Side account for @factorialrabbit for fanfic updates, fanfic requests, art doodles, maybe some recommendations, and rebagels of things anxiety says not to put on main. That sort of stuff. Unless otherwise specified feel free to use anything here to write or draw or otherwise create, or build on ideas however you like. Even if I do use it myself sometime, you know what's better than one cake? Two cakes. Prompt/Request Status - open but slow because whumptober
Hello! I have two /different/ flavours of hurt/comfort bingo, plus its whumptober soon. As such, I’m taking requests - General Zelda, LU, LM, LK, FFXIV, any MXTX work, FE:A, FE:3H, Tin Tin, Fall of Gondolin, more general silmarillion... And any fandom found on my ao3! There’s also a pretty good rundown of who I prefer to write about, too.
First is from Hurt/Comfort Bingo on Dreamwidth (https://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/)
And also Bad Things Happen Bingo, here on tumblr (https://badthingshappenbingo.tumblr.com/about)
And then, of course, Whumptober is around the corner.
All three of these events allow multiple events to be filled with the one fic, so... If you want to see anything off the list found here https://whumptober.tumblr.com/post/693852811398709248/welcome-to-whumptober-2022-in-its-fifth-year-of feel free to request that too!
(I may combine any suggestions with prompts from any of the other events just because I can. A few I do also have ideas I’m attached to for, but I’m very bad at writing without being asked specifically for it)
You can always find other random prompt lists in the following tag. Both on and off list prompts are always open, I just may or may not ever finish them, and at different times I may work slower or faster. The tag:
Text of the prompt lists is below, I’ll try update this post when/if I fill things:
List One:
captivity
culture shock
attacked by a creature
hallucinations / illusions
learning to be loved
explosion
skeletons in the closet
confession in desperate situation
toothache
Stockholm syndrome
forced to rely on enemy / rival
loss of hearing
experiments by evil scientists
presumed dead
deadline / time bomb (complete)
nausea
cuddling
imprisonment
dystopia
loss of powers
forced to face fear
medication
cages
depression
List Two:
Worked Themselves to Exhaustion
Lost Their Voice Screaming
Will Not Be a Victim
Crisis Catch-and-Carry
Never Be Hurt Again
Big Brother Instinct
Painful Wound Cleaning
Pleading
Wound That Would Not Heal
Vengeance
That’s Not Normal
Stumbling and Staggering
You Said You Would Let Them Go
Dying in Their Arms
Catatonia
Hysterical Strength
Gave Up Too Soon
Don’t Let Them See You Cry
Wiping the Other’s Tears Away (complete)
I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed
Sore Throat
Burns
Knife to the Throat
Accidentally Hurt by Friend
Forced to Hurt Someone
I need people complaining about Yanli being betrothed to her mother's friend's son to seriously understand that it is significantly more important to have a loving and supportive mother-in-law than a loving and supportive husband in an arranged marriage and as Madam Yu must have known, Madam Jin delivers everytime.
#fascinating thoughts#it is still super sad thought that madame yu felt the need to arrange a marriage#especially when JFM was so willing to just let her fall in love with whoever when the time came#so to madame Yu it still comes down either to power or a repetition of harmful generational cycles#like yes great that madame yu was intentional about it in terms of arranging a marriage where her daughter would have new supportive family#but uh.... still#complicated situation all around#like in today's society we don't think like that#I'd personally rather have a loving supportive husband than a supportive mother in law for example#because HE'S gonna be her partner the father of her kids and the leader of the clan someday#am I making sense?#just complicated#great point though genuinely#mdzs#mdzs analysis
I think this is the exact type of sentiment I wished to contradict with my post? I may not manage to phrase this situation particularly well, but please bear with me about this.
Firstly, I think it is mentioned that Jiang Yanli is already quite taken with Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Fengmian broke up that engagement because it was clear that Jin Zixuan did not have the same regard for her. This, of course, is because Jin Zixuan seemed, in part, to believe she and Wei Wuxian had something going on, but overall it was actually a pretty sensible decision, and it is not nice to be married to a man who does not even respect you. She might have easily become the next Madam Jin or Madam Yu if such resentment were allowed to fester.
