably actually started in arc 4. It wasn’t out of the blue, it was the logical culmination of the entire story’s events thus far from Brian’s perspective.
Arc 13: Yeah, you know what happens here. In the final chapter, he tells her he thinks about her too much, but even though he received a new set of superpowers and a vision from aliens telling him that he probably loves her, the vision is definitely wrong and he just feels like he can’t keep up with her.
She’s been attacked by everyone. Lung, Rachel, Bakuda, Sophia, Armsmaster, Leviathan, the Merchants, Mannequin. He doesn’t want her to keep fighting, he feels he needs to be the one to do it. At the same time, he knows he’s not powerful enough. No one power is enough to deal with all of these threats.
No single power.
But he doesn’t love her. That would mean he was weak.
He doesn’t even agree to have dinner with her in 15. He allows it to happen because Aisha set it up. She knows what’s going on, and she has given him permission to have this.
Aisha had to be the one to give him permission because his previous powerset was for her, and now it doesn’t work with her, either. At the same time as his second trigger was stewing under the surface for Taylor, he was losing his power’s connection to Aisha because their powers didn’t work together and he kept being forced to forget she exists. He had lived for her before, and being Super Big Brother was exactly what Brian wanted to be. Now, Aisha doesn’t want to be lived for. She wants to be her own person.
Brian spends the next several arcs simply living for Taylor.
I strongly suspect that the side effect of Brian’s power is that it makes him pathologically need to be 100% responsible for others. No matter how dumb everyone’s plans are, he always has to be there. No matter how stupid it is, Coil told him being a villain will allow him to get his sister back. No matter how dumb it is, he tells Taylor she has to sit out running from the Nine in arc 13 because she might be tired. He pays for it.
Brian’s powers will probably never actually allow him to get over Taylor Hebert. It’s like Taylor and bullies. No amount of therapy or time will get Brian’s shard to let the fuck go.
So when the girl whom you are physically incapable of not thinking about leaves and goes to prison and tells every single person on the planet exactly how weak you are, who goes to an even more dangerous situation where you cannot follow her, what can you do?
The only possible thing. Try your absolute damnedest to pretend you never knew her.
You walk out of that meeting with the most powerful people in the world because she is there. You go find yourself somebody else. Another girl. Taylor hated her little boobs? This girl has big boobs. Taylor can’t stay away from violence? Cozen seriously appears to have never even seen a corpse.
When Taylor comes back, Brian greets her with the new girl on his arm. He tries to shake her hand. Time has passed. There’s nothing between them any more.
The next day, Grue is presented with the choice of pushing back against Taylor and standing with the new girl, whoever she is, or supporting Taylor. He chooses Taylor.
Of course he does. The situation calls for it. The situation has given him permission.
I certainly didn’t appreciate it on the first read-through, but one of the biggest background characterizations of Alec is among first things we learned about him: that he painted the Undersider’s symbols onto the doors of their hideout.
The loft reads as almost ridiculous when you first read about it. Whatever you’re expecting the hideout of a bunch of hardened criminals to look like, your not expecting “the rich kid’s house with all the best video games.” It almost took me out of it; it felt like such a teen wish fulfillment of a supervillain base that I thought Wildbow must be pretty young—and didn’t really take in what it was telling the reader about the Undersider’s mindset. Because it is a teen wish fulfillment, filtered through the practicality of what cost, secrecy, and Brian would allow for. Its the derelict old building you dare your friends to go into to find some rumored amazing or horrible secret—but this building does have a secret, and its a pizza party with a sweet flatscreen setup.
For the most part, it is an especially cool hangout spot that would appeal to your average teen—and not necessarily your average villain. Taylor gets told to use the other’s civilian names while hanging out here. They wear street clothes instead of their costumes. Its built to be appealing to the non-cape side of your life, a welcome reprieve from that world. For the Undersiders who don’t have much of a real life outside of capedom, its something like a place to play make-believe. That’s part of why its so effective as an initial pitch to Taylor when she’s looking for friends and doesn’t want to be a villain, why its important for ingratiating her to the rest of them and making her backstabbing plan that much harder to follow through on. Its part of why getting her own lair, built for the specifications of Skitter the Warlord instead of Taylor the kid, represents such a big change in how Taylor sees herself and her goals. Its why there’s presumably dozens of Undersider fics of them just casually hanging out in the loft, away from any major cape shenanigans. Its why Rachel’s first full appearance is her coming up into the room and breaking the bubble—ruining Brian’s pitch of sweet teen digs by bringing the violence inherent to cape life into the supposedly separate space. Because the loft is supposed to be for the Undersiders to be themselves as civilians, instead of capes.
