#Spy stories

[justfinishedreading]

Spy x Family, volume 7 by Tatsuya Endo

Two stories in this volume stood out to me; first I really, genuinely loved following Damian and his two friends on a little adventure, they may have started out as the clear baddies, the bullies, but it does only good to the story and to the audience to learn more about them, to see them being just kids as opposed to antagonists, to see them bond as friends. Sometimes the worst in us is brought out by life’s pressures, situations outside our control, and in the case of children by pressure from the adults in their lives, but other adults can help, by being constant, positive influences in their lives.

In the second story, and sort of in the same vein, all the kids fight for some macaroons sold at the school and rumoured to boost the consumer’s intelligence and help pass exams. Again, what I like is seeing Damian’s humanity and Anya’s too.

The end of the volume sets up the next storyline (spoilers) as the family sets off on a cruise, I’m really looking forward to it.

Review by Book Hamster

[oakendesk]

Spy Stories Mar 1929

Walter Baumhofer

Wild West Weekly Mar 9 1929

Remington Schuyler

[crow-caller]

as a child there's nothing cooler than a kid who gets subjected to evil experiments and gains special abilities. it's even cooler if these abilities also cause unfathomable suffering to use/against others. children love stories like this.

[aerequets]

but we both know you can't.

I was thinking about the wheeler arc and how twilight was unable to kill yuri because he knows it would break yor. and then i thought that if yuri was the one to find out who twilight was first, it would probably be the same situation but reversed.

many implications .......

[peanutseagle]

imagine being obsessed with drawing your crush haha couldn't be me 💕

[kaidatheghostdragon]

Good reveal au, where after learning phantom's identity and realizing the atrocities that the GIW have committed (or alternatively, ethical science au, where they find out the GIW plagarized them), the fenton parents decided to create the 'ultimate ghost-ending weapon' and sell it to the agents.

They go absolutely overboard, describing to the agents in meticulous detail how it evaporates any ghost it hits near-instantly and describing it quite ruthlessly in the blueprints, and soon the GIW have raplaced all their main weapons with the new gun.

Except it doesn't actually kill ghosts. It's the Fenton Bazooka. You know, the one that creates a portable portal to suck the ghost back into the ghost zone? What they actually did was retool it slightly to make it look more grusome than it actually is. They even added a beacon in Phantom's Keep, which all Fenton Bazookas will target when they open a portal, so the ghosts are always delivered to the keep.

From there, Phantom stationed an emergency medical team at the keep to treat the many injured and ragged ghosts that the GIW 'destroyed,' and to explain what just happened.

What they didn't anticipate was that now that the GIW have a mass-produced weapon that they believed would effectively eradicate ghosts, they would go on the offensive. They have a number of cities they've been monitoring but didn't want to get involved in without better tools.

One of those cities is Gotham.

And the Bats are ectocontaminated enough to register as ghosts.

Batman witnessed several of his children get evaporated by green energy weapons within mere moments of each other. He's absolutely gutted. Devastated. They didn’t even stand a chance.

He'll get his revenge, and it's frighteningly easy to track the weapon to private subcontractors. The Doctors Fenton, in Illinois. Their research calls for the genocide of all ghost kind, and apparently, that war started by killing his own children.

His children will not die in vain.

He gets to Amity Park and finds the Engineer's Nightmare of a building that is Fentonworks, but that night, before he can hack through the security and break in, one of the windows opens.

It's one of his kids that he had watched evaporate before his very eyes. They give him a silent signal of one of their identifying security codes and gesture for him to come inside.

Is it a trap? A prank in poor taste? Utterly genuine?

He goes through the window.

All of his dead kids are there, wearing borrowed pajamas and only their dominoes to conceal their identities. Daniel Fenton (son of the Fentons, this is his bedroom, has voiced a few arguments against his parent's views, but still an unknown) is among the crowd of teens and young adults, twirling on an office chair and obnoxiously sipping a capri sun.

"First thing you need to know, Bats," Daniel says after finishing his drink, "is that my parents are absolutely NOT genocidal ectophobic scumbags, and that is the reason why your kids are still alive."

[marsreds]

honestly, knowing that henderson was supposed to be an one-off character but endo liked him so much he kept him and then henderson gets what's honestly the best, most tightly plotted, most blatantly political [tee hee old guy with monocle bc monocles are Elegant™ → actually he only started needing it after the police beat the crap out of him for calling out the mythologizing of the war machine, like. holy shit] arc in the manga so far?

god tier tbh

[jackedknife]

Could you draw a tf2 character lineup?

