heyclickadee

[heyclickadee]

btw if you're bored as an artist you should try learning to draw fat and skin folds, it genuinely is really fun once you get into it.

[heyclickadee]

Sorry, friends, I'm going to be going on about Sanctuary for a WHILE and this entire page has been living rent-free in my head ever since I read it yesterday: (spoiler images below the cut)

Not only did we get TechPhee, but we also got even more of Tech proving beyond ANY doubt just how physically capable he is!!! ❤️❤️❤️

Also I can just HEAR him delivering his "You did say that" to Parlin in the most casual, unconcerned tone known to man, and it makes me giggle so hard 😂

[heyclickadee]

Meet my OCs! They're all former clone medical officers who worked on the Kaliida Shoals Medical Center and went AWOL instead of helping the Empire experiment on their brothers after the war. They end up on Baraan-Fa.

Nightshift and Squirrel!

Halo and Shots!

These guys each have great strengths and get to explore their talents on their new home. I have a fic outlined, but still need a lot of time to write it. Still, I wanted to showcase the wonderful art of them done by my sister @barbieburnanator!

Feel free to do that thing where people ask about my OCs if you're interested.

[heyclickadee]

love ppl online being like "ur literally 30" like do u think thats not gonna happen to you??

[heyclickadee]

@summer-of-bad-batch

Week 10: bonus prompt: reunion

[heyclickadee]

This was so damn endearing, and I’m happy for him.

I also need to go check out Lamar Giles’s other books.

[heyclickadee]

[heyclickadee]

The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

∘₊✧──────✧──────✧₊∘

If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Some book recs for each of the K-pop Demon Hunters characters — here.

[heyclickadee]

Also the moment where Phee is a little vulnerable and lets on just how worried she is about Pabu and how desperate she believes Pabu’s situation is—she loves that little island so much. It’s why she’s willing to take the risks she does in this book to help them and take on jobs that are a little more dangerous than advisable to help them.

Anyway, I love her. Six seasons and a movie. Phee backstory (which! We didn’t get here) please.

[heyclickadee]

Another thing about Sanctuary is that Phee is a fantastic character. More of her, please. She could carry six seasons and a movie as the lead. She’s fun, she’s funny, she’s got tons of personality, a lot of heart—AND I still want to see her use that sword.

[heyclickadee]

My friends, I just have to get this off my chest:

Argument: "Bringing Tech back would cheapen his sacrifice because it would take away all the emotion of that scene if we know he survives."

Me: ... Happiness is an emotion.

HAPPINESS IS AN EMOTION.

HAPPINESS IS AN EMOTION!!!

...

...

...

***HAPPINESS IS AN EMOTION!!!!***

PLEASE GIVE ME MORE HAPPINESS!!! ALLLLL THE HAPPINESS!!!

As an aside... Am I the only one who rewatches shows and still takes events as they occur in the show regardless of what I know will happen later? Like, I know Echo and Ahsoka come back, I know Din and Grogu will be reunited, but I'm still crying my eyes out over Fives' and Ezra's and Din/Grogu's reactions because at that moment they, the characters, don't know what's going to happen! So, at least for me, ALL the emotions - including the sad ones - are still preserved.

[heyclickadee]

One, you could just ignore me. That’s an option. There are characters I see people theorize about returning that I think probably won’t ever come back all the time, but I don’t jump in their posts about it to badger them about it. I’m just theorizing. It’s fun and harmless. I have a different read on it than you do! It’s okay!

Two, once again, it’s Star Wars. I wouldn’t put money on any of the more major characters in Star Wars besides, like, Kanan Jarrus being dead and gone for good, not because I think they’re all coming back, but because it’s not exactly a sure bet.

Three, I try to apply actual ideas about storytelling and narrative analysis to my Tech Lives posts, but honestly the thing this boils down to is that I think he’s alive because I’ve, you know, encountered fiction before. And it’s funny that it’s with this character we’re all supposed to pretend we haven’t.

ALSO I am going to once again point out that Tech flips over as he’s falling and doesn’t fall back into the abyss the whole time. He’s doing what you’re supposed to do when you find yourself in his position by flipping over into the prone/skydiver position, something that will give him some ability to steer and potentially slow his speed, and he seems to be doing so on purpose. He’s deliberately animated taking a deliberate action. Meaning he’s doing his best to take control of the situation, rather than falling back and letting things happen, and in doing the thing that will give him a better chance of survival is shown as having not given up on himself.

It’s a tiny detail, but Tech is kind of the guy who regularly pulls off the team’s improbable survivals and escapes, and he lives in the improbably survival franchise.

[heyclickadee]

Oh, yeah, I figured it was. The sarcasm was thick.

I just saw an opportunity to elaborate on my point and took it.

