hi! welcome to the toxic sludge, i am your court-sanctioned sludge dumper!! i figured i may as well invest in one of those newfangled pinned post things.
i am decently proud of my tagging system but it can be a bit vague at times. if you’ve decided to go through my tags sweet i love that and a heads up that if you’re going through a fandom tag using the full name you’re only gonna be getting my original posts but if you use the acronym, you’ll get all my posts for a particular fandom. also? i am still a bit multifandom so if you don’t like a particular fandom i’m into, it’s nice and easy for you to blacklist!! cool right? if you need me to tag anything please let me know and i’ll hop onto that asap.
regarding asks,,, i love them. i’ve had a few au prompts which are my shit but i’d be delighted with whatever you send in. meta, prompts, general questions,,, all of them are delightful and i’ll do my best w/ them. dms too, if you wanna talk to me about anything at all i’m your gal,, between the hours of when i wake up and eventually go to sleep.
i have an ao3 here! am i good at writing? eh idk but i have some fun with it, so if you’re in a reading mood you might have some fun too!
paces in a circle. following the story bit by bit is actually great for contemplating it. i know the splitting chapters into parts is a TL thing but pacing in circles after 120.1 and now reading 120.2. hooh.
like okay fucking call me the metanarrative guy but i've been contemplating the beginning of the story. kim soleum loves horror stories. he does. but he never says this. never outwardly expresses it. but he must.
because he keeps reading them.
he says he's terrified, and he is, but he keeps coming back for more. He even wrote some himself. He loves these stories, and he loves the Dark Records universe.
The nightmare high school is an amazing case study of this, actually, mirroring the story he wrote. And his story was about understanding the scenario through the eyes of the monster. That the monster is hunted, too, that it's scared, too. He mentions that people left lore hints in the previous records of this Darkness, but he was the one to tie them all together into a narrative.
all the Darknesses are like escape rooms because what he loves about these stories is trying to figure out what makes them tick. he wants to know their rules. how to survive them. it's a very specific sort of interest in horror that can only really apply to something like SCP because there need to be rules like this for a collaborative universe.
And he extends a lot of empathy to the monsters as well, re: the story he wrote, seeing through their eyes. But there's other things, like pressing the button for his double in the elevator. Like endulging the blue dragon mascots that want to play with him. A lot of it is politeness born of terror but it is politeness nonetheless. He's trying to see their point and purpose.
Assimilation. A dangerous tactic.
There's this running thread of them trying to draw him in. Keep him in this world. And yes the most obvious example of that is Braun right now of course questioning whether Kim Soleum wants to go home in the first place. But there's also the blue dragon mascots and the cabin's contract and those tattoos. There is a Repeating Pattern of him delving into the stories just a little bit too far and strungling not to survive them but to untangle himself from them. Most evident in his friendship with Braun. And also everything else.
And I think about how the entire story starts. With Kim Soleum getting a funny little fake ID badge for Daydream Inc. and he is so deeply embarrassed about it. He is so deeply embarrassed to be at the pop-up store to begin with, to be seen indulging when he is a grown man with a job. This is teen stuff. He's not supposed to be here. Not supposed to be in this story.
But he's still here. Why? Because he loves this world. Loves the community behind it. Loves these stories.
Something abt sincerity I dunno man. It's a pattern. The entire world of Dark Exploration Records has drawn him in and refuses to let go because he loves it beyond the horror and sees so much more in every facet of it. There's something to be said about looking beyond the surface of a story and trying to gauge its intent and its message and its rules, and I'm thinking about the train to Tamra, and how it's a cesspit of misery and endless torture yet he still draws a purpose out of it from the bits and bobs whatever original author of it laid out.
He just meets every story where it's standing. A man after my own heart, really. Of course the stories don't want to let him go. Of course they love him back.
The thing is that while fans very much prefer to depict the relationship between Slade & Dick one way—which I believe is inspired by the ‘03 cartoon above all else—in the comics they’re chronically employed people who schedule their villain/hero showdowns on Microsoft Teams
Continuing this format. I saw two beautiful ORV pieces by @crimson-chains
"Hey, I like *pain*, let's draw this with Yin Yu!" This is my favorite quote from tgcf.
Post-PHM Headcanon: Grace's Eridian students create little constructs as gifts for him. Grace teaches them about Earth beaches/ oceans and they're all amazed. Grace mentions offhand the ways his artificial beach is different to a real beach, like the lack of shells, and within days, his students gift him buckets of hand-made shells to litter his beach. The Eridian equivalent of giving him their drawings to hang up in the classroom.