The slowest drawer on this website reports on duty🫡

First time drawing the whole team together woo!

[bacchuschucklefuck]

doing chibi is a good design exercise bc it forces u to think on shapes n essential details, essentially thumbnailing ur designs. its also a terrible design exercise bc it ends up looking cute no matter what

[sparrowlucero]

this is the iconic dinosaur horror jurassic park wishes it was

[amamamumumumu]

Damianya Week Day 3: rival kingdoms AU (and monsters AU)

okay...it may be a little different than you'd expect but in my head rival kingdoms AU look like this Anya is a Chimera and Damian is a Gryphon. As much as they look like each other their families are feuding, but they fall in love and refuse to have a war between the kingdoms I really enjoy drawing monster AU, and I'd like to do it more often in the future, but it will all depend on your reaction of course :,D

[mn00201]

lover #1

reference: The Story About A Very Ordinary Couple!

[burr-ell]

What I love about Spy x Family's recent chapters concerning Martha and Henry—two secondary characters with little direct connection to the plot as we've known it—is that Endo's taking the opportunity to once again hammer home what the story's actual stakes are. The idea of potential conflict between Ostania and Westalis isn't just window dressing for a wacky wholesome badass family gimmick—the previous wars are real events that various characters lived through, and all of them are in some way affected by it and have good reasons to want to avoid another one. This is primarily an action-adventure/slice-of-life manga with a lot of sendups to spy movies and pop culture of the 60s, but I think those things hold much more weight with the thematic underpinning of the horrors of war and the ruin it leaves behind.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

He was just being a silly little guy!

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[sleevebuscemii]

the thing about silver and stories and silver’s story is that before s3 before he loses his leg before he becomes quartermaster before he becomes long john silver. well. i think the reason silver’s story works against him in the end and by his own hand and his own self is that it’s not really his. the choices he makes in the end are born out of a belief in a reality that doesn’t exist, that what he wants is a quiet life with madi, that madi wants that, that flint is a threat, that flint doesn’t care for madi, that flint doesn’t care for him, and it comes almost from a belief of his own lie. of the fabricated version of himself after the events of the s2 finale, the version of himself that is long john silver and that is a pirate and is a walrus crewman and a revolutionary, which was all a narrative that was bred for him by circumstances, not out of his own choosing. i think a lot about the look he gives flint when flint tells him the crew named him quartermaster. the hate and the disdain and the doom because he knows he wasnt chosen as quartermaster because of his own scheming but because of the circumstances of what happened. not because the crew didn’t actually care and want him to be quartermaster but he didn’t win them over with the charm and wit of his manipulation it’s largely because of the sacrifice they believe he’s made for them. and that wasn’t a sacrifice he chose to make. his new role isn’t a victory he’s carved for himself it’s a position he’s caged into, just like billy’s creation of long john silver. silver assumes the role but gets lost in it because it’s not of his own making and that undoes him in the end. for someone who’s identity is created spontaneously based on the situation at hand, i think the one grasp on identity that silver ever had was that at least whatever identity he would create it was His creation. which isn’t the same thing as Having an identity but he loses his identity definitively when he loses that small power. and so much of it is the disability. in the same way that flint’s conflict with identity is between who he is and who people think he is based on his queerness, based on his ‘monstrosity’, silver’s identity narrows when he loses his leg, and narrows his power of being able to become anyone from anywhere doing anything, so he adopts the identities he’s assigned because he has to, because the options for identities he’d chose for himself are limited anyway, would probably be along these lines anyway. and in the end. in the end there’s nothing anyone could do about it because there’s no real silver. flint and madi couldn’t realize or recognize or argue that this version of silver isn’t real because neither one of them knows who the real silver is! madi certainly doesn’t because she doesn’t even know who silver was before s3 and flint doesn’t because silver never tells him. it’s so much of the painful resignation that comes up in their final confrontation and why silver’s backstory, specifically lack of, comes into priority at the 11th hour. flint can’t convince silver that this isn’t what he wants because there’s nothing to reference, he has nothing to bargain with, not the cause not madi not even their friendship. in the same way that miranda worried she’d be unable to recognize who she is now and flint tells her he recognizes her. in the same way that miranda tells him she recognizes him. there’s no one to recognize silver and there is no silver to recognize.

[peanutseagle]

girl gonna need five days to process this