#<- look you were warned.

[dani-luminae]

I'm thinking about Wish again. So as the only Wish liker I know of, tell me what you liked about the story and also maybe some things you thought could be improved!

I would be honored! And it got long, so... below the cut.

What I liked:

I would die for Asha. She is so precious!

All her friends were so cute! I love that they were a tribute to the Seven Dwarfs. People complaining that the friends had no personality... neither did the Seven Dwarfs, really. I am so happy that they clearly accept Simon immediately when he returns after the spell is broken.

Dahlia specifically tho. She is always right there for Asha no matter what, trying to calm her and support her right before the interview, stalling with silly questions so that Asha can get into the castle for Sabino's wish, being the first to join in "Knowing What We Know Now" after Asha, and especially!!!! In "This Wish (Reprise)" when Asha is nearly defeated and pleading to the audience it is Dahlia who answers first! She doesn't even know if it's going to work, if anyone else will join, but she's right there pledging her wish with Asha because she cares about Asha so much!!!!! (Yes I might ship them. Why do you ask?)

I actually really like Magnifico as he is. He's a great example of a villain driven by trauma, with a great amount of charisma and genuinely entertaining to watch while also being so "love to hate"able. (The same cannot be said for a lot of stans.)

I love Amaya. Perfect arc. God I feel so bad for her but now she can rule as she sees fit, not playing second fiddle as an accessory to Magnifico. (I don't doubt that they love each other but there really was no repairing their relationship after he hit her with magic.)

I love Asha's mother and grandfather so much.

I LOVE STAR!!!!!!! FUCK OFF STARBOY

They structured the plot similar to old, cherished Princess movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and most specifically, Sleeping Beauty.

The end credits!!! Having little nods to all the Disney animated movies (except Meet the Robinsons apparently????) it was so sweet.

Could be improved:

The music. I liked about... half of it. The other half felt flat. I think that's because they hired pop radio writers instead of like, lyrical writers, if that makes sense. Both of "This Wish," "Knowing What we Know Now" and "This is the Thanks I Get?!" were so great, but "At All Costs" just had me sitting in the theater like pretty lights, but did we really need the song? and I don't even remember "I'm a Star!" because it felt really flat.

I love Star but we were promised "an origin of the Wishing Star!" and we did not get that. He just happens to be a character. I wish we'd gotten that actual origin story. I wrote a little rewrite about it, in fact, in which Star gives his life and magic to Asha and she is the Wishing Star we see in all the movies.

Also I didn't... much like Valentino. He was funny for the first five minutes he could talk ("Who knew my voice would be this low?") but then he just kind of became obnoxious. He didn't really bring anything to the plot that I can think of (even Hei Hei in Moana justified his role by actually, for once, being useful in catching the heart of Te Fiti).

I think that situating Rosas in a geographically real location was a shortcoming, because suddenly there is a myriad of real-life local cultures native to the Iberian peninsula to chose from aesthetic (clothes, architecture, etc.) wise and they didn't. For example, Asha has long braided hair specifically inspired by the Amazigh people, who the designers imagined her having heritage from specifically from Sakina's side, but there wasn't a lot else there. I like the design of the clothes and stuff in the movie but it feels short compared to culture of the area.

Lore. Apparently this movie is set before all other Disney movies and Asha is the very first person to ever wish on a star? Except clearly her father did the same, and her friends are at least familiar enough with the idea of wishing on stars that they see it as childish (Gabo's comment: "What are you, five?" or something like that.)

Asha deserved a whole magical transformation. Her pose when Star dusts her with sparkles is an exact pose reference to Cinderella, but while Cindy got the most gorgeous change (and Walt Disney's personal most favorite piece of animation), poor Asha just gets glitter. A massive downgrade made even more down because of the reference, in my opinion.

Both liked and could have been so much better:

References. So many of them. Some were nice (Sandra's wish to make the most beautiful dresses being shown as Sleeping Beauty's dress, a man named Peter wishes to build a flying machine and his companion is a brunette dressed in blue like Wendy). Some were weird. Some felt like they had no real business being there (see: Valentino's comment about an animal utopia suspiciously similar to Zootopia.)

(No I swear I'm not bitter that Atlantis and Treasure Planet didn't get in-movie references)

Miscellaneous comments:

I understand the whole "people are reluctant to let Black girls have a love interest" thing and I completely understand. But Starboy was just not it. This fandom already ignores Asha for him and he doesn't actually exist. If he had made it into the movie I already know how people would be treating Asha.

I know I said I love Magnifico as the villain but I would very much love to explore an AU where Asha *did* become his apprentice, and maybe he was like a stand-in father figure to her, actually careful and guiding, before something threatens all the wishes. I don't know what, but I feel like there's a lot of different ways that his trauma could have been explored without necessarily making him lash out and require so much control.