Grace walks up and down the beach, arranging the shells in the sand, placing them far enough from the waves that they won't get washed away. Rocky grumbles that Grace's house is going to FILLED now because Grace made such a fuss over their gifts, but Grace is smiling so wide it hurts and when one of the shells accidentally gets swept away by the surf, Rocky barrels into the water to rescue it for him
grace barely ever swearing even in his own internal monologue means that for all we know rocky said fuck constantly and he just didn't tell us about it
I think a Mighty Nein opinion that I never really understand is the notion that Fjord is “boring”, especially when he has some of the most explored character flaws in the show so far. Before his new powers/warlock plot even come into the picture, he has established struggles he has to work through, and a backstory that builds his characterization in a way that intrinsically ties to his new warlock pact. The whole reason Uk’otoa is able to use Fjord is because of his relationship with failure, including him failing to stop Sabian causing his own death. He has one of the most fleshed out stories in the show so far despite not being the main focus of the season, and ironically him being more of an uptight “normal” guy is what provides a more dynamic perspective in a fantasy setting where he’s both curious about this unfamiliar world around him but also very realistically apprehensive about the dangers of adventure.
And it’s not like him being more “normal” means he doesn’t have defining traits, quite the opposite, he’s deliberately portrayed as an awkward, insecure softie burdened with anxiety, who’s trying to put on the act of a stern confident guy. It just always feels like people assume he’s boring because he isn’t as overtly zany as some of the other characters and so he’s so often dismissed. Which is unfortunate and ironic considering he’s ended up making some of the boldest choices despite his inexperience and has gone through some of the most significant development.
Like I find the contrast between his and Molly’s response to their situations very interesting. Both are confused and curious, but Molly is way less engaged in that part of him; he doesn’t have memory of what happened before involving that, he would rather move on and any enjoyment or dependence on that part of him hasn’t been explored(at least not yet, they could develop that in season 2). Fjord remembers his trauma vividly and he’s much more actively engaged in the implications of his powers despite being averse to opening up to the group. Like it’s funny to me when I often see people say he’s “too passive”, when I think one of the most interesting things about his arc is the exploration of how his passiveness changes when he starts to explore his new powers.
Him indulging in his powers is what gets the group out of jail and what lands them the upper hand against the devil toad. He listens to the commands of the voice in his head and goes off on a search of his own in the middle of a mission, almost abandoning the party for his own gain as a result, and tells no one that’s what he did. He even begins laughing in amazement when he’s given the ability to breathe underwater. He convinced Beau they should go through with the beacon mission because he’s desperate to prove himself. He pulled a sword on Caleb, fully tricked Trent on his own, and made the conscious decision to consume the orb, a horrifying and painful experience, because there’d be a chance he could save everyone in the sewers. Fjord is one of the biggest examples of passive ≠ uninteresting to me because it is his pre-established character flaws that actually play into him being a much more willing participant in his mysterious powers and corruption, we get to see all these moments where he willingly indulges and leans into it.
Obviously it all comes down to personal preference, but while Uk’otoa is an external driving force in his plot, Fjord’s story more specifically feels like a character study to me, which is what I find so interesting. He’s such an unsung mvp in the story imo.
if house md were running in 2024 there would be an episode with a patient who identifies as an ‘online content creator’ (cagily) where house agrees to take the case primarily because when he offhandedly refers to her as an onlyfans model both cameron and cuddy get really offended and say it’s a sexist assumption so he doubles down and becomes committed to finding the patient’s onlyfans and proving it. at some point it would be revealed that chase actually is an onlyfans model and started doing it as a stopgap after his dad died and he suddenly got disinherited but he makes so much money off it that now medicine is basically just a hobby. cameron and foreman both disagree with the concept online sex work but it turns out they disagree for different reasons (cameron thinks it’s exploitative and not-feminist, foreman finds it distasteful and thinks people should get ‘real jobs’) and spend most of their scenes together arguing about this while chase gets continually more shifty. they break into the patient’s house and there’s a full ringlight and camera setup which seems to confirm house’s suspicions. while trying to find the patient’s onlyfans house accidentally finds chase’s onlyfans instead and considers publicly embarrassing him about it like he did with wilson’s sex tape but soon realises that most of the staff at the hospital are already subscribed to chase’s onlyfans so makes fun of him for that instead. it then transpires that the reason why the patient is so cagey about being a content creator is that she’s an ASMR artist and all the soap she’s been shaving on camera has irritated her lungs. cuddy is about to make house give her 20 extra hours of clinic duty as recompense but at last minute it’s revealed that the website the patient uses for some of her bonus commissions is, drumroll…onlyfans, because she’s been banned from patreon. how does house know this? wilson is subscribed to her because the soap videos sometimes soothe him to sleep. something by cigarettes after sex plays. roll end credits.
Added some alt-text courtesy of @princess-of-purple-prose! Thank you!
[ID: Naruto fanart: A pair of lineless digital paintings of Sasuke and Naruto as young kids. Naruto is standing in front of Ichiraku’s stall in a well lit street with a ramen cart in shadow in the foreground, holding a potted plant and looking at the viewer with big, somber eyes. Sasuke stands in a run-down part of the Uchiha complex in a well lit path, and looks back at the viewer with a slightly nervous posture, eyebrows tilted and hands behind his back. Close-ups zoom in on them and show the detail.
The last piece shows them together, Sasuke tentatively taking Naruto’s hand with a smile as Naruto smiles back happily. End ID]
