#Contrasting Similarities

[gerrykeay]

im not putting this post into words. beams into your mind The Parallels

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[keferon]

Drift’s “Dead end” design is my Roman Empire…

Like. His Crystal City look is great. His mtmte look is also great. And the Lost Light one too. But when I look at this specific design eh idk there’s something very special about it. It’s the way he was created by Cybertron if I’m not wrong. I love this colour scheme. It’s so calm and simple.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I know those eyes.

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[crystallizsch]

still thinking about yuuna oujou and i love how she pouts??? 🥺

also the dynamic and chemistry between her and the cast (especially grim) is so fun, look at them 😭💕 i love them all so much i must protect yuuna's smile and whimsy forever

yuuna oujou you are such a joy... silliest girl ever (i can't wait to see if we a more serious side to her as we go through the manga)

[swordmaid]

they saw u from across the room and they really liked ur vibe (they’re gonna rob you later)

[superkirbylover]

peppino and noise character studies

in this essay i will explain why i am the only one to understand these characters

[pinkysberg]

i think it's interesting that red dead redemption 2 opens by setting up this dichotomy between dutch van der linde and colm o'driscoll. we see the ways in which they contrast quite early, but what we see even earlier is the ways in which their gang members contrast.

the o'driscoll that jumps arthur, once you have the ability to interrogate him, will fold instantly. no further beating required. you simply ask, and he will give up information. his loyalty to colm o'driscoll and his gang was fickle. then, when you see how colm treats his gang members, it makes sense. he clearly doesn't respect them, and that's why within chapter 1 not one but two o'driscoll's (barn jumper and kieran duffy) fold on their loyalty to their gang without much push at all. in fact, kieran also reaffirms this idea that he hardly knows the o'driscolls and he even hates colm.

dutch would know this. they have a history, which this chapter makes sure to relay, so dutch would be privvy to the way colm operates and treats those around (or under - in a hierarchal sense) him. he would also know what it yields. he affirms this when he talks about how many gang members colm goes through, how low the standards are for the o'driscolls and how impersonal their dynamic is. in contrast, we see the way dutch treats those around him. he seems to care for them and their well being, insists upon their safety. but we know retroactively that perhaps, this wasn't truly who he ever was. he's self serving, which this chapter also establishes through subtle nods like his calls for the gang to stay with him, or the subtle reflex to put himself before the group when speaking of charles smith's necessity to the gang.

the contrast between dutch and colm only really strengthens this idea of it being a facade for me. especially as we are told they have history, both from his own mouth and arthur's. with time spent around colm, both amicable and antagonistic, dutch has come to understand how colm works and how he doesn't work. and he responds accordingly.

colm and the o'driscolls are really a pretty minor antagonist, so it makes one wonder why they're the first one we're introduced to and struggle with the longest. their impact on the story is tangible but in comparison to the pinkertons, leviticus cornwall and dutch van der linde himself, they pale in comparison. but the contrast between dutch and colm, the o'driscolls and the van der lindes, in retrospect calls dutch's character into question early.

[yakuza-emulation]

This is Ran and Conan’s relationship to me (/j)

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

hot take maaaybe but imo the core tragedy of satoru is that he’s not a god, he’s literally just a normal guy who got godhood pushed onto him by other people . a god would be able to handle eternal solitude no problem but satoru isn’t one so he suffers for it

[soleminisanction]

So a while back I ran the numbers to confirm a suspicion that fandom trends towards a trans Tim Drake, and there's a lot of bits and pieces around his canon material that I think contributes to that interest. But there's a particular, subtle one that's been poking at my mind a lot because I think it might actually be a pretty significant factor that nobody really notices:

His costumes.

The original Robin costume, the one Dick and Jason wore, is childish but exposing. It's innocent enough when they're being drawn as spunky children, but during the period when Dick's still wearing it into his late teens and early 20s, it's practically as revealing as a lot of the women's costumes (and, in retrospect, almost certainly laid some of the groundwork for him sometimes being sexualized by the art and writing the way female characters normally are -- George Pérez, at least, absolutely put him on display every bit as much as he did Starfire and Donna).

Damian's costumes, meanwhile, lean more into archaic/fantasy armor designs and are thus largely genderless outside some vague allusions to the codename's Robin Hood roots. And Steph's is, well, a minidress, and one designed to show off her figure, drawing explicit attention to her femininity.

But then you have Tim's most iconic costume, his original one, which is not only fully covering in a way the original look isn't, it also, by virtue of being designed in the 90s, sports a very specific feature: molded body armor shaped to look like pectoral and abdominal muscles. In other words -- an idealized male body.

Not every artist always included that detail, but it was an explicit part of the design that you don't see as much these days, at least not for teen heroes. Which means it's inadvertently the perfect costume for a trans masculine Boy Wonder. It's got built-in body shaping. The cape and tunic layers even help to make his shoulders look wider.

Tim's second costume, the OYL later suit, doesn't explicitly have this body shaping element, but some artists still hint at it in the same way that Dick's Nightwing suits do (ie, we assume they're not showing off their real muscles with skintight suits for safety reasons, but who knows). Plus it comes with the bonus gay longing of changing the colors to mourn the dead crush he's too deep in the closet to recognize.

