#(and not a clear enough concept)

[lucabyte]

Olive Branch

Wrong Move

[crookedfivefingers]

3.13 | ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅꜱ

link to the post I accidentally wound up prattling endlessly about in the tags 💀

[rambunctioustoons]

thinking about the trope horror of assistants in the Daycare just straight up failing or quitting over and over and over again is as funny as it is tragic to me.

of course if you're waltzing on in there, rearranging the furniture and scolding the Robot who Literally Lives There it would cause problems. change is inevitable and always looming but would it not just get tiresome acclimatizing people to this role, just for them to quit anyway.

[capricioussun]

🌻 for Edge?

🌻 (sunflower) - What’s something your character has grown out of? Did it happen gradually or was it a drastic change? What caused this shift?

When Edge was little, he was actually entirely nonverbal! I always like to imagine most Papyri are quiet when very young, and took a while before their first words, but few to the same degree.

Id say it was both gradual and drastic, as he started offering a few sparse words to Red when he was around 6-9, but once they were on their own, there was more pressure to "act normal", so he wound up forcing himself to verbally communicate more frequently than he would've chosen.

Whiiich also sort of answers the next part! It was mostly pressure from "the outside world" (the rest of the underground). Pretty much anything can be perceived as a weakness, and since "quiet" reads more as "shy" for a child/teen, Red discouraged Edge from communicating predominantly in Hands.

[sincerely-sofie]

*gently places angsty Twig comic in your hands*

There comes a point in healing, sometimes, where you must grieve the child you never got to be, and bury her along with the desperate hope of one day somehow becoming her.

It isn’t fair. And it never will be.

But you grieve the child, still.

[afuntimepartyy]

I cannot draw right now. But I need to get this idea out go violently. Calling out to the wilds of the tumblr sprunki fandom, shaking, trembling and heaping MESSSSS when I explain the idea here. OKAY. OKAY!!!

Gray and wenda, before everything, were… close. If there’s anyone wenda was usually with prior, it was gray. She was always a little off putting, but it was… harmless! Just sort of a weird odd girl thing, but she was well intentioned. She was still the groups friend. Those were still her friends too, even if she was closest to gray before black.

Gray and pinki, some of the few survivors… there’s this assumption from gray, a bold but understandable assumption; pinki must *hate* them. At the very least, struggle to look at them. She can’t really look at anybody now anyways, no one can touch her without her pushing them away gently as she struggles to keep it together.

Wenda killed oren, wenda killed their friends, and while gray was spared they were an odd case. An exception.

…why would pinki have any reason to *not* want anything to do with them?

That couldn’t be further from the case. In a moment of vulnerability, and a bleeding heart that ached so wretchedly; pinki hugs gray. Taking great care to not let her face actually touch gray if she could help it. A tug, a hug, and a moment of understanding.

“I miss wenda too, gray… I miss her too.”

…And while croaked and rasped out, the words couldn’t be clearer and likewise her emotions too. She didn’t hate gray. She understood what it felt to lose someone- some people you were close to. Gray practically lost wenda, it was and remains unclear if she could ever be brought back from this low.

Pinki grieved and mourned while gray was still processing. Yet, all the same, she understood what gray couldn’t even understand themself.

She missed her too.

[robotsafari]

they sure were recovering something from that database (2nd doodle heavily inspired by one of @/nilpotence’s ISAT doodles, sorry.)

[arolesbianism]

I caved and made them real. Obverse me losing more and more motivation to draw as I made each of these back to back lol

[icewindandboringhorror]

I occasionally wish to reach out to old friends/acquaintances I haven't spoken to since high school/some other even earlier time in my life, but I have SOOO little social energy even for required tasks (like making dr phone calls or etc), I never have any leftover for extra ones, and it would be very odd to message someone I haven't spoken to in like 5 years out of the blue but then take 4 entire months to respond back lol.. My natural curiosity with nostalgia/collecting details of the past/etc. (literally if I were born a little earlier I would definitely do scrapbooking or something lol) is very strong, but, alas, not strong enough to beat out the Social Issues Demons apparently

[pekoeboo]

ugh. some thoughts.

really been trying to find the joy in drawing/writing again and honestly it's been such a challenge. friends have told me it's most likely depression that's making it hard to feel motivated and tbh they're probably right.

hoping to get back into being creative in the way I Want to be at some point tho. I miss it. there's still so much with my stories and characters that I haven't been able to share or explain and I wish I knew how without it feeling like this daunting, impossible task.

