#palant1r

[veliseraptor]

HELLLLLOOOOO ok so. i just finished the loki show. late late i know, im only just now getting back into the mcu in a big way since my friends got me into marvel rivals (i am cringe but i am free). anyway i loved that show for its timeloop swag and i LOVE a fucky little timeloop fic so im in the early stages of brainstorming a fic where Loki Gets Put In Da Timeloop and goes back to get closure with all of the avengers. and i was thinking about how he'd interact with steve i realized that like. they actually would interact in REALLY interesting ways??? like they're so oppositional (worlds most honest golden boy vs lying liar who lies) but also have so much in common (the grief is eternal and the displacement from ones own time never ceases) and THEN i was like hmmmm what if they kissed. i wonder if anyone has ever explored this before. and THEN i was directed to your ao3. ACTUAL CEO OF CAPLOKI HELLO?????? im currently reading through your "remember this cold" series and im OBSESSED. the dialogue is perfect. the angst is beautiful. the abrupt detours into erotic vivisection are inspired. the way that you treat loki's Many Crimes with the exact level of gravity they deserve while STILL writing a believable redemption. you get it. you GET these characters. and you've written enough of them that i could never run out. which SUCKS because now im READING YOUR MASTERPIECES instead of WRITING MY OWN THING!!!!

all of this is to say. new recruit on the SS Caploki reporting for duty.

i am years out of mcu fandom and who knows if i will ever circle back but i stand by steve/loki being an excellent pairing that (regardless of its actual status now, I haven't checked in a while) remains underrated. of the non-canon ships I have built on hypotheticals and scraps truly one of my forever faves.

and I am so honored to be your gateway drug into it because truly while i am, again, years out of mcu fandom technically there is a part of me that will always be the person going STEVE/LOKI YOU GUYS and writing fuckin ship manifestos and several hundred thousand words to justify my belief in this, again, non-canon ship built on hypotheticals and scraps.

and I have been deeply enjoying the comments you have left on ao3 even though I am terminally bad at actually replying to them (whoops) and am so glad that you're enjoying the series! there sure is a lot of it but I promise it does get to an end and then you can return to your own thing!!!

anyway hello and welcome and let me see if I can dig out an old reaction image for this occasion - ah, there it is, knew it was somewhere

(the tag is #steve&loki 5ever if you want to go spelunking in there, a lot of old gorgeous art not by me and headcanons and assorted other things in those pages)

[tofixtheshadows]

[walks into your office with two cups of coffee and a croissant] [gives you a cup of coffee and the croissant] ok so i recently saw this post of yours [https://www.tumblr.com/vastsexual/786180933431754752?source=share] and you have a good take on kabru that made me go through your blog and spend an enjoyable time thinking more about him and the biases i've observed and absorbed within the fandom. i think you are very much a Kabru Understander. however, maybe it's just the fandom circles i've been in, but i don't think the same thing has happened with mel medarda? if anything, i think i see the fandom cast her as MORE left than she actually is. like mel is the richest person in the entire city, with a seat on the ruling council, and we mostly see her aim to bring about progress via scientific innovation and diplomacy. like yeah she's often positioned as the Politically Right Person but i think that comes down more to Arcane being centrist than her being anywhere left of classical liberalism.

if anything, now that i think about it, i think Ekko is the primary Arcane victim of the phenomenon you're describing — i pretty much never see it acknowledged in the fandom that this mf is out there killing cops (we do stan), and even Arcane itself completely discards that aspect of his character pretty damn quickly. Sevika also gets that treatment i think. it's kinda wild that viktor gets cast in the fandom as the undercity figure with a coherent radical political ideology when sevika and ekko exist trying to establish political unity and beat up cops and viktor's political ideology is like, imperialist-parisitizing hostile gay transhumanism.

