#Light Versus Darkness

[aaartemisia]

“Five Saints Saga”

The story follows Pietro, with no memory of his past, washes ashore where he is taken in by a group of unique individuals blessed with elemental powers and supernatural abilities. He meets James and John, the lively pranksters, Miss M, the astute debater, Cecilia, the reserved and insightful "flower," Kateri, the serious older sister, Maria, the witty illiterate, and Anna Wang, the introverted Chinese girl with limited speech. Adopted by Lorenzo and Marina, a devoted Asian couple, Pietro begins his journey with this eclectic group.

Adopted by Lorenzo and Marina, an Asian couple with strong parental instincts, Pietro embarks on a journey with The group. During a late night walk, one of the Black Seven, Elvire Sven, abducts Anna for sinister intentions. Vira Tsavf, leader of the Black Seven, harbors secret aspirations to rule over the Five Flags. Amidst their quest, the group experiences sporadic moments of "consciousness blackouts," hinting at their forgotten pasts. The prophecy foretells that the Five Saints will overthrow the Black Seven, and light shall prevail against the darkness. As the prophecy unfolds, Pietro and the others prepare to face the formidable Black Seven, all while uncovering their lost memories. In the gripping narrative, Lady Cecilia foresees the emergence of the nine new heroes who will be christened *The Five Saints*. Armed with elemental powers reflective of their individual personalities, they embark on a mission to rescue Anna Wang, dethrone the Black Seven, and establish a base of operations from which to wage a war against the forces of darkness. The question looms. Can Pietro and his companions harness the power of light to overthrow the shadow looming over their world?

[ephratah]

God is going to kill the greedy pigs who rule this world.

NO ONE CAN CHANGE THAT!

[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.

[averlym]

i have been thinking about this lyric all day 

[swan2swan]

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous

"The Last Stand"

[respectthepetty]

Because @sparklyeyedhimbo gets it.

The dark versus light dynamic will never fail me.

Already in love.

[hondacivicbrain]

One thing I've been thinking a lot about amid the argument over the Barbie movie's lack of nominations is the aggressive level of hate it gets.

FYI, this is not about whether I think the Barbie movie deserved more nominations or not because it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter if it was a good movie or not. It doesn't matter that it was about feminism either. What matters — and what is at the core of all the hate — is that it's a movie for women. For girls.

Anything whose target audience is young women and teenage girls is inevitably slammed with hate.

It will be called overrated. It will be called basic. It will be shit on. The comments and reviews will be FULL of people saying how stupid or terrible it is, how they've always hated it, and how anyone who watches or listens or consumes it is too.

Again, it does not matter whether x product or y performer is overrated, or not talented, or a thousand other insults people (mostly men, but anyone seeking to set themselves, even subtly, apart from people who like popular, feminine things). What matters is the alarming level to which we've normalized the hate that gets thrown at young women — and especially at teenage girls — for daring to like something popular.

Since when has popular become a bad word? Products that are marketed towards women are hugely profitable, and yet critically shamed. Remember pumpkin spice lattes? I've never seen one girl fawn over them as much as I've seen 100 grownass men spew nonsense about how silly and childish and girly a flavor is. A flavor.

It doesn't matter what Taylor Swift's most adoring fans are like, even the ones who are over the top, because no one attacks men who get too enthusiastic about their favorite sports teams or fantasy football the way people attack her fans for being excited to see her in concerts. It's because her fanbase is predominantly young girls, and anything young women are into must be shamed.

The relative anonymity — or at least, the safety — of the internet has enabled people to be harsher than they might in real life, but bullying young women and girls for their interests is not a new phenomenon.

Romance has occupied the lowest rung of the genre ladder for arguably hundreds of years. Wholly romantic movies (meaning movies in which romance is the primary drama, rather than a subplot within another genre) must be *exemplary* to get critical praise. More male-centric genres like dramas or any movie seen as "intellectual" often only have to be *good* to get the same kind of attention. This is not a dig at Oppenheimer or any of the other movies nominated (nor am I saying Barbie is a romance). The point is that romance is held to a significantly higher critical standard because it is largely not for a male audience.

(As a side note, plenty of romance is genderless the way many other genres' audiences are, but as a society we've boxed it into a 'feminine' box and decided feminine=bad. I could write a whole essay as to why.)

I am absolutely not saying Barbie deserved or didn't deserve this or that, or that Taylor Swift should never be criticized, or that romance is a perfect genre. I am not saying these examples are the most important of their kind.

What I am saying is that anything that is both popular and centered around women is always, inevitably, and extremely harshly attacked by people who do not like it, and this has the potential to be incredibly damaging to teenage girls, especially in an age where social media use starts younger and younger.

What happened to, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all? Or, let people like what they like? You don't have to like something, but you don't always have to voice your hate for it either.

[girl-with-an-orange-cat]

Not me laying here following those who are posting about AO3 being down on Tumblr. It's just so nice that we've all gathered here to scream into the void about our unhealthy obsession. It's like a lil community.

[spidvrbatz]

Baby Regressor Robin from Teen Titans - Brown Comfort Moodboard

x - x - x

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[completeoveranalysis]

[8]

There he is! Most punchable man in the universe!

