#I went on a tangent here

[toaarcan]

Still kinda fucks me up that the latest episode of RWBY showed us the last time Tai was a happy, healthy, functioning human being and parent. 

Like it actually made my gut twist a little to see him like that, because we know that it’s like... a week away from everything going to shit, at most (Assuming that Raven saw Summer fall, told Qrow, and Qrow told Tai, and there wasn’t like... several weeks of Summer being MIA and TQ didn’t know while Raven was panicking elsewhere).

[lily-onher-grave]

oh no, don't mind me, i'm just thinking about how glinda and elphaba were just girls. they were just kids. they had dreams and they had desires and they had never, either of them, been loved. not in a way that was real. not in a way that mattered. they were just girls, and they found each other, and they needed each other, and they healed each other, and they were torn apart anyway

they were just girls, and they loved each other, and it didn't change a thing in the end, except for the fact that it changed them

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 4: Deranged Bedfellows

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.5)

[yoyo-s-coffee]

AY YO WHO THAT GUY

[wanderingmind867]

We underestimate Adam West and his versatility. I think he could've pulled off a story like the Red Hood story, but he would've given it such drama and pathos so as to make the awful character of Bruce Wayne become a star. Adam West wasn't just a comedic talent. Did you see his guest roles on later Batman productions? The man was a genius. The best live action Batman performer (and maybe one of the best generally). And you know... I would not be opposed to Batman just going back to the style of the 60s.

End of UtH fix-it where the bomb at the warehouse teleports Jason into the Adam West Batman show from the 60's. Jason's bleeding out when Robin finds him and fixes him with anti-hemorraghia spray and therapeutical fluting, and the general state of this universe is so absurd that it shocks him straight out of his episode. In the end they offer to adopt him and he decides he likes it better there and stays forever the one straight man in that universe, who comes to solve a situation with a really judgemental face like "you guys got tangled into a human knot of death? Again?". He also keeps shooting at people but it's fine because if he tells Bruce it was a "special technology fake death bullet" to trick the villains into surrendering Bruce just goes "okay makes sense" and doesn't investigate further.

[butchhamlet]

Inviting you to go off about Hamlet not dithering for no reason. I agree completely but I love to hear your thoughts always

in my recent dive back through my hamlet tag, i found this post, which makes this answer kind of redundant. but being me i am going to say it anyway. tl;dr: hamlet's Big Mistake* is not delaying; it's doubt; it's his total inability to be certain he's doing the right thing. which i think under the circumstances of "there is a ghost" is pretty reasonable, actually.

*obligatory "trying to apply hamartia/fatal flaws to shakespearean tragic characters is kind of a crapshoot because shakespeare rarely creates a guy with Just One Fatal Flaw" but also, even if you WERE going to assign hamlet a fatal flaw, it should still be doubting and not delaying.

let us remember the circumstances:

>ghost appears, claims to be my dad dropping in from purgatory, tells me to literally murder a man

literally not at all the wrong move to take a second to breathe here. whomst among us is getting this information and immediately going to kill 1. a living breathing human being 2. who is part of our immediate family and probably someone we know very well 3. and who is also THE MONARCH IN CHARGE OF THE STATE WHO HAS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT POWERS. as K @stripedroseandsketchpads said in the linked post, it's very easy for the audience--who in shakespeare's day would have been familiar with revenge tragedy's generic tropes, and who in our era knows that hamlet is a play about killing your evil uncle--to think, "is he fucking stupid? isn't it obvious?" but however knowledgeable about theater hamlet is (very), he's not waking up in the morning with the assumption that he's living Inside Tropes. (i do think he's aware he's in a revenge tragedy by the middle/end of the play, but that's another post for another day.)

point being: jumping straight to murder is a CRAZY ask. even from your shitty ghost dad who you address as king more than dad. plus, if ghosts are real, it does stand to reason that they might be evil/trying to get hamlet to damn his soul, because clearly supernatural and satanic things are not off the table. the ghost might be dad, but it might also be the devil, or maybe even a hallucination caused by a fit of grief. so the first step here is not "murder right away," it's "get some proof more substantial than a Maybe Ghost."

so:

