#I'm running behind

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Why are you running?

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[yashley]

"Yeah, but we talked about it and I didn’t want it." "Why not?" "Because it scared me."

[vulpinesaint]

gonna be so real i miss the sewer dinosaurs

[kaenith]

Color Fall 2023 - #3

That scene in the Temple of Darkness where Red and Blue are too wrapped up in their argument to notice the Big Poe always amuses me xD So... this is that, but with Pokemon!

Also, my piece for FS Fright Fight week two: hoax vs haunted

[ratwithhands]

I had this AU archived off my accounts for a few years, but I'm thinking about it a lot more these days so I'm digging it up for sketches.

This is Kudari from Codebreaker, functionally the starting antagonist for the story when Emmet accidentally collides with him and takes parts of his body.

For a little debrief, the main idea of Codebreaker is that Emmet discovers that he exists in a false reality, and that there is a parallel plane where all of the instructions for his reality exist. He finds his way to this plane by accident after walking back from another lonely day at work, and is hellbent on learning how to manipulate it in the hopes that he can recover Ingo with that knowledge. Kudari is his own set of instructions, who he partly dismantles, allowing him to actually interact with the code. This leaves a hollowed out shell that starts trying to find his own way to get his body back from Emmet.

I'd been thinking about the Beta Submas leaks which lead me to sketching him again. Here's the first rough warmup sketch I did with a fight between him and Emmet.

From there I just started reworking his old design to be worse 💀

Let me know if you guys want more of this freak, he's honestly really fun to sketch.

[jujumighty]

I think I might have a fear of characters without facial features is that a thing? But Dial art! How I view him

[akemi-snow]

KakaIru + Those Four Guys From Naruto

I'll assume you've seen the original versions with the canon couples. (I'd link it but have no idea what the OG really is). Now it's the gae version.

[starflungwaddledee]

just want to give a little heads up, but i'm going to be away for several days until tuesday next week! heading on an international trip for family obligations and will likely have little to no internet access!

i have a few things in the queue (gifts mostly) but won't be around to respond to new posts, dms, asks, etc, until i get back.

take care, see you on the flipside!

[seven-oh-four]

honestly WHAT game the splatoon devs the idea for the flyfish. whaf kind of game design decision is it to have an that can one-shot you from anywhere on the map, and will attempt this four times in quick succession every ten seconds, on two people, and even if the missiles miss they have a splash radius that deals damage to you and, need i remind you, this happens four times in quick succession, so you can dodge all four of them and still die, and also you can only kill it with bombs, and also you need two of them, and also you need to land them in little baskets on their sides, and also this can only be done WHILE THE FLYFISH IS FIRING, AND THERE CAN BE THREE OF THEM AT A TIME, AND DID I MENTION THEY CAN INSTAKILL YOU FROM ANYWHERE ON THE MAP

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

he’s so endearing to me you don’t even understand

🩵

[honeystarcamper]

"  Take heart, victory will be ours. "

Day 3 of @essthereal's 850+ editing event . . . a character with your MBTI type OR a character that shares your birthday

f2u with credit! :D

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Breaking Bread, and Spilling Soup.

[Bonus art]

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[eggsistential-breakdown]

Ian and the twice-divorced gray-eyesed rift Ian from the first chapter of @reblogincarnation-blues's fic!

anyways the closest experience I've had to the the feeling of reading the second chapter is taking my roommate to the ER for four hours for suspected appendicitis only to come back with a UTI diagnosis and an antibiotic prescription. and it breaks your one year streak of roommates getting appendicitis. in a good way.

[cereal-abyss-mage]

robin's position in the Family is so interesting to me

she seems to kind of be representing the family publically through her career, and yet she holds basically no direct political power in penacony. she was raised by the oak family but only sunday was fully informed about the stuff going on internally. the line in the 2.3 quest that she is "as good as her brother" (or something similar) implies that the high-ranking family members didn't really value her all that much prior to the trailblaze mission's events

but she is so recognizable and such a big public figure that she still generates penacony good publicity and exposure, which, for the family, means more profit and an easier time covering up their asses about any corruption happening behind the scenes. and that makes her very valuable in the family.

and for that reason, I feel like robin being this shining beacon of harmony was also very appreciated by followers of the order because of her personal connection to both gopher wood and sunday, who were both very involved with all that. and in a way she just increases their trustworthiness by simply existing

her having no political power and limited information also works to prevent her from distancing herself from the family because of its corruption. she would not stand for things like the order, so the only way to keep her involved is to just not tell her shit

basically my point is that robin and sunday were both kind of taken advantage of by the family and raised to be their figureheads

and it's really interesting to think about

[oddeyes588]

So, Oshi no Ko's ending... (spoilers, obviously)

What a fucking mess. How did we get here? How did we get from starting with such a high peak of storytelling and drop all the way down to hell?

I'm going to preface this by saying... regardless of how awful the ending is, Oshi no Ko will always hold a place in my heart. Hell, one look at my screen name should let at least some people know that bad endings have never been able to rid me of whatever brainworms I've accumulated for a series, and it certainly won't start now.

(CW: SUICIDE MENTIONS)

A certain someone infecting me with Ai Hoshino brainworms is also part of why. For better or worse, my hyperfixation with Oshi no Ko is set to last for a long while yet, even after it's ending.

So where to start in talking about this ending... well, let's start with the biggest thing. This is single handedly the most mind-boggling, absurd ending I have ever read, for all of the worst reasons.

Oshi no Ko, as a whole, has never exactly been subtle about its messages. The cruelty of the idol industry, of the entertainment industry as a whole. The self-destructive nature of revenge. Finding reasons to live for yourself, finding your own happiness... happiness for oneself. It was heavy-handed with these messages, and it's important that it was. Aka Akasaka seemed like an author who would not shy away from writing these criticisms, who had their main messages down pat, even if at times things got... questionable.

