#I'm so not looking forward to the summer

[warlordfelwinter]

fiver just standing behind wuk lamat looking pissed off during that exchange was so funny. you think you wanna invade the rest of the star, zoraal ja? then you'd best be prepared to face its protector, who has truly had his fill of warmongering idiots with dreams of conquest

[soulmvtes]

feeling a bit sad tonight

[axiliern]

I was scrolling through your art and read your comic about being outed - is everything going alright? It’s a bit of a stupid question, but I know what it feels like to be alone.

hai ty for ur concern!!!😭❤️

it's been a little over a year since i made that comic about being outed and tbh it HAS been more rough ever since my entire family found out BUT so far things r going a little more steady now!!

i'm moving out for college in like 3 months to a different city so ik thats gonna help a ton even w dealing w change. its now kind of just a matter of continuing on :']

[leslieseveride]

why does james beaufort give me conrad fisher vibes, but cooler???

[purpurussy]

.

[omnificent-orion]

For @sicklyjelly! Thank you ☂

Patreon | Ko-Fi | Commissions | Print Store

[because-its-eurovision]

so I just heard I'm gonna be unemployed after this month :) hooray

[thethingything]

I'm absolutely determined to pay attention to all the seasonal changes and embrace them as much as possible this year and to try and romanaticise it. we've tried to do the same for the last couple of years too but I think we're getting better at it over time

[secretsimpleness]

I've got problems with whomever designed Thane's fingers. Thane, Shepard / Mass Effect 2 (c) Bioware

Anyone remember that poll I posted in July? I shall share the results:

I did manage to produce two comics during my summer holiday but both were for Dragon Age, haha ha.... So there were delays for our second winner. But here it is! Thanks to those who voted :)

[tarantula-wizard]

im so happy the bugs are coming back

[swordsonnet]

i was initially a bit disappointed that protocol won't be (publicly) released until january, because i had been expecting it to come out earlier, but with the sheer amount of stuff coming out this year, it's probably for the best lol. my brain needs some time to process everything else first before it can shift into full-time magnus mode again.

[cospinol]

time for the summer 2024 isekai log☆! the count of actual, by-the-books isekai this season was surprisingly low, on about even footing with the number of single-wold rpg sludge settings; it's purely an academic distinction, but is nature healing...? both populations' crops were pretty decent this season either way, though, so maybe there's something in the water

far and away the best of the bunch is of course isekai shikkaku. this show has essentially the perfect premise, because probably the most interesting aspect of the genre as a whole - and always, by design, completely unaddressed - is the way it so often functions as a suicide fantasy. miserable about your everyday life? bullied at school or beaten down by your shitty job? Don’t worry, the perfect solution is always waiting for you, just a half-step away - all you have to do is die! it’s quick, painless, and also obviously always accidental (whether truck or random heart failure) because you can’t just admit that the power and joy of your escapist fantasy make the death of the ‘real life’ proportionally appropriate, desirable, and necessary; most shows move past their premises as quickly as possible to escape the implication but that doesn’t make it any less present.

so isekai shikkaku’s dazai (who is coincidentally hit by a truck moments before going through with suicide, establishing a Narrative for all the other characters who are coincidentally hit by the same truck while at the lowest points in their lives) is the perfect lead for a show about drawing portraits of the circumstances that lead people to seek that kind of escape, hearing them out, and sending them home. it’s an incredible anti-fantasy, and I could easily see myself outright hating it in a slightly lesser work, but this show is sympathetic and clever enough in its character depictions that the payoffs of characters being returned to their everyday regular lives for a second chance always feels satisfying & well earned.

it’s still not the perfect show by any means; it takes several episodes before it actually gets to the point, and not all of its standalone stories work (tama’s focus arc is unfortunately weak, for example), and although most of its comedy/antics work, it has an equal amount of gags about vestigial genre trappings that aren’t any funnier than they would be played straight (don’t show me those goddamn dialogue boxes). Still, this series has way more meat on its bones than any of its peers and is among the best of the season, even outside of the genre!

of course the other show I kind of liked is its polar opposite iseyuru, new reigning sovereign of No Thoughts Head Empty. once you’ve read the sentence ‘average op isekai protagonist adopts two equally op kids and takes them on low-stakes adventures’ (which is also the series’s title, incidentally) you can easily picture every single thing that happens in this show’s entire run.

