justdalek

[justdalek]

This links to a wheel with nearly a hundred fic tropes for plots, settings, and more. Spin it twice.

This could also work with art inspiration, but the buttons only allow for so many characters on them. And please do ramble in the tags! I'm going to have no idea what most of you are talking about, and it's going to be great.

[justdalek]

Mario and Luigi: Brothership Review

I just finished M&L: Brothership and hoooooly cow that was a crazy game (in a very good way)

tldr: 8/10, definitely 3rd out of the 8 M&L games (yes I'm including the remakes)

Long review under cut (spoilers ahoy!)

Okay, so let me say that I have been with M&L for over a decade now. I was introduced to the series via SullyPWNZ's let's play of M&L: Partners in Time and then eventually getting my first M&L game that is Dream Team and falling in love with the series as a whole (I've played every game except the original Superstar Saga).

That being said, there's a lot to unpack with Brothership, so let's get the cons out of the way first bc there isn't a lot.

Luigi being controlled with A in battles: UUUUUUUGH Nintendo if you do one patch to the game, please let it be either Luigi is solely B or you can toggle which button to use for him in the settings. My muscle memory screwed me over in so many battles bc I'd default to pressing A with Luigi instead of B bc in battle A = Mario and B = Luigi. Lowkey felt like Luigi's commands were made more complicated instead of simplified.

More with Arc and Arc's Father: This is a weird one, but it very much felt like Arc was just tossed to the wayside after Lushgreen Sea. I was waiting for more development with him or his dad, but we don't see his dad until the end credits. Very much felt like a wasted character and (pun not intended) character arc.

Receiving Bros Attacks: I do miss the puzzle aspect from BIS and DT and it very much feels like it takes forever to receive all the Bros Attacks (like you don't receive the shells until after Gorumbla's defeat)

Yeah, that's it. Let's get to the pros.

Quality of Life Improvements: Skippable cutscenes, fast forwarding, optional or very quick tutorials wonderful to see again!

Pacing: While slow at first, the ending does go by very quickly, so I'm not complaining about it.

Bite-Sized Exploration: With the islands being on the smaller side, there's still a lot to do and a lot to come back to!

References Galore!: Every one of the M&L games are referenced and it's so cool to see it!

Burnedette and Chilliam: Oh my god I love these two so freakn much. This is very much what I've missed in media in general is to have a happy couple with little issues and that stick together through thick and thin. Their bond mission was so heartwarming and cute.

Extension Corps: Okay, I love the pun names, but also their arc was something I kinda wish M&L would do more. If I recall correctly, this is the first time that an antagonist in M&L has been first of all redeemed and second of all still relevant to the plot post redemption. The ECs did good deeds after Zokket's defeat and were even willing to help the bros when Reclusa went bonkers. They're also just dorks and I love them.

Cable puns: This may be my inner mass comm geeking out, but I love every single one of the cable puns and enemy designs that incorporated said cables. It was very much a genius move.

Bowser is largely neutral: So Bowser not being the final boss and not going after Peach is??? Amazing??? Don't get me wrong, Bowser being Bowser in M&L is always funny, but this time it was very refreshing to have the main villains be villains without Bowser sweeping in and making it all about himself.

Starlow: I very much am not a fan of Starlow (I tolerate her), and while the cameo was nice, I'm more glad that she let Snoutlet do his own thing with the bros rather than using her as a crutch when she shows up to the ship.

Peach: She isn't kidnapped?! Whaaat?! Jokes aside, like with Bowser, I'm glad that Brothership took a much different route with her by having her join IDLE and be more proactive in helping the bros find out information. It's nice that we don't have to worry about "saving the princess" and can focus on Concordia.

Mushroom Kingdom denizens as a whole: I'm going to slightly compare Brothership to Superstar Saga and Dream Team in that the MK and Bowser's minions are really used a lot here, letting the player focus more on the new world. Very much enjoy being able to explore without crazy interferences from Toad shenanigans (looking at you, Paper Jam).

