#I need to rewatch some of these too

[cable-salamdr]

So anyways the reason I talked abt Ronin is because I binge watched Possession again and I realized. I have never drawn this bastard man. So here’s that (ignore that I didn’t add his hat it was annoying me)

+ me remembering that the Dobson brothers are all VAs that act in Ninjago as completely different characters and how much funnier certain dialogue gets with that context.

[mary-james-world-of-shames]

I died for a bit there but here is healthy old man yoai or whatever the kids are saying.

[aesthetic-bbyg]

i went down a terrible rabbit hole where i read the hobbit book, watched all three movies and then proceeded to watch all three lotr movies as well.

and what is it that i concluded from all of that?

he is the only man to exist. ever.

[vidduality]

It's disturbing how much rage bait ONE line said by a young teenage girl in an EW cover story with so much other content can generate. Dozens and dozens and dozens of click bait articles, rage video analyses, and SO many angry meta posts with people practically ready to tear Katara's actress apart with their bare hands. All for having the audacity to say that she found some of Sokka's more brazenly sexist lines "iffy" in the OG cartoon. She implied it wouldn't translate as well in a live action and that they had toned it down, and you'd think she announced the Avatar is going to be a warmonger the way the internet's turned on her.

This week's fandom discourse has been about as low key and rational as S1 Zuko being offered some calming Jasmine tea...

[xxplastic-cubexx]

chat im crying about charles xavier at near 1AM i need professional help

[fictionadventurer]

A Biltmore Christmas may be the first Hallmark movie to drive me to fanfic.

[aroaceleovaldez]

i am having A Time looking through some old blogs and stuff because I found some Ye Olde Gifsets of the Sea of Monsters movie and. okay. I know it's not fair to compare a movie and a TV show. Howeverrrrr, the PJO TV show allegedly had a HUUUGE budget. Cause it's Disney. (Actually, I did the math - low estimate budget for all of s1 was $96 million USD - allegedly $12-15mil per episode, compared to SoM's $90mil total budget) So why does the Sea of Monsters movie from ten years ago over half the time look better than the show? Like. A lot better.

Like I've complained about the CGI in the show before. Quite a bit. They can't consistently scale Chiron's horse half so he's changing size/proportions in every scene, they can't properly scale the stationary trident floating above Percy's head (you can TELL the asset is elongated improperly like someone stretched it and didn't fix it), they're actively avoiding animating Percy's hydrokinesis as much as possible, and the majority of monster or general CGI scenes are as hands-off as possible.

And as an animator I get it, if you don't have to animate something don't animate it. But. if your series is ENTIRELY CENTERED AROUND A CHARACTER WHO'S BIG MAIN THING IS CONTROLLING WATER. but you REFUSE TO SHOW HIM CONTROLLING WATER AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Then maybe you SHOULDN'T HAVE CHOSEN THAT SERIES. And I get most scenes with monster fights are difficult to CGI interaction with. CGI interaction is not easy to make look good. But also. You cannot get through the entire series without the characters physically interacting with monsters that are going to have to be CGI'd. And there are ways to do it where the avoidance of interacting with the CGI things is less noticeable, but the show very much does not do that. They did it for the minotaur fight! Everything is really dark with strategic lighting so stuff gets obscured. That one looked fine! But in like every other CGI fight Percy just. Does not touch. It very clear the show is doing very cheap CGI wherever possible and then having the nicer monsters and things that carefully do not touch moving things as much as possible. Walker sits completely stationary when Percy's turning to gold cause they had to CGI over him and it looks bad anyways. PJO TV has the budget for it to not be bad. Disney has the means. But they're not doing that. Even fully stationary CGI scenery like Olympus is clearly super lazy and is skipped over as quickly as possible and is just sad.

Anyways I'm gonna go reblog some old Sea of Monsters gifsets.

