#I actually have almost a year old drawing for this

[criminallyvenomous]

Star Shaped Scars & Dinosaurs - Spencer Reid X Reader

I realized last week that I had never actually finished Criminal Minds as I became obsessed with SVU (still am, shoutout Liv and Barba), so I started my re-watch to finish at season four. I’m around seven now and wanted to write a little lovin’ for my boy.

~

Plot - You were a sketch artist for the F.B.I., hopping between bureaus and doing some work for the city to help victims and their families. Spencer was just another agent to you, but you couldn’t help but notice each other.

You were sitting with your sketchpad and pencil case at the table. A seven year old girl was describing the man who took her younger brother.

“What can you tell me about his face? Did he have angry eyes with big bushy brows? Or were they smaller and with a big ol’ nose?” Using gentler terms and trying to keep the conversation light was just another part of the job for you. Sometimes, if the kid needed to especially be cheered up, you would draw them their favorite dinosaur or animal to take home with them.

“Angry. He had big brown eyebrows that were pointy.”

“Brown eyes too? What about his hair?”

Spencer was outside the door to the meeting room, where the team had allowed you to take the girl into for more privacy during the sketch process. He was sort of staring through the window.

“She’s pretty right, kid?” Derek asked.

“Uh-what? Um, I hadn’t really noticed.” But he had, he had noticed almost everything about you. How kind you were to survivors and the way you always tried to cheer up the kids you met. Not to mention the beautiful way your hair framed your perfect face.

“Yeah, sure. I’m sure she’d like to hang out with you sometime. If you, you know, actually talked to her.”

“That’s a fair point, but I’m sure she’s busy. Besides, there’s no way she’s, uh single.” Spencer stated, mumbling through.

“So, you are interested, Pretty boy?” Derek raised his eyebrows at him suggestively.

“Shut up, Morgan.” Spencer retorted, Derek chuckling.

The door to the meeting room had opened and you walked the young girl out and to her parents, who were sitting with JJ in the hall. As you came back, you turned to the team.

“I’d like to go over the sketch shortly, if that’s alright.”

“Of course, let’s head in.” Hotch answered, ushering the rest of the team to follow. Derek gave a look towards Spencer, who pretended not to notice.

“Wow, that’s great. I’ve got to say, the sketches have gone up in quality ever since you started, Y/N.” Emily complimented your work, making you blush.

“Thanks.” You smiled, “So, according to Anna, the man you’re looking for is a tall brunette with a buzzcut and larger eyebrows and nose. What is interesting though, is the scar.”

“What scar?” Rossi asked, as there wasn’t one on the sketch of the subject’s face.

“Here, I drew it on a separate page.” You pulled out the drawing and placed it on the table in front of you. “There is a small star shaped scar on the man’s head. It would be hard to see at first, but Anna said she was basically staring at it when the unsub squatted to be at her brother’s height.”

“If he has a distinguishable scar on his head, why the buzzcut? Wouldn’t he be worried about it identifying him?” Spencer asked.

“That I don’t know, but I hope these sketches help.” You grabbed your belongings and placed them into your tote, as you said your goodbyes to the team and headed out the door.

Derek nudged Spencer.

“Go talk to her.”

“Fine.” Spencer jogged to catch up with you as you headed down the hall, towards the elevator.

“Hey, Y/N?” You turned your head to see the adorable dork of an F.B.I. agent.

“How can I help you, Dr. Reid?” You asked.

“You can call me Spencer.”

“Alright, how can I help you, Spencer?” Oh, he liked how you said his name, well, he liked how you said anything.

“I was wondering what your favorite dinosaur was? I see you drawing them for the kids a lot, which makes me think you have a certain fondness.” Why did he choose that question to ask you, he was already beating himself up over it. You laughed.

“The apatosaurus. It used to be called the Brachiosaurus, but with time the name changed as the understanding of the apatosaurus adapted, which I’m sure you know.” You chuckled, blushing.

“An herbivore, nice.” He replied.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just that most people say a carnivorous dinosaur like the T-Rex, suggesting an admiration for its appearance and aggressive demeanor.” He rambled on.

“What can I say? I like a tall but kind creature, like you.” You weren’t shy, you had been seeing him eyeball you for months now and couldn’t deny your attraction to the doctor. He chuckled nervously before responding.

“Can I take you out? Maybe a movie?” Spencer finally made some serious eye contact with you as your comment gave him the confidence boost he needed to ask you out.

“I’d love that.”

~

Part two

[jumalanpelko]

JUMALANPELKO FANART INFO

Long story short, almost everything is ok + pls be patient with me i am TIRED and might take a while to answer but I will

--------------------------------------------

So since I keep getting questions about this stuff I put together little info post <3

"Can we make fanart?"

Yesssssss I will ADORE IT

"What kinda of fanart is ok?"

Drawings, moodboards, fan characters... i am not even going to make a list cause I am fine with anything!

"What is not ok?"

The only thing I would ask you to skip is nsfw stuff and like. Shipping Guard and Suncat since they are very much parent and a child. Also if you know that there is a big age gap between cats (like Suncat and Sugarpaws. I would also say the same about Senior guard and Sugarpaws since (and this isnt really shown in the comic so totally fine to have skipped it) they have bit of an age gap and Sugar was one of the cats training her (this is kinda shown in the first previous suncat comic but not clearly stated. Senior guard looks old but is actually just about a year older than Guard). You can always ask!

"Is it ok to change up the designs/do you have a reference for x?"

Most of my characters dont have references. I dont colorpick when drawing since I love to use strong color palettes. Changing the designs is totally ok!

"Can I draw them as humans?"

Yessss you can. They do not have canon human designs so you can go wild. And even if i at any point draw them as humans those designs wont be "canon".

"Are hypokits ok?"

Yes and since I see those as more of "fusing together designs" you dont have to think about "is it ok to ship these two". Tho dont sell these designs! Trading them for art ect is fine by me.

"When making fan characters do I have to stick with the canon?"

No.

"How should I tag the art/make sure you see it?"

#jumalanpelkofanart (or #jumalanpelko fanart. People have used both) and tag me on it! These tend to get lost however so is you want to make sure I see it send an ask. Note that it might take a while for me to react to it. Hoe is living ten spoon life with six spoons on a good day aka i am TIRED all the time and expressing how much i like something takes some energy. I will do it at some point tho! Usually i show of more art at once.

However you can always send the art to me again! I am not skipping anything on purpose

[apomaro-mellow]

Built for Loving 1/? Read on AO3

Another one from the steddie fic adopt community:

Eddie lands his dream job at a robotics facility that's best known for his pleasure bots. He doesn't mean to make a bot of his old high school crush but the design gets approved all the same. Problems begin to arise when the customer lodges complaints about the android.

Eddie had always messed with whatever he could get his hands on. When he lived with his parents, it caused trouble and he quickly learned that whatever he took apart, he should know how to put back together. It wasn't until he started living his his uncle as he reached adolescence that this particular quirk was encouraged. The first couple of weeks were awkward.

They loved each other and Eddie trusted his uncle. But a weekend visit was different from "both of my parents went to prison and I have nowhere else to go". But all it took was his Uncle Wayne walking in on him disassembling an amp and then everything fell into place.

