What's Past is Prologue

So! This is something I’ve been dying to show around, and a little piece I’m particularly super proud of. This is a (one time special event!) commission for the lovely, super duper talented @mprosperossprite for this scene from her (showstopping, jaw dropping, totally unique) fic Bring the World Back Into Tune. We agreed there is a sad lack of romantic BoN art around, and this is a small step into fixing this.

<3 <3 <3

hand-holding ok. that's the post

Okay another thing this season did brilliantly is the power leveling. We see how much power rand can just draw naturally when he gets that one moment with Logain coaching him.

Then we see how his raw power is basically useless when Siuan, currently the most powerful of the aes Sedai, trounces him immediately.

Then we again see the difference between the current aes sedai and the forsaken when Lanfear kicks Siuan’s ass immediately and then opens a waygate with a flick of her wrist that Moiraine took like a minute of complex weaving to accomplish.

And THEN during the climax we get to start to see what the ef5 channelers are going to be bringing to the table in the future when Rand oneshots Turak with the same weave Ishamael used (someone said it looked like bullets, I love that choice!!) and Egwene manages to hold off Ishamael with minor assistance from Perrin for way longer than literally anyone else has lasted against a forsaken so far.

And FINALLY we get to see Lanfear taken out at the knees by another forsaken, when Lanfear has spent the entire rest of the season dominating every single confrontation.

SUCH a good job with the magic system this season.

Right so Lanfear was set up to be the Big Bad Evil this season. Ishy was already a bit on the background, scheming, in contrast to Lanfear's overt violence and casual cruelty. We learn that, geez, Ishamael wasn't even that bad, considering.

And then Lanfear is held by Moghedien for one minute and she's in tears, scared shirtless.

We haven't even started to see what evil really is.

The Wheel of Time 2x01 / 1x01 Moiraine alone, remembering the power and the platonic intimacy that were the foundation of her every day life and desperately wishing she could have both back again

Next week on the Wheel of Time, Moiraine discovers the worst part about having a wife and a platonic husband: they can side with each other instead of you

Django series coming soon to USA Netflix let’s fucking gooooo

it was so funny when Lady Danbury and Violet were like 'why doesn't Lady Whistledown write about the struggles of mature women?' and in reality Lady Whistledown hasn't even had her first kiss yet

Perfect balance

What is that? A birthday hat. I make them. I made this one for you. I was not sure when exactly your birthday was, but I did not want it to pass without celebration. 

when a story has a predestined ending and you thought you already knew who the characters would become, but then you're hit with the fact that no, you actually didn't know these characters at all, they were unknowable to you until this very moment when a larger portion of their life has been revealed to you, and you realize, abruptly, that they had lives and losses and the aching desperation of a love they guarded with every piece of stubborn will they could muster, and the unknowable is suddenly rendered sublime for its opacity

Don't mind me, just thinking about how Queen Charlotte is still dressing like it's the late eighteenth century forty years later, how it's portrayed as a deliberate choice with her entourage also echoing the same exaggerated rococo style, how Lady Danbury is shown to have moved on by adopting the regency silhouette, how Brimsley said the Queen's daughters wouldn't leave her because she was trapped in time, frozen...

yup.

[source]

something I don’t see people bring up a lot when talking about worldbuilding, especially when you’re creating cities, is wind. prevailing winds in many places in the northern hemisphere blow from west -> east, and because industrial production tended to take place in the centre of cities, workers would live downwind of factories while the wealthier classes would live on the other side, away from air pollutants, which is why a lot of cities have a poor east-end and a rich west-end, a spatial configuration that persists in many places that are now post-industrial

and in general the built environment has a durability to it that persists far past the historical moments that produce those configurations. this means that the stated aims of a city via a vis city planning are frequently at odds with the physical layout of the city itself. so if you want to create a city that feels like it has a long history to it, working through its earlier stages of production can help with decisions you make about its layout, and also allow for weird spatial contradictions in a city that has to constantly fight against its own physical history

didn’t expect a sobfest from watching queen charlotte but i fully collapsed on the last episode