To Me In A Modern Au, Falin And Laios Grow Up In A Tiny Little Country Town, One Of Backwater Areas Where

Architecture details from my inspo folder

the sillies

here in the storm, i found peace in you

Drunken Love Confessions

"I like your stupid face. It’s so stupid. It’s so… I like it. Can I touch it?"

"You're all I ever wanted. I'm sorry I can't say it sober."

"I can't wait for the room to stop spinning, so I can focus on your face again."

"I would love to hear those words in any other place than this bathroom, holding your hair back."

"You're cute. And a bit blurry. But definitely always so cute."

"I think I love you." "And I would love to answer you accordingly, but I think I would appreciate it more when you’re actually able to understand my answer."

"Don't tell my sober me that I told you I love you. It was a secret."

"I…I want to give you my heart. It belongs to… to you. How… how can I give it to you? I don’t want it anymore." "Let’s wait until tomorrow with the surgery."

"Oh I'm dreaming of you again. If I wouldn't be dreaming and if you would be really here, then I would tell you I love you."

"I love you. But that's a secret. So I won't tell you about it."

"You're drunk." "Yes. And hopelessly in love with you."

"I'm seeing you twice. Oh, now I can give all my love to even more of you."

"Say that again after two coffees at least and I will be yours."

"You're so adorable. I want to pick you up and never let you down."

"I've always loved you. But I will never tell you."

"This is not a dream, I think. In my dreams we're usually kissing."

"I’m not drunk. Can a drunk person do this?" "You’re not doing anything." "But… I sent you my love. Did you… did you not get it?"

"Can you keep a secret? I am madly in love with you. But psshh."

"I fell in love with you." "No, you fell down the stairs. You should really learn to hold your liquor."

"You're so perfect. How can anyone be so perfect? Maybe you're just a dream."

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This is from one of my worldbuilding posts in response at the bias of temperate climates being considered the "default" in fantasy and fiction in general (so these are tags in response to tags in another post but try to keep up)

This is very true, and as someone from a subtropical region who has never truly seen snow, to me the danger that cold weather represents is, let's use the word, "exotic" when I read into writing. Things do get cold here, but the fact that there are entire months where things get cold enough that nothing grows and staying outside can outright kill you is not something I would get used to easily.

This is ESPECIALLY relevant when you're doing worldbuilding on pre-industrial societies. Nowadays we can go to the store in the deep of winter, but when most of the population is composed of subsistence farmers, the above dangers are more than fatal. In temperate regions, a great deal of effort in daily life was spent into getting ready for the winter; storing harvested crops and meat in one way or the other until the spring. A harsh winter or a bad harvest could and did mean people just starved to death.

In tropical and subtropical regions, you don't usually get a season where nothing grows. Actually, you do, most have a rainy and a dry season of some sort (in my region, you do get a relatively strong winter, but the main difference is rainy/dry), so the pace of life is regulated by rain, and there's also a greater diversity of crops (see for example the milpa/three sisters system of the Americas, still used today). It doesn't necessarily mean that tropical and subtropical regions had better food all the time, since they also faced the same challenges of dealing with bad harvests, droughts, and more (DROUGHTS, especially, are the kind of civilization-ending event), but they did sustain overall high population densities and extensive systems of irrigation. I'll admit I read this long ago and don't know where to look at it, but a good comparison would be the higher density of villages and small plots in rice-producing regions compared to those in more temperate places. The Americas were completely disrupted by European colonization so it's hard to make sweeping statements about them but if we believe 1491's research (there are some points in dispute there), they had very, very high population densities, and partly this must be because of year-round cultivation of a great variety of tropical and subtropical crops.

Indeed, cold places far away from fishing, for example, often had low populations because there simply wasn't enough reliable crops to support them. Until the widespread adoption of a calorie rich crop that can tolerate cold conditions. Can you guess which it is?

Hey, time to overanalyze magic again. It makes sense to me -- follow closely now -- that earthbending would just be the control of rocks. It's all the minerals that come from the ground, and sure, even some artificially created ones as long as they have the same structure. But just rocks. Not dirt.

Why not, you ask? I invite you to consider what dirt actually is. It's lots of things! Some rock dust, yes, but also crumbled plants, and decomposed animals, and a variety of fungus, and bits of poop from creatures both microscopic and large. Basically, it's a mess of all things organic (plus tiny rocks).

You don't want an earthbender for dirt.

You want a necromancer.

newest issue of first years fashion just dropped

Izutsumi in a traditional persian dress!! Her ears poking from under the veil is so cute to me

Sort of talked about this in my last post but ! I really want to see more persian representation in media, specifically animation. Really disheartening when most of the "popular" animated movies taking place in west asia are about war, revolution or just generally orientalist D: Hopefully one day that'll change !!

But till that happens >:) ill make my own representation

i saw someone critiquing the fact that Kathleen has a very soft voice but i love it. a soft spoken woman is not a harmless woman.