Eddie knew his uncle worked with his hands too, but not the specifics. It turned out he was an actual robotics engineer. Wayne downplayed it, saying he just did repairs on defective bots, that he wasn't anyone special, but that sounded like Eddie's dream job. And it was for a while. Eddie was on his best behavior, he went to school and got good grades because he knew these places only hired people with degrees.

College was no picnic, both the classes and paying for it was a test of endurance for Eddie. But he struck gold when he graduated. He never thought he'd be the kind of guy to say he had connections, but Wayne was able to get him an interview. And thanks to the awards from the robotics competitions and glowing recommendation letters from some of his professors, Eddie got the job.

He was about to start living his dream. Although his dream had changed since he was a kid. Eddie had forged a new passion during his late nights, drawing up blueprints and designs. He no longer wanted to simply repair robots. He wanted to design and build his own.

And there was no more prestigious position than that of Android Art Director. Especially for the company at the top of the android business, Brenner Ventures. Everybody wanted a Brenner Bot. They made all kinds, med-droids, nannybots, and tutor trons, but the most popular and most expensive were the entertainment automatons. That was their official moniker from the company. Most people called them pleasure bots.

A plethora of skills could be programmed into them but no one was using their human-like throats for singing. Eddie had never owned one. He'd only seen them from behind the glass of window displays. Even in college, he'd only gotten to see them a handful of times in the lab. Pleasure bots busted beyond repair but broken down to be used as a teaching model. Unlike other kinds of robots, people didn't readily parade them around. They'd be ordered discretely and then kept in the home of the buyer to be used however the customer pleased.

Eddie was no prude, he didn't care what people used to get their rocks off. It was the idea of creating something almost human. As close as they could possibly get. And after about a year on the bottom rung (customer service, repair, automaton editing) he had finally arrived. He got the email inviting him to a Research and Development meeting. He attended, noting how he was the youngest in the room. And then at the end of it, he was given his first real job as an art director.

He was going to design and build his first pleasure bot.

The client had filled out the request form and it was quite simple. White, male, 20s, no taller than 5'10 but no shorter than 5', brown eyes and hair. Eddie could see why he'd been given this task. On paper, it looked rather plain. Fleischer was giddily drawing a bot with an impossible waist while Bird had to figure out how to give one Rapunzel length hair that didn't tangle or mat.

Senior Art Directors got the first pick of client requests and they always went for the challenges. Eddie, as the new meat, got what they considered boring. But Eddie knew it wasn't all about what was on the form. It was what you made of it. He sat at his desk, monitor on and started with the basic build. The face was the most important part to these people, so that's what he started with.

No notes had been given on personality besides "agreeable, submissive" which wasn't much to work on, so Eddie got to imagining. He thought about the type of guy he'd want, which felt like an easy place to start. It took a couple of hours into drawing the face, erasing what didn't feel right just to draw a very similar line anyway, to realize he was drawing Steve Harrington.

Steve hadn't said two words to Eddie in high school and yet he'd been obsessed. A guy who ran through girls like toilet paper and so everyone pegged him as the playboy. But Eddie had spent long enough watching him from afar to read the yearning on his face. Imagine that, someone so beautiful who longed for love and yet never found it? Eddie hadn't seen him in years, made he'd found love by now. Found a nice girl to settle down with perhaps. But who was to know?

Once the thought was in his mind, Eddie couldn't let it go. If he did nothing else in this world, he had to let Steve be loved. Which meant he had to build this bot right. He did what he could at the office but ended up bringing his work home with him. Because it was only there that he had the material he needed.

He had to rifle through some boxes to find it, but there it was - an old notebook from his senior year. The year when his obsession with Steve reached its peak. Inside of it were dozens of sketches of Steve. Not just his face too. Eddie had drawn his profile, his hands holding objects, his legs in those stupid basketball shorts, his torso when they played shirts vs skins.

"God, someone should lock me away for this", he said before getting up from the box and taking the notebook to his computer.

He spent the better part of the night, finishing his design, using his sketches as references. One thing about the usual clientele for pleasure bots was that they were loyal. Once they bought one they liked, they held onto it, insuring it, getting regular repairs, sometimes even traveling with them if they were to be gone for a while.

Eddie would never get to tell the real Steve how he felt. But in his own strange way, he'd be making sure Steve felt that love somehow. Obviously overtime didn't exist in the Brenner Bot employee manual, but Eddie didn't care. This is what his whole life had been leading up to.

"You look like shit Munson. The bland bot givin' you that much trouble?", Fleischer said when he came in the next morning.

"I finished his design last night, actually", Eddie beamed, reveling in how his co-worker's face dropped.

Fleischer quickly picked it up. "Still gotta have it approved. And then the build. You sure you're up for it?"

Eddie shrugged. "If I can't handle a bland bot, then I wasn't meant for this job."

His design was anything but bland. Steve was anything but bland. He was beautiful, gorgeous even. The feelings that had cooled thanks to the separation had burned as bright as ever last night. Eddie sent his design to be checked. He'd played it off in front of others but he didn't know what he'd do if any part of it was critiqued or turned down.

It was checked in house first to make sure it met company standards, then sent off to the client to make sure it was what they wanted. Eddie waited for an excruciating 48 hours before the email came in.

Company Approved: Yes

Client Approved: Yes

Part 2 coming soon

[snexy-the-snail]

Make another Hermes fic and my soul belongs to you. My Boi is such a playful yet gentle pred I luv him ✨️✨️✨️

Ask and you shall receive <3 and saaaame Just the right amount of playfulness and making sure that hes not overwhelming the kiddos-))

Percy rolls his shoulders as he steps out of his school, feeling utterly exhausted. Trying to decipher words when spinning off the pages would give anyone a headache. He groans and runs his face, trying to coax away the pressure of a forming headache. He draws a breath in, relishing the freshness of the surrounding air.

That was something he found himself eternally grateful for since his little trip down below. There wasn't any burning with each breath, and the water didn't burn and curl in his gut, screaming about how wrong it was. He must have gotten caught in his thoughts, considering he rammed into someone. He winces, catching himself before shoving his hands into his pockets.

"Sorry, I wasn't looking where I was going." He mumbles out an apology.

Great, now he was going to get screamed at about how disrespectful he was. Instead, a hand ran through his hair, tousling it along the way. His eyes snap up, meeting a familiar face.

"Hermes?"

"Are you that surprised, little cousin?" the god muses, his eyes scanning over him. Maybe for injuries? That was becoming an odd habit for any of the gods who have checked up on him now. Usually, he was fine, but at times, there were little scratches or bumps.

"Well, yeah, I'm surprised; it's school hours." Percy points out, taking a step back and crossing his arms. He wasn't sure what this was about and if he liked it. Usually, their meetings happened on the shore or in his cabin. Seeing Hermes just sorta..here was odd. Yet his nerves soothed when the god reached out and took hold of his arm, tugging him closer to his body. Unlike most gods, Hermes was warm, like a summer breeze. It wasn't bad, just different than the chill his dad had. The corners of Hermes' lips arch upwards, his eyes still hidden by sunglasses. Ugh. Gods had the worst fashion sense, he swore.

"Pish posh, since when do I care about your weird mortal rituals?" He teases, his grip not once wavering on Percy's arm. It should make him feel trapped, it really should, but all it did was send little waves of warmth through him. He rolls his eyes, partly leaning into the touch, hiding a smile with a scoff, turning his head.