And then you've got his modern Robin look which has the same kind of shaping going on in a sleaker, more subtle way, though it can vary from artist to artist how much the red part of his suit is drawn as a breast plate vs. a part of the bodysuit.

As a bonus, the design also has a tendency to make him look lean and lithe, in an interesting contrast to Damian who, despite being physically smaller than Tim, tends to have a presence that makes him come across as stockier and more solid, possibly because he's more heavily armored.

You even see this with some of Tim'snon-Robin looks. I've mentioned this elsewhere but, the original Red Robin look making him look older when the cowl was up honestly makes a lot of sense. That suit was originally designed for a Dick Grayson who was pushing 60 to conceal the extent of his age while still communicating his maturity and development. It makes sense that it'd work the other way, to make 17 year old Tim look like he's in his late 20s/early 30s.

It's tunic over a body suit design is also just aesthetically pleasing in terms of forming an elegant male body type, the same way a well-cut suit can be. Again, it does especially nice things for the shoulders, which is why I personally prefer it to the fully bodysuit redesign they give him in the latter part of the series. Although as we can see from the details in Marcus To's art, even that body suit has seams strategically placed to suggest muscles.

And then of course there's the 2016 Rebirth era Red Robin costume, which is just a more heavily-armored version of his classic Robin look that's trying really hard to make him look masculine and mature, which means... exaggerated muscles.

And the thing is, it's not that this doesn't happen with other characters' costumes. But for various reasons it specifically didn't happen with the other Robin costumes, like I described at the start.

Which is not something I think people consciously notice. But I do know that, when I was writing my transmasc Tim fanfic a few years before realizing that I myself was also transmasc, one of the images that solidified the story for me was how good it would've felt the first time a transmasc Tim put on his new Robin costume and saw the Boy Wonder looking back at him. And I remember specifically thinking about how nice the shaped armor would be for that sort of thing.

It's kinda funny how an obvious attempt to enforce gender norms wound up, for lack of a better term, backfiring, at least in my opinion. There's just something about exaggerating the masculinity of Robin, a role designed to contrast and foil the already exaggerated masculine ideal of Batman, that makes it feel like a performance.

[ryuzumisama]

Went to ECCC yesterday and I made this Cullen sibling gang gang print just for the occasion 😅 Got Alice (Ashley Greene) and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) to sign it!

[momentomori24]

I may just be insane about this but does this feel like foreshadowing to anyone else. In this scene we see her trying to replicate the skill of someone else (her mother) and failing to achieve the same results that they would. That feels really specific and it's driving me insane.

Like, we see this come back again in the aftermath of the trial. Diana has repeatedly voiced her admiration for Wolfgang's ability to speak and inspire those around him in the darkest of times, saying she wished she could do the same. We see her pour her heart out and give her own speech to inspire the others-- except the reaction that she receives is cold and miserable, far from the newly kindled warmth and hope Wolfgang was able to create every time.

Diana is a chameleon. Her whole thing is to reflect, to replicate and to adapt. Do you think that this small scene where she tries to make a butterfly out of her hairclips-- a butterfly, an animal associated with transformation and change-- and the end result looking nothing like what she wanted it to be is a metaphor for her future character arc? She has declared that she wants to follow in Wolfgang's footsteps, wants to become something new, but do you think that by the end she ends up being the furthest thing from him? Do you think that by the end she will be left distorted, fundamentally wrong? Do you think that if she could see what she will become in the future, the only emotion that she can muster is horror as she gazes at a stranger that's supposed to be herself? That by the end, she won't be able to recognise herself, because there's no "her" left anymore?

[kevin-winfield]

Aaron and Neil - Mothers and Surviving

EC, Nora Sakavic // Interior in orange and diffuse front light, Nicola Nannini // Open Window by Moonlight, Mary Potter// Forever Flooding Sink, Lara de Moor // Large Bathroom, Chiara Gaggiotti // TFC, Nora Sakavic // Medusa Did Not Spread Gangster Rap Lyrics to the Youth of The Southern Cross, but She Did Not Care to Contradict Her Accuser Sedrick Chisom // The Corridor Chiara Gaggiotti// on earth we're briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong // Listening to the sun Grażyna Smalej // The sun was like an orange Stellan Mörner.

[psychomusic]

induced to me by my contemporary art exam AND a rewatch of rebels after years that. got me into sabezra unexpectedly AND i updated krita and there were many new brushes i wanted to try

refs (IF U CAN PLS HELP ME FIND THE ORIGINAL COSPLAYERS i can't find anything EDIT: found them!! they're starwars_irl on insta and @rebelartistwren / lionesscosplay on insta. thank you guys <3) and ✨colored version✨ under the cut

i can't find themmmmm I've been looking for 2 days but all i found were uncredited reposts

anyway they look amazing

i really wanted to try greyscaling but I'm not sure it looks good. idk. + while i was making it i was listening to i love you by fontaines d.c. (GREAT SONG FROM A GREAT UNDERRATED BAND) and. the grey fit into that mood much better

also two versions without the sketch lines. where ezra looks happier even if they're uglier

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The girls are plottinggggg

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[beif0ngs]

Law truly is at his most sassy self around Kid lmao

like never forget the time Law flipped Kid off during their very first meeting