However, from a practical standpoint, only perhaps 25% of this decision was generational trauma/search for power in Madam Yu's part. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a political move this was, and how close Madam Yu and Madam Jin must have been for this arrangement to exist.
Jiang Yanli, despite being a woman of great inner strength and kindness, is not what one would call a desireable bride. She is indeed the daughter of a clan leader, but her father already has a son and the son-in-law cannot expect to absorb the Jiang. Her father also has a ward with whom she is close in a way that would be socially inappropriate, especially given that the whole world seems to be convinced that both Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli were weak for him and not always in a brotherly way. By herself, she is considered plain and weak, with few or no achievements to her name. Nearly everything about this is misogynistic, but it is also the reality that adult Jiang Yanli would have to, and likely did, navigate.
Jiang Yanli is extremely fortunate in that she has a father who is either wholly disinterested in this marriage business or willing to let her find someone to fall in love with (though how she's going to do that when apparently she doesn't go out as much is beyond me, maybe he was waiting for someone to come asking?) and a brother who pretty much worships the ground she walks on. That being said, it is practically an expectation for women to marry (and I don't think we have a single unmarried lady in MDZS except Wen Qing, whose life is presumably disrupted and then ended too soon, and Baoshan Sanren, who might as well have had a husband) both at that time and today.
Madam Jin, in this scenario, is the second mother. It is obvious that she is extremely politically powerful, to the point where her husband the sect leader did not have any concubines in spite of sleeping with any woman he could find, and apparently did not ever take in a bastard despite having only one son until Jin Guangyao became too important to ignore. She was, in fact, so powerful and important that she could singularly dictate who the wife of the heir and the future Madam Jin would be and chose a bride and alliance the literal sect leader was not keen on. This is the kind of protection Madam Yu wants Jiang Yanli to have. I genuinely cannot emphasize enough how much trouble a mother-in-law can cause you both physically and mentally (women where I live have been literally murdered about it in this very century) and while I cannot comment on Chinese dating cultures in modern times (any Chinese people reading this please share insights if you want to!), I don't see how this wouldn't have been an issue then. This is especially true if you belong to royalty/nobility because there the power struggle exists beyond simple domestic matters. As a woman, you would be expected to co-ordinate with and work with her for the household, and your only line of defense against any harassment would be your husband's love and favour, who, in Jin Zixuan's case and every other case, might just find her a tad too boring or unattractive and take a concubine, or just simply grow tired of having a wife who could not get along with his mother.
(As an aside, consider checking out the Lu family drama to see the kind of struggles that would exist among nobility and how much power women could have. I'm pretty sure there is a cdrama with Empress Lu but the name escapes me. She, like most other Empresses, is both fascinating and ruthless and I love her so much.)
Is this misogynistic on the husband's part to do and Madam Yu's part to consider? Yes. This is also incredibly pragmatic. So apart from the 25% generational trauma and power struggle and the absolute terror she would have felt about her own position and her friend's being repeated for her daughter, 75% of it was actually extremely well-thought out for Jiang Yanli's safety and long-term benefit, and from what we know, Jiang Yanli, if not particularly over-enthusiastic, was certainly willing and approving of the groom (even if he could really do with some common sense).
ETA: Post canon Wei Wuxian in the Cloud Recesses is a very mild but good example of the kind of problems newlywed women might face from non-supportive in-laws in spite of having a supportive husband. While Lan Wangji thinks the world of him and tries his best to mitigate effects, Wei Wuxian has to adjust large parts of his life and personality in order to coexist peacefully with the Lan and apparently even then the children get in trouble for interacting with him. It is also notable that he and husband spend a lot of their time escaping travelling, which is not an option a bride in a noble household might always have.
I finished skyward sword!!! I had a blast with this game and i’m so attached to it now 😭😭😭
I kinda promised a full rendered fanart without taking into account I haven’t fully rendered something in YEARS, this is what i have for now but i may do some corrections in the future.
Fav boss: KOLOKTOS 110%
Least fav boss: The imprisoned aka avocado demise and Scaldera
Final boss thoughts: i really REALLY wanted the demise fight to have a phase in the sky with the skyloft, it was impossible tho as the fight is set in the past. I liked it but i expected a lil more ig.