the only thing that’s unusual to any degree about this show, given how overwhelmingly by-the-book it is in every other respect, is the absence of 50% of the usual hax-and-harem staples granted to mc-kun. totally excising any ecchi inclinations is not only reasonable but imo necessary to the success of a show with this specific premise, of course, but the absence of any romance on any level was a little surprising to me and, in the void left behind, left me feeling like this might actually be a sleeper Gay Isekai. beyond just being love-interest-less, it’s almost entirely homosocial; all but one of the adult characters takumi spends any amount of time with are men, as are the majority of the supporting roles, not to mention the divine co-parent who saddled him with the kids in the first place. Like…

this is where the main heroine goes in the op, right? also, there is a subplot with an explicitly gay character who wants to kill takumi for supposedly trying to take his man, and the whole thing is just brushed off as kind of a no-harm-no-foul situation. much to consider

i initially assumed that konofuka would end up in a much higher position on this list since it was one of my most anticipated shows of the season and the energy its first few episodes generate is honestly a rare treat. the atmosphere is incredibly rich for a simple trapped-in-vr-mmo story (with an intentionally simple storybook aesthetic), and the tension is electric; the power dynamics/interplay between player groups operating under limited information & the carefully-placed moments of horror/violence in its semi-cutesy setting all work together to raise its stakes in a way that feels natural and immediately immersive.

unfortunately, at the show's approximate halfway point, that just...... stops. it's not shocking for first-arc villains to be dispatched at the end of the first arc, but once our main party foils the enemy debugger team, there's simply nothing left. it has places left that it wants to go, but is content to meander there with no sense of urgency at all. i'd be less bothered by this if the first group of opponents our main party was facing felt like less of an urgent threat, but what sold me on this show was the real sense of danger that suffuses the first arc, and the pivot to kind of half-hearted stumbling-into-danger-that's-not-danger that ensues just isn't compelling in the least in comparison.

it doesn't help that none of the characters have any skin in the game after amano's gotten his (kind of...) revenge; it's a real killer combo of lack of character development, plot progression, or really any sense of purpose at all. there's a little bit of growth for nikola (and haga, by association)... and then a glimmer of akira's nascent maybe-my-team-is-evil arc, though curiously that one doesn't seem to be pointing in the direction of her PKing tendencies (i guess her murdering that man in cold blood was just fine) and instead is just about her getting teleported into a dungeon by alba in a random accident, and i have major issues with the premise of that entire arc and its main villain's villainous activities being a partial retaliation (and also an incidental straight up accident) against tesla, who initiated aggression and is actively trying to harm him. her (& haga's) rigid dedication to enforcing the game's rules to the detriment of others is an interesting setup, but with so little else going on in the back half of the show it can veer into slightly repulsive (i don't really know how else to describe the yamanaka situation and its conclusion), which would be great but i also don't think it's intended at all. so... meh (regretfully)

annnnnddddd at the bottom of the barrel, in every sense of the word, is failure frame, of course, lol. i can't even muster any real contempt for this show the way i can for a shield hero or even an arifureta; it's mostly just a little pathetic. you can tell that it's really aiming for the grimiest depths of those shows at every turn, but while it is almost always at least a little unpleasant, it's also incompetent enough that it's almost endearing; there's just something about how badly it wants the viewer to believe that mc-kun spamming the same three status effect spells and defeating the strongest man in the world before the show is even half over that makes me want to... just pat it on the head and send it on its way, i guess. there are so many little things that add up, like the ugly cg models of the two leads that the designers were so proud of that the entire op and ed sequences are dedicated to showing them off, or the fact that the protagonist has to tell us and his party multiple times not just that they are his found family, but which of his family members back home they individually remind him of. anyways, i'm not actually going easy on it, this show's shockingly badly made and never actually fun to watch, but it's at least not quite as repellent as its peers in the subgenre. also to be honest it gets 1 extra point because misaki watada voices a lead <3

andddd a brief lightning-round for the ‘all the required tropes except the isekai part’ light novel sludge:

mobkara is bad and looks bad but, in the season’s most shocking heel-turn, paid off the previously near-despicable secret-keeping drama between the two leads with a very charming moment of real character growth and mutual understanding. also, the real point of interest is whatever happened in this series’s production that resulted in the character voiced by kanahana regularly singing songs provided by nana mizuki, it’s so funny and jarring every single time

nazeboku looks bad and is bad, and somebody involved in its production should at some point have taken action re: the fact that its character designs/art style are complicated beyond its means to animate, & as such the sheer effort of trying (and failing) to keep them even close to on-model prevents the characters from ever emoting correctly. just nothing but stone-faced staring in all the most emotional scenes lol

and that's the state of the season, more or less! well, i guess i forgot i parry everything which is also genre slop but very pleasant about it. also i feel like i'm slowly dropping my pretence of caring about anything except seiyuu content here so it should be clear i wasn't paying attention to anything in that show except for toshihiko seki playing a smug blonde character. that's what watching anime is about, thanks for playing

[redwinterroses]

Happy Easter!

[starlene]

starting to feel really complicated about the upcoming Finnish production of Moulin Rouge!

[kira-nerys-rocks]

Torri Higginson in Turning Paige (2001)

[spacestationstorybook]

sighs. dash can you please come get me i fucking hate it here