Anyway. I love ur takes so i would love if you could extrapolate more on where you've seen this trend with mel, maybe you've seen significantly more fucked up fandom communities than i have, but my read on her has always been that in the real world she'd be like, a pro-NATO democrat

Hey. So the Arcane fandom is a big and varied place, and there's definitely a lot of that. But I have also seen people- I believe mostly jayvik shippers, for obvious reasons- try to paint Mel as more personally and politically conservative than she is. I also don't think she's a revolutionary or anything (that would be Sevika and Ekko, if the writers hadn't forgotten they existed and had political motivations). Ultimately, she wants to maneuver Piltover into a place where it's strong and stable and safe from her mother's imperial conquest, which is a pretty good ideal to have. She's determined to honor Jayce and Viktor's desires to not see hextech weaponized, and she votes to give Zaun independence. She's no worse than anyone and better than most.

But I have seen people act like she has been personally oppressing Viktor in Piltover, all while blowing his own politics and allegiance to Zaun out of proportion. I've seen people act like her motivations are purely materialistic, that she's only in Piltover to enrich herself, I even saw someone say that she "only thinks about what's good for her image" which is just purely misogynistic projection. And on and on. This has been mostly on twitter firsthand, some on tumblr, and other bits my friend @sangrefae has brought back to the gc from tiktok or bsky like a cat with dead mice.

This is a common game fandoms play, "my fave is coincidentally more progressive and ideologically pure than this character I dislike", but the characters a fandom dislikes will often tend to be nonwhite characters, so it becomes this very ugly situation where the white guy (it's usually a guy) is given the crown of social justice warrior in fanon (whether or not he's even done anything), and the characters of color get to be looked at as cops with more power and privilege than the white characters (and we see a relative of this trope in the real world- have you noticed how many side characters on TV who hold up the [white] heroes with bureaucratic red tape, or who are cast as bigots against them, are played by Black actresses?).

I talked about a related issue here where white (male) characters often get awarded extra fanon traumas just to make them more oppressed.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

man your post about the weight the touden party treats death with reminded me to watch the latest dungeon meshi episode and im lowkey inconsolable. anime doesn't make me cry often but i actually sobbed. that episode is BRUTAL and so perfectly constructed with the context of what's gonna happen later.

and just. thinking about how it is probably the healer of a group who has a large part in setting the "tone" of how Big of a Deal death is, since they're the ones resurrecting people. how in namari's group it is in fact specifically the party cleric/resurrector who's using her as a meat shield.

and how the touden party's treatment of death as a last resort probably isn't just due to everyone treating the lives of the party with weight and value. it's probably also due to marcille treating her party members' death as something to be avoided at all costs, even though she has the power to reverse it.

now im also thinking about how chilchuck's formative experience of adventuring was being used as disposable bait, and how that combined with the unusual weight the touden party places on preserving life probably informs his choice to stay with the party.

....and ALSO thinking about how that's definitely something that makes SENSHI more comfortable with the party, given his aversion to magic

thinking about how izutsumi was clearly viewed as disposal, fitted with a curse that would kill her if she ran away. how she didn't join the other ninjas in risking their lives to fight falin. unlike them, she didn't want to die even knowing she could be revived — or perhaps she didn't trust that she would be.

how the last words falin leaves laios with before the teleportation spell are that she wants him to live.

man,

[context]

Yes yes yes you get it exactly once again!!

It's so interesting how the healer absolutely controls how casually their party treats death and revival and the contrast between the Touden and Tonsu party I think is a really deliberate example, especially since you have Namari going from a party with a healer who is TERRIFIED of death and sees revival as a last resort to a healer who literally uses her as a meat shield, even when she's clearly scared and unhappy with that. She lectured Kaka and Kiki about the unreliability of revival and the risk of it not succeeding, I wonder if she received that same lecture from Marcille when they were still adventuring together?

With Marcille, there's this constant terror of death, the intimate knowledge that it IS coming and eventually there'll be nothing she can do to prevent it. Revival works in the dungeon most of the time, but what if it doesn't? What if it fails? And I think that every time she sees one of her loved ones die, she's faced with both the fear of revival not working AND a reminder that one day, her loved ones WILL die and there is nothing in the world she can do to prevent it. I bet her dreams are haunted by their few deaths every single night.

And with Chilchuck, who seems to be constantly battling against parties to get half-foots treated seriously and not as disposable fodder, the Touden party probably feels like an oasis in the desert to him. Yes, they're annoying and weird, but they also genuinely respect him and don't throw him around as something disposable. With the exception of Senshi, they also seem to leave him the hell alone while he's working, trying their best not to accidentally set off traps that could hurt or kill him. Their treatment of him, aside from Marcille and Senshi treating him like a kid, is probably a good basis for what he wants for ALL half-foots.

