#Clown dad and wolf dad and whatnot

[dellinah]

I was going to name this “angel of darkness” after the song I listened to on repeat while drawing this, but then I remembered it’s Loona and she probably wouldn’t appreciate anything that could relate her to Cherubs of any kind. So now it’s just LoonaDeath.png

Anyway Puss in Boots 2 hum. It’s all everyone is talking about rn. And it makes me hella happy.

I went in without any expectations since I had avoided most trailers and wow. I came out with one of my new favorite movies of all time, animated or otherwise. I genuinely think it’s among DreamWorks’ best. I did not expect such an accurate and respectful depiction of mental health and PTSD; or a valid discussion about mortality x what makes like worth it, or what counts as a family, or healing broken trust.

But it delivered that and much more.

I just love it a lot, everything about it. Animation, story, character, themes. Between Puss in Boots 2, The bad guys and Del Toro’s Pinocchio I think 2022 was a great year for animation and none of it was Disney so hummm. Let’s see if that changes.

Either way it was a great movie.

So. El Lobo hum.

Yeah shoot me he’s pretty hot I’ll just embrace it. I love him. All my furry friends do, one way or another. Whether you think he’s really cool or you want him inside y-

Probably one of the most memorable and menacing villains in recent animated movies and damn it I love him. In a lot of ways. For a lot of reasons. But they went all out on his animation and his scenes are so great.

Long story short a very random and weird roleplay between a friend and I ended up with us figuring out that Loona is Death’s biological daughter. Which explains their similar eyes and color pallet, and also why Loona is such a natural killer. So I made this.

It makes perfect sense and that’s CANON NOW

Or, you know, it’s just Loona dressed up as Death for Howl-o-ween. Whichever you prefer.

I like how this turned out so far. I WANT to try shading and maybe a bg but who knows so I’ll post this anyway. I hope you like it too.

also watch the movie if you haven’t !!

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 4x04 Fear, Itself

aka it’s tacky to taunt the fear demon

Welcome to this dailyish text post series where I will rewatch an episode of Buffy and go on an impromptu rant about it for an hour. Is it about one hyperspecific thing or twenty observations? 10 or 3k words? You don’t know! I don’t know!!! In this house we don’t know things.

And today’s episode takes some of the core concepts of Nightmares and distills them to its most intriguing character beats. And yet 19-year-old me still had Nightmares in her top 15 and not Fear, Itself, because… Reasons?

Well, I guess 19-year-old me already knew what 28-year-old me knows all too well now - that I’m a sucker for great dream concepts and sequences, especially in this show. And maybe past me didn’t quite realize just how much Fear, Itself operates under those very same rules and definitions.

This episode doesn’t really waste time throwing random clowns and whatnots at our heroes. (Although there is a spider, just to check that out of the list, as well as a bunch of bats to sort of make up for the vampirelessness I guess.) Once the action starts, we get to the heart of each Scooby’s fears pretty fast.

Isolation appears to be a common theme for all four of them. Which of course is Buffy’s calling card on any normal day, but at this time especially. Fresh off from her experience with douche-eyes she’s afraid to open up her heart again, and fears that she’ll end up dying alone. That even her friends would give up on her eventually after all the times she pushed them away.

Xander meanwhile feels left out of the group due to his insecurities about not going to college, and living in his parents’ basement. He feels like he’s stuck compared to the others, who are off living their own lives, completely forgetting about him in the process. Like they can’t even see him anymore, as he’s standing still.

Overall however, it’s Oz and Willow that interest me the most.

The episode makes the connection early on of Oz describing how wolfing out feels like a complete loss of control for him, and he warns Willow against getting too much into all the magic stuff, fearing the same for her. The problem is that for Willow, losing control along with herself in magic and its power will only truly manifest in later seasons. Instead, the primary role of magic for her this season will be as a metaphor for sexuality - specifically queer sexuality.

So, Oz telling Buffy not to encourage Willow in her magic endeavors takes on drastically different meanings based on whether we look at it in the context of season 4 or, for instance, season 6. And if we’re looking at both Oz and Willow’s latent powers as sexual metaphors, the comparison also makes sense with the circumstances of Oz’s departure. He’ll cheat on Willow by giving into his wolf self… But more on that later.

Sexuality is dangerous also wouldn’t be a new theme on the show. But at least we’re now more open to it, I guess? Even our predatory douchelords are just regular assholes rather than actual monsters torturing the heroes for having sex.

And as Willow puts it, college is all about the experimentation. (Haha, get it? Cause she’s gonna have a girlfriend in college. Did you get that reference? We’re like dropping hints here. Like that guy going back to hide in the closet. This is a very subtle show.)

Also, consider Buffy’s role in that initial conversation on the topic. Unlike Oz, she doesn’t actually have a hard stance on how far Willow should go magic-wise. She does suggest that “if it’s too much, don’t do it”, but that’s it. And even then, when Willow calls her out for “not being encouraging”, she backtracks saying that she just didn’t realize that this talk had an encouragement angle.

But I’ll probably talk more Buffy and her reactions and support of Willow later on in the season.

Willow blowing up on Buffy (”I’m not your sidekick” - a senctence she’ll echo at the end of s6) in the haunted house is however more in line with our other interpretation. Willow wants to take charge, and she’s desperate to prove to herself that she has the power to do so. Her spell backfiring on her is a bit of the old loss of control that Oz brought up, but it’s also about her fear of not being able to do the spell properly in the first place. To ever reach that level of control and self-assuredness.

For Oz however, his fears of losing control are much more easily discernible. He’s afraid of being a monster, of hurting the people he loves, and especially, hurting Willow. Him running away also brings up another one of Willow’s fears, which is emphasized with Willow’s “Oz, don’t leave me!” echoing through the house as we transition to the next scene.

Meanwhile Xander and Anya are having a not-real-talk about their relationship, and decide that they’re kind of dating since they had sex a week ago and it didn’t suck? Which once again says a lot about how Xander sees love and relationships. (Anya is like a 1000-year-old newborn demon baby, I’m not even gonna judge her for conflating and mixing her feelings that way.)

Giles has way too much fun being an unemployed adult, and I love Willow’s small exchange on the dorm corridor with another student, once again signalling how well she’s fitting into this environment compared to her high school years.

There are still many things one could touch upon. The way the Scoobies seem to shed their costumes as the episode goes along, rather than becoming them a la Halloween; the fact that Buffy’s costume being Red Riding Hood feels like a Helpless subversion, especially with her mom helping her to make it; how their conversation about Buffy’s dad calls back the above mentioned Nightmares; how the Scoobies would like to hit douchebag in the face as much as I do…

But the note I want to close on is Buffy’s iconic pumpkin monologue. Which remains incredibly iconic still.

Buffy:  I was just thinking about the life of a pumpkin. Grow up in the sun - happily entwined with others, then someone comes along, cuts you open and - rips your guts out.

This is peak television.