"Obviously not a lot, considering you just show up randomly." shrugging off the god's hand. He knew it was only because it was allowed and not because he was strong enough to shed the grip."Still, why are you here? Quest or something." He prompts, eyeing the god cuatiously.

"No, no, nothing of the sort," Hermes says, neatly falling into pace when Percy starts to walk again. It was something he had noticed; no matter what pace it was, Hermes seemed to fall into place almost naturally. Part of his domain probably.

"Mhm, sure. Aren't you busy delivering stuff anyway? Why hang out with just a demigod?" he teases. He expected a chuckle or a nudge, not for Hermes to grab onto his arm again, a frown gracing the god's face. Seeing any of the gods actually serious was like hearing your full name wrong. Upsetting. He swallows nervously, his gaze dropping to the sidewalk rather than seeing the random bits of trash and bugs than the lens of the god's sunglasses.

"You're not just a demigod."

"Gathered that."

"Don't say things like that about yourself." Hermes continues, lightly taping his head, a false smile on the god's face now. "Sure got it," Percy mumbles. The grip released from his arm again, lingering only slightly before the god stepped closer. "I mean that Peresus Jackson. You are not just a demigod; you are a child."

Great, full name and a serious conversation. Percy felt like he was 5 years old again, getting caught talking to the pet store goldfish again, only worse. He shoves his hands into his pocket, trying to keep himself from giving Hermes any more ammunition to keep being serious.

"Heard you loud and clear, I'm just gonna keep going." He says, clearing his throat, hoping that this would finally drop the conversation.

Stupid sunglasses obstructed the god's eyes, so he couldn't tell precisely what Hermes was thinking; so great. He started walking regardless, relieved when Hermes followed suit again, though stuck closer, this time practically shoulder to shoulder with him. "You don't need to walk me. I'm fine." He says that the god didn't disappear right away.

Great.

"Let's just say I'm delivering a package, hmm?" the phrase shouldn't have sounded so..comforting. When was the last time he had someone walk him home? He draws his shoulders in, shifting the weight of his backpack. It was okay; he didn't need to be walked home, and he was capable of protecting himself. It was just..sorta nice he found.

"You're really corny. I hope you know that," Percy grumbles, rolling his eyes. He had a reputation to keep up well, he wasn't sure what was left of it at this point. He sighs slightly, hiding a smile as they continue to walk toward his apartment.

The walk there was quiet, Hermes falling into step with him, their footsteps blending together at times, others the god simply just floating. It was nice doing something so mundane with a god, just a simple walk. He lets a slight hum as he knocks on the door, the bright blue improving his mood already. He had a key, but being able to see his mother's face when she opened the door was everything. Sally was older, but the way she smiled always made her seem younger, at least to Percy. He smiles, ducking into the offered hug.

"Hey, Mom," he murmurs, taking in the warm scent of candy and now books. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Hermes straightening up and..sniffing the air?

"Hey yourself, sweetheart…and?" She turns her gaze to Hermes, staring at him with a critical eye before continuing. "Lord Hermes?"

"Please, Hermes is fine, my dear."

"Ugh, don't she have Paul? He's great, thank you." Percy says, rolling his eyes as he steps inside the apartment, relaxing at the warmth and safety that immediately floods his senses. Hermes follows, which he doesn't fully enjoy, but hey, it wasn't horrible…Yet.

"Relax, it's called manners, something you lack." Hermes teases, the god stepping into the apartment like he had been here thousands of times, which Percy very much didn't appreciate.

"I've been so kind too, even walked you home squirt." The teasing continued, Sally even glancing at him expectantly. Right. Being polite was something his mom valued, and unfortunately, he couldn't tell the god exactly what he wanted.

"Oh, thank you, great and powerful Lord Hermes, for walking me three blocks to my humble apartment." The sarcasm slipped out naturally, Sally not looking impressed while a smile cracked across the god's face.

A musical-sounding laugh poured from Hermes, a hand settling on his shoulder again. The weight was warm, as always, and made a sense of satisfaction curl in his gut. "Well, my darling little whirlpool, it was my pleasure. Someone must make sure you get home for a nap, hmm?"

Ah.

The truth finally came out. Judging by that glint in Hermes's eyes, he would not be getting out of this either. His mom had busied herself in the kitchen again, occasionally glancing over to them. He knew she wouldn't step in unless necessary, while she couldn't exactly fight a god (didn't stop her from whacking dad with a hot pan), she would mercilessly chew them out. He shakes his head, letting her know he'd be fine. Well, not emotionally; it was still ungodly gross.

"Ugh, fine, hey mom, I might not be in my room. I'll be fine, though." He says, giving her a small wave. He wasn't sure he had the strength to explain the whole being eaten alive thing right now. He didn't even know if his dad had already covered that with her anyway. "You're sure?" Sally responds though he could see her relaxing when he nods in confirmation.

Hermes tilts his head but follows when Percy starts to his room. This felt so..wrong, weird almost. God, stuff didn't exactly come home with him, so this..was interesting. He takes a small breath in, closing the door behind him. The god moved around his room, looking over the various items on the wall. Some skate posters and books were strewn on the bed, and everyday things were out. He watches as the other moves to his bed, sitting down on the mattress. After a moment, Percy moves to his CD player, popping in a disc. The last thing he wanted was for his mom to walk in on this whole thing happening. He kicks his shoes off, dumping his bad shortly after.

"You're serious about it, aren't you?" He grumbles, rubbing the shoulder where his bag had rested. Normal wasn't ever going to be possible, though he already knew that. Hermes stretches out on his bed, before patting beside him.

Percy sat without complaint, letting a breath out as Hermes ran a hand through his hair. "Very. I haven't exactly been keeping track of who's on nap duty now that you're not at camp." the god points out, the dizzy sensation blanketing over his senses. He lets a breath out, squeezing his eyes shut to get rid of the feeling. The weight of the hand followed with ease, which made sense; he had a feeling Hermes had plenty of practice with this.

"You know I won't combust if I miss a few nights."

"Mm, that's not what Uncle P said. There's a reason we have rotations now." Hermes' voice rumbled now, the underlining of his divine voice much easier to hear now. It was weird how that happened. The smaller or closer you were to a god, the easier it was to listen to the divineness. He cracks an eye open as the god's hand encircles him, fingers longer than him, delicately supporting him as he is lifted up.

"Could you just give me a stuffed animal like Annabeth? No gross snack times needed." He supplies helpfully. The corners of the god's lips quirked upwards. Fond but tired.

"I doubt you'd even take the time to lay down for it to work."

Touche.

To be fair, Percy wasn't sure he would willingly take naps. If he wasn't tried, he wasn't going to lie down. "I don't actually need naps, it's just nighttime sleeping." he defends, pulling his legs more onto Hermes' palm as he's lifted up towards his mouth.

"Hmm, I don't think naps would be too harmful." the god murmurs, the warmth from his open mouth rolling over him like a summer breeze.

"Yeah, not getting into the self-care talk; Aphrodite has very much already given me the chew-out about that," Percy grumbles, cringing when the god's tone snakes out over his teeth. His feet sink into the plush muscle as the hand he's resting on tilts. The progression of sliding in was almost natural now, a curling of excitement settling in his chest. He wasn't sure when that started, but he hated it. A chuckle resounds around him, the vibrations running through him like being on a ship plowing through waves.

