2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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Show & Tell
$LAYYYTER
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
titsay
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Xuebing Du
The Bowery Presents
Monterey Bay Aquarium
untitled
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
sheepfilms
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EXPECTATIONS
roma★
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Interview Vampire Daily
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@mackintoshx3
We need to have a warhammer series or movie using the language style used in isle of dogs
Were each character only speaks their native language
Imperials would be speaking low gothic
Marines speak high gothic and some low gothic
Aeldari would be speaking literally just modern day irish, gaelic and welsh
Orks speak their funny words
T'au speak their language
Chaos speaks the dark tongue
Necrons from what we know speak a language that can be understood by all, so they would get ☆~subtitles~☆
renaissance in the 21st century
some more
the WHAT??
okay, found her
some more good replies from the notes
i didnt expect these to hit so hard but then they kept going and going….my god
op disabled reblogs but I think the point still stands
reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.
The Alchemical Child: Ahriman, Helio Isidorus, and the Great Work Gone Wrong
Or why Ahriman is the most mommy ever
The word "Rubric" carries a hidden weight. In modern English, a rubric is a scoring guide, a set of criteria used to grade a student's work. The word descends from the Latin rubrica, meaning "red ochre" or "red earth," which itself comes from ruber — red. This etymology mattered to medieval scribes, who used red ink to mark important passages in manuscripts, the headings and instructions that stood apart from the black body text.
But the same root gives us another word: rubedo, the fourth and final stage of the alchemical Great Work. In the sequence of colors that marked the transformation of base matter into the Philosopher's Stone —nigredo (blackening), albedo (whitening), citrinitas (yellowing), rubedo (reddening) — rubedo was the culmination. It was the moment when the Stone achieved its final, perfected form, a deep blood-red, capable of transmuting lead into gold and granting immortality to its maker.
Ahriman's Rubric is all of these things at once. It is the final work of a student who thought he could surpass his master, left for Magnus the Red to judge. And it is, in the most tragic sense, an alchemical Great Work — an attempt to transform the dying matter of the Thousand Sons into something eternal, perfected, and immune to decay. That it failed does not make the metaphor less true. The failure is, in fact, what makes the metaphor complete.
In this essay I would like to talk about Helio Isidorus, a character whose brief, strange existence represents the closest thing Ahriman ever came to success, but also the most devastating proof of his damnation.
Warhammer 40k is often built on silly linguistic determinism, and I think Helio’s name is quite telling, if you know where to look. No important name in the Ahriman trilogy is random.
Helio is the Greek word for sun, and Isidorus means "gift of Isis."
In Egyptian mythology, Isis is the goddess who gathers the dismembered pieces of her murdered husband Osiris and reassembles them, breathing life back into his body long enough to conceive their son, Horus. Horus is the divine child, the heir, the avenger who will restore order to the cosmos. Isis is the gatherer of fragments, the weaver of wholeness from scattered parts.
Ahriman's entire existence after the Burning of Prospero is an Isis-work. He gathers the fragments of his shattered Legion to hunt the shards of Magnus' broken soul. And like Osiris, Magnus cannot be truly resurrected no matter what Isis does, because he is the king of the dead now, forever bound to the Underworld, or the Warp.
He attempts, through the two of his Rubrics and through a hundred lesser workings, to reassemble what was broken, to breathe life back into the corpse of his father's dream. Helio Isidorus is the "gift" of that labor — the child born from Ahriman's obsessive reassembly of the dead. The sun, off course, is a powerful metaphor for hope. It represents renewal, the triumph of light over darkness, and the promise of a better tomorrow. That is what he is to Ahriman, a gift of hope. He appears when Ahriman is at his lowest: the second Rubric has failed, Ahriman is catatonic with grief, as there is nothing else for him to do. And then Helio Isidorus enters the stage. The unique Rubric Marine we remember from earlier, who was less dead than the others, now miraculously restored to flesh. He is quite literally Ahriman’s sun, rising over the horizon in the middle of the darkest night.
The goal of the Great Work is creation of the Philosopher's Stone, and the birth of the filius philosophorum, the Philosopher's Child, is a metaphor used by alchemists to describe exactly that. They viewed their Great Work as a living, organic process, and compared it to birth. The Stone is born from the union of opposites, masculine and feminine, it is "incubated" inside a sealed glass vessel, called philosopher's egg, and the result is a spiritual entity, rather than a lump of gold. Just as a child represents a new, pure beginning and the future potential of its parents, the filius represented a purified, divine essence born out of corrupt, raw matter. It was "born" from the wisdom of the alchemists, hence being the child of the philosophers.