(Just look at the side materials that we got for Oshi no Ko. Things like Viewpoint B. Everything, if nothing else, remained at least somewhat consistent to what the story was trying to convey).

And yet somehow, for reasons I cannot begin to understand... at the end of Oshi no Ko, Aka spat on every single message his work has ever had.

Aquamarine Hoshino, a traumatized boy who views his life as worthless, ready to give it up and sacrifice himself if it means succeeding in his revenge, who has said outright that that he intends to die after his revenge is over... is faced with a chance for a new beginning, a chance for love, given a chance to life a life of real, genuine happiness... faced with SO MANY people who love him and want him in their lives...! And he chooses to die anyways, taking his father with him to the ocean depths in a murder suicide, all so that his sister wouldn't have to live with the stigma of having a murderer for a brother. Something he does without hesitation, because everyone will move on from him eventually.

And Ruby... oh Ruby. Oh how they character assassinated you... faced with the crying face of her own mother in her reflection, she conveyed the truth... the truth that Ai was always just an ordinary girl, an ordinary girl who had her real self beaten down by the desires of people, turned into a perfect and pure commodity, all for the ugly desires of the people... who was then KILLED for failing to live up to those desires... what does Ruby do?

She choses to surpass her mother as an idol... because sure, Ai may not have been perfect, but she won't be like Ai! She'll be her own idol! An even better idol!

And so she does. She effectively becomes Ai 2.0. Ai without all of those complicated hidden feelings, Ai but she really is pure this time.

And in the wake of her brother's death... Ai but without any happiness of her own. Without any happiness outside of her singular, sole purpose. Having lost everything that she held dear, she now truly is the Perfect Idol, and nothing else. A monument of praise towards the Idol Industry.

...Everything this manga had been building up to. Building up to convincing Aqua that he deserves happiness... hell, Ai's one and only wish, for her babies to grow up healthy, for them to be happy. Building up to Ruby finding her own happiness, finding her own real reason to be an idol.

With an ending that Aka has confirmed is what he'd wanted the entire time... everything is flushed down the proverbial toilet, never to be seen again.

Aqua dies pointlessly and in a way that goes against every message we've ever had concerning living for yourself. Hikaru never had nearly enough screentime, let alone an arc, to justify being irredeemably evil and needing to be killed. Kana never gets to confess her feelings, Ruby's feelings go forever unaddressed, Akane serves fundamentally no purpose, Ai's wishes go almost completely unfulfilled, and Ruby becomes a shell of herself with being an idol now the only thing she has... and yet all of this is framed as a good ending.

The idea that this is in any way a good ending is... completely baffling to me. I cannot understand what is going through Aka Akasaka's head. Not only is this narratively the worst possible ending, but even the ending itself feels so hollow... rushed, as though none of it really meant anything, least of all Aqua's death. All but proving him right.

His death, his sacrifice, his suicide was worth it. Because despite how many people were hurt by his passing, in the end, they all moved on just like he expected.

(WHICH, LET ME JUST SAY, IS AN EXTREMELY POOR, RECKLESS, AND IRRESPONSIBLE MESSAGE TO BE WRITING ABOUT FUCKING SUICIDE. ESPECIALLY TO A COUNTRY LIKE JAPAN, WHERE SUICIDE RATES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PAINFULLY HIGH!! IT WAS ONLY WHAT, 20-SOMETHING CHAPTERS AGO WHERE YOU HAD THE LITERAL MANGAKAS IN THE STORY GO ON FOR A WHOLE CHAPTER ABOUT HOW THEIR WRITING HAS AN INFLUENCE ON PEOPLE'S LIVES, HOW THEY HAVE TO BE READY TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT THEY WRITE, AND YOU WROTE AN ENDING THAT GLORIFIES A CHARACTER'S SUICIDE!? SAYING THAT ITS OKAY HE DIED BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS STRONG AND EVENTUALLY GOT OVER IT!?? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME—)

Sighs...

Ultimately, in the end, this ending was an utter mess of an execution. Ideas that Aka was clearly too committed to, never once seeing how fucked it was, and never changing course.

And honestly? The fact that he wrote such good shit before this, wrote what I would even describe as masterpieces... only serves to make this ending hurt that much more.

[semperintrepida]

Descriptions and metaphors I haven’t been able to use while writing stories set in Ancient Greece:

anything related to clocks ("tick of time", "like clockwork") or smaller units of time (minutes and seconds)

anything related to gunpowder ("exploded", "cannoned")

machine-related terms ("motored", "pistoned", "windmilled", "[do something] mechanically")

electronic terms ("flipped a switch", "closed the circuit", "picked up the signal")

sneakily anachronistic idioms ("called their bluff", "show their hand")

the concept of adrenaline (and cousins dopamine and serotonin)

any reference to the brain being the source of intellect

so many medical/anatomical concepts — air can be breathed into the chest, but nothing about oxygen in the blood, energy in the blood, blood cells, etc

L-shaped, U-shaped — no such letters by those names in the Greek alphabet

I'm sure I've let plenty of anachronisms slip into what I've written for the AC: Odyssey fandom over the years, but I've tried my best to honor the time period. Every description and metaphor in fiction comes from the POV character (or omniscient narrator), and the words on the page should only be things they would know. (Maybe one day I'll write a little essay about third person limited/close POV and all the ways I adore it.)

That said, AC: Odyssey has a few temporal slip-ups of its own. My favorite is characters saying "okay"—and I'm eternally grateful for that because it means I can use it in my stories guilt-free.

Anyway, it's fun to ride the line between authenticity and pedantry.