Cozette as Zokket: I'm not gonna lie: I did not see that twist coming. Looking back at Cozette and how Reclusa got his mitts on her, it's such a good twist in that even the best of people can get brainwashed under the right circumstances to do evil things.

Reclusa: He's such an asshole, but I love him as a villain. Even though he's physically there towards the end of the game, his character isn't rushed and we get to see him be so unapologetically evil the entire time.

Connie and Snoutlet: These two were so much fun to have on this journey. I like their energy and banter more than Starlow and Prince Dreambert, and I hope there's more of this kind of energy in future M&L games.

Vibes: I feel like M&L has down spiraled in terms of having a lot of negative humor since Bowser's Inside Story, with it really being ugly in Paper Jam. However, Brothership literally turns the ship around and has a much more positive atmosphere about it, and it's so refreashing.

Music: While this game doesn't have the most memorable soundtrack, when it does have bangers they are super good. Standouts for me include the battle and boss themes and Twistee Island.

The Message: I usually see this more in the Paper Mario series, but the overall message that while being alone, having bonds with people is important is such a good message that needs to be told more. The fact that this game displays that there are multiple kinds of bonds (family, friends, romantic, rivals, etc) is so cool and validating to see.

Mario and Luigi: Easily one of their best performances alongside Dream Team. They bounce off of each other and truly show the power of brothership. Also having Luigi cook so much in this game was so freakn funny but also, "he has an idea! Let him cook!"

There's so much more I could say, but I really love this game overall and can ramble about all day

[justdalek]

I finally watched the Wicked movie, and something about this portion of “No One Mourns The Wicked” kept getting looped in my head, so I thought I’d make something of it.

… It would be something the Sins of Gluttony, Lust, and Greed would sing, wouldn’t it?

[justdalek]

YES THATS THE FRAMES!!!

I don’t have time to find the exact frame rn, but istg that at one point in Sinsmas, Andrealphus looked like Berdly

[justdalek]

I don’t have time to find the exact frame rn, but istg that at one point in Sinsmas, Andrealphus looked like Berdly

[justdalek]

Also if anybody has questions about Seven (literally any question lol), feel free to ask!

[justdalek]

Wooo time to present my college senior project!

For several years now I’ve made some concept art here and there about the Seven Deadly Sins, but now I actually got to bring them to life in this pilot! So please go check it out, the cast, crew, and I had such a blast making this, and aside from a few more episodes that’ll be releasing in the following months, we hope that it’ll get off the ground and become a full blown tv show!

[justdalek]

Oof, it’s been so long since I’ve last drawn these two dorks-

Anyhoo, the idea had been circulating in my head for a while about mashing batb with my sins world, but these two have three different characters they could be, so I’m drawing them all starting off with Sin of Envy Cogsworth and Virtue of Kindness Lumiére! Envy and Kindness are both huge nerds and almost always a package pair, thus them picking Cogs and Lumi as their humans to walk among mortals.

The other two pairs are coming soonish, that being:

Virtue of Chastity Cogsworth and Virtue of Abstinence Lumiére

Sin of Gluttony Cogsworth and Sin of Lust Lumiére

Feel free to ask any version questions btw, all 6 are very hilarious in their own rights

[justdalek]

Me: Man, I haven’t drawn Lumiworth in forever

Me, 2 hours into line art and coloring: Wait a minute… Lumiére’s hair is supposed to curl downward, not upward-

The page of line art: Whatcha gonna do bout it?

Me, sobbing: Guess I gotta redo his hair-

[justdalek]

OMG. Somebody said it out loud.

Disney is absolutely not the only studio doing this though.

It seems to have become standard practice across movies and series everywhere.

Anything that doesn't do it is like a breath of sunlight and fresh air inside a dank musty cave.