"Sure laugh it up. It's like a 5-hour conversation that comes with face masks and like meditation that actually works, but I'm not telling her that." He huffs, the support from the hand weenign as he slides between the teeth of the god. His scenery changes from his ceiling to the roof of the god's mouth.

The subtle glow keeps it from being pitch black as a soft clack seals him inside. It was insane how he had gotten so used to this. Any mortal would be freaking out. Then again, he had to the first few times. Still, the whole behind-the-scenes thing freaked him out. Gods didn't have to look human or even have stomach-like organs; they could be put in the box, literally. Once, he had even just fallen through Apollo when the god forgot he had him that day. It had…been experience falling through the god and just staring up at a just as surprised and apologetic face.

Still.. he let the moment play out, mindlessly letting the god's tongue push him around, the salvia soaking into his clothes. This part was always the grossest; they wanted to be covered in saliva, and half the time, he couldn't get his powers to work with it, so the slick, goopy feeling clung to his skin like wet newspaper did to literally anything underwater.

It wasn't long before the familiar dip in his stomach forward as he was tilted backward. As always, Hermes didn't swallow right away, which was expected, but part of him wanted to see how far he could push it. He didn't answer, didn't give his usual cue, just sorta laid there. Gravity really should have all right pushed him down into the pulsing throat, but nothing happened.

Realistically, with all the saliva gooped up around him, he should have slipped down, or the god should have swallowed already, but any excess saliva just sort of disappeared. It felt almost like he was headed to the tongue as well, like he had been a wet paper towel thrown on the wall. Huh. Weird.

It was still nice to know that he held a tiny bit of power, even if it was because Hermes was allowing it. The gesture was nice. "I'm fine; send me down." He says. It didn't happen instantly, even after that; the first swallow only drew him up to his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. The muscles were tight but never too constricting. There was still time to 'back out,' but after a moment, another 'glk' rolled over him, slipping down deep into the god's core. The heart never sounded like it should, either non-existent or- like right now- beating rapidly like a hummingbird. He rolled his eyes, letting the muscles tug him down further until a tight pressure rolled over his feet, and with a wet squelch, he finally landed in the organ. Automatically, it tensed around him, holding him in place. It was like being wrapped up in a ghost net but oddly comfortable.

"All snug, my dear little cousin?" Hermes' divine voice always gave his tone a sing-son-like effect, not as much as Apollo's but like- in a way, it made him sound light and air.

"How can I not be? I'm like an army blanket wrapped in here." Percy shoots back with a slight grin. A stomach wall presses against him. No doubt the god is just checking in on him from the outside.

"It's to keep you from moving around when I'm doing my job." Hermes hums, the space loosening up. "Woah, hey- Just because it's soft, but that doesn't mean I want to bounce around like a ping-pong ball." He yelps, bracing himself. Instead of rapid movement, he got laughter that lightly jostled him around, sliding around in the pit of the organ.

"You're a jerk you know that?" He grumbles, crossing his arms. The muscle tensed around him again, holding him in place firmly.

"I'm still your favorite."

"How do you know? Maybe it's Apollo."

A snort sounds around him, and he god moves from his sitting position, judging by the odd folding movement inside. "With how many times he's dropped you? Doubt it." He could barely feel the god's hand pressing against him, cupping around him.

"Yeah. I guess I should be thankful you don't do that, right? Plummeting to my death sounds like a lame way to die." He muses, none to be surprised when an unhappy whine drawls from the god. Most immortals (who liked him) normally got weird about his death even though it was most assuredly coming. Probably sooner than anyone wanted to admit.

He moved on quickly, not exactly wanting to have another scolding talk about death. "Don't you have a job to do?" He says, digging his elbow into the muscle, not surprised to hear a heavy sigh sounding out above him.

"I suppose I do. You take that nap."

"Course."

[larz-barz]

Name: Mikitama Suzuki (goes by Miki)

Age: 14

Species: Half demon and Bakeneko yokai

Important Relationships: Mikitamo (Miko) Suzuki (twin brother), Michio Suzuki (older brother), Haruki Suzuki (uncle), Giyuu Tomioka (adoptive father), Tanjiro Kamado (best friend/boyfriend depending on what universe it is)

Occupation: Demon Slayer (3 years)

Rank: Hashira (2 and 1/2 years)

Breathing Style: Starlight breathing

Backstory: The Suzuki siblings’ parents were killed by Douma 2 years after the twins, Miki and Miko, were born. They were members of his cult and he found their mother to be very beautiful. He killed her first, not knowing that Miki was watching. She quickly alerted her father, resulting in her father’s death as well. Michio ran away with his 2 year old siblings to their Uncle Haruki’s home. Haruki took them in with open arms, but a year later a low rank demon killed his wife when she was protecting the children. After this, Haruki became very abusive towards them since he blamed them for the death of his wife. Michio tried to protect his younger siblings, but he was almost never able to. Michio, Miko, and Miki discovered the existence of demon slayers after one came to protect them from Haruki after he was turned into a demon. The slayer brought the kids (Michio was 13 while Miki and Miko were 10) to the demon slayer headquarters. The Master talked with them and decided to allow them to train under the hashira so that, they too, could become demon slayers. Miki and Miko trained under Giyuu Tomioka, the water hashira, and MIchio trained under Kyojuro Rengoku, the flame Hashira. After training for a year, the siblings went to the final selection and passed easily. 6 months later, Miki crossed paths with Douma. Recognizing him as the one who killed her parents, she quickly killed him. Miko and Michio were very happy when she killed Douma. They were surprised to find out that she could now be a hashira. Miko and Michio became hashira as well around 6-7ish months after Miki did.

Quotes: “Just because you were there to see someone you care about be killed, doesn’t mean you could’ve done anything to prevent it. You just have to carry on and protect the people you still have.” -Miko Suzuki

“Family is the most important thing. I’ll do anything to make sure my family is safe.” -Michio Suzuki

“If I could, I would go back and save mother and father, but I was too young to understand what was happening… All I can do now is stay strong for the ones I love.” -Miki Suzuki

Fun facts (Miki):

When Miki saw Douma for the first time in 9 years, she was immediately filled with pain and rage as the memories of seeing her parents eaten by him filled her mind.

Miki’s favorite food is chicken udon since Michio used to make it for her and Miko, eventually teaching them how to make it too!

Miki wears a mask because she’s insecure. It helps her feel more confident and happy!

Miki loves doing crafty things like sowing, pottery, painting, and drawing.

Miki is often underestimated because of her small size and her age, but she doesn’t let that stop her!

Miki uses the breathing style that was passed down through the Suzuki family for generations: starlight breathing.

Fun facts (Miko):

Miko will often get angry anytime he sees someone mistreated, and he’ll do everything in his power to stop it.

Miko gives Miki piggyback rides when she’s tired or injured (this goes both ways, they’ll even do this for Michio!)

Miko and Michio often go into full protective brother mode anytime Miki gets hurt or upset since “no one hurts their little sister and gets away with it”

The only ones in the demon slayer corp that know about their background, are the Master and Kyojuro and Giyuu.

Miko loves helping his brother and sister with anything no matter what!

Miko created his breathing style, constellation breathing, from starlight breathing.

