I'm Feeling A Little Bit Of Awkwardness With Lot's Of Embarrassment! I Just Finished My Bachelor Degree

Rhaenyra tracing aemonds line of sight back to lucerys and gets distracted as jace jumps in. Aemond does not give a fuck about anyone else he just wants his hands on lucerys 🤣 nyra has seen this film before

Absolutely love the fact we establish here he does not care he's been hit by jace or even made the toast for rest of the brothers, but did it only to provoke and get near lucerys and the fact nyra notices 🤣 she knows obsession when she sees it

And yes that twitter account is mine

I just can't get enough of them 🥺

im sure this has happened at least once in canon we just didn't get to see it </3

This is it! And people out there describing this as "mild criticism" is just being ignorant at this point.

i kind of don’t like Taylor describing what happened to her in 2016 as ‘getting cancelled’ because it definitely wasn’t. it was a whole different beast. getting ‘cancelled’ is people finding out something about you, talking about it for a week, causing you to take like 3 weeks off and then everyone just moves on. she had a grown man who was weirdly obsessed with her since she was 19 publicly discredit her art and sexualize her to the entire world, put her in a revenge-porn style music video with a wax figure depicting her naked body without her consent, had a crowd of tens of thousands of people say ‘fuck taylor swift’, had a mural painted of her death, and went into hiding for almost two years. ‘getting cancelled’ involves a few tweets and an apology note…. not years and years of therapy. 

mahito!!! save me, mahito!!

when I say this the the ghibliest movie to have ever ghiblied. i mean that in the best way.

instagram / twitter / inprnt

Realizing that the reason Taylor’s music is so compelling and lends itself to so much analysis is because it scratches the same kind of itch as reading novels or watching prestige TV does — there are so many recurring and complementary themes and motifs and evolving “stories” that it really rewards the part of the brain that wants to connect dots and escape into another world. (And TTPD is a masterclass in this.)

Dairy Blog: Family

I don't think people realises how precious one's family is to them. For me family is home, home is where I can come back and be myself around my family, it's where I cry the most also where I feel the happiest! But most of the time I took them for granted believing they will be there for me forever & ever to forgive my past, my mistakes and my ignorance. So when I see people disrespecting my persons, i get so angry, so angry! I believe any relationship begins or more clearly to say the foundation of every relationship is faith and respect & love. But why we always disrespect our family, home so much? I put things down in disappointment when the people to whom I look up to, disrespect the humanity in me.Then the only thing i believe that all i can do is to break & burn things down. So, always treat your family, your home the way you would like to be treated with love & respect. I got nowhere to hide, to lick my wounds, please put my name on top of your list, handle my heart with care. Don't let it go! This is the last time.

“Stop apologizing. You don’t have to say sorry for how you laugh, how you dress, how you make your hair, how you speak. You don’t have to be sorry for being yourself. Do it fearlessly. It’s time to accept this is you, and you gotta spend the rest of your life with you. So start loving your sarcasm, your awkwardness, your weirdness, your unique sense of humor, your everything. It will make your life so much easier to simply be yourself.”

— Unknown

“A Thread of Tips” by Shelby

• #16 is missing but to find out more tips, follow her on twitter; be sure to thank her! 😁

disclaimer: check sites and tips before using at your own discretion.

Can’t stop thinking about how attack on titan is not a romance but how its narrative hinges upon the most devastating love stories I’ve encountered in fiction.

How Ymir and Historia cling to each other under the burden of a crown they didn’t ask for.

How Eren, the definition of an “attack” protagonist does anything and everything for Armin, who shrinks away from violence (despite having to become the embodiment of war).

How Erwin gave Levi the sky, and it is a debt that Levi knows he can never repay.

How subtly yet thoroughly they work Moblit into every scene, a step behind Hanji, cautioning them and supporting them, so that you don’t even notice him until he’s gone.

How Mikasa’s “Akerbond” to Eren goes so much further, so much deeper, because he exhibited such raw, unfettered inhumanity in the name of protecting her when she was a child, when he barely even knew her, and that is all she knows of love.

How Connie feels like he’s lost half of himself with Sasha gone.

How much Carla loved her son.

How much of an impact Marco made on Jean.

How Armin could eat Bertoldt’s love for Annie and have it latch onto his own admiration of her.

How Marlowe thought of Hitch as he was dying.

How Reiner keeps going for the kids he has to mentor.

How Falco put himself between Gabi and danger over and over again.

How violently Sasha’s family mourned but how reverent of her spirit they were to forgive her killer.

Idk man I just think for a show that started off as kids fighting giants and turned into “my war crime is worse than your war crime”, it is driven almost entirely by unique, poignant and thoroughly convincing love stories.

