This Is How The Golden Age Of Piracy Ended.

counterpoint: French

how can any language be ‘ugly’ if it’s always also the language passed along from a mother to her child, the language of two lovers in the dark, the language of stories told by grandfathers, the language of vows and eulogies, the language of learning and singing and feeling and connection and culture… how is all of that not inherently beautiful

Everyone always says that Zack Valenti is in everything but people don’t mention how Julia Morizawa is also surprisingly everywhere(sorry if I messed up names)

Then war of the spark happened

Nicol Bolas Endgame

Ever since the Mending, Nicol Bolas has had some kind of master scheme going to try and restore him to his former glory (and then some) but the steps he’s been taking have often seemed disconnected and random. 

After Rivals of Ixalan concludes however, I think I have enough information to put together a theory that ties these things together.

Let’s start by taking a look at what he’s been involved in (that we know of in canon) since the Mending… 

Keep reading

"homosexuality is unnatural! there's only two genders! it's a sin-"

I'm sorry, have you seen NATURE???

and there's so many more species than this that exhibit homosexuality, varying genders, etc. SO! MANY!

it's very much a natural thing. it always has been. unfortunately, while homosexuality is found in many species, homophobia is only found in one

ALSO THE ARTIST IS HUMON, FIND THEM AT HUMONCOMICS.COM!! was so sure I had included that but apparently I forgot, so sorry!

You could also tie in two other common tropes with the whole “Superman-esq is trying to contain all these guys” which is the whole no kill rule everyone follows and how villains constantly break out

Basically the Superman knock off purposely enforced the no kill and purposely tries to make containment not a priority so that way there’s always villains to keep the hero’s distracted so they can’t start enacting facist coups or whatever but it’s a ticking clock of hero’s getting fed up and just putting people down and villainy getting less popular until there aren’t enough villains to keep this system going and it all comes crashing down

sorry for random addition just an idea that popped into my head based around this

A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.

New goddess idea: She’s an earth goddess of the new age who’s domain is spinning and weaving, but specifically spinning and weaving gigantic structural steel cables for construction and other industrial purposes. Her skin is steel grey and hard to the touch and her hair is like long dredlocks of woven steel. She laughs at shitty architecture deigns that will fall apart if actually built and protects well-made bridges and buildings she likes. She might warn you of unforseen danger if you always wear your proper PPE.

Okay now what do I name her

okay, so:

Rachel is literally one of the richest people in the country…all she had to do was say her full name and that chauffeur in botl immediately cancelled on his client to drive her and her friends around. When you add her wealth and status to the fact that she’s very outspoken about her family’s entire business and organizes and promotes multiple protests and does performance art…like. she’s popular online. no doubt.

Piper’s dad is supposed to be like, the hottest guy in Hollywood, and even though those girls from the wilderness school didn’t recognize her, he doesn’t really strike me as the type of celebrity parent to shield her from the media or events- he wants her to enjoy and take advantage of the privilege she has. I’m sure he’s got her plastered all over his social media and takes her as his date to every red carpet premiere. When you take into account she’s a Troubled Youth™, I’m sure gossip mags and anyone who likes celebrity kids is obsessed with her. 

Annabeth, since Magnus is ‘’’’dead’’’’, is legally the sole heir to her family’s entire fortune, and technically owns the building that Blitz and Hearth are running that wonderful homeless youth shelter out of. I’m sure that will get her some media coverage. 

And then we’ve got…Percy, the kid everyone remembers blew up the St. Louis Arch and I’m SURE there are still debates about whether he was really a hostage or not years later. Frank, who’s grandmother was a wealthy business woman, who hasn’t been seen since his family’s estate mysteriously exploded. Thalia and Jason, who are literally the missing children of a disgraced Hollywood starlet. Don’t you think this could…get messy?

