Untitled

[cryptidcola]

reblog this version instead you little shits

[hezuart]

Bittersweet Card Suit

Fizzarolli, the childhood friend

Verosika, the high school sweetheart

Stolas, the "it's complicated"

and Striker, the opportunity missed

[zarnzarn]

"Didn't there used to be a chandelier here?" Blitz blurts out. Stolas freezes where he'd been standing, fingers tightening on the bowls of food clutched in his hand as he looks into the doorway Blitz had abruptly stopped in front of.

Blitz throws his own towels onto a vase on the side and walks into the room eagerly. He doesn't remember any of the day they'd spent all those years ago as snot-nosed little shits like Stolas does, much as he's wracked his brains for it the best he can. But he does remember the chandelier, and he can feel the spark of memory connect to others, flickering like a dream falling out of reach, saturated with warmth and laughter and the blurry image of a distorted familiar face.

"There was, right?" He grins, looking up at the ceiling, where the golden rod foundations are still intact, now carved in and dripping with expensive diamonds. "We- we played here. Ah hell, I remember being fucking fascinated with that thing afterwards- I think Fizz tried to strangle me to get me to stop talking about it, heh."

He runs a claw over the metal, dust gathering on his fingertip. "Cause it was such a stupidly simple thing, y'know? Just glass and thread twisted together to make such a pretty piece. All those colors sparkling every time you moved. I wanted to make one of my own when I got older, to put in the office."

He tilts his head at the barely visible talon marks in the floor, seeing double as he watches them being made. "You- you tripped. Got entangled in the threads, didn't ya?" He laughs, overlaid with the cackling of ten-year old him and the sheepish laughter of the other kid as he helps Stolas out of the mess of knots. "Damn, that was funny. You were alright to hang out with. Don't remember the rest, but it was fun."

He stares up at the old thing for a moment longer, basking in the memory of a simpler time and two children chasing each other around a glass chandelier and laughing, unaware of how their lives would snag back onto each other later on. He smiles, feeling oddly sentimental. What were the odds, huh?

Then Blitz huffs amusedly. "I am remembering this correctly, right? There used to be a chandelier here? Fuck knows my shitty memory-"

He turns around and stops, smile fading off his face. He'd expected Stolas to be... happy or whatever, that Blitz had finally remembered fucking something of a meeting that had been so important to him. He's not expecting-

"Yes, there used to be," Stolas agrees, voice flat and mouth pinched and eyes glazed over. He grabs the towels and stalks away. "Stella broke it. It's not there anymore."

Blitz doesn't think he's talking about the chandelier.

[ravenwitch45]

If I had a nickel for every time I learned the intertwined backstory of two characters that met as children and fell in love, already knowing that the world messed them up and split them apart by the time they reached adulthood, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot

But it's weird it happened twice

[s4m43ll-deactivated20221013]

EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS OPEN

Here’s my PayPal link if you wish to make any donations

( I apologize for any spelling mistakes you may find.)

[the-bus-called-graveyard-8]

TURNING 10 TODAY: “Private and the Winky Factory”, which first aired on July 29th, 2012.

“It really is true. You’ve got the drive, the steely grit, the flame in your belly… leadership, man! The next stage in your soldier's training. We’re going into that factory, oh yes, and you are going to command the mission!"

[slicckestmaang]

There’s things about this episode that I enjoy. Then there’s the fact that this episode canonized Rico voring Kowalski….

[parkchanwoohoo]

[prokopetz]

The Smash Bros. cast swapping anecdotes about their various evil doppelgangers and Mario getting into an argument about whether Wario counts.

[princeps-civitatus-peach]

Surprisingly, Mario is arguing that Wario does not count as he has literally never made that connection in his life. You can’t just say every fat italian in overalls is a Mario counterpart, he’s his own person with hopes and dreams. Evil hopes and dreams, but still.

Daisy, meanwhile, manages to argue very convincingly that Peach should be considered her evil doppelganger.

[aromancy]

Wario is playing Devil’s advocate because being Mario’s evil doppleganger is great for business. If he was just some guy, nobody would buy Warioware.

[cutecutejames]

Waluigi argues for himself vs. Luigi, but Luigi just thinks he’s kidding and laughs it off. Waluigi goes home and cries.

[gubbins-turtledove]

made a vid of the Boys

[jelixpo]

Chapter 15

Self reflection

Want to read the comic in order? You can over on tapas :)

If ya’ll can guess what games the screenshots came from you get legal bragging rights i checked it’s the law

[wethankyouohmonolith]

I did something cuz I was bored. I want to add more to it, but it'll probably take a while 'cause I get distracted a lot.