[dontgofarfromme]

Every so often I do find myself thinking about The Eclipse because I went into that show expecting a mildly politically-conscious high school drama with some kind of supernatural element and came out having watched a comprehensive dissertation on the damage internalized homophobia does to a person and the way people in authority can weaponize fear to facilitate the persecution of marginalized people by members of their own groups, and absolutely no eclipse-related magic to speak of

[im-smart-i-swear]

how many were there before you?

i rlly like how this one turned out!! my love for kuron will apparently never end so im stuck perpetually thinking about him till the day i die. alt ver without the snow effects under the cut

i recently discovered the joys of shading with the lasso tool:) i like his expression n hair n the shirt thing a lot, also this is the first time in a while i attempted any sort of background really (even if its rlly flat but shhh). ive had the idea for this piece stuck in my head for a while now so its been v fun finally putting it all together<3

[frankiebirds]

this scene makes me need to lay down. goddddd.

sometimes i get the sense that reid is more attached to gideon than gideon is to reid. obviously they both serve as surrogates for the family member each is estranged from (gideon is estranged from his son and reid is estranged from his dad) but.

you know. reid clings to gideon, not physically but emotionally, and i think a lot of his wellbeing at the start of the series relies on gideon's presence. gideon almost certainly knows the most about reid out of anyone on the team—i don't think canon ever says that reid has told gideon about diana, but i would imagine he has—and i think reid feels understood by him in a way he doesn't by other people, even compared to the rest of the team who (mostly) try their best. i think he also tends to try to be as good and deserving as possible of gideon's presence, since he definitely at least partially feels like his father left because he wasn't good enough.

on the flipside, while gideon definitely sees reid as a son, he's...not the best dad. i think we see him repeating a lot of the mistakes that drove a wedge between him and stephen with reid, and i think that had mandy patinkin stayed on, we would have gotten a larger parallel there. he holds him at arms length, trying not to get too close, although he definitely cares about him more than he lets on and the mask slips sometimes, like this moment and on the plane after ldsk.

[girlivealwaysbean]

so many thoughts but i CANNOT stop laughing that all that time we thought louis had some elaborate mind control type reason for staying with armand and it was really just.. HIM TRYING TO MAKE HIS EX JEALOUS SLSKSKKSKSKS

[bogkeep]

stars finally aligned for me to watch castlevania: nocturne and oh, i like it so much more than i expected to. i was dragging my feet because i gotta be in the correct Mood for dark and violent shows and i'm not familiar with the games and don't know any of the characters etc etc etc.

anyway. i don't usually have a lot of interest in vampires as monster in and of itself, the whole blood sucking thing just holds no interest to me - the one aspect i DO find very interesting is vampires as immortal former humans. what i like about the castlevania cartoons is that they have vampires from many different eras and cultures, which is Exactly what i want from vampire stories, so i'm sold. what i like about nocturne specifically is that they have made the allegory explicit - vampires as the oppressor class, nobility and slave owners, and set the series during the french revolution. that's so tasty. that's so good. placing a vampire slaying series in a historical context, and a world where vampires are Known entities and not secret monsters is so delightful. i am so glad i'm finally watching this

[cardinal-baenitez]

Okay enough time has passed I think John Locke forgiving Ben just like that was such bullshit he should’ve fucked him senseless as revenge or something

[jordansanghaislife]

Quinn’s letterboxd is so fun lol x !! A lover of Sky High, Big Fat Liar, and Cheaper By The Dozen 😍, plus a mean girl musical Stan !! Possibly a Reneé rapp fan 👀 Also love that he constantly rates things 5 stars based solely if he had a good time, which is so me lmao no critical thought just if enjoyable 10/10 lol

[thebestusernamepossible]

Literally going insane, might have to write fanfic for the first time in 2 years because the people™️ do not get my favorite female characters like I do and I feel the insurmountable urge to write her. I’m going to bite drywall why don’t ppl see her complexities. PLEASE STOP WRITING HER ETHIER AS DOMICILE MOM OR BITCH (or just for shipping) she is so so cool please guys please.

