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MORE FICTIONAL LOVERS!!

thinking about drawing some more like in this style....

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Years ago I saw an edit like this on TikTok decided to recreate it

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Bob’s Burgers oc! Montez! He is Grover’s “boyfriend” or something close to that :3

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what? oh sweetheart no, you're not weirding me out at all. you're weirding me in. keep talking, freak

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HELP

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Why We Can't Stop Talking About Lore Olympus.

One of the biggest reasons LO was criticized so heavily apart from other webtoons out there isn't just because it was a popular webtoon (though that certainly was a factor), but because unlike other webtoons on the platform, everything bad about it can't be pinned on any single obvious thing.

Like, a lot of Korean isekais on the platform are pointed at as being "bad" because they're just cookie-cutter copies of one another, from the art style to the double standards enforced over their shitty two-dimensional characters. But they still have something technically good about them which even the biggest genre haters can appreciate, usually the art which is often pretty consistent - and oftentimes quite gorgeous - so it's easy to sum up their problems as "yeah this is just another generic isekai romantasy story and it's bad for the same reasons all the other generic isekai romantasy stories are bad". There isn't really any deeper explanation to it, as many of those explanations can be summed up as "this just isn't for me" or "this is just doing what the works in this genre often do."

Merryweather comics are the same way, they're all consistently bland and are too pre-occupied with fanservice to offer much of substance, but you can pretty much just leave it at that and call it a day. They're meant for a very specific audience with very specific tastes.

But there's no single one thing about LO that can be simply summed up as "bad" with no further explanation, and many of the things that wound up being "bad" about it were pointed out not by people who fell outside its demographic, but by its very own readers who the comic had been written for in the first place.

Because while the comic had a lot of issues from Day 1, before it was even an Originals series (the age gap problem, for example), there were a lot of the things that USED to be EXTREMELY GOOD, only to then become progressively worse over time in ways that became proportionately harder to explain or defend.

And while a lot of problems are symptoms of the series trying to tailor itself to specific genres and demographics, a lot of its problems are also wholly unique from any other comic on the platform. While many comics tend to lose some amount of quality over time from the crunch of deadlines, they still usually gain some quality in one way or another - maybe the plot stops making sense, but the art still improves, or the art lowers in quality but the plot becomes even better over time. In the vast majority of cases, even comics that are operating within the chokehold of Webtoons' deadlines and expectations tend to still improve in some way, because it's natural that a creator is going to improve over the course of time and practice.

But I can't think of a single comic that defied the natural expectation of improvement harder than LO. It wasn't one thing that got worse with each episode, virtually everything about the comic got worse.

The art? It went from being vibrant and iconic to being simultaneously over-saturated and dull.

The plot? It went from being an earnest office drama romance to being some Marvel-derivative Avatar the Last Airbender crossover fic.

The character motivations? They went from being nuanced and compelling to two-dimensional and aggravating.

The character designs? The art speaks for itself.

The dialogue? It went from being subtle and natural to feeling like it was written by the first generation of ChatGPT.

The continuity? Fuck it, make shit up. Is anyone even still reading the comic at this point? Because clearly its own creator wasn't.

And all of that is still just scratching the surface of everything that went wrong with this comic.

This is why anti's and LO critics can't just drop the subject at "the comic sucks" like they can with other comics on the platform, because that is a gross understatement of everything that's so baffling and confusing and shocking and astounding about the comic's decline. Unlike other comics that suck enough to make you not even want to read them in the first place, LO was a comic you wanted to read and - when things started to go wrong - insisted had to eventually get better because we knew it could be better, we hadn't imagined everything we liked about it for the past 2+ years, right? Surely all that potential can't be wasted here? Surely the comic's flaws had to be balanced out somewhere?

Fact is, LO has always had problems since the beginning, and many of those problems started with its amazing ability to set expectations through strong premises - only to flop hard on those expectations in the follow-through, something that Rachel has seemingly always struggled with even before LO. The art wasn't perfect back then, neither was the narrative or the character motivations.

But it was never about being perfect, the point was that everything about it made sense, from its intentional design choices even to its design flaws. We could explain why something worked, and we could reasonably defend why something might not have worked while appreciating the attempt from a perspective of "we can see what Rachel was going for here".

But it's so difficult to share that perspective throughout S3 because the vision is nowhere to be seen. There's seemingly no sense in what Rachel was trying to do, what direction she was going in, what she was trying to accomplish, because not a single aspect about the comic at that time felt like it was thought through, especially in comparison to everything it had established back in 2018. It was like every week between episodes, Rachel was being swapped out for a person who had never read LO and had to try and re-interpret what they thought LO was based on only taglines like "Greek mythology" and "Hades x Persephone".

It was like LO was suddenly being written by ChatGPT.

Maybe it was the new editor, maybe it was the shift in LO's direction that was clearly a response to its heightened popularity, maybe it was on account of Rachel clearly stepping back more to let her assistants do more of the work. I don't know. But that's precisely why I and many others in this community can't stop talking about it, because you're telling me that the woman who won three Eisners for this-

-used to communicate so many feelings and meaning and emotional depth through these?

I don't think there's anything else that can sum it up better than that. This is why we talk about it. This is why it's so hard to let go.

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I bring a sort of “selfshipping” vibe to the fandom that the fandom don’t really like

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huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while

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Secret Room🤫

(ramble under cut that hopefully makes sense↓)

I like to believe that in their earlier days of the relationship, Peepers absolutely has no idea what do to. I mean, he does? To an extent? He latched on quick but ain't really know how to deal normally. Thinking about all the Hater paraphernalia he keeps in his bedroom, and how attached he gets to someone deemed his favourite, it wouldn't shock me if things weren't the best in the beginning. A hidden room tucked away deep in the Skullship that nobody knows of. Collecting miscellaneous stuff his date intentionally leaves around. From "missing" jewelry to candy wrapper scraps that just so happen to have lil love notes for him. Adding more to the board each day, trying his best to decipher it all. Making pros and cons lists to see if he should continue...whatever they got going. Yes, there's a polaroid from one of their many dates added but what if they're just friends? What if it's out of pity? Yes, he framed its love confession and somehow got a poster of dem to display(how'd he get this??) but the math still ain't adding up. Eventually, he caves in and comes to terms with the fact he in the trenches. He's furious. The rug and pillow were both gifts. "So you always have somewhere to relax and decompress."(yay autism floor time♡) The whole situation was quite vexing. He couldn't tell if he hated it or not.

tag list: @solsunships @meliorazul @tomayto-joe @sumplysilly @sleepingwiththeflowers

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⭐️💙⭐️Golden Dream⭐️💙⭐️

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for your consideration

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oh yeah people..... this is what FAME looks like...

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depression is really hard rn. thats where my emotional support TV comes in..

i keep forgetting my taglist im so sorry

🌙tag list!🌙

(reply to be added or removed!)

@nerdk1sser @apolloselfships @dreamyronimance @what-an-askew-corner @starshroom-doodles @kruxband @meliorazul @luffystwinflame @mia-ships @heartz4beyonder @justfrankie3 @little-miss-selfships @sweetheartharlow @bizarrescribblez @mickeytank-bank @daysnknights

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getting so flustered over a character i feel like doing this

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You ever see someone draw your f/o in a way that gets you flustered enough to feel embarrassed about it? It’s like “oh there’s that artist who draws my special guy in a way that makes my brain not work sometimes”. It makes me wanna hide under a rock so people can’t see me.