Carl Jung, a psychologist whose writing informs much of my analysis, identified the Divine Child as a universal archetype — a pattern that appears in myths, dreams, and fantasies across all cultures. According to Jung, the Child represents both the past and the future, it is the vestige of a lost wholeness — the memory of a time before the ego fractured the self — and simultaneously the promise of a wholeness yet to come. The Child is what we were before we became broken, and what we might become if we heal.
The Child is "less than nothing but stronger than everything." It appears helpless, fragile, insignificant, a mere potential, easily overlooked or destroyed. And yet it carries the force of the entire psyche behind it. The Child can accomplish what the conscious ego cannot, precisely because it is not bound by the ego's limitations.
The Child emerges at moments of crisis, when the conscious mind has exhausted its resources and can find no way forward. It arrives as a compensation, an answer from the unconscious to a problem the ego cannot solve. The appearance of the Child archetype signals that transformation is possible, that the impasse can be broken, that new life can emerge from the wreckage.
Helio Isidorus is Ahriman's Divine/Philosopher's Child, both in alchemical and Jungian sense. His very name encodes the claim, as another name used for filius philosophorum is the"Sun Child". Carl Jung also explicitly linked the child archetype to the sun and solar mythology. In Jungian terms, Helio is the psychic compensation for futile striving. He is the answer Ahriman could not produce through logic, sorcery, or sheer force of will alone. He is the living proof that the second Rubric was not a failure.
In classical alchemy, the Alchemical Child is often depicted as an androgyne, a being who contains both masculine and feminine, who transcends the division of opposites. This is the rebis, the double-headed figure who represents the union of sun and moon, sulfur and mercury, Red King and White Queen. The androgyne is the image of psychological wholeness, the integrated self in which all contraries are reconciled.
In Jungian analysis, it represents the final product of psychological integration — the unified self. The Child helps the ego reconcile deep inner contradictions without breaking down, it integrates conflicting parts of the self into something unified and whole. It is a living symbol of individuation that represents a personality that is whole rather than split. It points toward potential growth and the continuous evolution of the human psyche.
Helio Isidorus is all of that gone wrong. He is indeed many-headed and whole, he does promise unification, he does transcend the division of opposites and he does point towards evolution, but the salvation he promises is perverted. The Child turned out to be a psychic curse that seeks to merge all Thousand Sons, both Sorcerer and Rubric Marine, into a unified gestalt Warp entity called the Pyrodomon. The Child is a monster that tries to devour its mother and her entire family.
Just as the Jungian Child, Helio is "less than nothing but stronger than everything." At first, he appeared as an amnesiac man who doesn’t remember what or where he is, and forgets all conversations immediately after they happen. His scenes with Ahriman are filled with endless repetition because of this. After a certain point, however, he starts burning Rubric Marines into ash and turning sorcerers into Rubric Marines, and finally remembers what he is.
Ahriman is forced to destroy his own child. Helio Isidorus, if allowed to exist, will consume the Legion. He will erase every individual Thousand Son, absorb them into a single psychic entity that is neither the original Helio nor Ahriman nor any of the brothers it has devoured. The gestalt will be the death of identity for the Thousand Sons.
Do you know what the failure of an alchemical work is called? Abortus. Ahriman aborts his alchemical Child by going back in time to make sure that Helio Isidorus never existed at all. He returns to the casting of the second Rubric and kills Helio Isidorus before he could be "born". He is dead dead, there is no dust inside his armor, no echo of its owner, nobody can even remember his name.
I’m sorry, I just couldn’t not insert this bullshit into here. I wrote all of this only because Rob Sanders gave us very vivid gestation and miscarriage visuals in Atlas Infernal, when he was describing the daemon Ahriman and his pupil Xarchos tried to bring back to life after the daemon has been split into shards (damn, I guess Ahriman really has a thing for collecting shards). Actually, I don’t think that the book was weird. Thousand Sons already have enough references to Hermetic alchemy — Ahriman literally states its foundational principle "as above, so below" in the books, and it is very likely that Magnus is Red because the last stage of the Great Work is red, and because the Red King is necessary for the creation of Philosopher's Stone. So, the childbirth imagery that isn’t even unique to Atlas Infernal (it appears in other TS books too, in a bit subtler way) is actually in line with the theme of sorcery and Magnus’ dream of humanity’s ascension. Magnus’ dream and the Stone are the same thing, they are the realization of absolute human potential and spiritual awakening. The Stone is supposed to transform the lead of ignorance into the gold of wisdom. Perhaps Ahriman’s hair is white in Atlas Infernal because the other component of the Stone, besides the Red King, is the White Queen. It might explain why Ahriman is Like That and why Czevak wants to call him a slur so bad. He is described as androgynous, Atlas Infernal makes him assume different illusory visages for some reason, including female ones, and in the Omnibus Ahriman literally has dissociative personality disorder, and his self-doubt and conviction that he deserves punishment are represented by a woman. Lmao. He is not beating the allegations.