Loose threads and various trivia from the Poppy War series that I can't stop thinking about

I'm writing this because I have very little time to write at the moment so I won't be able to fit all these elements into the Poppy War fic I'm writing but I still have to get it out of the system because the amount of detail is insane.

DrUgS!

Ancient Chinese medicine in general is full of hallucinogenic and poisonous plants that were dosed very carefully, but shamans used them to talk to the gods, and the most common ones were:

The fly agaric mushroom: the mushroom that Chaghan and Qara gave to Kitay and Rin for the anchor ritual.

The ephedra plant: it was generally drunk in the form of tea and I think it's the liquid from the flask Jiang gives Rin in the first book when he sends her to meditate in the forest since Rin describes its effects not as a high but more as the beneficial effects of the plant in question.

The datura plant: it's extremely poisonous and was used in small amounts for its powerful hallucinogenic effects and sometimes its flowers are a blue-violet so I think it's the famous blue powder that Chaghan carries around in a small bottle although I couldn't find anything claiming it was used in that form. On that note, one of the candidates for Chaghan's drug is also cannabis, which was also used by Taoist monks and nomadic peoples from which I assume Hinterlands are inspired and, although they are modern hybrids, there are blue variants of this plant so it could be an artistic license from Kuang.

Betel nut tree: as Shiro experiments on Altan and Rin rants that the introduction of the Speerly to opium was an idea of the Red Emperor to make them addicted to Nikan and that previously their people used the bark of a tree without specifying which one. I think this is the tree in question although in reality, it is the nuts that are consumed because in addition to being the fourth most commonly used psychoactive substance after tobacco, alcohol, and caffeinated drinks, according to the World Health Organization, it energizing effects prevent fatigue and thirst so the famous fame of the Speerly warriors, at least those in Tearza's time, perhaps also stemmed from this as well as the brutal training regime and the legend of its origin is also very much linked to the Speerly eyes.

2.The Different Peoples of Nikan

I will only talk about Speerly and Hinterlanders otherwise I will never stop writing.

Speerly: As I mentioned above, the Tiwanese legend of the birth of the Betel Tree is linked to the inspiration for the red eyes of our phoenix warriors. According to the legend of the Paiwan tribe, one day a child with red eyes was born in a village, who killed any living thing with a glance. In the end Pali, this is the child's name, after finally integrating himself into the village and using the power of his eyes in wars between the other tribes, will be put to death after accidentally killing children but a friend of his notices that a betel nut tree was born on Pali's grave, the fruits of which are as wide and red as the boy's eyes that will protect the people of the village from then on. Now, what do you do with an intriguing legend about a red-eyed boy whose death essentially gave rise to a light drug tree? Apparently Kuang's answer was an entire red-eyed people reaching out to their murderous goddess via a drug of the colour of their eyes. I love this woman.

Hinterlanders: Rather than being one of a single people they are a sort of confederation of clans inspired by the Huns and the Mongols but I find it fascinating that many have light eyes and hair isn't an artistic license by the author to make them more 'shamanic' like most fantasy writers do because apparently a lot of ancient nomadic Asian ethnic groups had light eyes and hair. I used to think it was incredibly rare and more a thing of the descendants of peoples who lived near the Silk Road or the European border.

3.The Dragon

The Dragon is a Yao not a God.

I know Chaghan has already explained this, but many seem to forget about it, while I who had read Poppy War because I was in abstinence of Wuxia like MoDaoZuShi started shouting IS A FUKING Yao! and suddenly Nezha's whole speech about how it's not like Rin suddenly makes sense. Because Yao are often confused with Magical Beasts or Gods but Yao is a broad term for any animal, plant or even inanimate object that has gained spiritual awareness and magical powers. In this case, as Chaghan explained, an animal has absorbed the power of the Caves (if we want to speak in terms of theology or even Wuxia it would be Qi or even Mana if you prefer) which are one of those places where the veil between the two worlds thins and supposedly filled with the power of the real Rain Dragon and has become the 'Dragon'. But he is not a god because, as has already been said in the trilogy, true gods do not have material bodies. This can be confirmed in the story Vaisra tells Nezha about the shaman Yu who suggests that he has turned into the Dragon when in fact he may have been eaten and absorbed into the 'collection' of the Yao because in The Nine Curves River, a story by Kuang in the collection The Books of Dragons, she suggests the Yao existed before Yu's time because she makes no mention of Yu's legend but instead it is a fisherman who becomes the dragon in one of the versions.

The Dragon (Yao) is a Yinglong

The story of the Cave Dragon that Vaisra tells Nezha is inspired by the story of the legendary King Yu, founder of the Xia Dynasty who, according to the story, controlled the flooding of the Yellow River thanks to a Yinglong a very powerful water dragon that had lost its wings to kill a drought demon. This dragon is also related to the eels, through a connection that I honestly didn't understand, at least as Wikipedia explained it, and it relates back to how Rin sees him when he attacks the cave, because at least to me he reminds me of a giant eel.

