#The color kinda match with the others so-

[tremmelin]

So I've played this game several times since I saw this post yesterday and it's so cute and fun! And strangely addictive, lol. The hand-drawn art of all the different little areas and characters is amazing, it's such a complex and colorful little world. There are so many things to look at and interact with! (I mentioned this in the tags of my original reblog, but I recognized the style from some games I found on Unityroom - Heartreasure and its sequel. I always loved how unique and charming the art was, and that was in black and white! And the exploring of different areas was also familiar, but even better since we're actually moving in the space.) Anyway, speaking of interacting, every time I would come across another player, we automatically started spamming the little emoji greetings at each other to say hello, and sometimes we would circle each other like a little dance. Once I even saw three big, matching avatars in the town square doing what appeared to be a choreographed dance, lol! It was adorable. I really find that part of the game so fun. It's also really fun to discover the transformation spells and new greetings! I just wish there was a way to save your fave combo to easily change back to it. (Mine is the little tiger prawn combined with the "!" emote - 可愛すぎる!!) I really enjoyed piecing together the clues for some of them. Others are still completely mystifying me, I have nooo idea how to solve them, lmao. Buying the little pets is expensive, but it's super cute how they follow you around and react to your greetings and such~ Getting stars to buy pets and complete some quests is ... a bit of a chore, If I'm being totally honest. The flying movement, for me, is very hard to control, and constantly double-clicking to break balloons and move more quickly before the time runs out is kinda tedious. I found it best to break as many of the white ... statues? spirits? as I could so that I'd have a good stock of orbs, then do several rounds of star-gathering at once, then go shop. Not my fave aspect of the game, but certainly manageable. Another thing I wanted to mention is the dialogue from the NPCs. Some of them are helpful, others give you quests and spells, and still others will make random comments. Some of the latter made me laugh irl, they're so silly and funny. I played in English, btw, and the translation seemed really good! Very smooth. Overall, this is a really entertaining game and the simple concept makes it both accessible and very easy to get caught up in. I think I played for like 2 hours the first time I visited! I really like it, so I was sad to see that it will apparently be closed after the end of this month, because I could see myself coming back to Asaha Land often. That must have been my paper wish on the bamboo in the Mushroom Forest ... If anyone reads this, I definitely recommend checking this little game out :) Dokkoisho!

The original game, which is filled with my character world, will be closed to the public on January 31!

[candiedbeez]

Some stan twins dragon designs I’ve been cooking up

Ideas and thoughts I had:

Both - night/sea

- sea on Filbrick’s side/night on Caryn’s

- very faint nightwing tear scales, powers are weak and linked to each other

-hatched from the same egg

- have had matching earrings since they were very young

- both are relatively large compared to other dragons from their tribes

- coloring/markings got duller with age

Ford

- 6 large horns + six talons

- eyes were originally red (matching Stan’s coloring) but turned yellow after repeated possession from Bill

- small crown-like jewelry is enchanted by an animus to keep Bill out (in place of the metal plate)

Stan

- the purple in his pupil matches Ford’s coloring

- more constellation/star markings than Ford

Anyway, these designs are still kinda concepts so they’re a bit messy and I may change some things! I’m working on the rest of the cast rn too

[alarajrogers]

Writers Tell You What They Believe, Not Who They Are

I’ve been percolating this post in my head for a while.

I want to talk about the Neil Gaiman situation. How there are, apparently, people out there who are trying to declare that there’s evidence in his writing for what he turned out to be, who blame the fans who were taken advantage of or who still find the writing beautiful no matter what the man is. Those people are wrong. They point at previous examples of writers who showed their true colors like JK Rowling, but this is not that situation.

I’m going to contrast this to Rowling, and to Orson Scott Card, another writer many of us (particularly us older ones) loved before he turned out to be a shit. In fact, I’ll start with him.

But first, I’ll tell you: Writers do not tell you who they are. They tell you what they believe. Sometimes those match. Sometimes they do not.

I was a huge fan of Orson Scott Card, and read everything he wrote once upon a time, so I know he wrote kindly and sympathetically about gay men and boys. He didn’t give any of them love or a happy ending, but most Card characters don’t get love or a happy ending, so this was not notable. Thus it surprised many of us when he came out swinging against gay marriage, and some people viewed him as a hypocrite.

He wasn't.

Card’s work repeats a theme over and over: older men have to hurt children and young people, raise them harshly, crush their dreams, in order to save them, or the nation, or the world. Over and over again. It’s relevant that Card was abused by his father as a child, so we can certainly see how tempting this paradigm would be for him. These older men suffer, because they sympathize with the young ones. But it has to be done, for the sake of everyone.

Around the time he was campaigning against gay marriage, Card said, in a forum post that unfortunately appears to have been lost forever, that we can’t have gay marriage because men would naturally want to marry men. Men just understand better and are naturally simpatico with other men, and presumably the same is true for women. So if we had same-sex marriage, all the men would marry other men, and human reproduction would stop, and the species would die out.