>pretend to be crazy >get some proof

and, okay, fine. the pretending to be crazy is... a decision. based off the amleth story, we can infer the rationale is "keep claudius from realizing i've figured out the murder, because if he knows that, he will kill me." re: the monarch who can KILL PEOPLE WHENEVER HE WANTS because he HAS SOLE POWER. but hamlet, perhaps All That was a little bit much.

nevertheless: hamlet starts being crazy at the top of act two. he sets the mousetrap scheme in motion in the second scene of act two. that's not that much of a delay, dude. that is one (1) scene of arguable "dithering," and he's not doing NOTHING, he's establishing his antic-disposition cover. you could argue that a lot of time has passed, but the timeline of hamlet is so blurry. we do not know that. he's covering his bases, okay?

and then he gets down to business! he has to yap about it first, but he surveils claudius during the play! and THIS is where the problem arises--he doesn't put off investigating; rather, he can't STOP investigating. because no amount of evidence is actually able to convince him to Do It. this isn't procrastination; this is a deep inability to be certain that he's on the right path. and this is a case where certainty matters, because if he's wrong, murder is a mortal sin. and also regicide. people get killed for that. like badly killed

2.2 is hamlet setting up the mousetrap thing. 3.1 (to be or not to be) occurs in the time before the players set their shit up, a delay that is not his fault. 3.2 is the mousetrap. 3.3 is claudius in the church, and then--

>talk to my mom >impulsively and paranoidly murder the royal advisor > > >oh jesus fucking christ i murdered the royal advisor

"hamlet's flaw is inaction" okay. well. i would say manslaughter is an action. in fact it is Such an action that it gets him banished for an entire act of the play. and thus we cannot really call anything after 3.4 a delay, either, because he's not sitting around twiddling his thumbs, he KILLED A MAN AND GOT EXILED TO ENGLAND.

the one place you can argue for hamlet dithering here is 3.3, with claudius in the church. hamlet claims he doesn't do it then because he doesn't want claudius to go to heaven for Died While Praying Virtuously. if you believe him, fine. if you think this is kind of a load of bullshit to cover that he doesn't want to do it--sure, okay. if he doesn't want to do it, it's because he still doesn't feel like he has enough evidence to justify it. the evidence he has--the evidence he thought would make him certain--is claudius freaking out during the play. but let us remember that the murderer in the mousetrap is the player king's NEPHEW. for all hamlet knows, it's actually entirely possible that claudius is freaking out because he thinks this is a threat from hamlet, not a staged callout post.

"but we know claudius killed king hamlet because--" because he says so. in his soliloquy. to the audience. which we can hear because of the structure of theater. which WE can hear. which hamlet CANNOT! and so hamlet has set up this elaborate rube goldberg machine to allow himself to Attain Certainty that he's doing the right thing. and yet no matter what happens, he can't reach that certainty for real.

and he never does, actually. in the last scene of the play, watching his mother die after drinking poison, he'll still demand everyone bar the doors to seek out the treachery--he's still leaving open the possibility that claudius might have nothing to do with this (as if claudius doesn't spend acts 3-5 way past jean ralphio levels of suspicious). and yet hamlet still doesn't seize on the obvious, because no amount of proof can be enough for him, because fundamnetally he doesn't trust himself. he doesn't trust his perception. he doesn't trust his judgment. in the end, he doesn't even kill claudius for killing hamlet senior. he kills claudius because claudius has poisoned HIM (and laertes and gertrude). arguably, he dies without ever being fully certain claudius actually killed his father.

now, we can all come up with our own interpretations of WHY hamlet doesn't trust himself (because nobody else seems to? because everyone thinks he's crazy? because he's worried he might be crazy? because he's religiously conflicted?). i think most of you can guess my answer. but we don't get an explicit why and that's not the point of this post. the point of this post is that however you read it, hamlet's not procrastinating. he is trying, desperately, from a place of intense political and emotional duress, to grasp any amount of empirical evidence before he kills another person with his own hands. and he can't.

anyway! anybody here take the yale-brown scale lately?

[blitzbuckz]

✨I SUPPORT THIS BITCH ✨

[tibby-art]

Given how much Scar’s character knows. (From him connecting series that we don’t think he should know about to his character. And him knowing things he shouldn’t…) I’m on the band wagon that Scar is some sort of Eldtrich God.