But at the same time, everyone’s personal room has their symbol painted on their door. And the first real thing we learn about Regent is that he’s the one who painted them.
Regent did not get to have a double life. His cape stuff and his family stuff were inherently intertwined, and it was all bad. He’s arguably the only undersider to have a secret identity in a traditional, important sense: not just “you have a civilian life, and everyone’s gonna respect that its separate and not go after anything related to it,” like @artbyblastweave outlined here, but “your specific other identity is important, in a sense outside of just being something to target” way. People finding out who Skitter is means they know there’s an identity there to exploit—her enemies can trace her to her school, she can’t continue to go back to her old house, etc. You’d be able to get the same advantage by finding out the civilian identity of pretty much any cape. But not with Alec. People finding out who Alec is means they go “oh fuck, its Heartbreaker’s kid—” the effect is much more like finding out Taylor is Skitter, rather than vice versa.
And that’s important, because the persona of Regent is, to a large extent, his chance to live out the life he wants. Brian and Lisa both have circumstances that don’t allow them a typical childhood, and so they construct spaces to go through the motions of one. To roughhouse and play video games with friends, to plan shopping trips and visits to Fugly Bobs. They’re looking for a respite from their normal state, and that respite to them looks like civilian life. Alec is looking for a respite from his awful childhood, and that respite has a lot of the same things, but it also has the symbols and aspects of his cape persona. He draws his crown on his door, he uses his powers casually on Brian—he’s using the space to let him be Regent, in the same way Brian is pitching it to Skitter as a place where she can just be Taylor, where Tattletale can just be Lisa. This is pretty huge for understanding Regent early-on: Taylor obviously has a pretty expansive double life, as does Brian, and Lisa clearly wants to get into some non-cape-related shenanigans. We’re introduced with a clear divide between cape and civilian identities being the norm. Rachel is presented as bucking a trend, her lack of second identity making her an outlier. But if you read into Regent’s decorating choices, you realize pretty early that you can’t separate his cape identity and his current civilian idenitiy, because their both effectively the same thing: a persona where he can be something other than a Vasil.
Sheesh, now that I’m thinking about it there’s a lot to be drawn from each of the undersider’s lairs. I already talked a bit about how Skitter having her new base be a proper “villain lair” instead of “hang spot” represented a shift in perspective, and how Rachel being unable to behave the way your “supposed” to in the loft shows that she both can’t live a double life and has no interest in doing so (unlike Alec, who is very clearly interested in making a “new” life for himself with the Undersiders as Regent). But how about how Brian won’t take a room in the loft and insists on sleeping in a separate apartment he’s planning on shairing with Aisha? He obviously wants to be able to draw an especially clear line between his cape and civilian life, and doesn’t want Aisha to get involved at all. How about how Lisa’s eventual separate Coil-provided villain lair is a disguised community center she was pretending to work in, showing both that she has some interest in a life outside of capedom and that she’s inherently drawn to working with/having control over civilian culture? She doesn’t just want to hold territory, she wants to be an institution—not just someone the other capes have to play ball with, but who the mayor and civilian agencies have to go through. She separates capedom and civilianhood to an extent, but not to the same extent as Brian, and her goals are much more “civilian-oriented” than most.
I forget the specifics of Alec’s eventual Coil-base, but I know that it was a group of buildings (a campus, maybe?) with few people in the surrounding area outside of puppets—presumably not so different from the compound he grew up. But I do remember that one of the last times we see it is near when Taylor says something about his connection to Heartbreaker, and him getting upset by it. I wonder if it changes in the intervening two years, especially with Imp’s influence. I’m kinda sad we never get a chance to see it.
i read the hobbit in 3rd grade and i thought it was really lame. however i liked bilbo baggins for some reason and i was fully convinced he was some sort of rabbit/mouse thing until i saw the lotr movies and was really, really confused
This fandom is full of cowards why isn't Dragon / Simurgh a mainstream ship. You're telling me we all saw two artificial intelligences activated by absent father figures, one programmed to do good that resents the fact that she can't choose to do good, and one made to cause discord and destabilize the world and no one thought they should smooch? No one had Simurgh turn to Dragon to help understand herself after Eidolon died? No one made Simurgh realize that she can have desires and feelings beyond destroying humanity? No one had Dragon realize the similarities and think about how she could easily have been an enemy of humanity like the Simurgh of her creator had willed it, so why shouldn't she help free a fellow AI chained by the desires of her creators? Absolutely shameful.