Like…Percy popping up on Rachel and Annabeth’s instagrams, and people who recognize him are just like ‘hey what the fuck’, and internet sleuths who have been obsessed with that case look further into it, and realize Annabeth was also involved in the mysterious kidnapping/terrorist streak, then looking further into her and realizing…apart from her and her nuclear family, everyone she’s related to has died under very mysterious circumstances? Magnus was pulled out of a river with a hole burned into his abdomen. Randolph’s wife and children drowned at sea, Randolph was thrown down a cavern or something, Magnus’ mother was mauled by wolves in her apartment in the middle of Boston…like hello? Then they realize there’s no record of Annabeth like, existing, between the ages of 7 and 12, and…does this bitch even have a birth certificate? Her father’s a notable professor and author, but there’s no mention of her mother anywhere, not even a single picture, and when pressed his life long friends said he just showed up with a baby one day, without even having ever mentioned he was seeing a woman…so this baby just? appeared? one day, with no warning, and now she’s an heiress who owns a homeless shelter in a city she doesn’t live in? what the fuck? The internet sleuths started out trying to crack the mystery of the Arch Bombing and somehow opened up a whole other can of worms.

Oh, right- the bomber! How does Percy Jackson know Rachel Elizabeth Dare?! The conspiracy theorists are worried about that- maybe it wasn’t a kidnapping, maybe the kid really was on a crime spree, and now maybe Rachel is looking to take her protests up to a new level and is looking at this criminal mastermind for help. Some weirdo who knows how to use a facial recognition program and has too much time on his hands identifies them both as being present at the Hoover Dam Riots from a few years ago- the riot that lead to the destruction of those angel statues! The sleuths are then able to pull up an article tying both of them to an explosion at their high school- but with Rachel’s father’s wealth and Percy’s stepfather being a respected teacher there, it’s no wonder charges were dropped! They then find some other weird, buried reports- Rachel stealing a helicopter and flying it into Manhattan? Rachel appearing to have deranged, mysterious ‘episodes’ in the middle of class? Wait, what the fuck- Percy’s school principal reported him as a missing person, and his mother and stepfather were uncooperative with the police investigation? Then Percy showed up 8 months later and claimed his aunt kidnapped him, but wouldn’t give the police any information past that?

So the sleuths start digging into those 8 months- there’s security camera footage showing Percy, looking haggard and homeless, stealing a cop car? around the area of that huge explosion in Rome? spotted all around Greece in the days before the bombing at the Parthenon? What the fuck? 

Then, holy shit- they find footage of him and missing teen Frank Zhang getting onto a private plane less than 20 minutes after the Zhang estate was blown up?? These conspiracy theorists aren’t even barely ready for this rabbit hole. The Zhang kid isn’t very active on social media, but combing through Percy Jackson’s pages they’re able to find a few images of him. Recent, post-estate bombing ones. Most of them appear to be goofy selfies with Percy and an unidentified girl that was also spotted on the security footage with them, but there’s one group shot that catches everyone’s eyes- because apart from featuring the weird Chase girl, what the fuck is that Tristan McLean’s daughter????

So they start combing through Piper’s pages- she’s more active than the Zhang kid, but apart from posting her mugshots with goofy captions, going on rants about meat-eaters, and posting videos of her dad being weird, she doesn’t have a lot of information. Except…one internet sleuth that joined this internet search party swears she recognizes a boy that pops up in a lot of pics on her instagram. Some more digging and they got it- it’s Leo Valdez, the kid who was accused of killing his mother! He’s got some cousins that have been trying to clear his name for years now, but they haven’t been able to find him because he keeps running from foster homes, they have a whole page dedicated to people trying to track him down! They contact the Valdez family members, and they’re elated to find out he’s alive and safe- but then it becomes a question of how does he know Piper McLean and what was he doing with her, Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Frank Zhang in Greece around the time of the Parthenon bombing???

They start looking into the other two teenagers pictured with the group in Greece- they can’t find anything on the young girl, other than the Jackson kid referring to her as ‘Hazel’ in some of his posts, but the other boy…

He’s not very active online- just some aesthetic coffee shop pics, a few blurry selfies, and designs for what appears to be an architecture project at his school. But his username is ‘*disgraced*’, he’s called ‘Jay’ and ‘Jason’ in posts by his friends, he’s got blond hair, striking blue eyes, and a very specific scar on his lip…

THE TRUE CRIME COMMUNITY IS FLIPPING THEIR FUCKING SHIT. DID THEY JUST FIND BERYL GRACE’S MISSING SON AFTER 15 FUCKING YEARS?!?!?!