Just, like. Immediately ruining everything. Like he does everywhere. 

Now with terrible smoke!

I like how this brings back some of the imagery they introduced in Outo, with those evil smoke monsters laying the visual foundation for the kind of things going on here for us a thousand years later. 

Oh! And Water-chan is actually actively defending Sakura here! That’s incredible!

Much more than your average Reservoir!

[nature-hiking]

Light versus Dark- Alpine Haute Route, July 2021

photo by: nature-hiking

[dazais-guardian-angel]

honestly, episodes like this that are so stellar in almost every way just make it all the more frustrating when bones fucks up so bad other times. Like the quality of season 4 has probably been the most consistently good the anime has been since season 2, and yet the entire series still on average just reeks of tonal issues, pacing issues, wonky expressions that don’t do Harukawa’s art justice, cutting of crucial scenes or internal dialogue, and straight-up just completely missing the point and nuances of so many moments in the manga/light novels.

BSD has always been dark and gritty to an extent, but the anime has always been too “fluffy” (for lack of a better word, or I guess shounen-y) to truly understand and capture that, and it’s so frustrating when episodes like this one and Mushitarou’s episodes clearly DID have a lot of love and understanding and attention to detail put into them. Even the Dark Era episodes, which is my favorite and what I consider to be the best story content in the entire franchise, are imo honestly outclassed by the aforementioned episodes purely in terms of adaptation. But then episode 6 this season was incredibly rushed, and Dazai’s arrest scene completely butchered (and Nikolai’s bird speech, to an extent). Atsushi hallucinating Dazai in episode 8 was mediocre as well. Kunikida always has his core character moments shafted. Dazai is never allowed to be vulnerable or “uncool”. Season 3 had “Portrait of a Father” aka arguably one of the most important and most powerful chapters in the entire manga up there with Yosano’s backstory chapters, and yet it’s absolutely the most pathetic, hollow shell of an “adaptation” I’ve ever seen in my life and yes I WILL forever be salty about it.

But then they pull an episode like this out of their asses, where they actually tried. It’s so frustrating. </3

[ephratah]

[bylertruther]

thinking about how lonnie only ever cared about will when he died and that was just to profit off of his death + will giving a girl he doesn't know his toy truck just because she's crying and he thinks she needs it more even if he knows joyce can't buy him another one + one of the very first things will did upon waking up in the hospital was ask if jonathan was okay + will telling them to close the gate in season two even though he's part of the hivemind and that would've killed him, too + will breaking his own heart by confessing his feelings and giving mike the painting he's spent so long on but saying that all of it came from el thus sacrificing his own wants and self to again help others + how that same selflessness and self-sacrificing nature of his is going to undoubtedly rear its head in season five again because he's at the center of it all and it all goes back to him and vecna is a creature that feeds off of n fans the flames of pain and guilt... feelin very scared n anxious in this chili's tonight over this actually 😳

[rosahope]

disclaimer: huge thank you to @asterites​ for allowing me to not only pick her brain but use some of her lore and concepts for this verse! art credit.

𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐮𝐬 𝐱𝐢𝐢𝐢 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞

In ancient times, Solheim was considered a pure, holy land which guarded one of the FOUR CRYSTALS; these Crystals were considered what remained of the god, Bhunivelze, sealing him away in the sea of Chaos. Serenity, Solheim’s heiress and chosen individual to protect the power of the Solheim Crystal, was renowned throughout the land for her beauty, grace and kind heart. Her aura remained a warm and pure one for her people. 

However, a day came when the Solheim Crystal came to be in danger. Darkness encroached upon the land, threatening to swallow the planet in its entirety. In an effort to save the world from darkness, Serenity channelled the power of the Crystal through a sceptre which had been passed down through her line for generations — a sort of conduit for which the immense power of the Crystal could be used by human hands. 

The use of this power, however, came at a great cost to Serenity herself. By using such a large amount of its power, the Crystal responded by encasing the princess in a crystal stasis. Serenity was rendered into a soundless slumber, unaware of the ultimate fate of Solheim or the world as the centuries passed. 

It was only when she was awoken by representatives of Niflheim that Serenity’s role began anew. Niflheim was quick to realise, however, that the princess held no memories of her life or her previous deeds as Solheim’s saviour. Seeing an opportunity, the Empire managed to convince Serenity to join their cause by capitalising on her role as the Solheim Crystal’s protector and her worship of the god, Lindzei — a god which linked Solheim and Niflheim through their shared advanced technologies and culture. 

Though the Solheim Crystal had broken long ago, some of its power remained, heavily muted, from the crystal shards of Serenity’s imprisonment. This allowed her to once again take up the mantle of attempting to banish the darkness from the world. With knowledge of the only remaining Crystal, the Lucis Crystal, in the possession of the Lucis Caelums, Serenity became an ally of the Niflheim Empire, falsely led to believe that it was Lucis and its Crystal’s protector that was threatening to plunge the world into darkness once more.

[a-very-smooth-boltzmann-brain]

Either I'll emerge out of this year with a philosophical thesis or I'm going all out of my mind