Fun facts (Michio):

Michio may seem super serious, but he’s actually a huge softy! Especially when it comes to his younger siblings!

Michio is always encouraging Miki and Miko to do things they love. Training is important, but so is mental health!

When training, Michio will often go to the sakura orchard behind Miki’s estate.

Michio lets Miki braid his hair sometimes since it’s so long.

Michio only shows his sillier side around his siblings, Kyojuro, and Mitsuri.

Michio created his breathing style, supernova breathing, from starlight breathing.

[buttastic]

so over the past few days I read this comic called mary tyler moorehawk by dave baker and I think I have to talk about in a more formalized sense but I don't want to do it on a platform where I'm connected with actual comics people so here you go tumblr. there's gonna be a lot of spoilers for mtmh here (and to a lesser extent of house of leaves and rant: the oral biography of buster casey) because it's impossible to talk about this thing otherwise

here we go

the first thing I will say about it is that it takes rather a lot from both mark z danielewski's house of leaves and chuck palahniuk's rant: the oral biography of buster casey.

this is not a problem for me. if anything, this is the opposite of a problem for me. I love those books. I've been wanting more comics and specifically more big published graphic novels that do the kinds of post-modern structural weirdness that these prose novels do. but that kind of gets to my problem with it:

there are completely vanilla straight-forward comic pages and then there are hol-esque prose sections and never do the two intertwine.

the story is this: à la house of leaves, a journalist writes about the production of his favorite canceled-after-9-episodes tv show, mary tyler moorehawk, in an alternate 5-minutes-to-a-hundred-years future dystopia à la rant. this leads him to try and track down the original creator of the characters, where he discovers that mtmh was originally based on a comic. the structure then bounces back and forth between sections of this comic from plot points long past where the show cut off and journalistic sections where the narrator interviews people and does a bunch of junior detective stuff. that is the Plot and Structure.

the Premise is that dave baker, the actual author/cartoonist who lives in our world, receives a package in the mail that contains the manuscript of the book we're reading, that was delivered to him by dave baker, about his quest to find dave baker. I wish I could post screencaps of the intro, but alas hoopla doesn't let you take those so I'm stuck with what other people have posted.

but so anyway this entire book revolves around dave baker doggedly extolling the singular genius of dave baker while dave baker kind of shrugs at the camera. it's breathtakingly narcissistic in a way I almost respect.

the dystopian future that this takes place in is one where owning physical objects has been made illegal--for environmentalist reasons?? we'll come back to the bonkers politics in this. but so the primary entertainment is either fascist propaganda films or hologram web streaming videos with no stories where you watch people do mundane activities that I have to imagine is some kind of dig at tiktok. the only option outside of that is the way of the physicalists--people dedicated to the cult of illegally hoarding physical art objects from before such things were purged. the only people who are allowed to own anything are corporations, who can own anything including people, but honestly if we think too hard about what it means to live in a world that truly owns nothing this whole story starts to fall apart.

like it seems like mostly it's illegal to own art? but people are described as drawing several times so art SUPPLIES are at least acquirable, somehow? but whatever, not what this is about.

but so anyway somebody gets the bright idea to revive the old ways of tv shows (except they have to broadcast them onto dishwashers instead of tvs, since dishwashers are one of the few things people are allowed to own. also, somehow, broadcasting is meaningfully different than streaming) but also along with this she revives all of the evil predatory shit tv companies do verbatim, which feels really weird.

like the book is about dave baker (the journalist)'s quest to figure out why his favorite tv show was canceled and he lives in this dystopia where art is illegal and he managed to illegally watch this show because his uncle knew a guy who knew a guy and he has to dodge police raids to even talk about this stuff--

--but the reason his favorite show was canceled is because a tv ceo tried to claim perpetual rights to someone else's comic characters and that person left in a huff?

like idk! do something interesting with your setting! I actually do not think trying to combine the approaches of house of leaves and rant is a bad idea. they both feature people talking Around an object/person that is never directly depicted but still shines through anyway, and both have elaborate metanarratives running at the same time. there's a lot to work with there!

so I think the mistake here is trying to combine the Worlds of hol and rant. hol takes place in a world that is basically identical to our own to try and get you to wonder if the navidson record actually happened, or at the very least if johnny truant actually found someone writing about it. rant takes place in a scifi near-future to continuously bait and switch you with wondering how far removed this reality actually is from our own. both of these are extremely Core To What These Books Are About.

mary tyler moorehawk, on the other hand....seems to just be using these as a fun aesthetic to explore?

mtmh makes extensive use of hol-style footnotes, but they never really go anywhere. they're extra set-dressing but they always immediately resolve themselves and are almost completely ignorable. every once and a while one will loop back around, but never in a way that's plot-critical.

the scifi setting is completely incomprehensible unless you've also read rant and know kind of what it's aping. in rant there is a big cultural divide between upperclass people who do their media consumption by plugging sensory recordings into jacks in their brains to feel things second-hand and lowerclass people whose brain jacks have been rotted out by exposure to rabies (listen it's chuck palahniuk) who have to actually experience things in person if they want to feel anything.

like, I feel like this is what mtmh is gesturing towards with the divide between hologram tiktoks and Real TV but it feels sooo telling that baker decides to replace palahniuk's focus on real sensation to one about....watching better tv

I don't want to get too in the paint of defending chuck palahniuk here because I am on record as hating that bastard (and I do. even if I do like the book rant for the most part. it's complicated) but rant is at least a book About something. rant is a book about feeling everything you can and defining who you want to be when other people have already made up their minds about what you'll be and also the AIDS crisis. house of leaves is a book about love and grief and obsession and rampant un-checked obsessive-compulsive disorder.

so what's mary tyler moorehawk about? that's easy: comics! sort of.

at least, it wants to be about comics. mtmh is trying to weave you a tale about how discovering the right piece of media at the right time in your life can Change you and make you realize how wonderful art can be. problem number one with this is that in mtmh the medium that touches people is a tv show, not a comic, but we'll come back to that. problem number two is that this revelation doesn't Do anything for these people except teaching them that they like art now. nobody except genius auteur dave baker attempts to actually Fix anything about their situations or society, and a constant throughline in this is is that fictional people are better than real ones.