So, going back to Helio Isidorus.
To destroy the Alchemical Child is to destroy one's own hope. If the Child represents the future — the possibility of growth, of healing, of becoming whole, then to abort the Child is to foreclose that future. Ahriman, by erasing Helio Isidorus, condemns himself to remain as he is. He will never complete the Great Work and cure the Rubric.
It's a very interesting detail that Ahriman realizes that he has to die for the second casting to succeed. For the real Great Work, that is true. Red King and White Queen don’t survive the intensity of their union and die to make space so something else might be born from their ashes. The Red King, Magnus, is pretty much dead. He was killed by Leman Russ, his soul has been shattered into fragments, and those fragments will never fully reunite. Perhaps that’s why the first casting failed, because Ahriman lived. In the second one he was genuinely supposed to die, but that didn’t happen because his plans were thwarted by Knekku, who sacrifices himself to save Magnus, as much as what remains of him can be saved at that point.
Those are not all of the parallels though, there is more. In alchemical terminology, incaementum refers to the fixation of the volatile — the transformation of a liquid or gaseous substance into a solid, permanent form. The volatile principle is mercury, the feminine, the changeable; the fixed principle is sulfur, the masculine, the stable. The Work involves fixing the volatile without destroying it, giving form to the formless while preserving its essential nature.
The Rubric was an act of incaementum on a Legion-wide scale. The Flesh-Change was volatility incarnate: bodies shifting, mutating, becoming unrecognizable. The Rubric fixed them. It made the volatile solid, turned flesh into dust and bound that dust inside immutable ceramite. The Rubricae are the fixed principle, the volatile made permanent, but they are also the volatile destroyed.
Helio Isidorus represents a second attempt at incaementum — not of individual bodies, but of the Legion's collective soul this time. He wants to fix the scattered Thousand Sons into a single permanent entity, to complete the Work that the Rubric began. And the result is the same: the volatile is consumed instead. The cure ends up identical to the disease.
Alchemical texts emphasize the importance of the vas hermeticum, the sealed vessel in which the Work takes place. If the vessel is cracked, the Work fails. If the vessel is impure, the Work is corrupted.
Ahriman's vessel is his own soul, and his soul is very far from clean. The vessel is cracked by pride and by desperation, by the massive guilt of having destroyed his own Legion. The vessel is impure, contaminated by Tzeentch's influence, by the corrosive environment of the Eye, by the cumulative weight of unforgiven sins.
He does perform the nigredo, the stage of the blackening and death of the old self, though. Prospero is destroyed in fire once again, to help the Exiles reach the Planet of the Sorcerers. Alas, that is not enough.
In alchemy, there is a concept called circulatio, and it is the circulation of the material through repeated cycles of dissolution and coagulation. The circulatio is a necessary stage of the Work, but it is meant to be temporary. Eventually, the material must stabilize. Eventually, the Stone must form. In essence, it is a loop, and Ahriman’s story is full of loops. Two failed Rubrics, multiple shards of Magnus hunted willingly and unwillingly, literal time loops he relives again and again to defeat the Hyksos Phaeron Setekh. Ouroboros, by the way, is the symbol of the alchemical circulationI’m talking about. Alchemists believed that the Stone required the substance to "die" and be reborn countless times through circulation. I think that might be what Rob Sanders wanted to say with his version of Ahriman focusing so much on illusion and changing his face again and again. Ahriman is trapped in an eternal circulatio, his soul dissolves and coagulates, dissolves and coagulates, never reaching rubedo and never producing a viable Child. Maybe the change of the face was Sanders’ metaphor for that.
Maybe I’m crazy, but Ahriman’s tragedy is very maternal to me, because of the alchemic parallels and how much the narrative feminizes him. We are informed that he was a sensitive crybaby while his brother was a more traditionally masculine chad, his royal blood, moe tendencies and the love for faking vulnerability to deceive others make him look like the biggest damsel in distress. All sorcerers are perceived as feminine by the Western eye, since they wear flowing robes and paint their eyes with kohl. Warhammer in general likes to queer code Chaos. Really, if a twink appears on the screen, you just know he’s gonna be evil. Pre-Rubric Ahriman has the personality of an annoying overachiever girl from your school, the teacher’s pet who keeps reminding the teacher about homework at the end of each lesson. When he tries to forge a friendship with Wyrdmake it looks funny and sad at the same time, he really is like a girl faking her interests and personality so she could get the cool bad guy’s attention. And he is super super patronizing and condescending, in the way an elementary school teacher is condescending. He is actually very different from Magnus in that regard, Magnus isn’t that sugary.