Senshi being distrustful of magic and especially of revival magic finding a party that heavily relies on magic while refusing to depend on it to solve everything, especially death. . . That's really good, ngl. I wonder how many adventuring parties he saw go through the dungeon treating themselves and each other as disposable, and how many times he saw revival magic fail from the sidelines. . . Something to think more about.

And Izutsumi!! Yes!! Oh my god, the idea of her not being revived if she'd died is so tragic but it makes so much sense, like they essentially had a bomb collar on her, why would they waste the time, magic, and energy on a revival? I could see her dying in that battle and Tade being the only person to argue for her to be revived, but even then, I think Maizuru would shut her down immediately and Tade would just. Quietly accept it because what else could she do? She's barely treated any better. So joining the Touden party, where Izutsumi isn't expected to die for them no matter what and where no one is disposable, was probably the first time ever where she didn't constantly feel the threat of death looming over her, even in the deepest and most dangerous parts of the dungeon.

Falin, using her very last moments to send her loved ones to safety even while being intimately aware that the chance of them finding and reviving her were slim to none. . . I love her.

[edwardsallow]

i MUST hear more about your arcade/caesar grossfic. they compel me So Much and everything youve posted about them only draws me in more

(Gonna insert my answer to this ask in here too, since they’re about the same topic.)

Well, I certainly appreciate the interest from both of you, and whenever it gets done I expect to post it on AO3. I’ll be sure to drop a link on this blog, of course.

As for the content, it’s.

Well.

It’s chugging along!

The Producer, also called Arcade Makes Bad Decisions: The Fic is the most recent addition to the WIP purgatory I’ve been collecting since I last finished a writing project two months ago. It will hopefully break the streak, since I’m still actively writing it. In the fic, Arcade has a prolonged emotional episode on the anniversary of his father’s dad’s death, which he’s spending separated from people with overlapping life experience (like his mom and Daisy) while working to become a research nurse. He ends up lingering in a part of town he’s not used to, meeting Edward, and having a one night stand with him. Interspersed throughout are flashbacks to Edward at the age of 35, as old as Arcade is in the present. Back then, he was presenting as much more of an overtly dangerous, untrustworthy thug than the beguiling, image conscious slimeball that takes advantage of Arcade’s extended breakdown for some fleeting sexual contact. The non-chronological order adds enough suspense that I feel comfortable calling it porn with plot, but ultimately what it comes down to is just that. Mildly distressing porn, decorated with some themes of performative masculinity, stress addiction, and cultural stigma.

I’m gonna make a concerted effort not to post any supplementary material to the fic (stuff like the playlist, the header image drafts, etc) before the damn thing itself gets done, because I really need to stop letting these WIPs die on the vine once I’ve had my fun with imagining them. Always good to know that there’s an audience, though. Thank you!

[is-the-post-reliable]

i love your blog so much! it's so great to see someone actively combatting misinformation on tumblr! keep it up! sending you a virtual slice of cheesecake

thank you!!! I appreciate your kindness <3

[lelelego]

i love ur art sooo much btw its so clean and the colors jive so well!!!! the way you draw the new vegas gang especially beats ass. anyway do u mind if i perhaps doodle ur courier :3

gosh thank you!! :^D of course please go ahead i would be very honoured!! and please tag me in it if you post it!!!

[fuckyeahfanfictions]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar) Characters: Sokka (Avatar), Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang (Avatar) Additional Tags: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Fortune Telling, idiots to lovers, Weddings, Crack Treated Seriously, the gaang are Supportive, Fluff and Humor Series: Part 1 of The Zukka Shitpost Records Summary:

Sokka thinks fortune-telling is bullshit, until Aunt Wu tells him he's going to marry the Firelord. Then he knows fortune-telling is bullshit.

[tannnnblogs]

are you ok with fanart of your courier/comic? ive been on a BIG new vegas art kick lately and ur art is so inspiring

Yes! I'd love that, thank you!