Sleuths completely drop the bomb plot at this fucking point, and put all their energy in finding out if this is The Jason Grace, and- they literally can’t find a record of this person before he suddenly started appearing on Piper McLean’s and Leo Valdez’ media profiles. It looks like all his social accounts were started in August of the year he would’ve turned sixteen. But he’s the right age, he looks close to the computer generated age-up pictures made for the case, and- holy shit someone found a picture on Percy Jackson’s instagram of Jason and a girl called Thalia!

People are losing their minds- this girl looks a lot younger than the 20-something Thalia should be, but Beryl Grace was known for her innocent baby-faced look, so that can explain the difference between her and the aged-up picture. Same striking blue eyes as the boy next to her, same freckle pattern splashed across her nose, same raven hair and sharp smile that made her one of Hollywood’s biggest beauties before she could even talk properly. 

She doesn’t seem to have any social media herself, but pops up in quite a few of Jackson’s and the Chase girl’s pictures. Once Beryl Grace’s old friends, who have been searching for her children for years, see the picture of the smiling siblings together, it’s nothing but tears. They’re insistent that these are absolutely the Grace siblings, and are begging the police in charge of their case to track them down. They want to know they’re safe! And the rest of the world wants answers! Where have they been for all these years!

And how are they connected to what appears to be an ongoing bombing/murder/money grabbing plot????

what is going on here?!?!?!

 All this information gets dragged up in less than a month. People are going full Pepe Silvia level crazy trying to piece everything together. Netflix has already announced a conspiracy documentary about the hunt for the truth about this band of kids and what their end goal is.

Chiron’s just sitting at Camp Halfblood watching all this shit go down like:

Annabeth’s little brothers Bobby and Matthew are going Full Feral Gen Z online to fan the flames of conspiracy, “oh yeah the first time we met Percy Jackson and Thalia Grace they stole our dad’s car and drove it off a mountain”, “one time Annie stabbed a man in front of us”, they post a tik tok of what appears to be Annabeth and Percy drenched in blood and dust cleaning off weapons??? They set an ABBA song over it??? Everyone’s losing their minds but then one day on a live stream people start asking if they know Why their sister and her friends are like this and they just dead pan, ‘oh, they’re all demigods. the ancient gods are all real and it just gets messy for their kids sometimes, Annie’s mom is Athena-” and everyone is like ah. they’re just assholes feeding us false information. (they still post tik toks like ‘put a finger down if one time your sister took you out for ice cream but then this weird man who would later hold the titan kronos in his body showed up and begged her to run away with him so he could avoid the kronos thing even though she was like 15 and he was an adult and then she pulled out a knife and told him she should slit his throat after all he’s put her through but then he called her out on her bluff but still accepted the rejection and left and then she offered to get you a second helping of ice cream if you didn’t tell your parents about that whole thing and then later the ice cream parlor was attacked by a snake woman’ lmao)

Anyway, desktop detectives keep pressuring the police and the fbi and whoever the fuck to look into this whole thing deeper and make some arrests, but they can’t, because while everything that’s been surfaced is suspicious, it’s all circumstantial. The only ones that actually have arrest records are Piper and Leo( and Leo’s was without evidence, as his cousins are still fighting to get the case reopened!), all charges on Percy and Rachel have already been dropped or overturned, there’s absolutely nothing physically connecting Annabeth and her father to their family’s deaths, Frank was never actually a suspect in his family’s fire and while the footage with Percy was suspicious it wasn’t illegal, and they still haven’t been able to physically produce the Grace Siblings or even get a phone number for either of them, so like….all that plus the occasional intervention of the Mist, even though it absolutely looks like this is a whole criminal master plot…they can’t prove it! Just taking a group picture on a boat in Greece isn’t enough to legally claim they bombed the Parthenon!

This all comes to a head when the Netflix docuseries premieres, full of the online theorists who pieced this whole puzzle together but where unable to find the last piece that would connect the whole plot and make it make sense….

Percy Jackson films a video of him and all his friends who are fingered in the docuseries watching and reacting to it. They think it’s completely hilarious. He posts the video to his youtube channel (which Sally later Murders him for) and it’s the top trending video for like…half a fucking year. 

like…the drama. the mess. the conspiracy. I want it. 

What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids

Top 10 best anime fight scenes, number 1 : [August 27th 2020]

Based on the above tweet by Dana Terrace!

Buying a car

English added by me :)