zoerayne2426
This is so gorgeous
request for virgil and some emo tunes🎶 @imanexistentialcrisis
This is how the golden age of piracy ended.
The first mermaid to get tattoos :)
“we didn’t know any better,” the crewman says, and swallows, presenting the chest to the captain. “what do we do now?”
“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.
“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we - i won’t. we won’t.”
“i know.”
x
“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”
her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.
“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.
“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.
x
“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”
“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”
she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.
x
“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.
“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”
she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.
“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”
x
her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”
the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.
“why not?” the mermaid asks.
“he’ll win,” the first mate says.
the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.
x
the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.
“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”
x
the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.
“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”
they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.
she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.
the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.
x
she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.
x
“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.
she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.
“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”
the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.
“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.
“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.
“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”
“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”
“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”
“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”
x
the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless - of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.
“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.
the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.
“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”
“and now?”
“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”
the mermaid smiles, fully this time, her dark eyes gleaming under the white linen sail. “they didn’t know any better.”
She protects her family.
Hi everybody! Guess what’s being posted on AO3 now at the following link!
That’s right! Here you go. I’ll be uploading it in some chunks, because I want to make sure I have everything I wanted edited cleanly finished, but follow the story there!
HEY GUYS GUESS WHATS BACK ON THE DASHBOARD AND BETTER THAN EVER
I love this
alacerlucifer
electricbreeze
Schrödinger’s boys
klubbhead
FUCK
What about cracking open a cold milkshake
As we all know, the milkshake brings the boys to the yard. The presence of the boys is a prerequisite for the cracking open of a cold one, but cold ones do not have any inherent boy-attracting abilities. Milkshakes, however, do. All else being equal, the boys would proceed to the milkshake yard. While it is possible to announce the presence of cold ones in the hope of attracting some boys, the pull of the milkshake is much more powerful by comparison.
mind you, all of this nonsense hinges on whether or not the boys are back in town
Y'all: ugh I wish fandom content creators would post more 😩😩😩😩😩😩
Also y'all when someone posts fanart/fanfic/edits/etc:
look im not popular in any way when it comes to my content creating and i absolutely understand that more attention makes you feel good about the content you’re putting out but I think that one, depending on other people for your own drive to create content isn’t really okay. also there’s always going to be more likes then reblogs like I don’t know, I don’t think this is something worth complaining about.
erensjaegerbombs
The main issue here is that it didn’t used to be this way. At all. And I’m certain a lot of the people who are making a huge issue out of the like to reblog ratio are people who are been here for a while (like myself) and remember the days when reblogs dominated the hell out of likes.
Up until around 2016 or so, the like to reblog ratio was the total opposite of how it is now. And it applied on posts with fewer notes and posts with a large amount of notes:
You get my point. But over the last few years it has flipped completely:
And, of course, see OP’s screenshot.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the posts with more reblogs have an astoundingly higher amount of notes because of increased exposure. Reblogging allows more people to see the content, that’s more people to either continue reblogging or at least give a like. For artists in particular who would benefit from the exposure in terms of commissions and patreon and all of that, this is a huge deal. It can make all the difference.
Tumblr as a blogging platform was created with the intent to post and share content. It’s not meant to be a consume-only form of social media like Instagram. For fandom blogs in particular, it always boggles me that people don’t share content that they like. Tumblr was appealing for fandom in the first place because of the ability to plaster your blog with amazing things that other people made - this used to be unheard of. For me, it’s like saving something precious so you can always come back to it again. It’s giving the people who follow me something awesome to look at too. Creating and sharing content is the heart of fandom.
People rely primarily on their dash for content. Most people avoid going into tags/searches because of wanky fandom drama. So reblogs are crucial for exposure! Likes are a nice gesture, but they do nothing to help share and promote content. That’s why content creators are frustrated or moving to other platforms, or why they stop making content altogether. Tumblr has its issues, but it’s still one of the best places for exposure due to its reblog function and overall post formatting. It’s discouraging seeing content creators on Tumblr as a concept die off. This site is nothing without them.