[lolathepeacocklord-deactivated2]

Y’all ever just-

Make memes with your own art???

[eaglebones-falconhawk]

a baffling legacy 

[screaming-oak]

inspiration hath struck me tonight

[punkasshunter]

Did anyone ask for a possibly kind of body horror take on the growths on the Smokers? No? Too bad here it is anyways

Despite them probably being carcinogenic judging by the extent to which they cover the hosts' body, or at least are malignant since by L4D2 they seem to have spread on the surviving Smokers, I hc that they're not entirely without function. They're full of glands that are the primary manufacturer of the spores that they produce. The tissue is spongy, almost like a puffball, and will burst and release infectious spores in a large quantity if concussed too hard. From the development that we see over time, I imagine that towards the core there's a sort of ball of cells consisting of the same matter as their tongue in a nascent state, where they eventually emerge through the skin.

[jimmygibbsjrrr]

I would absolutely love to hear some headcanons about either Hunter or Smoker, whatever which one you choose!

why not both?

quick disclaimer I talk about violence and death and fucked up Infection stuff in this post, woohoo

Hunter:

Turning into a Hunter is reeeaaally painful because of the way their joints and spine warp and muscles change. That’s why their posture is so fucked when they’re standing. Crawling is much easier on them, hence why their leaps are more powerful than their ordinary standing jump.

The Infection also intensely increases their sensitivity to sound and smell. This is how they can hunt down survivors so effectively. This means that they don’t really need their sight any more - that’s why they claw their eyes out, because the extra input is both overwhelming and unnecessary.

Out of all of the Special Infected, Hunters have the most heightened survival instincts, hence why they’ll jump away so rapidly and AI Hunters won’t use their secondary melee attack. They can afford to be more picky about when they attack because their attack is so powerful.

Whilst not necessarily the case in gameplay depending on the difficulty and scenario, when writing Left 4 Dead as a more realistic storyline I think Hunters are the most dangerous Special (aside from the bosses). This especially counts in the first game, where a strong contender, the Charger, doesn’t exist yet. Severe injuries from a sustained Hunter attack would be near impossible to treat with their limited medical supplies. As a result, I usually end up using Hunters if I need a character dead.

I always write the Church Guy as turning into a Hunter. Out of the other two choices, the aggression and survival instinct turned up to max lines up well with the Hunter’s attributes.

Smoker:

I think the Infection stretches them out to gain that signature height.

While they have multiple tongues in the second game’s design, I think the reason they don’t use them is because of the strength and concentration it takes to constrict a survivor (if you watch their animation whilst doing it, you see they’re using their whole body to pull).

Being killed by a Smoker would be a terrible way to die, no matter how it happened. They can pull you off a ledge and doom you to a death by falling and breaking your neck. They can also break your neck manually by gradually choking you until you black out and stop struggling enough for them to snap it like a twig. If they drag you close enough they even start just hitting you, as if the choking wasn’t bad enough.

I like to think the claw marks on the back of Bill’s jacket are a reference to when he gets murdered by an early concept of the Smoker in one of the very early trailers, but maybe that’s a bit of a reach. Either way, I think a Smoker made those claw marks, back in the early days when the Fairfield Survivors weren’t entirely sure that the Infected had started mutating.

Generally got less to say about these guys but I think they’re solid, well-designed SI.

[renthony]

If in five years tumblr decides that The Owl House was A Bad Show, Actually because of problems that were directly caused by a homophobic studio cutting them off at the knees, I'm going to scream.

Legend of Korra got attacked because Korra and Asami "only held hands in the last shot," despite the uphill battle the writers waged against Nickelodeon to give us even that much.

Steven Universe's final season gets remembered in the most bad-faith way possible because the crew risked everything to get the first-ever queer wedding in a kids' show, and got penalized by the network because of it.

Adventure Time gets panned for "waiting until the very end" to make Bubblegum and Marceline canon, despite the fact that they couldn't get the network to allow it until after the wedding in Steven Universe (hey! look at that! STEVEN UNIVERSE BEING IMPORTANT TO OTHER SAPPHIC SHIPS GOING CANON, fancy that!).

She-Ra gets accused constantly of being "toxic representation" despite the sheer number of queer people who fought tooth and fucking nail to get it to happen at all and put their entire soul into representing themselves honestly.

The Owl House crew has directly cited Steven Universe and She-Ra for paving the way. Lumity would have never fucking happened without the milestones made by others who came before.

I am begging people to learn about the history of queer representation in television, and I am begging people to stop holding queer media to infinitely higher standards than any other type of media.