It's part of the 'fix it in post-production' epidemic sweeping through the studios. Fix it in post is often used as a time/money-saving measure - and is absolutely part of the same mess that the WGA is fighting against currently.

Rather than fixing things on-set - audio, lighting, something in-frame that shouldn't be, etc. (which is all handled by unionized crew) - they leave it for the CG folks (not unionized) to edit later.

(on ridiculously tight schedules that leave them scrambling, cutting corners, and working inhumane hours)

See also: that part where scripts aren't finished, because the studio won't fully staff the writers room, and won't pay to have writers on-set for day-of-filming script questions and fixes (which could resolve issues such as 'what kind of lighting do we need here?')

Anyway, all this shit we, as audiences, keep complaining about - bad lighting, bad sound, wonky visual effects, over-usage of not-great CGI, stilted acting on green-screen sets, scripts that seem not-quite-finished, costumes that look like they're cheap and flimsy, terrible hair and makeup, films and series that aren't as polished as they could be...

Plus the complaints we have about streaming services and their shenanigans...

All of that is enmeshed in the extreme capitalism that has taken over everything, including entertainment, to the point that studios are abusing their workforce and churning out material that - at best just doesn't live up to its potential - at worst, is just unwatchable shit.

[justdalek]

my copy of brothership arrived yesterday and now i can safely say this

[justdalek]

episodes that i think every tv show should have:

timeloop

whodunit

musical

beach trip

random genre change (especially if it's to a noir detective thing)

one where they get randomly meta and fourth wall breaky but then never acknowledge it again

one where something happened but we as the audience don't actually get to see how it happened and only see it through the unreliable narrated flashbacks as recollected by the characters

[justdalek]

has anyone done this yet

[justdalek]

A post I made a few days ago, it mainly concerns twitter and instagram but I thought I would share it here too because I only see people talking about mass deleting their insta! I got hundreds of comments on this post over instagram, so here are some clarifications:

I’m in support of Cara, I made an account too (follow me there hehe) I just find the constant panicking and fear-mongering extremely stressful and tiring. Yes, everything about this sucks, but we don't know the end of it yet. Yes, we should make more accounts! But I don't think we should fully give up on these sites so suddenly. I’ve heard that insta started implementing opt out buttons for AI in some countries, so I think we should wait and see what’s gonna happen before leaving the site completely. What they're doing is literally illegal and I just hope they'll be sued eventually.

Even if you don't want to "migrate" to Cara fully, I think you should definitely make an account! Cara is the platform we, artists have been waiting for for years now and I hope it will stick.

I want to adress a mistake I made - I said AI was a “hot trend” but I worded it badly. What I wanted to say is, I believe they will make more regulations for AI with time. But I know it’s here to stay - in Hungary, art universities, studios and ads already use AI :,)

No I don't have any problem with fetish art, yall do what you want! I said that because Cara currently doesn't allow N.S/FW on their platform.

[justdalek]

[justdalek]

Woo, apologies for the crazy bouts of inactivity as of late, but good news comes with it!

One of my old projects got picked up by my school to be filmed for a t.v. show pilot called “Seven: The Deadly Sitcom”!

So in honor of it, you guys send me one of the deadly sins you want to see its original design to its current design!

[justdalek]

The animals of the seven vices

I just wanted to talk a bit about how the seven deadly sins, or seven capital vices, were always associated with animals as symbols (which is quite ironic, given the vices are human in nature). In fact, it is quite funny to see that originally the idea of representing the vices as animals was done as an anthropomorphization. The animals were humanized and designed as a reflection of the sinful humans or the social categories most afflicted by this sin (it was quite common in early Middle-Ages: take La Chanson de Renard, the song of Reynard, this very famous fiction in which animals are used to parody the medieval society). It was only later, as time passed, that the animals came to be considered as the embodiment of sin, not a reflection or symbol of it, and as a result the representations stopped humanizing the animals and started doing the reverse, animalizing the humans as a way to represent sin overtaking them.