I just think that's really sad? that's really sad. in the end of the book dave baker the journalist takes back his own findings and dave baker the comic genius' loose pages back in time to deliver them to our world dave baker, who is apparently the younger self of the coolest guy who ever lived. (I found This whole plot weirdly derivative of the scott pilgrim anime but what's another one here, right?) dave baker the genius tells dave baker the journalist (these ones are actually different guys) that he needs to make sure mtmh gets published as a comic, not as a highly corporate work to get butchered, and to foster a future where art and artists by extension are protected by society.

well that's all well and good, but what does art Provide in this universe, exactly? mostly, it seems like the primary functions are escapism and validation, the two most toothless things anything can provide. in the face of this horrible dystopia we must endeavor to Feel Better About Ourselves In A Way That Makes Us Feel OK About Avoiding Other People. great, awesome

I know I'm avoiding talking about the comics thing once again, but let's circle back to what this dystopia actually is. oh god tumblr is eating my shit let's see if I can reconstitute this

so things are described as fascist and corporate in mtmh a lot but the actual things that happen—loss of private property for environmentalist reasons, a focus on communal experiences instead of private ones, the death of consumerism—feel pretty unambiguously leftist. it's not enough for me to call this comic right wing, but it IS enough for me to call it centrist hand-wringing about how art won't be able to exist under communism. but whatever. this book is not really interested in making grand political statements.

so if there's no point in a better future, let's imagine a better past. finally, let's talk about mary tyler moorehawk's relationship with comics.

the climax of mtmh occurs when journalist dave baker finally tracks down auteur dave baker and discovers that mary tyler moorehawk—the beloved, deeply flawed, and obviously meddled-with tv show he dedicated his life to—was originally based on a much longer, infinitely more nuanced and elaborate series of comics.

this is the crowning achievement of this entire book. the world opens up under our protagonist and he learns to no longer be content with shadows and to walk out of Plato's cave. everything this book was trying to do crystallized for me at this moment, because of how much it mirrored my own entry into comics. for me, it was the feeling of discovering my favorite anime were based on manga. it was hearing that the guy behind invader zim also made comics. it was learning who jack kirby was and how hard he had to fight to make his art. it's the Core Thesis of not only this book but all of cartooning—that indie comics are a beautiful realm of possibility that are one of the few modes of expression that can exist completely divorced from corporate oversight and executive meddling. it's beautiful!

and it's maybe 3 pages out of this 250 page book?

I've been talking almost exclusively about the prose side of this book so far. the other half is the actual comic Mary Tyler MooreHawk, the one the show is based on.

it's a fun, cute pulpy adventure comic about a family of do-gooders repeatedly trying and failing to save the world.

it gets bleaker and bleaker as it goes along. where the prose half is potentially the more interesting half, I think the comic half is the more compelling one, where a recently aggrieved bunch of adventurers keep losing more and more but decide to pick up and keep trying anyway because it's all they can do.

the style is fun, both visually and in terms of genre. it's kind of a pastiche of all kinds of adventure comics from different decades and different countries, though this does mean it dips into some pretty racist tropes near the beginning.

it, like the prose, is much better on emotionality than politics. unfortunately for it, I think it gets bogged down in what the other half of the book is doing. it's a petty simple and compelling story but elevating it to being The One Story That Will Save The World shines a lot on a lot of its inadequacies, some of which I don't even think are actual inadequacies.

pinning the entire media revolution on what appears to be a flimsy children's serial is summoning my inner "read another book" guy and I don't even think it's a bad children's serial. I think if the prose part had talked up more about the parts of this comic that we don't get too actually see at all instead of presenting a small section of it like a mic drop it would've gone over better.

because at the end of the day, mtmh is just a pretty conventional comic. even in-universe it seems like the thing that was novel about it is that no one else was making comics. this kinda gets at my big picture problem with this whole book:

I have been talking about the structure and maneuvers of this narrative purely in comparison to prose novels.

part of this is on me. I could really easily compare the included sections of comics in this book to the black freighter sections from watchmen, for example. but that's not really the most interesting part of watchmen, is it?

I see in mtmh a deep and abiding desire to do something different with comics as a medium, or at the very least a desire to do something different and also showcase comics. but the problem with that is that it derives most of its big maneuvers from and expresses them through prose.

I found this comic because I was reading through reviews over on solrad the other day and found this one by elias rosner. I was getting annoyed about 1) this book being an obvious house of leaves pastiche and then not getting talked about by someone familiar with house of leaves, and 2) the assertion that this book was more about tv than comics when it seemed obvious to me from the premise that this a book about the way comics are devalued.

but the more I read of this thing the more apparent it became to me than while it has massive respect for comics as a cultural heirloom, it either doesn't know or doesn't care about the interesting structural and narrative maneuvers unique to comics and defaults to drawing from prose.

grant morrison has been churning out bizarre post-modern comics since the 80s. we live in a post-homestuck world. pick up a michael deforge comic. read even just a scott mccloud book on the possibilities of comics? read anything. read shoujo manga with brain-breaking panel setups. read webcomics interrogating what it means to be a comic. read abstract comics. read weird comics. comics comics COMICS! there's so many of them!! they're all so interesting and weird!!!! come on man!!!!

anyway. I think there's a part of me that really wants to like this book. in a lot of ways, I feel like I was the target audience. but I also think it had ambitions that were not at all matched by the level of skill and effort baker could put into it. idk. I've only ever read one other book by dave baker, everyone is tulip, which struck me as a solid but weirdly copyright-dodging retelling of real life musician poppy's real life abuse. maybe I'm just destined to always be frustrated by this guy.

[trashisstillhere]

Time for some NN AU stuff again but this time, it’s the one evil gal who is the cause of all the stanking lately!

Introducing: the sorceress herself!

Finally drew her look for the au!

It’s similar to the original but the clothings all new alright. All thanks to Kurai.

Now there isn’t much to say other then she’s currently still in the land of shadows and there’s where she sends her stanking from with help from Kurai-

Oh and, I have spend most of my time writing down how her and Kurai first met sooo..

Here ya go! Go ahead and read if ya want!

No warnings this time, don’t think there’s any needed for this one…other then there’s also some kinda lazy drawings in this too.. and maybe a little bit ooc?? Idk lol

——-

The first meeting of Kurai and the sorceress:

—-

In the deep depths of the land of shadows, on top of a rock, there was the sorceress herself. Clothes still the same ones she has had for 800 years but now more filthy, more ruined than before.

She looked defeated, yet frustrated, MAD. She had been trapped, thrown back in here once again by none other than the ninja himself a few years ago and she obviously wasn’t happy about it.

She didn’t even care about what year it might be now, all that matters to her is to get out and get her revenge once more!

However, escaping from here again isn’t as easy as her first successful attempt back then. In fact, it has gotten even MORE difficult. This time, she can’t just easily go out with the help of her own chaos pearls. It’s like she’s actually trapped for good this time! Oh how annoying!

But she wasn’t going to give up! She REFUSED to give up now! She will come back in some other way and once she does, she will finally free her long lost lover, the sorcerer, and together they shall finally take over the town like the good old days!

All she has to do is to figure out a new way to get out of here…but how? How will she do just that?

“Oh! Why hello there, miss!~”

A voice caught her off guard, her head quickly turning around to see who it belonged to. She was now face to face with a new and unknown stranger, who the sight of took her by surprise.

“What in the-“

“What’s wrong, hm?? Why the long face-“

The stranger was already asking questions but the creepy woman immediately stopped him from continuing. “Who are you!?” She started asking her own questions. “Where did you come from!? Wait, those floating around you….Are those…chaos pearls?!”

She almost touched them with her long, thin pointy fingers as she pointed but the stranger backed off with an unpleasant expression on his face. “First of all, really rude to interrupt me asking you things only to do it back yourself..” he sternly said, narrowing his eyes at her before continuing. “Second of all, yes. These are, in fact, chaos pearls! MY chaos pearls, so no touching!!….Anyway…”

This just got the sorceress even more confused and before she could ask something again, he quickly continued himself as he does a small bow.

“My name is Kurai. I have been stuck here for quite some time!…and who might you be, miss?…”

Okay, now this was REALLY strange. She only stared at him for a while, before finally replying.

“….the sorceress..”

“The ‘sorceress’? Interesting….are you related to the sorcerer, by any chance?”

