It's About How Mello Is A Martyr Doused In Catholic Imagery And About How Near Believes In No God, But

good

i could use a little help again.

my last paycheck was embarrassingly small and bills cleaned me out immediately. i drive up to hundreds of miles a week for work and gas is stupid right now, plus i need some help with food and other stuff as well. 

paypal venmo cashapp

i’m going to try to delay my car payment, and my next paycheck will actually be good for once, but it’s gonna be another week and a half until i get paid again. i fucking hate having to keep doing this.

The universe pushes them together without their knowledge in completely different projections.

Somewhere they are chasing a serial killer, and both dying from bullets and injustice. Here they listen to the catchy tune while applying enormous amounts of eyeliner.

This is so ironic, Matt thinks, looking at Mello.

Mello always carries a rosary on his pistol with him. Of course, the God that Mello honors so much wouldn't like it... Matt is always smoking a nervous cigarette with the calmest and most imperturbable face.

Their attributes seem to be the red thread between them. It doesn't break.

They will always find each other.

inspired by NA NA NA - MCR

another version, less saturated

i'm eleven chapters into a weak hero fanfic but i'm not posting it until i can think of a name

One thing that like. shakes me to the core if I think about the radiant emperor duology. is how Zhu wanted to help Ouyang despite the betrayal, in a way that was more than just a convergence of their fates.

Two things: since the first book, we know they're similar, connected, and that Zhu feels this connection wholly with a fascination that slowly becomes more complicated. She is more open to the connection that Ouyang, because she embraces wholly who she is, knowing her otherness in a complete way that for Ouyang was only pain and self-hatred. Second, Zhu is incredibly strong, mentally and emotionally, in separing herself from those who aren't in her tightest circle. Shelley wrote in two beautiful separate instances in hwdtw how when you witness someone in pain, if you don't hate that person you will be contaminated by that pain, and Zhu has for most of the series such unflinching emotional fortitude that while she observes and acknowledges and fights for other's pain, she doesn't feel it herself, not completely. Book one ends with her killing a kid because he is in her way, we can't forget it.

Ouyang's grief, so potent throughout the entire second book, is fully understood by Zhu only when she loses Xu Da. And Xu Da's death, united with the connection Zhu and Ouyang have nurtured in their fucked up way of theirs, is enough that when Ouyang's deep-rooted disgust and refusal of femininity breaks their alliance, it doesn't break their connection. Sure, Zhu feels true betrayal, and mours the possibility of a future that Ouyang sees only for a brief moment, for himself after the end of his revenge, made possible by Zhu. But Zhu, who is so ruthless she is similar to a person who is more violence than humanity, kind of... pushes the betrayal aside. She will help him anyway. They have the same goal. She keeps on including him in her dream of a future, even after he betrayed her.

When she learns of Ouyang's death, she tries to be happy he at least got what he wanted, completed his fate. She wants his desire for revenge to have mattered for herself, to quench the doubt if everything she's doing is worth the pain, and for Ouyang, sadness in her heart. But she already knows somethins is wrong in the air, in the room where the Great Khan's blood ran down the tiles, and that's what makes me insane. Their bond didn't break when Ouyang rejected their sameness and betrayed her. The bond deteriorates only when his sacrifice was for nothing. Zhu aches for Ouyang. She carries his ghost with her and at the last moment, Ouyang would be her final weapon. Except we've seen how Xu Da's death changed things. How grief, for Xu Da and Esen, shaped Zhu and Ouyang forever. So the fact that the last thing Zhu does before starting her reign is fixing the bond, restoring it to its original resonance, is what proves she was going to forgive him, in a way. She was going to give him a place in the new world.

The entire book is a sequence of tragedies, created by love expressed too late, too little, love that was not enough, yet was also the cause of every tragic end. So there's a little love also in Ouyang and Zhu's tragedy, where their sameness wasn't enough, and Ouyang is the last piece of the old world, made better by Zhu's will for a better future.

this is perfect, exactly what i thought while reading tbh

what's interesting about wang baoxiang is that when it's his pov, you understand why he says all the things he says and it feels scathing and calculated, but when you hear it from ma's pov, it just sounds so defensive and vulnerable. like, here is a man who's bracing for hatred before you even look his way

i love him so much but everytime i think about him i am in pain

Ouyang is such an interesting character istg. I need a spin off series detailing his entire life just so I can study him.

he’s literally pure rage. he’s fuming all the time. he’s miserable and angry and pissed off and would rather die than even attempt to change or be happy in any way. he kills the one person he loves after destroying Esen’s life and kingdom. he violently denies himself any pleasure out of self loathing yet keeps spec sheet of everyone who was ever mean to him. he desperately wants to be seen and understood as much as he wants to rid the world of anyone who even comes close. don’t even get me started on his deeply complex and incredibly simple misogyny    

I’ve never seen such a fucked up, hateful main character. Ouyang is a pathetic, horrible little man in every objective and subjective sense and I love him so much

“who cares about death note after L died” so sorry you’re not a fan of serving cunt </3

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.