Another fun fact to mention - originally the “animals of sin” were quite exotic creatures, like the lion or the whale, because the classification of sins and the whole origin of monotheistic (especially in this case Christian) religions come from “exotic country” like Greece, Turkey, Palestine, the Middle-East. But in the Middle-Ages it was difficult for the priests and churchmembers to make the common folk of Western  Europe understand what those animals represented, since they had never seen them. And so they switched with animals much more common in France, England, Germany, be it animals of the wild, like foxes and bears, or  city and farm animals, like dogs and goats.

For Pride, the traditional animal nowadays is considered to be the peacock, which was indeed a typical representation of this sin. The peacock, with its beautiful tail and colors, was considered to be an allegory for how prideful people covered themselves in jewels and precious clothes - but the bird cannot hide its “ugly legs” the same way the prideful beauty is only skin-deep. However, as you can note, the peacock truly represents pride in a sense of vanity, and indeed was only used for the pride when the vice of “vanagloria” (vain glory) was fused with the one of superbia (pride).

Before the peacock were the lion and the horse, two animals representing pride in its original sense of arrogance. The horse was the animal that the knights, lords and kings rode, a beast of the upper class, yet you could also fall from the horse’s back or the horse could throw you down, just like the prideful often falls. As for the lion, it was considered to be the “king” and “nobility” of the animals (in La Chanson de Renard, the king is parodied as Noble the Lion), but also a wild, dangerous and ferocious creature (and thus evil).

For Greed, nowadays most people will tell you that the typical animal associated with this vice is the toad. I cannot deny that there is indeed a strong link between this animal and the idea of greed (the first Christian animal allegories of greed include toad), and in general of wealth (in China, they have frog statues that, when you put a coin in their mouth, give you prosperity and money in the future), but the exact reason why is unknown to me at the moment. Some people say the toad was considered a “greedy” creature because it wanted to live both on land and water, unable to just choose one part of the universe like all the other animals. I do not know if this explanation has true cultural basis.

Usually, greed was also represented by several other animals in medieval imagery. On one side, you had the wild ravenous animals: the wolf, seen as a greedy devouring beast, or the fox, which often raided the farms to “steal” the chickens and young animals away (and the fox was always perceived in Middle-ages as a greedy thief). On the other, you had smaller creatures, like the mole (due to living underground and constantly digging the earth, it was a reflection of Greed’s materialism) or the badger. More surprisingly - the monkey or the ape was seen as the animal of greed. Why, you might ask? Because when the bourgeoisie appeared in medieval society, they wanted to flaunt their wealth all the way they could, and one of them was to buy a monkey and show it to all your friends and clients. As a result, the monkey became the symbol of the greedy bourgeois and materialistic merchants that wanted to show off and flaunt their wealth - and the animal of the vice of Greed.

For Lust, nowadays people will tell you the animal is either the cow or the goat.

The cow was not the most widespread representation of lust in the Middle-Ages, in fact it seems more of a modern interpretation. Some point out how the cow was seen by ancient civilizations as associated with love, beauty and sexuality - and it could have been a joke on how the social category of Lust (the same way Pride was kings and noblemen, and Greed bourgeois and merchants) was the one of the “lady” and “noblewomen”, the upper class women (who would be the center of love stories and romances in legends, and often cheat with their husband when they are away at war or for political reasons).

The goat was much more traditional than the  cow. The goat (be it the female goat or male goat) was perceived as a symbol of an excessive and aggressive sexual strength, which can only lead to a brutal copulation or a frustration of the desires.

The sow was also often considered to be the animal of lust - where the male pig represents gluttony, the female pig is the other excess of the flesh, a symbol of lasciviousness. But more importantly - the snake was the symbol of lust. The snake which seduced Eve in the garden of Eden to bite into the apple, the snake with its phallic shape, the snake that some theologians considered had sex with Eve and thus eating the apple was but a metaphor for Eve cheating on Adam with the embodiment of temptation and evil.

