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Bora! She’s blasian (black and korean!) she has POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) and Chronic Pain! 🩷💜

She takes her rollator everywhere!

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august is like holdin ur breath

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hey bro can i ask you a question that will reveal a deep and fundamental gap in my knowledge of the world

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It will be a miracle if I make it through work today augh

But if I do make it through work today I'll be obligated to work tomorrow which will be worse

I just cannot win at this place

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this one goes out to the ex horse girls don’t forget your upcoming t shot

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Some pretty tricky designs in this batch, but I'm fond of the outcome. Just over a third of the way to having a full deck now, and given just how long and hard I've worked on each card I'm very tempted to compile an A5 artbook as well... if funds and interest allows, of course!

If you have just a couple of bucks a month to spare and would like to see this deck made, please consider joining us on Patreon. And if you happen to have a few more dollars than that, prints of completed cards are available on the $20 tier. Literally nothing I do is possible without the fine folks over there, so please consider helping out if you can.

Previously: FF playing cards | FFVII playing cards | FFXV Tarots | FFVII Tarots | FFXV Playing cards | FFVII Full Tarots | FF Hanafuda deck | FFVII Shinra photo book

Patreon | Bluesky

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I know I say that I'm kinda nuts for doing the amount of visual research I do, but at the same time: Specificity is SO much more compelling and real feeling, and imo not getting references often makes things look more amateur.

Eg. drawing a sofa- my mental image of a sofa is something like this:

Like. Its a sofa. It works. But it's not very convincing, the pillows are kinda wrong at the back, and it's not really giving any information about the owner. Even if you want a basic sofa... What kind of basic.

comfy and cheap?

kinda rigid?

inherited? ------

who does this comfy cheap ikea sofa belong to anyway?

guy living alone?

teenage girl?

Grandma?

Anyway I'll get off my soapbox but specificity is sexy and fun and it can do your storytelling for you!

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And our champion for 2025....the most annoying fandom on tumblr....is Taylor Swift! This fandom originally qualified with 64 nominations. It will be eliminated for next year's competition

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Hikaru: Have you seen Haruhi?

Tamaki: Not since this morning. Why? Is she missing?

Kaoru: Oh no, she's fine. We just dressed her up really pretty and we want people to see her

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i had a vision

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I think Hikaru is vaguely tragic in a way that's often underplayed in fandom. I know, a lot of airtime in fandom is given to the particular kind of tragic that the Hitachiins are as a unit, but I think Hikaru’s whole deal is often under-explored.

His big fear— and I’m not saying he’s aware of this beyond a subconscious level— is that he's not going to find a true connection with someone, but his actions (aloofness, hot-headedness, jealousy, co-dependency) push other people away, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You definitely could, and I choose to, read his ambivalence over his desire for Haruhi and his desire to not hurt Tamaki as latent feelings for Tamaki, which, of course, doesn’t work out. His first real attempt to create an emotional connection with someone outside his relationship with his brother (i.e., attempting to woo Haruhi) ends badly. (I mean, not BADLY because he and Haruhi remain good friends, but you know.) And I think that probably stung more than your average failed teen courtship due to the fact that it was literally the first time he’s tried to forge a personal relationship with someone that, by definition, could not involve Kaoru. 

Top all that off with his standard issue dose of ‘my parents were too rich/busy to raise me/love me properly with any degree of warmth’ emotional neglect, and we’re left with a person with a lot of attachment issues. He doesn’t even possess the amount of self-awareness that Kaoru has that might help him work on these issues without someone pushing him to do so. 

While, yes, his friends love him very much and view him as his own person, we know that Hikaru wants romantic love and connection with someone else, not just the platonic bond he has with his host club friends. But his actions make it difficult to do so because he lashes out both when someone new tries to get close to him AND when he feels threatened that the person he’s finally close to might leave/grow close to someone else. 

If Kaoru’s big fear is that he’ll be forgotten or left behind, Hikaru’s is that he’s BROKEN. His primary fear, I think, is that he is fundamentally unloveable and that is not disproven within the text of the manga. Man, that’s SAD!

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From Volume #8