Shen Yuan finds himself transmigrated into the last video game he played before his death – the dungeon-delving, cult-building anthro hit game of the year, Immortal Lamb Crusader Way. Much to his dismay he finds himself in the role of the BBEG, the God of Death, He Who Waits – Shen Qingqiu! Is there any way he can guide the protagonist, Luo Binghe, to level-up and victory without falling victim himself to the Lamb Crusader’s blade?
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This fic is a crossover/fusion with the game Cult of the Lamb. You should not need to be familiar with the game in order to read this; Shen Yuan will deliver the important context bits in-story. But for the sake of having the correct visuals in mind, here is what the Lamb looks like:
Awww ain’t he cute.
And here is what He Who Waits looks like (scale is correct):
Yes, he does have cat ears.
If I could draw, you can bet I’d love to see a Luo Binghe version of the Lamb, and also of Shen Qingqiu in his final form, but alas I cannot. Still, the visuals should be enough to start with. Enjoy!
Next day reblog, now with added art -YinNotYang on AO3 drew some absolutely pitch-perfect art of Lambhe and The Yuan Who Waits:
Incredible.
Last reblog, with one more piece of art by the wonderful YinNotYang!
one time i went up to my friend (also my coworker) and gave him hug from behind and just like held him there for a moment and our one regular client walked in and was like “huh….so are you guys like….winnie the pooh and piglet?” and i lost my fucking mind. what does that mean. i also said yes and that i was pooh.
me and this coworker are now dating and the same client client came into today and was like “sooo winnie the pooh and piglet?” again so we asked him what he meant and apparently those were the only two male fictional characters he could think of that hug
Wait I realized this Twitter rate limiting thing happened literally the same day as the Reddit 3rd party app shut downs. Wonder how many of those users have come here today to this Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing Ass website
So do I just like....follow...anyone? Like real people? Like the actual people and not the subject matter? That isn't like following someone to their doorstep? Why does this seem so personal???
More than 15,000 hotel workers are seeking higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions. This includes an across-the-board $5 an hour raise, as well as affordable healthcare and better pensions. They also are seeking a ban on the use of E-Verify, which is used to deny employment to undocumented workers and workers involved with the criminal justice system. You can follow what is happening at their Twitter.
Something about this wave of puritanical evangelism in a progressive hat that's gripping the zeitgeist currently recently caught my attention and I think I've figured it out.
I kept seeing advertisements on Instagram about that movie Corsage, about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The mini-trailer features Vicky Krieps, who plays Elisabeth, being tightly laced into a corset, demanding it be tighter while maids look concerned.
This is par for the course. Empress Elisabeth was famed for her obsession with her looks and her documented fear of fatness that caused both her orthorexia and her chasing an ever-thinner look. I'd be surprised if that wasn't depicted at all.
And yet there were tons of people in the comments bitching about how the movie was "depicting unsafe corseting practices" and "can't you people get anything about this stuff right?"
It gave me pause. Maybe not everyone knew about Empress Sisi. So I responded to one commenter, "but it's truthful. She really did corset like this."
And the response I got was, "Well, they're making it look like a good thing! People won't know!"
And it clicked. It suddenly made absolute sense.
The idea that depiction is equal to endorsement and encouragement is what is currently in the popular belief system.
Empress Elisabeth was well-documented as going through a well-made leather corset every few weeks because she tightlaced so severely. Her thinnest recorded waist size was 16 inches. She frantically kept herself at 110 pounds on a 5'8 frame. She would fast for days and barely ate when she wasn't fasting. She had herself sewn into her goddamn clothes just to look as thin as possible. You cannot simply overlook this when making historical fiction of her, just like you couldn't overlook Winston Churchill's rampant drinking if you wrote things about him. It is intrinsic to her identity and if you remove it you remove something very fundamental.
And because the trailer depicts this facet of her life, everyone decided that the filmmakers were condoning and even encouraging this practice in real life.
Because they cannot conceive of something just existing. Even in fiction, a depiction of something negative must be proof that the creator thinks it's a good thing. Why else would it be there?
And it was such an enlightening look into how people think. It makes so much more sense.
History, and Sisi's dangerous tightlacing, be damned.
I do want to point out another thing here that tends to be ignored by antis, which is that how you interpret a text is not universal.