The movie feels rushed. I'm not saying that in an "it was bad, eew" way but in a "it could have been so much better" way. The literal tagline was "A story a century in the making!" and that drummed up a lot of expectations, but the end result is that honestly, it kind of feels like it needed more time to bake.

That being said, it was clearly crafted with a lot of care and thought put into it for what it was meant to be, and time constraints aren't the creators' faults.

[ink-the-artist]

house tour :)

bonus art, lossy versions of the first 2 gifs

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Look what we've become.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[galactaknightyaoi]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GALACTA KNIGHT!!!! And congratulations to Meta Knight for experiencing the Cain Instinct for the first time.

Galacta Knight, as you might've been able to tell already, is one of my favorite characters, and KSSU is one of my favorite games (the original SS was my introduction to Kirby!) so I wanted to go all out. Happy day, old man. I pray for at least 20 more years.

Oh, and don't worry! He's not upset about the cake smash, he thinks it's funny. And he got back at him.

As for the in-universe explanation for there being 16 candles in his cake?

... 500+ didn't fit in safely.

The birthday boy and his family were just a bit too flammable.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 209

Now Jason was planning on, well, a lot of things, when he came back to Gotham. He had a lot of plans, several of which had to do with the old man and even more that had to do with cleaning up Crime Alley, making it safer and all that. 

What he was not planning on was to find some sort of lab in the basement of where he was planning on setting up a safehouse. Nor was he planning on finding several literal children in cages inside said lab. Oh and Lazarus Waters- but children! With muzzles! Being experimented on!

Now he’d like to say he had a plan in what happened next, but if he’s honest everything had gone Green and he didn’t remember what happened next, only that he’s back home with said children and covered in blood. Oh and everything smells of smoke. 

… And apparently there’s more of these things dotted around Crime Alley with the rest of these kids, er, siblings? Family? Fright does mean family? Okay kids, he’s not turning into Bruce but you can stay here while he deals with this… however long that takes. 

He better not be turning into Bruce he swears-

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[lbhslefttiddie]

youve heard of sex flowers get ready for the flower that makes you into a celestial shoujo herione complete with particle effects you cannot turn the fuck off and creates a wifebeam so powerful it can incapacitate and maim and keeps making you burst into tears and fall on your ass which makes the wifebeam More Powerful and you also cannot turn this off either. and is also still, sort of, a sex flower

from one of my favorite fanfictions, Celestial Afterglow by elanor_pam, a fic that defies description in the best possible way

[fivewholeminutes]

A Series of Small Offerings

PART ONE -8- The Way That You Were

To tear that knife from what once / Would have been dead fingers

I have. Struggled a lot with this one, but I am glad it is done. I've had this idea rotating in my brain for a month and I have tried starting it at least 3 times both traditionally and digitally before I decided to turn it into a cut out, because I feel the most confortable making cut outs, actually.

HUGE, ENORMOUS shotout to @copper-sands / @ancientbygone for being my hand anatomy expert!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Without it this piece would look way worse <3

[mijchi]

>ACT NATURAL

I'm sorry but since when this became natural for Markus?

[gamer-comix]

my new favorite kind of amazon review is people who bought manga but don't know what manga is

[uncleardyn]

(alan wake-gravity falls crossover) man i love that character. you know, the deeply paranoid author who made a pact with a dark entity that ultimately ended with him stranded in another dimension separated from his loved ones for years at a time? takes place in the pacific northwest? has twin imagery associated with him and a reoccurring specific piece of symbology related to the unfortunate situation they're in? doesn't ever explain the reasoning behind his actions and instead just kinda goes "bro trust me"? yeah he also wears an outer layer of clothing with elbow pads on it, that one.

[glittergroovy]

[thebramblewood]

The Vatores Present... A Decennial Vampire Bash: Part X

Featuring everyone in some poorly lit and questionably edited shots, I'm so sorry! Endless thanks one last time to you all! @sprout-sims @melancholicsimmer @moonfromearth @sueniia @sims4thehoes @loveryss @igotsnothing @sammyshuno @madebycoffee @simming-in-the-rain @deathtulips @eggysimblr @jaigny @sylvan-glade @forssims

Previous / Next

Helena: [slurred] I'm suddenly not feeling so hot, Lilith. Lilith? LILITH!!!

[VAMPIRE CHAOS ENSUES]

Lilith: Helena?

Helena: STAY BACK!

Lilith: What's wrong? Give me your hand. You're shaking.

HELENA: DON'T TOUCH ME! NO, GET AWAY! YOU'RE MONSTERS, ALL OF YOU!

Lilith: Helena, what are you talking about? It's only me, and I'm no monster.

Helena: [edgily scans the room, now silent and empty] Do you promise?

Lilith: You can trust me.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Detectives at the Disco (Elysium)

[korolation]

amber redesign woooo

[enbysiriusblack]

orion as the hunter, sirius as the hunting dog, and james as the prey.