ANYWAY I WAS NEVER HERE FOR THE GAMEPLAY I WAS HERE FOR THE LORE, AND BOY I ENJOYED IT
Speed paint and alt version under the cut!! Had to sped it up even more bc it was
I don't know how you manage to capture the aesthetic of the game so perfectly, it's very charming!!!! You did SO GOOD with the colour pallet, blue undertones worked really well, it's so soft and fresh! It's cool how after hatching in the actual colours some splashes of blue remain
Little falling guys and tiny Skyloft are adorable!! The bird is very epic! And enchanting Zelda, always lingering just out of reach. Her face turned out sooo pretty and you did such a great work with her accessories, even added lyre pattern and a pulled string?? Marvelous
I wonder, how long did the full illustration take? The video flies so fast :D
As for the game, Scaldera was so so so bad. I remember running out of EVERYTHING. Also I was stuck for a few hours with The Imprisoned, but I can't be mad at him, he's just a toothy avocado
the thing about mxtx novels is that they demonstrate both a significant degree of authorial misogyny and a better understanding of feminist theory than the average Tumblr user
on the one hand it is clear from her work that she understands how patriarchy and similar systems of power and oppression (notably classism) work, as well as an understanding of Why They Are Bad that goes beyond the typical "girlboss" or "men bad" forms of feminism.
on the other hand she does not give a single fuck about her female characters.
#every woman she writes has depth and internality and a relationship to the society she lives in#and it's really impressive how she manages to do this while allergic to having a woman present for longer than 3 pages at a time#like damn miss moxiang this character was very compelling for the 5 lines of dialogue she was allowed to have. how do you do it? - via @lgbtlunaverse
Have you ever thought to yourself 'Damn, Stardew Valley kind of lacks... a whore?'. Have you ever wondered what a TGCF character would even be doing in Stardew Valley?
Then you have come to the right place. Introducing...
Yeah. That guy.
I have spent the past few months teaching myself how to do Content Patcher modding to add everyone's favorite God of Love to Stardew Valley and the initial release is finally ready! Yay!
What can you expect in this mod?
This mod attempts to flesh out Pei Ming beyond what the novels had reduced him to. No knowledge of the story will be required to use this mod as it was written for all players in mind. As of now, Pei Ming has several heart events and other events that will be expanded upon in the upcoming months. For some reason, he ended up in Stardew Valley and is not too happy about it. Good thing the farmer likes to help everyone and their grandma, no?
Includes two different types of roommate behavior, randomized dialogue, adjusted schedules with SVE compatibility, an optional custom map, two new special orders, several events and new items.
Big thanks to @pastelshroomsbasement whose recolor mod gave me the idea and who allowed me to use their sprites for this! You can download the mod on NexusMods using the link in the title.
Sorry for the long post. Reblogs are very appreciated <3
if lan xichen decided to go back in time and Fix Stuff (by telling jgy shit about jgs. i read this somewhere but idk if it was on tumblr or ao3 or what) (found it chapter 67 of @ibijau's oneshots) and nmj did the (totally imaginary) love confession durng sunshot and lxc turned him down with im not good enough for you da-ge (and then ran away to recruit more sects) would be moping for DAYS and my would be like whats wrong. are we going to be under attack?? and dage would be like no. i cant tell you. and meng yao likes nothing more than secrets so he pries it out of nmj and nmj is crying and being like HE DOESNT LOVE HE HE SAID HE WASNT GOOD ENOUGH MY HEART IS BROKEN and my would be SO confused because every single time lxc has looked at nmj hes been like. full oflonging and regret and love and my had clocked this and been like alas my dreamsss crushed. im in love with them both and they Only have eyes for each other. and he would look at dage (weeping on the ground) and be like if IM not fucking you literally only zewu jun is good for you. SOMETHING needs to be done. and meng yao would push down his own feelings and get really dedicated to this scheme of matchmaking mingjue and xichen and he ropes huaisang into it and xichen is Dying. Meng Yao is trying to - get him with nie mingjue? and he cant because what if its a PLOT by meng yao. what reason would he have he doesn't know but he never knew last time either did he.