I don't know when I'll get around to actually sharing art again (or writing, if ever). was hoping that I'd manage to get some of my mental and physical issues in check recently for just long enough to get back into the swing of being creative, but that hasn't seemed to work. everything feels bad, both artistically and physically. I'm struggling to keep up with the frantic pace at which my brain comes up with story concepts and intriguing character interactions, even tho everything in me wishes I could turn it into tangible artistic expression so I can get it out of my head and share it. it used to be easy. I don't know why it's not now.

I'm just . tired, I guess.

[cuteniaarts]

The weight of the world is a heavy burden

Especially for a child

(Or, in slightly less dramatic terms – I imagine that the first of her past lives that Avatar Suiren [who is the Avatar after Aang instead of Korra in my AU, and also Ghazan and Ming-Hua’s daughter] gets to talk to is Yangchen, because she is too plagued by memories not her own [including Jetsun’s death, fun fact]. And Yangchen wouldn’t want another child to go through what she did on their own)

(Or maybe someone just needed an excuse to draw @katkastrofa’s latest obsession in a context that interests them as well, just in time to maybe cheer her up a little? You can’t prove anything)

[mercuriart]

evil mfs here to be gay and ruin your life

[cacaitos]

okay, i guess i will add individual arguments to the mangas selected eventually (<- no lo va a hacer al final), but i would like some peer review for these stacks.

Stack 1:

Stack 2:

[sympathytea]

Alright chat before s2 starts tomorrow I want to put one more idea out there or rather, theory.

So we know that the red gate at the diamond level probably leads to like, a lobby or something. Probably a no-pvp zone. Assuming that every civilization has a lobby exit gate at their last level (depending on the weapon this might just be instantly accessible) Is there actually a way out? Or is this it? Are they suspended in the void? Is there ever really anything outside of the civilizations? Is it an apocalypse out there, perceived to be that way? Or is it. Nothing special? Personally what I'm going with until its proven wrong: There is no true exit. Death is the only way out of PVP civilization. The whole thing with Evbo's immortality, his obsession with trying to get down lower and see if there's anything outside of it. Wouldn't it be fucked up if there was actually just nothing except this hell that he put himself through for no reason? The guy in episode 1 might've had a point there, and might've been the smartest guy Evbo ever met. The point of the whole game being to not play at all.

Putting himself in a cycle of dying and living and dying? Probably the worst idea he had, assuming I'm right. Which considering everyone seems more concerned about prolonging the inevitability of death? Farming for durability, paying for immortality with said durability? What if they already knew there was nothing out there, and nobody thought to tell Evbo. Either because they didn't have the heart to crush his dreams, or fear that it would break him. Could you imagine how devastated he would be if he got that revealed to him? That there isn't a way out, that nobody is going to escape PVP Civilization. There is no Chosen One, to lead everyone out of hell.

[rmbunnie]

I know Morrison's Batman tends to be considered one of the greats, and I am definitely warming up to it more than I did on my initial read, but there are still some elements of it I found really didn't mesh with me. I feel like I can say this a lot more concisely than I did during my initial readthrough of Batman and Robin 2009, plus I've had more time to reflect and actually form a coherent opinion that wasn't a gut reaction, and keep in mind that I've read Batman and Robin in a vacuum Morrison-wise and can't speak on it in the larger context of their Batman run, but aside from just. very odd writing of certain characters, I feel like one of the more significant things that rubbed me the wrong way with this storyline was that a lot of the "weirdness" I'd seen hyped up felt either inconsistent enough that it didn't have a significant presence for me, especially towards the end of the run, or very surface-level.