Righttt like, my best guess is he's some sort of dimension-hopper or something... a traveling trickster god.. mentally i'm at a corkboard w/all the red strings connecting to different scars trying to piece it all together, holding my head in my hands

It's like. Okay. He had an encounter with s8 tycoon scar where he stole his hat, and he killed him (?) but today he said he simply broke a wheel on the wagon and stole the hat? He says each hat has a story. Does Jellie's hat also have a story. Jellie obviously travels with him across every universe. He seems not to mind when people don't remember who he is but he gets VERY upset when people don't know who Jellie is; just thought that was interesting

Did P!Scar travel to the hermitcraft season 8 universe? After the moon hit the server? Did tycoon scar travel to the pirates universe? Or are they the same person and it's just a lie? When he first spawns in Pirates SMP he makes it a point to mention a mysterious flower crown in his inventory. He says it's an important crown, and it's the only one on the server. Buttercups??? (Sidenote he also spawns with some blocks of cyan glazed terracotta. Not sure what that's about but it's dangerously close to being light blue glazed aka the vex magic. I would have lost my mind)

At the very beginning Scar says his ship was called the Flying Jellie. The Flying Jellie. What if it wasn't a boat. What if it was a space ship. He calls it a pirate ship but that doesn't necessarily mean a boat, ti could be a space pirate ship. (He's done loopholes with his phrasing like this before, like today when he sold michela a sword that was "nearly full" durability, only to later clarify it was "nearly full-y depleted"). He says he won an important battle with the ship, but he lost the ship and the crew. I've seen people say that the crew is supposed to have been boatem, not sure if that's canon? Is the ship story even true?

He made references to both Pearl and Grian today, are they his Pearl and Grian from the pirates universe or is he referring to the hermits? He mentions Pearl by name to Sausage, who says he doesn't know who that is (and yet Sausage goes on to casually mention the moon at the mention of Pearl, either Sausage is also a dimension-hopper and he's bluffing or he has a subconscious connection to his other lives). He doesn't say Grian's name but he talks about a man on his crew who sunk with the ship that's very obviously meant to be Grian (says the man's head looked like a loaf of bread, that he wore red, would have been a Kite). He doesn't seem too upset about the loss.

He greets Cleo, Scott and Martyn when he first sees them even though they don't know who he is. Cleo flat-out says "I don't believe we've met" after he greets her by name. Interestingly enough when he first calls Martyn by name, Martyn doesn't question it (I know Martyn also has some Lore going on, maybe he recognizes Scar too) Also I saw someone point out that his pants resemble mayor scar's pants. Possible season 7 reference, season 8 reference with tycoon scar and a possible? season 9 reference?? with that flower crown???

I literally can't tell if he has this planned-out intricate lore that connects all of his minecraft SMP characters like Martyn does or if he's literally just saying random stuff for fun. His character could be lying about his entire backstory, we don't know. i have no idea what's important to the lore and what isn't. this man is such a trickster god its not even funny. tldr WHAT IS GOING ON

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

i love it when bad is very specifically a good roleplayer by giving other people good prompts. like casually bringing up wilbur now to tallulah. or when he put missa in the petting zoo. or all those times he Tormented the Lesbians so they could protect each other from him. its just so !!!! I love watching roleplayers be considerate of other roleplayers and gleefully hand over something they Know the other person's character can react to. i've seen cellbit do it, too (that time he handed his knife to bbh. oh my god). it's not a rare thing, and it's possible to be a good roleplayer without keeping that sort of considerate back and forth in mind, but its one of my favourite things to notice. foolish does it too, sometimes- i haven't watched him much, but i did take note of when he Made Sure to bring jaiden along with him on a cucurucho quest. and basically every interaction he had with bad when the eggs were missing. its just so so good

[helluvahotmess]

'I want you to continue to be who you are.' what if i fucking died what then

[phy-be]

3. Sun and Moon

[waitineedaname]

Came here because of your FMA Post-Canon GreedLing series and now I want to read/watch/idfk what this is SVSSS now. You've infected me and now I need to do research

YESSS READ MY SICKOS NOVEL!!