The best canon line is this!
>Sevatar managed to unclench his jaw. ‘You have a way of treating brother-warriors like children, you know. The sugary treacle in your tone does not hide the fact you are a patronising Terran shithead.’
Ahriman shook his head a second time, patient in the face of this tirade. ‘It is not my intention to mock you, Jago.’
He punishes himself for the failure of the Rubric with passivity and forced submission. Like, oh my God, he’s literally in some guy’s hot witch harem, acting like a whipped dog (the actual words from the canon line). I’m not equating feminity with submission, that is what our society does. He acts like a middle-aged widow whose husbands keep dying under mysterious circumstances while she enjoys their inheritance. There is one line that implies he feels some sort of envy over Pavoni’s flesh-altering talents (the obvious seductions of being a strutting peacock, lmao, the actual words from the book. That 100% wasn’t about the use of their talents in combat). Don’t make me mention his fucking boob plate. His post-Rubric self is very sentimental. He’s so caring about the Rubricae, the only thing that cracks his mask of perfect control is that one conversation with Ignis, where Ahriman gets angry at him for calling that he’s doing to Helio a "dissection". Off course he doesn’t want to hear that he’s dissecting his precious baby. Helio is Ahriman's son in the way that a child is the son of a mother: carried, nourished, and delivered through agony into a world that will destroy him. That is horrific in such an existential way, honestly. A woman surrounded by her dead children, and the only one who opens his eyes and speaks tries to kill her. If I were to joke about Ahriman’s postpartum depression and miscarriage, would that even be a joke at this point? All of it does read as a drama about spiritual infertility. Yeah, that’s extremely cursed, but it’s true. Honestly, that graphic detail about the daemon he and Xarchos tried to summon having an underdeveloped conjoined twin attached to its body was pretty peak if you think about it. Ahriman is always metaphorically carrying his twin brother’s dead body around and having flashbacks about him.
This is a very messy meta, I know, I didn’t want to post it. But I guess it’s my blog and I’m allowed to post bad takes here, and since I’ve been called "Ahriman scholar" before, why not this one? I don’t like when metaphors are too obvious, or when essays provide conclusions ready for use. Ahriman is a great character because of how much deniability there is in his story. My take being pure insanity and the most deep take on Ahriman at the same time fits his duality very well! Everything is a truth and a lie, and you never know where one ends and another begins. I love Thousand Sons for being crazy that way.
So, does anybody else think that Ahriman is a sad milf?
The level 5 music video definatly will have long lasting influence on the art i make
Shit is sick as fuck
Literally how can i not be inspired by it?
Genuinely surprised to see this from Jamie p and super glad as well. I feel like it's become such a pattern of seeing white queer creators casually say some racist shit or something to come out and then never properly apologize.
So seeing Jamie Paige be outright "No fuck y'all stupid racist white teens, she'd rather stop making music catering to you than let you make a fool of her art" is incredibly refreshing and makes me glad that to be a fan of hers and feel both seen and comfortably safe knowing that for once someone has the decency not to be a racist piece of shit!
Also go listen to Slayr right now! I remember hearing a couple of his songs before, and liking all of them, and this one is no different. Honestly I hope we get to see more hip-hop sampling and remixes of vocaloid music because its so so cool and wish it was done more often.
And hey this is also directed at all you fuck ass "rap is overstimulating" idiots on Tumblr too!
Something else I think is important to add to this post as well :]
A bit more self explanatory, but I'm glad he's confident to state it for the people in the back that Vocaloid isn't just a white people thing. It's a bit bittersweet to me in a sense that a lot of black creators online feel the need to hide themselves, but I definitely understand (I'm guilty of this sometime too the way Tumblr acts sometimes) but I'm glad to see that people are being more openly anti racist for once and I hope this trend doesn't stop.
Also I know it's already his most popular song, but it is such a banger too, go listen to this and the rest of his vocaloid music too!
Important addition requested by prev
See this, this is what I like about TikTok. Little moments like this
Oh so *THAT'S* why the alphabet mafia are trying to subvert Our Precious Children with drag story times and whatnot. Gotta start 'em young on the plastic crack addiction.