We can enjoy making things as much as possible but when we share it and no one cares enough to show it to others, it does make us wonder why we bothered in the first place. And this isn’t a new complaint from content creators. But it has worsened over time as the likes started dominating the reblogs.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate likes at all, notes are notes. But reblogs equal more notes, which equals more exposure, which equals happy content creators, which equals more content for fandom to consume. It’s a wholly positive chain of events that circles back around. Your reblog could be a deciding factor on whether that content creator chooses to keep contributing or to give up entirely.
Reblogs mean the world to us. They can really brighten our day a whole lot.
yeah, it’s absolutely a result of cringe culture. the whole atmosphere on tumblr has changed radically. with cancel culture, the constant policing of fandom content, calling everything ‘problematic’, harassing creators for doing literally anything, and unmitigated sense of entitlement to other people’s work, it’s literally impossible to like anything without someone crawling up your ass about it. creators are afraid to create, and consumers are afraid to share.
charlesdances
I think it’s also a combination of a lot of things:
- as above states ‘cringe culture’ and ‘cancel culture’ DEFINITELY plays into this and makes people super conscious about what they can reblog fully (without some twat who shames them or for them to lose followers)
- the whole ‘like’ habit is very much adapted from various other social media (a lot of people on tumblr I’ve noticed are super young and are used to this function i.e. facebook, twitter, instagram, etc)
- there are certainly way more people who aren’t creators and only come on to tumblr to either browse like those other sites and give likes and (sadly) either can’t be bothered to or have no incentive to reblog a post (again I’ve noticed this is a recent thing due to people coming into tumblr later and not recognizing the reblog function’s importance (or they honestly just don’t care)
- the search/tag function was never perfect but now it’s even more BROKEN
- the recent policing/flagging of posts earlier this year (ALSO BROKEN) that is dissuading people even more from reblogging/posting things
- and BECAUSE of the recent policing people are dissuaded and so many people have moved to other platforms
- some people are super into keeping to the aesthetics on their blogs (I have a habit of doing this)
Also I’ve noticed most of the people who stay on here have either been a really long time user of tumblr/are content creators who have accumulated and built a solid following/content creators who, popular or otherwise, rely on this platform for exposure and get work/have a lot of mutuals still on here/are willing to adapt to the constant bizarre changes made throughout the years on this hellsite (and the most recent changes are the ones that causes even the most grizzled of tumblr users to move on to other sites or at least to not solely rely on it so imagine those of which who don’t feel like they should even bother because they have no stakes in doing so)/all of the above.
Some people question the importance of the reblog over the like, and have this odd mentality of ‘ohh don’t just do it for the notes, JUST do it for the love’ which is honestly just baffling and screams of ‘hey thanks for making something I’m really into YOU SHOULD DO MORE FOR FREE’ or someone offering you a job and saying ‘oh don’t do it for money do it for EXPOSURE’. To these people let me tell you something:
Reblogs are free. And if you want to talk about EXPOSURE, reblogging a post can do WONDERS. Take it from someone who has gone through the various experiences of going to sleep after hours of work, posts it mostly for fun and for the fandom to enjoy, and then waking up to see that someone in the industry who has influence and power has noticed you. Even better? They’ve decided to hire you for work or to ask if they could spread your work around to people they know!
Reblogs help. Reblogs are important. Reblogs CHANGE lives.
Excuse my weird ramble I'm gonna go in, but people act like gay cowboys are this new thing. And act like its something recently coined. But thats not even close to the truth. I know that most people don't know this but, Cowboys are literally apart of gay culture. Men would escape the cities, or life in general and go live in the middle of no where to be together. That was their life. Its sad thats they had to of course, but that was the reality.
Not only that, cowboys are of color history. Cowboys literally are from Mexico, thats where they originated from. It was not only white men that were cowboys. It was us. Not only that, so many black folks were cowboys. This isn't even some hidden thing. If you look at real pictures of cowboys you'll find the ones of color, because they were.
Cowboys ARE gay culture they ARE people of color. It has been ours from the beginning. And It is absolutely amazing seeing how that is being brought back, but I just wished people would realize, its being brought back, not made now.