my very basic pitch: SVSSS is Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, a Chinese transmigration novel! the premise is that Shen Yuan is the #1 anti-fan of a trashy stallion novel -- he likes the monsters and the little crumbs of plot and loves the protagonist, but fucking hates literally everything else about it. when he finishes it, he's so overcome with rage about the ending that it literally kills him, and his dying thoughts are "dumbfuck author, dumbfuck novel." much to his surprise, he wakes up as the central villain of that novel with a transmigration system essentially telling him "you think you can do better? just fucking try it buddy"

it's a hilarious series, and a very quick read! the characters are really fun, the two main characters are completely deranged (a classic example of "I can fix him" *makes him worse*), and the balance between ridiculous humor and genuine emotion is excellent. also, as a loving satire of stallion novels/BL novels/webnovels in general, it has a lot of interesting things to say about the tropes embedded in those stories, as well as interesting things to say about being a writer and being a reader!

there are official print translations in English, so I recommend checking out your local library/bookstores, but if that doesn't work for you, it's also available on the Internet Archive and Anna's Archive! it's fairly short, only four books (three for the main plot + fourth book of plot-relevant extras)

enjoy!!

[sapphic-agent]

Let's Talk About Shigaraki

I've had some time to collect my thoughts, so I think I'm ready to finally talk about Tomura.

Fair warning, this is more of a rant. Mostly because there isn't much to say except that Horikoshi hates this motherfucker, almost as much as he hates Izuku.

Tomura is a character whose autonomy and agency has been stripped by the narrative repeatedly. And that's not really uncommon in MHA (Izuku, Hawks, Shoto, etc.), so why am I pointing it out? Because Horikoshi's assassination of his character didn't need to happen. In fact, it feels like he bent over backwards to make sure it happened.

Anyone who's been around my blog long enough knows that the MLA arc is one of my favorites, I even put it in my top five MHA arcs. It did a great job of having Shigaraki progress as not only a villain but a leader and come into his own power. My one issue with it and what kept it out of top three was that it seemed to immediately undo all the progress Tomura made by making him want AFO (the quirk). Him gaining this quirk didn't tie into his goals at all and it flipped him from wanting to use his destruction to make a world for the LOV to be free in (Eric Vale's delivery of this scene in dub was fire btw, go watch it) to him just wanting more power. It was an extremely weird decision.

The PLA War further perpetuates this and it causes some confusion as to where Horikoshi was going with his character. Instead of a newly established in-control and ambitious villain, he turned Tomura into a puppet for All For One to use for his own benefit.

(Off topic, but that also felt out of character for AFO. Prior to this, he seemed to want Tomura to succeed and carve his own path, even taking the time to gently correct his outbursts and give him actual advice and guidance. You could argue that this was manipulation on his part, but it didn't feel like it at the time. Why would he want Tomura to be level-headed and calm if the plan was to use him as a husk for his own control? It felt way more like Tomura was initially meant to be his successor, not his puppet. This reads more like another Horikoshi retcon)

For some reason, it feels like the intention was to turn him into a victim for Izuku to save. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... Except he didn't develop Izuku enough for him to be able to do that.

Izuku doesn't understand Tomura, he even admits this himself. He sees Tomura as someone who causes destruction for the hell of it. And you know what? He wasn't wrong going off his few interactions with him. But that's where we hit our problem; Izuku has not interacted enough with Tomura.

And honestly? There's no excuse for this. They're supposed to be our protagonist and antagonist. They're supposed to be parallels with one another. So why in the world do they only really have one intimate scene together?

(I have mentioned this before, but Izuku should have been the one kidnapped, not Bakugou. Bakugou being in this position provides nothing to the plot, especially because All Might would have sacrificed his power for anyone. Bakugou isn't a dynamic or integral enough character for this to benefit the character progression of Tomura or the rest of the LOV, but Izuku is. Him learning why they're villains would have really done so much for their characters, as well as his own)

This leaves their interactions during the Final War completely stagnant and stale. Izuku doesn't understand Tomura, and Tomura knows that. He sees Izuku as a goody-two-shoes with no understanding of how dark the world can be. Except Izuku does understand because he experienced it. But how would Tomura know that? And how would Izuku know how Tomura became a villain? There's no understanding between them which is why Izuku is unable to connect with Tomura like he did Stain and Gentle Criminal. Which is why him trying to save Tomura goes nowhere.