Because the response to "there are upsetting and morally wrong things in life that need to be acknowledged" is always "we're not saying you can't EVER bring them up, you just can't romanticize/condone them! If you show them as good, then people will think they're good!"
And like, okay. Y'all know the children's hospital meme, right? The INTENDED meaning by whoever designed it was that it would look like someone dragging a giant red paintbrush around the floor. Fun! And there is obviously at least one person on Tumblr who focused on the theory around the color red and how it's a positive color (probably not the point of the design, but still taking it in a positive way). And then there were a bunch of people on Tumblr who were like, "Uh, it looks like blood, though?" You've got at least three different people who are all looking at the same exact thing and seeing three different meanings.
And that's just a single fucking color, not even a complex story with a lot of moving parts. I am 100% certain everyone here has at least one story with a moral lesson they interpreted differently than the author intended. (Mine is that episode of Arthur where it's supposed to be bad that he punched D.W. in the arm for breaking his model plane. BITCH DESERVED IT. PUNCH HER AGAIN.)
It's not that no story ever romanticizes a bad thing. It's that regardless of whether someone intends to portray a thing as good or bad, someone else is going to interpret it the exact opposite way. So "it's okay if you don't condone it" isn't useful, because whether the text or author condones a thing is not at all relevant to how some people will interpret the same thing. Like, this is so common WE HAVE A DIFFERENT MEME FOR IT.
ALT
Bringing it back to Empress Sisi: I am 100% certain that there is at least one person who would see a scene where Sisi is clearly supposed to be neurotic, deeply insecure about her body, and doing things so extreme and unhealthy that the other people around her are clearly judging her for it, and will be like, "Wow!! Corset pretty!!!" Some people are just going to do that.
So, "it's okay if you don't condone it" is really "you can't depict this thing at all because someone might interpret it the wrong way." Which you will note is NOT allowing people to discuss upsetting things, despite protestations to the contrary.
Ah, it’s time for me to talk about Charles Manson again!
If you don’t know the name Charles Manson, here’s the tea and I swear I am not making any of this up. Charles Manson was a cult leader in the 1960s who believed he was the manifestation of Jesus Christ, and that his purpose was to instigate an apocalyptic race war to put “the white man” back in his proper place and kill all Black people.
He believed he was supposed to do this because the Beatles wrote a song telling him so.
Now you may be thinking “okay…what?” And if you know your Beatles discography you might be thinking “Happiness Is A Warm Gun? Maxwell’s Silver Hammer? Yellow Submarine would be a stretch, but it was the sixties, everyone was on drugs.” And you would be…wrong.
It was Helter Skelter.
The song is about a children’s fair attraction in the UK.
[Image ID: a fairground attraction that reads “Helter Skelter” in fancy, old-timey carnival lettering across its front. The attraction consists of a tall cage support surrounding a flight of stairs, which lead to a children’s slide that spirals around the cage. End ID.]
This is a Helter Skelter. For which the Beatles song was written and named. It’s literally just the UK version of those giant fun slides you see at the state fair in the US.
Part of the lyrics to the song Helter Skelter say “when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/where I stop, and I turn, and I go for a ride/til I get back to the bottom and I see you again,” and looking at the image, you can see that’s a pretty accurate description of riding the attraction.
But Charles Manson decided that what this meant was that the white man had reached the bottom, and had to go back to the top, and this was a struggle that would continue until either white people lost the race war, or all the Black people were dead.
People will see what they want to see in what’s around them whether it’s “romanticized” or not. This dude saw an invitation to violence and incitement, ending in the deaths of nine people, in a song about how the song’s narrator feels his romantic relationship is like riding a children’s slide.
And if you want a case-in-point? Even now, someone who’s never heard of Charles Manson and the Manson Family is going on Wikipedia to look it up, seeing his mugshot, skating right past the whole he-was-a-white-supremacist-who-led-a-cult thing, and going “haha, crazy eyes! They should get Jack Black to play this guy!”
You’re not solving shit by saying “just don’t romanticize it.” Because let me tell you, the Beatles were definitely not romanticizing genocide, but somebody somehow got that from them.
Removing swears and slurs from the subtitles without removing it from the audio is implying that deaf/HoH people need babying, unlike their hearing friends and family sitting right next to them. Which is frustrating.
The point of subtitles is to give the same experience to everyone watching, regardless of ability—not to be a more palatable version of what's being said.
ALT
ALT