I used to think that the reason I wasn't satisfied with Izzy's death was because I was too attached to his perspective as a character and couldn't focus on the big picture of the season and the main Gentlebeard relationship enough. I mean, I was still convinced that his death and the way it was carried out was a shit writing decision, but everyone else outside the Izzy Canyon circles seemed fine with it, so I was starting to think that maybe they were right.

So I looked back on the rest of the season and rewatched the finale... And realised something that I'd been trying to ignore because it was too painful to admit. A huge part of why Izzy's death hit so hard (in a bad way, not that delicious masochistic pain of having a beloved character die a good, narratively satisfying death) was because throughout this season he was the only character who actually had a satisfying arc and development. Practically no one else did. I didn't actually care for Gentlebeard this season, not the way I cared in S1. From episode 1 to 8 and a half, Izzy's arc was crafted with more care, kindness, subtlety and narrative weight than the main Gentlebeard arc which, in comparison, felt like a string of choppy beads badly tied together in an approximate shape of an arc, but collapsed as soon as you looked at it too closely.

Yes, we all know this season suffered for being 2 episodes too short, but I don't think that's all there is to it. This is starting to feel like GoT season 8 all over again. Would it have been better if it wasn't so rushed? Maybe. Or maybe it would have been even worse because this season just didn't seem to know what to do with itself or the characters. The themes and symbolism are all over the place and completely inconsistent. Ed and Stede's characters are practically back at the same place they left in S1. All they did was bounce off the walls back and forth with no real growth. As soon as they took a step towards fixing their relationship or growing as people, they either tool three steps back or it just got dropped. Stede letting fame get to his head? Interesting and realistic development. And how was it resolved? It wasn't. Stede and Ed being whim prone? I'm glad they brought it up. And then they just fell for another whim and it was presented as a satisfying ending.

Ed went from the Kraken, to taking the first steps towards being Ed, then suddenly all the way to being Ed by way of a Night of Magical Healing Sex that he he didn't actually want to happen because he wasn't ready. And then all of a sudden he pivoted to abandoning Stede and piracy and becoming a fisherman... for 5 min. And then back to Blackbeard again because two fishermen were mean to him for 5 minutes. And then abandoning it again to open an inn. How was any of this even remotely coherent or satisfying? They didn't even have a single conversation about any of it. Ed had more proper closure and communication with Izzy during his dying scene than with Stede and the rest of the crew put together. Izzy's arc got sacrificed to do the heavy lifting for Ed's arc and became nothing more than a shortcut to speed run his character growth. Except it didn't even lead anywhere. "Ed, they're your family, they love you" no they don't, he didn't even have a single positive conversation with any of them except Fang. Of course this could have been the point, and Ed could have seen Izzy's death, his own discovery of found family and his dying words as a pretext to repair his relationship with the crew. But he just left them and stayed with Stede instead.

Sure, you could say this was only the second act of the story, and S3 will resolve everything. But the second act is still meant to move the story and the characters forward in some way. Yes, of course if we get S3, I imagine Stede and Ed's life as innkeepers won't exactly be idyllic. But the problem is that the conflicts they'd have will only be a rehash and repeat of the same conflicts they've already have, or were supposed to have, this season. Multiple times, even. We already know that Ed is simply unable to live with himself no matter what life he chooses. The title of S1 was literally "wherever you go, there you are". We already know Stede's love isn't enough to fix him. We already know their goals in life are completely opposite. Maybe they could have shown Stede realising, after his humiliating in S7, that piracy wasn't all it was cracked up to be or he isn't suited for it, and that's why he chose to leave it behind and open an inn, but that's not the explanation we were given. It was just another whim. They literally didn't learn anything this season. They had two baby conversations in E4 and E5 and didn't take anything from it, just kept doing the complete opposite of anything. "We're both prone to whims, let's take things slow" became "let's take things extremely fast by moving in together permanently and becoming entrepreneurs". They never talked about the actual, deepseated, longstanding trauma issues they needed to resolve before they could even begin to have a proper relationship. They literally got a heavy-handed glimpse in what their life would become if they just stuck together without addressing their own personal issues, and chose to do that very thing. It that's what S3 is going to address, then why were Anne and Mary part of this season instead of the next one?

I remember everyone saying they wanted Ed and Stede to reunite as quickly as possible in S2, and I get why. They have great chemistry together. The season is about them. But for it to work, spending more time apart is exactly what they needed. They needed to learn how to live with themselves and others, first. Romantic love alone can't fix you as a person. You have to fix yourself first. Community can help (as with Izzy's case), but you still have to put in the work. In retrospect, I'm glad that Izzy didn't get a love interest this season - because he wasn't ready yet, and had to learn how to have normal relationships and friendships with other people before attempting an intimate romantic relationship, lest he ended up falling head first unit another toxic mutually dependent relationship. That's what Stede and Ed should have tried too. Instead the show just ended up using Izzy's death as a quick surgical fix, robbing Ed of his agency and having to do the hard work repairing himself and his relationships with other people. There's a sad irony in getting exactly one character's arc just this, and then using it as a sacrificial lamb to patch over the main character's arc.