It didn't have to be like this though. Even if it was rushed, Horikoshi could have squeezed it in. He could have made the effort. He chose not to. Partly because he can't be assed to give either of them good development, but also because he avoids the shit Izuku went through like the plague. He hates to acknowledge it and when he does it's sugarcoated (and used for Bakugou's gain, not Izuku's own). Because of he gets into the nitty gritty of it, his favorite blond rat's "development" goes right out the window.

Horikoshi wrote himself into a corner here, which is why the Izuku vs Tomura fight is so lackluster. Their interactions mean nothing, so their fight means nothing. What's his solution to this?

To fucking kill Tomura and retcon his entire backstory to force AFO back into the plot.

The last shreds of agency Tomura had as a villain were ripped away. He can't even have his own tragic backstory at this point. Hell, Kotaro can't even own his own shitty decisions, blame is pinned on Nana even though him abusing his kids was his choice and AFO somehow had a hand in him having kids?? Ok.

(Abusive man not being held accountable without someone else- a woman- taking the shit for it, what else is new in MHA)

Also, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN AFO GAVE HIM DECAY?

In all fairness, this has been a theory for a while. But again, the entire point of his character in the MLA arc was that he took charge of his "cursed" power and made it his own. So AFO giving him Decay erases another part of his development.

(And to add to this, what exactly was the point of having him take a quirk away from Tomura? Why not make him born quirkless so a parallel can be drawn to Izuku (and even Aoyama)? What is it with Horikoshi and quirkless aversion? There are four characters born quirkless in the narrative even though they're supposed to make up 20% of the population: Izuku, Aoyama, All Might, Melissa. Only Melissa stays quirkless)

AFO just happening upon Tomura- desperate, shunned, and vulnerable- who just happens to be Nana's grandson makes him so much eviler and more despicable. Him seeing an exposed child and deciding to use him to be cruel to Nana's memory and Toshinori drives home his callousness. Making it so that he orchestrated it just takes away from that. Tbh, it just makes him look like a loser. So, both Tomura and AFO just suffered character assassination.

Back to killing Tomura, do you know how awful this comes off? This character claimed his own power and goals, only for that to be stripped by making him a puppet, the attempt to save him is drawn out and goes nowhere, and then he just fucking dies. Like he never mattered at all. Like trying to save him was a complete waste of time and there's nothing about him worth saving.

And people saying he deserved to die for his crimes, THAT ISN'T THE POINT. It isn't about what he did or didn't do. I couldn't care less about that. It's about how Horikoshi stripped him of agency again and again and then discarded him when he didn't serve the shitty narrative he created.

Tomura and Izuku deserved so much better than this

[the-tenth-arcanum]

I can't believe trump is winning the elections...

[iztea]

hello iz ik it's such a cliche question and idk if you've already answered that but- how do you learnt drawing humans??? like everyone says practice but i don't know how and i struggle so much :( thanks already for answering!! i really really love your art

hi!

the very regulated, academic, objectively correct bs answer: learn the fundamentals, study and practice!

the unhinged, off-the-counter, cool uncle from your dad's side of the family answer:

Imo, the best way to learn how to draw on your own is to reference and study other people's art. There is no need for you to reinvent the wheel, and if you are a beginner and have no idea what you're doing, tackling multiple fundamentals at once can overwhelm and demotivate you quite a lot. So, for your morale and motivation, I think it is totally okay to just observe multiple artworks from multiple artists and engage with them critically ( * N.B. : artistS - plural; by referencing multiple works, you lower the risk of accidentally becoming a copycat or locking yourself into an art style that will never be as good as the original because it was not yours)

What I mean by critically engaging with an artwork is to analyze how they're tackling difficult body parts that you struggle with. For example, let's say you can't/don't know how to draw legs. Look at a picture of a real human leg, observe how someone else has simplified that leg form and anatomy, and then try to recreate it. Don't just copy their linework 1 to 1. That is not the point. Do it your own way, incorporate aspects of others' art that you like, and make them yours. You should have 5++ references of that leg from 5++ different artists. There are maany people out there who post their studies online, raw sketches or structural drawings (TB Choi comes to mind for example). Look for people like them, and if you can't find someone, then Pinterest is your bff. When learning how to draw, hunting the internet for how people sketch >>> rendered art. If speedpaints are more your thing, then youtube has you covered. Personally, I've learned more from a 20 min speedpaint with nightcore bgm and zero annotations from some guy that doesnt even speak english that has 300 views than I've learned from 10 min long art tutorials from fluent english speakers with 1 mil views. At the end of the day, we can yap and theorise as much as we want, but it's the act of drawing that brings results and seeing how other people draw is sometimes worth a thousand words.