I know this didn't really make sense, I just wanted to say this
backthatassbuttup
troylers-bae
HOLY FUCK
????????????
pheonix-inside
OH WOW
Dang!!!!
A CROW TRIED TO GO IN OUR CLASSROOM AND HE HAD A PEN
heliosapollo
yes hello i am here to learn geometries
That crow is more prepared than some of my students.
standbyfortitanfall
You’ve all just like, completely skipped over the possibility that this crow has seen people using pens in this room, found one, and is trying to return it. There’s been videos of crows picking up sweet wrappers and stuff and placing them in bins after seeing humans put their litter in bins. I really do believe that this crow is trying to return the pen and that is ADORABLE AS HELL.
angelalchemy
THEY ARE SO SMART I LOVE THEM
laurelai
Crows are thought to be self aware by some scientists. Its perfectly possible the crow wants to return the pen to humans. Knowing it belongs to humans.
Corvids. Who KNOWS. :)
offendedfunyarinpa
Another cool crow deal: Once, when trying to assess if crows could reason and use tools, scientists had two crows who didn’t know each other each take a wire from a table (one was hooked, one was straight) and try to grab meat from a bottle with it. The crows could see each other, though they had separate bottles. Only the straight wire worked for this, so they hypothesized that if crows could reason, the second trial would have the two crows fighting over the straight wire. The second trial started and, to the surprise of the scientists, the two crows both went for the bent wire, one held it down and the other unbent it. They both got meat out of their bottles. They came to a peaceful solution without verbal communication. Crows are probably smarter than we are.
vertisol
they still shit all over the place and eat garbage
ok but so do we
Cool facts about crows:
1. Crows understand the concept of gifts.
There’s a little girl who started feeding the murder by her house and they started bringing her trinkets (cool pebbles, coins, shiny things, bleached animal bones, etc) as a thank you.
2. Crows remember who has been kind to them and tell other crows about the nice humans.
There are various examples of people who have helped crows and the crows not only come back to say hi, but also bring friends who need help over for the nice human to help.
3. Crows are the only other animal known to make tools in order to make another tool.
4. Crows have been proven to have a sense of self
If you mark them with a coloured dot that they can see and then show them their reflection in a mirror they soon realize that the reflection is them and not another crow.
5. Crows have regional dialects and accents.
They are also able to copy each other’s dialects and accents to fit in if they move to an area where the accent is different.
6. Crows regularly visit their parents after leaving the nest.
They also regularly live with their parents after reaching adulthood to help with raising their younger siblings for up to five years before moving out.
ask-kirby-sans
Crows are better than people
Crows are pretty nice birbs
Me, in Ancient Greece, tying my sandals and pretending I don’t know that swan checking me out is Zeus:
cryingexercises
me, an ancient greek, knowing that some thot is about to send hera on another murderous rampage
Me knowing the baby zeus just put in her is gonna have a hellish life because she got thotty with Hera’s man
I’m a dude, LMAO. :p
It has come to my attention in the notes that Zeus’ monster thundercock would probably still get me pregnant anyway, and you know what? You’re absolutely right! Me, going to Mount Olympus to pick up my alimony checks from Hera, cause Zeus is out being a thot with someone else after I moved on to some cute, horny Satyr:
deserttigermuarim
Hera smiting you as soon as you appear there:
Me, walking right back into Olympus after I convince Zeus to give me some thotty job like cup bearer or whatever so Hera can’t touch me:
this post makes me thankful that the world didn’t end
If I had to nominate one of my posts as my favorite I’ve made the last decade, it would be this one.
Sooooo puff, puff, pass?
damn dolphins really know how to party, huh?
.... its a bong fish!!!
My Pride Ocs + the character sheets I’ve completed so far. (More to come soon!!)
Y’all ever just get a sudden love for characters you just found 10 minutes ago?
sablesides
Hi hello I’m very gay for this entire post
justawholesomedork
I would gladly die for everyone on this post
caffeinated-bisexual
I’m glad I am not the only one having these problems
asfjhqeufoewife;wlewe <3333333333
enbyendertime
When I thought I couldn't love Rayla any more than I already did she went there and did ALL OF THAT!!!!