Also while I’m here, fandoms tendency to shove women in the ‘pure powerful goddess who can do no wrong’ box and then proceed to never give them an actual narrative role other than like ‘supportive’ or ‘took out a few background guys’. Like why DOES this incredibly badass and complex female character just get shunted into doinging some cool flips, getting praised about it (she’s the strongest fighter, so feminist wow) then never getting actnowleged as a 2 dimensional character.

I saw this a lot when I was in the Batman fandom, particularly with Cassandra Cain. She is a highly complex and interesting character, but in fandom she’s kind of shunted to ‘Badass therapy dog who takes care of the men’. Because even on the slight chance her backstory is brought up it’s always never delved into and mostly used to make her etheir more tragic and in need of support on a surface level or to let her be compassionate with the men characters who get their actual problems foucused on. It’s a unqiue kind of frustrating because it’s like almost letting the cool female character be cool, but it’s more like the idea of a badass women is shoved in your face, maybe joked about (or if we’re lucky she gets to beat up a few bad-guys), but ultimately treated like a cardboard cutout. Interestingly this actually isn’t entirely a female character thing, it’s also common with like old grandfather/grandmother characters and the elderly in general. But it’s usually badass women from what I see. :/ Why can’t fandom explore their stories (people do but why is it so much less), why can’t they be the prtags of cool AUs or time-travel fix-its, or crossover events

Idk I think I’m just frustrated, and I typed out more than I thought I would. Also Ive seen what happens to some other posts complaining about fandom misogyny, so please know if you’re a TERF, fuck off you have no place in this discussion. We will never agree, and frankly all of these points apply to canon Trans Women characters. Don’t say shit ill fucking end you.

[nattikay]

ahh I feel like I've made a bunch of rant-y posts this week, sorry about that y'all, but I've got one just one more to slap down real quick 😅

This video came up in my YouTube recommendations, and while it makes some interesting points, I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that "Avatar's story wasn't very good because it wasn't complex enough".

Here's the thing: The good/bad scale and the simple/complex scale are SEPARATE. A story does not need to be super complex to be good. A good story can be complex, certainly! But it doesn't need to be. A simple straightforward story can still be a good story. And so it is with Avatar, in my opinion.

Same with the character criticisms. Sometimes we just don't need to know every minute detail of a character's life for the character to work within their story, we just need to know the parts that are relevant. Selfridge, for example...do you really think we needed to have part of the runtime set aside to flesh out every little detail of what led him to become a greedy corporate middle manager? Would that tangent really have inherently enhanced the story being told here? Or would it just have taken time away from the intended focus, that being the wonder of Pandora and Jake's journey?

More complex does not automatically equal better. A good story is one that is told well: the audience can follow what happens, they resonate with the emotional beats, there are no gaping holes or inconsistencies in the plot or worldbuilding, characters grow and change in a believable way. And that can be done in complex stories AND in simple stories!! Just because your story doesn't have a gazillion wild plot twists and intricate 10-page biographies justifying every decision every named character makes doesn't mean it can't be well-executed enjoyable story!

Avatar's story is not a bad one. It's simple, sure, predicable even—and if that's a turn-off for you, hey, that's totally fair—but it's executed very well. No, we don't know how Quaritch became head of RDA security, we don't know how Norm came to be part of the Avatar program, we don't know what inspired Grace to become a botanist...because we simply do not need to. Those details just aren't all that relevant to the core story being told. Could they make for interesting trivia? Sure. But is it needed to understand the heart of the movie? The message? The story? Not really, no. In fact, depending on how it's implemented, adding extraneous details like that could actively bog the story down.

Simple movies can be good. Simple movies can be bad.

Complex movies can be good. Complex movies can be bad.

"It's too simple" is, therefore, a rather silly criticism. Totally valid as a personal opinion! But kinda meaningless as an analytical criticism.