ALSO I am going to once again point out that Tech flips over as he’s falling and doesn’t fall back into the abyss the whole time. He’s doing what you’re supposed to do when you find yourself in his position by flipping over into the prone/skydiver position, something that will give him some ability to steer and potentially slow his speed, and he seems to be doing so on purpose. He’s deliberately animated taking a deliberate action. Meaning he’s doing his best to take control of the situation, rather than falling back and letting things happen, and in doing the thing that will give him a better chance of survival is shown as having not given up on himself.

It’s a tiny detail, but Tech is kind of the guy who regularly pulls off the team’s improbable survivals and escapes, and he lives in the improbably survival franchise.

[heyclickadee]

Hey everybody go read Sanctuary

[heyclickadee]

I hope y’all know that Sanctuary has made me triple down on my Tech Lives stuff, because I do not see a way for this version of this book to be what got published now if Tech is in fact dead and if we are fully done with these characters.

[heyclickadee]

…okay but that’s the thing.

Yes, all of what you just described could have happened. Tech can create air resistance and steer in a way the car can’t, so he could have slowed his descent just enough to clamber on top of the rail car and use it as a jumping point. There aren’t giant ravens on Eriadu, as far as I know, but there is some species of giant flying reptile and, yes, he could have played some sort of sound on his datapad to try to call one up and ride it to safety because we’ve seen him do that exact thing before.

Do I think that’s what happened? No. Not necessarily. There are a lot of options for surviving a long fall, many of which are presented by the show itself at various points, up to and including he just didn’t die when he hit the ground—something we see happen to Hunter at the end of the previous season. The point is that anything could have happened to Tech after the camera cut away and that we don’t know what he’s falling into because the creative team took the time to hide it in mist. It’s automatically ambiguous.

The entire purpose of choosing a long fall we don’t see the end of as a character exit is the ambiguity. It leaves an out for a writer to plausibly bring a character back because, again, anything could happen in the gap of time between when the camera cuts away and when we assume, but don’t see, nor see the aftermath of (something that can be done definitively but tastefully and in a non-graphic way), the character should hit the ground. And picking a long fall as Tech’s supposed exit from the show, rather than excising the part where he’s dangling and actually killing him, and killing him in a far more definitive and more efficient way by, say, shooting him or killing him in the crash that happens a minute later—you can still preserve the self-sacrificial aspect with both of those—was a deliberate choice on the part of the creative team. Meaning they chose that ambiguity. And continued to choose ambiguity for the remainder of the show, as there is no moment you can point to and say, yes, this is undeniable proof that Tech died. Not even the epilogue, which—in the absence of any confirming lines between Hunter and Omega like, “Tech would have been so proud of you,” and the utterly bizarre behavior of removing Tech’s goggles from the archium and dismantling the closest thing he has to a grave if he is, in fact, still absent and in need of one—makes more sense if Tech came back in the gap.

The reason I was pointing out that we see Tech flip himself over into a skydiving position as he falls isn’t because I think that it, by itself, automatically means Tech is alive. It’s because: one, I’ve found that people very often misremember this moment as Tech falling back the whole time in both fanart and fanfiction, and I think it’s an interesting and often forgotten detail, and; two, it’s part of a larger pattern of deliberate choices made around Tech by the creative team.

Rather than going with the more aesthetic choice of having Tech fall back the entire time and to follow him some way down—a choice that’s usually made when a character is going to die in the fall, as it signals that the character is content with their life and choices and gracefully accepting what they see as an inevitable fate—they show him doing what he would if he were trying to give himself a chance. Which means it’s something the audience needed to see. By itself it just tells us something about Tech, which is that he, as @laughhardrunfastbekindsblog pointed out, is going to fight to make it out of this alive no matter how bad his chances are.

As part of the larger pattern, however—a pattern which includes things like thoroughly establishing that Tech as a survivor who often does manage to pull off the impossible and hit long odds every time, along with the ambiguity of the fall itself—it seems like showing the audience that Tech is trying to find a way out of this alive means that he probably did. Otherwise there’s no reason for that detail to be there.

It’s not really about how he made it. I’ve got a favorite pet theory for how involving Saw, but it really could be anything. It’s more that everything in the story (functioning as a story) around him seems to set up that he did.

ALSO I am going to once again point out that Tech flips over as he’s falling and doesn’t fall back into the abyss the whole time. He’s doing what you’re supposed to do when you find yourself in his position by flipping over into the prone/skydiver position, something that will give him some ability to steer and potentially slow his speed, and he seems to be doing so on purpose. He’s deliberately animated taking a deliberate action. Meaning he’s doing his best to take control of the situation, rather than falling back and letting things happen, and in doing the thing that will give him a better chance of survival is shown as having not given up on himself.

It’s a tiny detail, but Tech is kind of the guy who regularly pulls off the team’s improbable survivals and escapes, and he lives in the improbably survival franchise.

[heyclickadee]

out of curiosity…

Personally I just finished the book and I’m more #TechLives than ever, but wondering what others think!