xichen would be in SUCH a panic. meng yao would just be Intensely confused as to why this isn't working. it Should work. does he have trauma? who told zewu-jun he wasn't good enough for someone?? he sends Nie Huaisang to figure this out. like sure there's a war going on but xichen's spy is actually very good at perdicting what will happen! it's all FINE <- zewu jun does Not have a spy. zewu jun is going fully off memory and trying to keep this timeline as Close as Possible but he let jiang cheng keep his core. horrible battle where everyone is routed awfully. nmj <-sabercursed not really thinking straight goes and yells at lxc because he assumes that the spy betrayed them. and xichen is also in tears and shell shocked at the end of the battle. his pristine robes are Covered in blood. nmj is screaming and lxc looks up and goes i told you! I'm not good enough. for you. and mingjue freezes and looks. betrayed. shocked. apologetic but its too late xichens run off again and meng yao finds him on the edge of the battlefield and gets him into his tent and mingjue looks at him in the eye and goes very devastatingly: a-yao i think i fucked up.
If There's Anybody Out There by @factorialsfandoms
Link meets the Chain under perhaps the worst conditions possible - strung up to the ceiling, and bleeding onto Ganon's half-formed incarnation. One currently being made of the curse in his blood.
A tense Hyrule-meets-Chain story. Meeting Hyrule mid-sacrifice is a classic and I especially like this one; poor Hyrule is so confused and it really adds to the action and the care. I love how determined he is to keep fighting and how the others look after him.
You might like this if you like hurt/comfort and distrust turning to trust.
Kinda fascinatingly how objectively fucked the Jiang home situation was. Like, you have this situation where "everyone knows" that Sect Leader Jiang loves Wei Wuxian so much and favours him over his actual son, INCLUDING his son, and. No. He does not.
You know what the last thing Jiang Fengmian, the man who supposedly "loves Wei Wuxian like a son" says to Wei Wuxian ? "A-Ying... look after A-Cheng". That's it. Not a goodbye, not a "take care of yourself", nada. Just instructions. Jiang Cheng gets "A-Cheng. Be well". Wei Wuxian gets told to ensure that
You know who else did pretty much the exact same thing, five pages ago ? Yu Ziyuan, who tells Wei Wuxian that "even in death, you have to keep [Jiang Cheng] safe"
I cannot stress enough that this is fundamentally the same interaction. Sure, Yu Ziyuan is infinitely harsher with her words and more abusive with her actions, but her last actions are an exact replica of her husband's - they comfort Jiang Cheng like parents, because they ARE his parents, and then they order Wei Wuxian to protect their son.
And that's why I'll never buy the idea that Jiang Fengmian loved Wei Wuxian more than he did his own son. He may have LIKED Wei Wuxian more, but that was because he LOVED the man Wei Wuxian reminded him of - his father Wei Changze. And he may not LIKE Jiang Cheng, for being more akin to Madam Yu than Fengmian, but it's undeniable that he loves him
And the real fucked part ? Wei Wuxian KNOWS this. He KNOWS that he's second-best !! He's accepted that !! You know who DOESN'T know that ? Jiang Cheng. Madam Yu. To a certain extent, I believe even Jiang Fengmian himself.
And also, this might be painfully old news by now, but also... Zidian unravelling itself when Jiang Fengmian touched it ? Both because it was obeying Yu Ziyuan's command to keep the boys safe - and to a certain extent she considered her husband's vicinity safety - and because she trusted him enough to make him one of Zidian's masters too ? Right after we see that Jiang Fengmian went out of his way to repair Madam Yu's hairpin for her ? This, after so many pages of everyone - including Madam Yu herself - insisting that the two hated each other ? Ugh
I think about this so often because it's so deeply fucked up.
Like maybe, possibly, there is a universe where JFM and YZY actually did get married because they fell in love or had some passionate affair or something. But that was never going to be this universe, because in this universe there was a political match arranged for them. Usually in fiction, if two characters are compatible then having a match arranged for them just kind of expedites things. But here we see that it's cast a pall on their entire relationship. JFM probably didn't want to marry YZY at first in fact, and YZY knows that, and every subsequent interaction in their marriage is tainted by this knowledge that they are together because it's politics, which means that all the resentment from their early drama lingers and sticks and never gets addressed both because JFM is avoidant and YZY is bitter, but also because there can be no assurance that anything between them isn't just about the path of least resistance. JFM does something for YZY as her husband? Well he's just seeing to his obligations, he's just trying to appease her temper, of course he's treating her like his wife they're married they've had children and the two other people he might have been into are both dead. YZY does something for JFM? Same deal, like at this point they don't have any sensible alternatives, they are stuck together but rather than resolving their differences, it exacerbates it.