The sorceress’s eyes widened at that. “You know the sorcerer!?”

“Of course! In fact, I am a fan of his work! I got to watch some of it! Quite fascinating!~”

Before she knew it, Kurai held out one of his hands, suddenly making a whole ‘screen’ of some sort pop up out of no where from pure dark magic. In that ‘screen’, she saw HIM….

The sorcerer. Her old long time ally, her long lost lover…

Just seeing him again on that screen made her miss him even more than she already had, she really wants to see him again…

She NEEDS to see him again.

“Look at that! So much chaos! Just what I like to see!…my, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen something like that!”

The screen then disappeared, Kurai looked straight at the sorceress again. “Soo…who are you to the sorcerer, exactly? Are you his sister or something?”

“No! We’re not really related like THAT!…we’re allies!…we are close, very close…he…is my true love..”

Kurai seemed to raise a ‘eyebrow’ at that, seeming very curious. “Oh? True love? I didn’t know that he actually had a lover!..”

“Yes! Back then, we were inseparable! Until that wretched ninja came and ruined everything, making me go to the land of shadows! And ever since then, I’ve tried to come up with plans to get my revenge for 800 years! There are times I’ve almost succeeded…only to end up back again and now, it’s like something is stopping me from escaping again!! like I’m cursed to be stuck in here now or something!!”

The creepy woman didn’t know why she was telling all of this to this ‘Kurai’ that she had JUST met yet she couldn’t help herself, she has been alone with her anger and desperation for freedom for so long now that she just really needed to rant it all out before she might actually explode.

“Is that so?….seems like you’re in the same situation as me…” Kurai mumbled the last part to himself, the sorceress just kept going.

“But im not going to just give up and stay here for even MORE hundreds of years all over again!! No!! I’m gonna go find another way to get out and once I finally do, I will finally free the sorcerer and we will both finally get what we always wished for: CHAOS!!… oh yessss…I can already imagine it…!”

As she said this, she thought about the possible ‘happy ending’ for both her and her lover, both of them standing over Norrisville with every single human now stuck as stanked monsters and the ninja officially defeated. Officially DEAD. How perfect!

When she finally looked back at the floating stranger again, she noticed his current expression. It was an unsure one, with a frown and his eyes glancing right a few times.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that!?”

“Oh my….you don’t actually know, do you?…”

“Don’t know what?? What are you talking about??”

Just from the woman’s confused expression alone, Kurai already knew the answer. With a sigh, he looked her dead in the eye.

“Miss Sorceress….the sorcerer is gone. He’s not around anymore…”

That made her eyes widen again.

“What!?”

“The sorcerer has already been defeated, just a few years ago. Now he is gone, All thanks to the ninja….and his old past self..”

To prove to her that what he said what true, Kurai made the ‘screen’ appear again. This time, it showed some scenes of what happened to the sorcerer back then, at the moment of his last defeat.

“See?….”

“W-what the!?….that…b-but…no…it…can’t be!…h-he’s!?….”

The sorceress barely knew what to say as she watched what happened at the sight her wide eyes stared at, at the sight of how her old lover was defeated…and then disappeared for good..

“Unbelievable, isn’t it? I think so too…to believe that he was gone, just like that in a blink of an eye….and the fact that you only got to know about this just now….

Unfortunate…how unfortunate indeed…”

Silence was the only thing coming from the creepy woman right after that, standing there like she just got paralysed and stuck in the same exact position.

All this time, after being trapped on this realm once again, she has spend days for her revenge again to get back to HIM….AGAIN…..but now, she has realised how much time she has just wasted, not knowing that HE was now GONE, that HE already lost few years ago…

Now. The anger she has felt soon became more, growing into RAGE.

A sudden, loud, furious scream came out and without thinking, the sorceress started attacking almost everything around her.

Her chaos pearls glowed, She used her powers, blasted them, at some of the rocks and boulders that floated around the realm. She even hit some of the monsters that existed in there, even getting her hand on a small one that she just violently shakes before throwing away without any care.

Kurai watched as she went insane, his head dodging the monster that just got thrown away.

Soon, she slowly calmed down…a little. Her rage was still so strong, her powers still almost out of control. Kurai slowly floated over to her by the side, he could have sworn he even saw her….tearing up?

“Hmmm…”

He hummed to himself, examining her expressions that were currently filled with frustration. As he did, he took something from under his kasa.

“Miss Sorceress-“

“WHAT!? WHAT DO YOU WA-“

She was about to snap at him but immediately stopped the moment her eyes got to see a ripped piece of fabric that seemed…familiar…

“W-wha….t…?….is…is that…”

“That’s right.” Kurai spoke up. “This is a ripped off piece from some clothing that I was able to get my hands on….one that belonged to none other than the sorcerer himself. I was gonna keep it with me for a bit longer but…I think you need this way more than I do right now…”

The sorceress kept staring down at the piece, one of her shaky hands slowly reaching up to it and carefully taking it with her fingers like it was something so fragile that it could easily ‘break’ if she wasn’t careful enough. The ripped fabric surprisingly still felt warm in her grasp, even the material still felt a bit new….and the scent of it, was exactly the same as HIS.

Keeping it close to her face and taking a few more sniffs, she took a few deep breaths, the piece helping her calm down a bit more. Her rage was still burning hot inside but this one thing right here, it helped tamed it for now.

“Sorcerer….my love….”

Kurai just watched her in silence for a while, seeing how she clutched onto the piece and lovingly held it in her hands, only focusing on it with her eyes closed. For a second, his expression seemed to almost look….disgusted? But then suddenly turned to a calm one.

“You truly love him, don’t you?….”

All he got was a small nod from that, he seemed to be thinking of something before suddenly seeming to get an idea of some sort, a smile soon taking over.

“Would you, perhaps, avenge him?”

The sorceresses eyes soon opened back up at that. “What?”

“You’re still furious about the news of his defeat, no? Even with him gone now, I’m sure there’s still a part of you that wants to get revenge…on the NINJA…”

He slowly started floating around her, all around in circles as he continued.

“You want that Ninja dead, right? That is also what you wanted besides freedom and being with your lover again, to finally get rid of the one person who is the reason for you being trapped here for years….right?”

“…….of course it is. I want him and still want him GONE. Make him feel pain, make him suffer for what he has taken away from me!…I want to be free from this prison of mine, to cause mayhem at that town once more!”

“Well then…”

Kurai then stopped right in front of her, holding out one hand. “Then let’s make a deal.”

“A deal?”

“Mm hm!” He nodded. “Just like you, I also want to be free from this realm! I also absolutely LOVE chaos! I too would like to cause some out there in the human realm! We both seem to have those things in common, Miss Sorceress! And maybe we can both finally get what we want if we help each other out!

I know we just met but now after getting to know a bit more about you and your relationship with the sorcerer, I would be thrilled to give you some aid! To help you get the revenge you oh so desire! The chaos! Everything! We will be unstoppable!!”

The sorceress was still a little unsure about this ‘stranger’ yet his ‘deal’ and his words was quite tempting, very tempting…..he genuinely seemed like he really wanted to help her out, to be free from here as much as she did.

“So, tell me Miss Sorceress…..do we have a deal? Will you accept my help to achieve your ultimate desires?”

She knew exactly what she wanted, what her answer would be.