Nowadays people say that the animal representing Wrath is a bear - pointing out how mother bears are very violent and aggressive when it comes to protecting their young. I have to say that this is however a modern interpretation. It is true that the bear was seen as a being of violence and brutality - but not so much a “wrathful” beast. It was rather considered to be a gluttonous and lustful being. It is true that many wild and aggressive animals were considered symbols of wrath: the leopard, the wolf, the lion… The king of them being the dragon, the physical embodiment of the wildness, dangerousness and destructiveness of nature, the chaotic fires and claws of evil.

But the traditional animal of Wrath was actually the boar. Aggressive and attacking all those around him, charging blindly - just like the wrathful are blinded by rage. It even reflected how wrath was perceived as the vice of suicide: indeed the hunters often used the blind and violent attacks of the boar against him, he went so fast and so blindly he would end up impaled on their sword, the same way the suicidal are blinded by their desire for self-destruction and run towards the “sword”.

The hedgehog also had a role as a symbol of wrath - since he was covered in spikes, he was seen as a reflection of how the wrathful becomes untouchable and drives everyone away by covering themselves in “spikes” harming  anyone trying to get close.

Envy’s animal was always considered to be the dog (especially the greyhound). It was due to the idea that the dogs kept fighting between each other for food - and the specific picture of dogs fighting over a bone. A dog unable to stand another one of his species having a bone (literaly something with no meat and thus seen as useless) and trying to steal it away - this was perceived as pure envy.

Other animals close to the dog were perceivd as the embodiment of envy - like the wolf or the fox, wilder cousins of the dog. Envy also had a strong connection to reptilians - be it the snake (that according to some used envy and jealousy to make Eve eat the forbidden fruit), a dragon or a basilisk (that poisons everything around it).

Gluttony’s symbol stayed the same since the ancient times: the pig. An omnivore being perceived as the embodiment of over-eating, who visibly enjoyed a lot the act of eating and wallowed in the mud and his own filfth… That was how the excessive and wasteful gluttons were perceived.

Other animals were also considered symbols of gluttony. The wolf was seen as a hungry devourer (hence why in fairytales he keeps trying to eat everyone), and the bear was also considered to be an embodiment of gluttony and lack of temperance (due to how crazy bears are about honey and how much they can eat - again, in La Chanson de Renard, the character of the bear gets tricked by the protagonist due to his gluttony).

And finally we reach Sloth, or Acedia.

Nowadays people tend to say that the goat or the sloth are the “sloth animals”. The goat, yes, it was perceived as a symbol of laziness (some pretend that this is due to the “scapegoat” which is the easiest and laziest way to get rid of a problem by accusing instead of searching the truth, and while this interpretation is valid, it is probably not the true explanation since the scapegoats weren’t perceived like that in Middle-ages, but anyway). But the sloth was too recently discovered to be a symbol of sloth in traditional art. Of course it is connected to the vice (after all it was NAMED Sloth), but it is not a traditional symbol of it.

The traditional symbol of Sloth (and Acedia, the two being separate yet later fused together) is actually the donkey. Of course many people understand why the donkey is sloth in a pragmatic term - it is said to be a lazy, stubborn beast that you have to force to work. Those more educated will know that the donkey was also seen as the animal unable to choose and incapable of making adecision - there is this story of how a donkey ended up dying of thirst and hunger because it could not decide whether to go right to drink or go left to eat. But what few people know is the religious meaning of the donkey.

You see, the donkey is known to eat thistle. And the thistle, beautiful but that pricks those that take it, is a representation of the temptation of sin. As a result the donkey eating thistle was a symbol for people simply taking the easy way and falling for the temptation of sin (the stuff on the ground that pricks) instead of making an efffort and reaching for the virtue (such as the fruits hanging from the branches of trees).

In modern days, people tend to use snails as a new symbol for sloth.