One of the runs I see hyped up as some of Morrison's greatest work is Animal Man, especially for its metafictional ending. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I expect that I'll enjoy it, or find it very interesting at the least (although author-inserts can come across a bit arrogant sometimes imo.) The point is I've heard good things, that it comes down to a very interesting and one-of-a-kind conflict in the end, which made me in some part hopeful for similar with Batman and Robin, (although I do have to admit I was reading it in part to see how off his Jason really could be.) I didn't really find that, tbh. There definitely were genuinely weird plot points with impact on the story which I feel were really successful, unfortunately it seems like a lot of them were at the cost of any prior characterization for the characters involved. Damian has steel implanted into his spine which allowed Deathstroke to control his movements and set off his emotional connection with Dick, Talia just had to be written horribly for it to happen. Sasha is a really interesting parallel to Damian/Robin-in-general. The conflict around her grotesque mask permanently fused onto her face and the fear that it'll kill her completely to take it off, the scene in which she gets said mask in the first place/the dollotrons, and the concept of a villain getting their own Robin in someone completely unrelated to Batman and the impact their legacy has had is all really original and cool, it's just that it's all dependent on a bewildering version of Jason that directly contradicts all previous characterization save BftC. To me the tradeoff doesn't feel necessary, but the events are inventive and have weight in the larger story.

In other areas though, especially as the run wrapped up, the zaniness that I see hyped up a lot, while providing a unique atmosphere, felt a lot like set dressing more than anything. In retrospect, the first time I really noticed this was the Professor Pyg dance page back in issue 2 or 3, I believe? But it became much more frequent towards the end of the series. The entire city becomes infected with a viral drug by Professor Pyg which isn't a major threat and doesn't serve anything in the story much besides being wacky, letting Professor Pyg say odd things about his mother sometimes and putting Commissioner Gordon... in a dress! Zany! (Professor Pyg is eventually... presumably?... torn apart by a parade of dollotrons and his narrative importance dies with him.) Alongside the Morrison-original villains like Dr. Hurt and Professor Pyg, there's a mysterious new player in town who's been orchestrating everything, and after a dozen issues of mystery it's the Joker, but wearing a mask and making edgy "differently-abled" jokes!

Dr. Hurt is interesting, and I liked his part of the story if I ignored the panels of auxiliary weirdness thrown on to add to the vibe, and I think there's something fun and interesting there about the legacy of Batman vs. artistic interpretations with his motive of ruining the Wayne's legacy (made more apparent with his talk about the Batcave being "the way it was meant to be in his head," the manor and Batcave "his to ruin," but Dr. Hurt kind of fades out of the story as Batman returns and is defeated by Joker, laying a banana peel on the ground. In the context of the theme of artistic interpretation and Morrison's commentary that they never cared to pretend the story was going to end with anything but a return to the classic Batman, I actually find this really interesting. A character heavily defined and reinvented by Morrison's writing being defeated by one of the most iconic Batman characters with a classic comedy trick from the 19th century feels like the conclusion to the contrast between Batman's legacy and the artistic license of the authors writing the comics: you can have your personalized elements, but the legacy of Batman is elastic and unlikely to be molded by them: certainly it won't be destroyed. Despite this, it didn't change the exhaustion of seeing the Gravedigger's mask come off and settling in for another comic where the Joker is gonna be doing classic zany Joker stuff.

As much as I'm frustrated with the way Talia and Jason are written during this run, I didn't entirely hate it, and the more I think about it, the more I find things I like. Some of my frustrations come down to taste, and are an unavoidable product of my personal taste differing from a pro comic author who had an established writing career while I was going to elementary school. I feel like some previous Batman comics were referenced in really exciting ways, for example the combination of Bruce's absence, a drug being used to gain control over citizens, an odd demonic presence, an imposter cult leader (If you can call Dr. Hurt that) prolonging his life through magical rituals, the background detail of complete chaos in the city, and one of the main villains being torn apart by a crowd of his followers, from the limited number of straight-up-Batman storylines I've read, felt pretty strongly like a nod to The Cult. But even considering the commentary on creative license vs. the consistency of Batman as a pop culture icon, the feeling of reading the comic was frequently that I was being convinced of a weirdness that didn't extend through the story down to the actual structure or plot points of the issue I was reading (with exceptions, such as the Sasha + Professor Pyg thing,) and although I appreciate the message of the return to status quo in the ending, with the hype of the story's inventiveness and uniqueness on my mind, it was kinda disappointing to realize halfway through that for all the weird window dressing, the story would be commiting to a much more traditional turn than what I was expecting.

[strawberry-seal77]

EXPLODES A MILLION TIMES