With no hesitation at all, she accepted his hand and shook it.

“Deal!”

Kurai’s smile started becoming even bigger at that.

“Excellent….pleasure doing business with you, new friend~”

They soon let go of their handshake.

“Well, now that we made this deal….how about I show you where we can start of?”

“Wait, You already have something in mind?”

“Yes. And this also has something to do with the sorcerer!….say, did you know that he had two humans working for him?”

“What!?”

“Hm….I’m gonna take that as a no. But yes, when he was still out there and trapped underground, he had two humans who willingly tried helping him with his escape plan. Two men, one short, famous and rich and one tall mad scientist and a supposed ‘evil genius’……”

As he explained, he made the ‘screen’ appear again. This time, he showed the two men he just had mentioned along with how they communicated with the sorcerer back then.

“From what I remember, their names, or at least what many called them, are Mcfist and Viceroy. Mcfist here was the one to make the deal with the sorcerer to help him escape in exchange for a power of his choosing as a “reward”….they tried many, many attempts while hiding it all from the public so they wouldn’t know the truth…yet they failed, every. Time.”

“I think I’ve kinda heard of Mcfist back when I roamed around the town for the first time after 800 years of being stuck here….I never knew he was secretly working for the sorcerer this whole time!..”

“Well now you know, Miss sorceress!! Since these two had history with him, I thought we could start our new plan with them first! Sure, they weren’t enough to help your lost lover back then before his defeat but maybe now, we can find a use to them ourselves! Make them, you know, our little servants in a way! If you get what I mean…”

He looked back at the sorceress with a little wink, she seemed to understand what he was getting at. “I see where you’re getting at…..and I would really like to get to know these men for the first time. Immediately!”

“of course, of course!” Kurai nodded. “Let’s try to find a way to connect with them from here!! Oh and while we’re at it, you could really use some new clothes! No offence but….the one you currently have right now is so dirty!..”

The sorceress groaned at that yet didn’t deny it. “Tell me something I don’t know….” Her free hand gripped onto the fabric of her own clothing, looking annoyed by it.

“No worries, I can go help you with that as well! I’ll go see if I can find some monsters around here who would be kind enough to have some of their fur or skin used as clothing material….or just find some random fabric! The land of shadows is quite huge! Who knows what you can find in here??”

“Now….the most important question is……are you really ready for your new beginning?”

“…hmph, you should already know my answer to that. Especially now that we both have a deal.”

“Now THAT is exactly what I like to hear!”

Now the creepy woman herself couldn’t help but start smiling herself, already thinking about the possibles this could all bring her.

“Once we finally start….i can finally get out of here again and once we spread chaos all around this pathetic town, we will win and finally destroy the ninja!!”

She slowly started to laugh evily, Kurai couldn’t help but join in and laugh along with her.

The whole realm was starting to be filled with laughter that would soon get louder, louder and louder and louder and louder and louder-

“Are you laughing with me or at me?”

“With you!”

“Good……hehehehe….”

——

Aaaand done! Finallyyyyyyyy

The sorceress with Kurai!

What a great duo! Kurai is such a great helper for her! Sure hope nothing bad happens to her in the future- /hj …..or am I?

[fantasy-anatomy-analyst]

What does the muscle/skeletal anatomy of your bat people look like now? I know they must've changed over the years like the quetzalin.

since they were only created for the tutorials I made, I haven't actually been drawing any bat people lately. but! my skills in anatomy have improved since those old posts were made, so yes there are differences in how I draw bat people now vs back then lol.

for reference here's the masterpost I originally made for bat wing humanoids

I stand by the ideas in those posts, it's just how I drew the visuals that needs some improvement. artistic comparison time!

(Image description: two simple outline depictions of a humanoid with bat wings, highlighting the upper torso muscles in different colors.

in the first image the arm is missing, marking the shoulder with a circle, so it does not hide the muscle groups. The wing muscles are bigger and more prominent while the arm muscles are smaller and layered under the wing muscles, and the arm shoulder is roughly in the same place a normal human's shoulder would be. the wing membrane connects to a short tail rather than the legs.

in the second image, the wing musculature is almost the same as the first, but with a little more accuracy in its detail. here, the arm shoulder is lower and more forward on the torso, so the secondary muscles around it sit below the larger wing muscles instead of being squished between them. the rest of the body is also different, as the first image shows a mostly human face shape and legs, while the second image shows more bat like features. the tail here is also much longer. end description)

tada! new and improved bat wing musculature. moving the location of the "normal" arms is also a fix I made to the quetzalin, and I think it does a lot to improve the anatomy! it's less intuitive, because it looks so much less human, but it does free up more space for the wing muscles, which is important.

[charmwitch]

thank you... I'm still an infant in this fandom and I don't really talk to too many people about my works. I just want to have fun and enjoy this sudden, weird hyperfixation. I've played the games when they came out, but I think I was too busy with university and other stuff to really appreciate them back then... I know I'm annoying but I hope you all like my art.

It's kind of crazy to think how fast these two games came out one after another, and they made new models and stuff! Woooh! Happy Anniversary!

Thank you!!! I just wanna draw them cute... art is so hard haha

more thoughts:

I'm not an old guard of the series or anything. Most of you know I've only been working on OCs/FFXIV and some ragnarok online and other fanart for the past few years... thank you everyone who's stuck around for those and beyond those, honestly.

I've been having a lot of fun and enjoying not worrying whether my interpretations are okay or good with the fandom. I don't actually talk to a lot of folks in fandom (unless you reply to me on bsky, I feel uncomfortable in discords due to previous interactions.) But I'm always happy to discuss and share with other fans. So please feel free to send me comments if you'd like. Tumblr makes it hard bc there's no real good way to reply to say, tags, and I had to turn off asks a while back, but in the comment box I'm always loving comments!!

Sometimes I think "will this love ever amount to anything" and I mean, it won't. But I'm happy to share my works. They almost feel fleeting though, like they don't matter at all, but I hope you reading this enjoy them. The journey to enjoying something enough to draw it thousands of times is so funny. It does fill me with hope though during these times.

I dunno, I just wanted to say some things I guess. thank you for being here.

Happy 18th Anniversary to Radiant Dawn this week

I have two years to improve my art and make sick ass illustrations for the 20th anniversary. For now, I'm screaming because the 20th anniversary of Path of Radiance is exactly two months away. Gotta work on sickass drawings.

anyway I love Soren's white robes because like I said on bsky it's a physical manifestation of his growth throughout the series. letting his heart slowly thaw out. it's cute. I like it.

[thedo0zyslider]

Happy two years, empires season one finale, still my favorite smp finale to date 💖

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[rosemaryreality]

I wanted to do that thing were you redraw an old piece of art. I made the original in July 12 of the previous year, it's nice confirming that I have made progress.

Here's the og i made:

[mochindayo]

I found old art from last year! Why I didn’t post this, idk?

But I’m throwing more OC’s out there into the snzblr void.

Right: Oliver - he’s honestly a rework of my OC Arata if uhh any of you were following me 4 years ago lol -

Left: Nolan - not really rework of Matsuoka (another old OC) but like, somewhat is? -

[non-un-topo]

My Neekeys over the last two-odd years. I was curious to see the changes 🤔

[puppppppppy]

Jitterbug

[lulu2992]

Happy birthday to her 🌸