Found out there are baseline humans in Warhammer who are specifically into pursuing Astartes, like Space Marine chasers. Which then makes you realize there's absolutely a market for Astartes sex work. Which then makes you wonder if any traitor Astartes who refused to fall to Chaos and couldn't cut it as a space pirate ended up selling hole on some planet outside of the Imperium.
"But Astartes don't have sex--", sure yeah they don't have a sex drive, but that presupposes that every sex worker is only having sex they want to have. That ignores the existence of gay-for-pay and asexuals who do full-service sex work because they view it as just another day at the dick sucking factory. Sex work is a job like any other; you're not helping people with the fakakte self-checkout machines at Target for the love of the game, you don't have a passion for it, you do it because you need to pay your bills. Same deal.
So yeah now my headcanon is that there are renegade Astartes on backwater planets posting the Warhammer equivalent of Craigslist ads like "Night Lord needs someone to be the Lord of his Night. 500 credits per hour. Outcall only, no kissing, lights must be off"
my first time ever having a post blow up, this is my chance to make it big in the transfem poasting scene. ive been workshopping this one for ages, this is my best work
*ahem*
girl penis, call that a genis
Everybody do the Genis, The Genis is a dance!
Everybody is a genious, who knows it in advance!
Everybody do the Genis, The Genis is a dance!
Everybody is a genious, who knows it in advance!
Kicks a nearby camera
I made a little bloons td6 challenge but i can't let anything just sit on it's own
So here's some backround lore~☆
In the dark ages of monkey kind, The Great Castle of Master Alchemist Geralius Quincy the 3rd would go through a siege performed by the bloons trying to stop the master and his students from creating more potent concotions.
He gathered all he could:
A couple bowmen,
A couple catapults,
His merchant fleet with pirate allies,
A couple of his acolyte alchemists,
Wizards from his tower,
The Royal Beastmaster of the castle, who at the time was tending to the 23 cats of the castle so he came late to the battle.
But then many of his allies aided against the latex menace!
A great frost ape of the cold cold mountains, he was stomping around and decided to join just because he was bored.
A triad of elemental bowmen, they jist appeared, no one really knows who let them in the castle.
A ninja attack force from the great kindom far away, who felt that they could use the training.
Great druids from the nearby forest, who saw the bloon invasion as a threat to their sacred forest.
And
A bunch of mermonkeys, they owed Geralius a favor which he quickly cashed in.
Also there was some guy named Dan there, no one really wanted him there with his strange habit of saying he'll "fetch the Masked Mecaque" then turning around and putting on a mask and putting on a voice, which unnerved people.
Here's the challenge code
ZFVGEWS
the five trauma reactions: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and mating
id like if we could keep the alliteration going but i dont know if anyone has made an f word for mating
Fornicate
nope not a real word you just made that up
Fertilize
thats what plants need and has nothing to do with mating
Fuck
Are we ignoring the fact that she stated that fornicating isn't a real word?
Even though it is?
Shush, you're ruining the joke
SHOOTS YOU WITH MY SUPER PINK LAZER
You now have triple the amount of iron in your body
Yay, thank you for curing my anemia!
I suffer from success
the five trauma reactions: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and mating
id like if we could keep the alliteration going but i dont know if anyone has made an f word for mating
Fornicate
nope not a real word you just made that up
Fertilize
thats what plants need and has nothing to do with mating
Fuck
Are we ignoring the fact that she stated that fornicating isn't a real word?
Even though it is?
Shush, you're ruining the joke
SHOOTS YOU WITH MY SUPER PINK LAZER
You now have triple the amount of iron in your body
the five trauma reactions: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and mating
id like if we could keep the alliteration going but i dont know if anyone has made an f word for mating
Fornicate
nope not a real word you just made that up
Fertilize
thats what plants need and has nothing to do with mating
Fuck
Are we ignoring the fact that she stated that fornicating isn't a real word?
Even though it is?
WAIT NOT JUST THAT
FERTILIZE HAS MULTIPLE MEANINGS
From cambridge dictionary
Fertilize verb
To cause an egg to start to develop into a new young animal or plant by joining it with a male cell
DON'T LET THEM LIE TO YOU
HORNYPOST WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE INFORMED!!!!!!!!
the five trauma reactions: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and mating
id like if we could keep the alliteration going but i dont know if anyone has made an f word for mating
Fornicate
nope not a real word you just made that up
Fertilize
thats what plants need and has nothing to do with mating
Fuck
Are we ignoring the fact that she stated that fornicating isn't a real word?
Even though it is?
How do trans people always become hotter than those cis-het people I've heard so much about?
It's called the poop deck because the ship poops from there!!!
Duh!!!
the prettiest girl at the party