Maybe the Yin sacrifice their children to the Yao

Okay I know, it sounds absurd, now I'll explain. Also in The Nine Curves River it is understood that it is set before the reign of the Red Emperor (the monks still operate) and the people of Arlong sacrifice the most beautiful people they can find in times of severe drought. Now there is no reference to anything like this in the era in which Poppy War is set but something may have changed when Yu was the one bound to the Yao in Dragon form, because in the story it is referred to that Yu would not allow anyone else to suffer, and in The Nine Curves River the Yao can cause an abnormal and prolonged drought until the sacrifice has been made but not in the times we are shown. So Yu did something that kept the Yao at bay for over a thousand years after his death or the Yin family sacrifice their children in secret. I have this theory that the Yin took it upon themselves to nurture what they thought was a God for the sake of their people after all forms of worship had been banned and, since in The Nine Curves River it is specified that the sacrificed people must go there voluntarily (perhaps a limitation imposed by the fact that even real gods cannot invade the minds of shamans unless the latter want them to and so a Yao who feeds on their power cannot go out and eat whoever they want whenever they want) the Yin Lords of the past would have piqued the curiosity of the sacrificable children to make them go to the Grotto voluntarily and the Yao would accept them as offerings and prevent the drought. So Vaisra knew that one of his sons would be eaten? Hell yes. Or at least he hoped that Yu's legend had some truth to it (knowing Riga) and that he would end up with at least one son turned into a Dragon to use for his revolution. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

Mingzha was not devoured by accident

Of course the whole theory above is dismantled when Nezha tells Yao that he was so hungry that he hadn't even thought of keeping Mingzha for himself and had devoured him straight away and that Nezha would go with him, presumably to do what Yu did (perhaps he had intuited something that is not told) to keep him at bay for so long. But hunger may not have been Yao's only reason for choosing to eat the child. Mingzha is presented to us with gold bracelets and anklets that are good luck charms for children, and so far nothing strange apart from the potential to be a heartbreak parallel for Nezha's handcuffs. But in The Nine Curves River the author implies that all Dragon sacrifices are marked with gold bracelets and anklets, so when the Yao chose Mingzha it was because he thought he was a sacrifice to be devoured.

The Red Emperor and Yu were like Nezha and Yin.

Me with a really crazy theory? More likely than you think.

So from what I understand even though it's not specified, the Yao doesn't eat all his sacrifices otherwise people like Yu and Nezha and the Fisherman wouldn't exist, even in legend. Maybe he plays with his food or maybe he has to give a fraction of his power in return, unfortunately we don't have enough elements to determine this but in Yu's legend there is a reference to the fact that the Dragon Province had become unlivable due to the currents and climate towards the end of the Red Emperor's reign, giving us a very specific time window in which to place the tale, which is strange in itself, but also makes a heavy implication (at least to me) that it was the Emperor's presence that made Arlong prosperous and, towards the end of his life, the work of his 'sacrifice' tapered off until Yu took his place.

Now, why do I think the Red Emperor was a Yin? Because Kuang loves to make us suffer and since Rin is Tearza's descendant it would make sense for Nezha to be a descendant of the Red Emperor but also for a few other reasons: Kitay says that the aunts and cousins of the Yin Clan were chosen as concubines of the Emperors and if the intrigue of the Harem didn't go out of fashion it wasn't just because of their beauty, women related to Kings and Emperors were a useful chess piece in political machinations. The coat of arms of House Yin is a dragon and speaking of historical reality the only ones who could wear the dragon on their robes or as a family crest were the Emperors and his family. Reference is made to the fact that there were no survivors of his lineage almost too insistently, just as there is no reference to Tearza's lineage until she calls Rin my blood. The Yin have the Imperial Seal that was thought to be lost. I'm pretty sure the Red Emperor is historically the equivalent of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, whose birth name was Ying Zheng and well . . . I know the Ying character and the Yin character are different but they sound similar and from a plot point of view the Red Emperor's remaining descendants could have hidden themselves by changing surnames but still one that had a resemblance to the one of origin or a side branch of the family, the possibilities are many. Lastly, he might be right about the Yin feeding their children to the Yao in Dragon form.

As for Yu, I think he was another yin descendant because, at least in the Italian version, Nezha seems to know that Yu is his ancestor.

That's all for now, at least until I find the rest of my notes. If any of this inspires you to write something I would love to have a little credit, even a small one, and oh. . .I definitely want to read it, or if you want to go in the rabbit hole with me don't be shy