i'm being very emotional about them tonight so don't mind me but it makes my heart implode how merlin never thinks to manipulate arthur to change his mind about magic. never thinks to use arthur's trust to achieve everything in a blink. because arthur would. he would do anything merlin says already and with a little manipulation merlin would've got him to kill uther if he wanted, he wouldn't even have to lie about anything. instead merlin chooses to let arthur go at his own pace and form his own opinion and refuses to risk having arthur go insane with grief and guilt and yes it was so stupid to not even try and to keep arthur in the dark for so long but also the devotion the loyalty the very human desire to protect the man he loves from everything including from himself. it's driving me insane.

I (inexplicably third culture kid at times) grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day because my mother is normal, and all my English friends were rude about them despite literally never having tried one because "ough it just sounds gross." Anyway I want to see if this is a trend beyond children from southern England.

NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO MAY NOT KNOW - JELLY IN THIS CASE MEANS JAM, NOT JELLO-TYPE FOOD - MANY OF MY PEERS WERE NOT AWARE OF THAT.

If you're a writer you're supposed to write a lot of bullshit. It's part of the gig. You have to write a lot of absolute garbage in order to get to the good bits. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time writing bullshit," but that's dumb. That's exactly the same as an Olympic runner being like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time running all those practice laps"

As Merlin looses his magic into the air, he wonders. Will his king, bright and gold and warm, one day know all of him?

For @merlintarotfest

Cards from the Light Seer's Tarot: 7 of Wands, The World, 2 of Pentacles

Full img on AO3 (posted for the collection)

When was the last time you ate something green and NO GREEN M&M'S DON'T COUNT

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

yeah we’re like best friends. i like her posts all the time

Can you tell me I did a good job? I won't believe you or anything. It's just nice to hear sometimes.

thinkin about the chosen one story told from the pov of the person standing next to them again. thinkin about the one who has to stand by and watch the chosen one become a weapon, a sacrifice, an offering to the machinations of plot and can do nothing but make sure they’re fed and rested and soothe them when they wake up screaming from nightmares. thinkin about the fierce devotion that has to exist to follow someone to the end of the world just so they don’t have to die alone. thinkin about the terror they’d feel every step of the journey knowing it’s not their place to change how the story plays out. thinkin thinkin thinkin.

the ladies have a baby!!

for @merlinrarepairfest

Before Moonrise (5343 words) Fandom: Merlin (TV) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon Additional Tags: Dubious Consent, Fuck Or Die, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Trauma Bonding, Captivity, Implied/Referenced Torture Summary: Werewolf!Arthur trapped in a room with Vampire!Merlin. The full moon is rising. Arthur is compelled to either fuck him or kill him (Kinkmeme Prompt).

The council is baffled by how a humble and poor farmer succeeded in taming a dragon, a feat demeed impossible as kings and the most powerful archmages have failed for centuries.

The knights of Camelot chase a dragon through their kingdom, hoping to slay it before it vanquishes the next village.

As they ride up to a village they shout out that the villagers should run, take cover in the forests around or they’ll be picked off by the devious creature up above.

Most villagers scream and run for their lives. They let everything fall out of their hands, they cut loose the livestock.

One young man, almost still a child, doesn’t run away, frozen in fear in the middle of the village square.

The knights watch as the dragon dips down from the sky as they are still riding towards the village centre.

The young farmer looks up and reaches towards the dragon with his outstretched hand.

In the last moment the mighty dragon struggles to hold his course and corrects it upward again before even reaching the village.

The dragon is a great distance above them again when the knights reach the brave soul standing in the village square.

“You! Who are you and what have you done?” The first knight shouts out.

“Who wants to know that?” The villager shouted back.

The knight dismounts his horse. “I am Prince Arthur of Camelot!”

The villagers around them that have also returned whisper ominously while the young man in the middle just wipes his nose at his sleeve.

“Really? You don’t look that princely.”

The Prince rolls his eyes as the other knights step forward and draw their swords.

“Answer the question.” The Prince warns.

“Merlin. And I just told the dragon to leave.”

the thing about cracking open a long-established popular ship tag on ao3 is that it allows you to be extraordinarily picky, and i think it must be the closest thing i will ever experience to being filthy rich. i scroll along at super speed like no today i am only interested in fics with this precise range of words and one of these three tags. only authors i’ve heard of, please. hmm, i suppose i could consider an unknown quantity given its apparent popularity with the people, but… no, no, this summary doesn’t do it for me. no particular reason, it’s just… eh, i don’t need to explain myself. bring me 50 more like this for me to choose from and we’ll see.

someone just lamented that their new pairing has only 5000 works ("where's the rest of them?") which is approximately the size of the pairing i was celebrating in the original post, and it really threw into relief that it's impossible for us to even conceptualize the extravagance of a true scrooge mcduck fandom if we've never been in one. i am a reasonably well-off dentist who takes her family to cancun once a year.

because at the end of the day it’s about how love and hate will destroy you equally. it’s about the fact that merlin and morgana both lost themselves because they became so consumed by their love and hate respectively that it made everything else not matter. because merlin loved arthur so much he hollowed himself out for the sake of it and morgana hated uther so much it ate her alive and became all she was