This trickles down to their relationships with their children. Jiang Yanli is the failure, but she's a tolerable failure because she's a girl and sexism in their culture wouldn't have let her amounted to much more than a baby factory in the long run anyway. She gets to be her mother's tool in cementing an alliance with Madam Jin, combining their bloodlines, and mirroring the exact same situation as her parents own marriage. JFM meanwhile sees that this is a mirror of their situation and opposes it on those grounds, but this just offends YZY and seems to reiterate that he regrets being "forced" to marry her.
Then there's Jiang Cheng, the ostensible living POINT of all this drama. The male heir who is capable of cultivating to the standards expected of a sect leader. The whole reason YZY and JFM were set up was not only to politically cement the Yu clan's loyalty to the Jiang, but also to try and genetically combine their cultivation potential and get a prodigy out of the deal. That's how it "should" work according to the reasoning behind all the bloodline supremacy in their culture, their kids should be Strong Cultivators. But what did they actually get? A girl dud and an heir who is just good-ish, who actually if anything inherits some of the worse superficial traits of his parents between his mother's temperament and his father's communication skills.
Meanwhile there ARE actual widely recognized cultivation prodigies in the same generation bracket. Among them is, of course, Wei Wuxian.
The thing is, for Jiang Fengmian, Wei Wuxian probably is a way to repair the past but just not in the sense that most people think. Wei Changze left the Jiang to become a wandering cultivator with Cangse Sanren. We don't know the details, but for JFM to be so caught up on that that it's widely known he is even years later, one can imagine that he actually didn't take his buddy leaving very well. He's just not all fire and brimstone about it the way Jiang Cheng later is about Wei Wuxian, because his personality is totally different. But still, we get confirmation when he assigns WWX as JC's permanent bodyguard that this is in fact what he's after here. He doesn't want to replace his son with the child he maybe he could have had with someone else, he wants to get Jiang Cheng the servant that Wei Changze was supposed to be. The eternal loyal righthand man. The carefully groomed lieutenant, exactly like Madam Yu's own personally trained handmaidens who die beside her, or a Jiang equivalent to Wen Zhuliu.
Which is deeply fucked up! And I don't just mean that it's fucked up for Wei Wuxian, although first and perhaps foremost it is, but it's fucked up for Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli too. Like there's often discourse about whether or not the Yunmeng trio really do see each other as siblings, but the thing is regardless of how they actually think about it in the privacy of their own minds, they were raised by the same people in the same house. Wei Wuxian didn't have any family that wasn't them, and they grew alongside him for much of their childhoods.
So like, regardless of the societal concepts surrounding it, functionally they were siblings, they were just siblings being subjected to perverse and contradictory treatment at every turn. Wei Wuxian simultaneously being propped up as this "favorite" golden child by word-of-mouth while also being devalued as a servant who's not really part of the family at all. Jiang Yanli the treasured and beloved daughter who is also an abysmal disappointment and walking embarrassment. Jiang Cheng the most important male heir who represents every social pressure that ruined his parents' happiness, like everything happened just so he could exist, but instead of being Great he's just a wet sack full of furious cats.
And they all know their own shitty hand! Wei Wuxian knows that even Jiang Fengmian doesn't see him as a son! Jiang Yanli knows she's weak and disappointing and that her main utility is as a marriage alliance contract! Jiang Cheng knows he's not the ideal heir, that he is failing at just embodying a lot of stuff he was ostensibly born to be. So Wei Wuxian attempts to become a good martyr and Jiang Yanli tries to fall in love with her arranged match and Jiang Cheng tries to put his sect before everything else, and this gets two of them killed and leaves Jiang Cheng standing in the hollow gilded wreckage of society's lies with nothing to cling to but an already-permanently-tarnished image that he keeps trying to wash clean with blood.
Listen, no one said the art had to be a drawing for the @linkshipping-big-bang ...
I had the absolute pleasure of being paired with @cloudyskies48 and their absolutely bittersweet vidow retelling of the Four Swords manga, The Shadow and the Light. I really hope I managed to capture the longing and tragedy of your fic in the bind.