> References in general also help a lot. I can't tell you how many times I was too lazy to look something up and spent 14235 hours trying to draw it off the top of my head only to have it done in 10 minutes once I finally gave in and pulled up a reference. So yeah, always use references. Don't be like me this is actually a bad habit

Okay, but how to /use/ that reference if you're a beginner? Very simple: draw on top of it ( *Do Not trace the outlines, that's pointless if you actually want to learn something). Draw guidelines over the body parts, deconstruct and simplify the ref into just boxes and lines ( always think in 3D ). This will help a lot with keeping the proportions in check. You can start by drawing those guidelines first and then get into details. Kinda like in sculpture: you start with a big block of a rock, and then you slowly carve and build form and then detail. The more you draw, the less you will need those guidelines as you get a feeling for the proportions yourself and will no longer need this step.

Once you become more confident in your skills or have a "sense" for drawing and you are in too deep to just give up after hitting your first wall, then you can tackle the scary intimidating stuff that is art fundamentals ( or you can do them simultaneously, all I'm trying to say is to never forget that you are not the only drawer in the world; looking in your neighbor's yard is totally okay within the reasons of common sense ). You don't have to raise and milk a cow it to make butter, you can just buy it from the store. If you want to bake a cake, a beginner chef will use store-bought cake mix because they have no idea how to cook. Once they learn the science behind baking (because it really is a science) they will buy their own ingredients and then improve or personalize the cake with better, well-researched ingredients, they will add their own twist, flavours, adjust the macros, perfect the technique and so on.

This is how I've personally learned how to draw by myself bc I'm self-taught and didn't care for formalities as it's just a hobby of mine that I do for fun. If you want proper advice you should probably listen to more qualified people but I can only preach what I practice.. Anywayssss hope it helped!!

[ginnyw-potter-archive]

Could you give a hint about how you think Ginny felt kissing Harry on his 17th birthday? because for him the feeling was better than fire

There is a lot going on in that scene. Yes, for Harry it was better than firewhiskey. Harry doesn't expect to be kissed but then Ginny calls him into her room and the boy makes smalltalk, which she ignores to everyone's relief.

Ginny calls him inside with a purpose. She knows exactly what Harry is going to be doing. She has known it since they broke up, and his slip-up a few days before confirms that. She pales, but she's not totally surprised.

There is some meta on it already and I wasn't able to find it back right now, but for Ginny this is a goodbye. She is not worried about him finding some Veela. They both know it. It's what she says because she doesn't want this moment to be sad. She lets him know she understands what he's about to do, that she understands this kiss doesn't change that they broke up. I think Ron severely underestimates both Harry's and Ginny's attachment and understanding of one another then.

Ginny knows this might be the final time she kisses him. His odds weren't all that good. That's why it's a goodbye. There is a lot of pain in it for her, I think. We don't have as much insight about how Ginny feels kissing him in general, but we're going to assume she's about as smitten for him as he is for her.

If she is fire, he is water. Calm on the surface a lot of the time, but with things brewing in depths that only very few people understand, like she does. They can both cook up a storm in different ways, in their own powerful ways.

And she kisses him like she is parched. We know this, because Harry tells us she kisses him like never before. There is so much longing from both of them because they need more time and it's just not enough. I think she calls him inside because she wants to give him a goodbye, but I think as soon as their lips lock, she lets her emotions take her over and take any second she can get, and even that moment is sadly cut short, it's poetic but it's painful. And in a way it's Harry's unfinished business (metaphorically for Ginny and a happy future which she is inevitable tied to), the thing he thinks about when he is about to die.

Edit: excellent meta was by @whinlatter (https://whinlatter.tumblr.com/post/707539962902577152). It's a slightly different take for some parts but has some amazing analysis)