Leaving aside what this implies about Card himself and what he was obviously not letting himself realize about himself, this means his opposition to same-sex marriage is exactly what he told us, in his books, over and over, that he would have to do, when he became an older man. Older men hurt young people to force them to conform to what society needs. If men being allowed to marry men could destroy the human race, of course it’s his job as an older man to prevent it, no matter how sympathetic he might be to gay people’s desire to love each other. They have to suck it up and endure heterosexual marriage, like he has to, and like he assumes most married men have to, or humanity dies.

He's wrong, and his belief is honestly kind of repulsive because it means he assumes every man who says he loves his wife is kinda lying, or at least, made himself believe it. But he’s not a hypocrite. He told us what he believes, and it matches what he does.

Now, JK Rowling. I was an adult when Harry Potter came out, so I was never a huge fan of Rowling. I’d already read better fantasy, for children, by female authors, from England… Seriously, Rowling is kind of mid when compared to other fantasy writers for kids. But Harry Potter was pretty cool. I liked the fact that she presented us with an obvious villain, an absolute asshole, a cruel teacher who bullies the kids, plainly in league with the main villain… and then made him turn out to be a hero. Someone who, the whole time, was sacrificing himself to keep everyone, including Harry himself, safe. And who was, nonetheless, still an asshole. I liked that. “You don’t have to be a good person to do the right thing.” Sounded to me like a good message.

Rowling’s beliefs seemed pretty bog-standard white suburban liberal. Of course diversity is important, that’s why there are token members of several races. Fascism is bad, of course. The circumstances of your birth don’t matter nearly as much as what you make of your life. Child abuse is bad.

But there was stuff that people who were not raised as white suburban liberals kept pointing out. Like… Rowling doesn’t think it’s important to do enough research to have a real Chinese name for her one Chinese character. It’s not going to be a problem that Irish, Scottish and Welsh children – all oppressed by England once upon a time and in many cases still oppressed – are going to school in Scotland with English children; the only conflicts will be between houses. Slavery is of course bad, but have you considered that maybe some slaves want to be slaves and you should probably leave them to it? If a woman is sufficiently evil, it might be a good idea to arrange for her to be raped by centaurs. Women who look mannish are figures of fun and probably bad people. Fat people are bad. We do not at any point need to think about the question of, in general, what would wizards from oppressed Muggle families do if brought into the wizarding world and trained, because, well, that’s not worth thinking about.

Also, while Rowling might not consciously be an anti-Semite, she did come up with one of the most vicious collections of anti-Semitic tropes and applied them to her goblins, who are money-obsessed, bankers, have pointed noses and ears, and are not treated kindly by the narrative as non-human magical creatures the way Hagrid himself and any of his pets are.

Also, she gave us “Dumbledore is gay” in Word of God, but couldn’t be bothered to put it into the book that is heavily about Dumbledore’s past, which goes into detail about his close friendship with a fascist who despised the Muggle-born, where establishing that he loved Grindenwald would have made the whole relationship make more sense and make Dumbledore more sympathetic.

So… she ended up becoming a TERF. And this felt like a betrayal to those of us who saw in her beliefs the same liberal ideals we held. Except… she was never intersectional. She never told us she cared about minority humans. Her bad guys were fascists because they wanted to dominate the Muggles – a group that includes all of us, actually – and to purge “half-bloods” and Muggle-born, which, again, all of us are Muggle-born and we would be if we suddenly got that owl from Hogwarts. It’s real easy to hate fascists who want to put the boot on your neck specifically. She got a little bit into fantastic racism with the prejudices against Hagrid, but other races – like the goblins! – were just treated badly because that’s the way it is, and Harry never thinks to push back against obvious injustices unless they affect him and his friends.

She was always a bit skeeved out by “women who look like men”, and then the TERFs radicalized her and told her that trans women are a dire threat to cis women and that trans men are sad little girls who’ve been brainwashed to give up their womanhood, and she believed them because none of this contradicted anything she told us she believed. She very clearly told us in the books that she really didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t a white British human, and she has next to no consciousness of how the Irish, Scottish and Welsh actually perceive the British, and while the Weasleys are poor because they have way too many kids on a government worker’s salary, they have no class consciousness that stands in opposition to Harry’s, or anyone else’s. Rowling just doesn’t empathize with people who aren’t like her. So it wasn’t hard to get her to hate people who never did anything to her, because they were different enough that she could be convinced they were dangerous.

Neil Gaiman is not like that.

Like most good writers, Gaiman told us what he believed. And I think he was sincere in those beliefs. Even after he himself became a monster, I think he believed what he believed because those themes show up consistently in all his work, from the Sandman to his more recent works. And I’m going to point out the relevant ones, that seem to have an impact on this discussion.

We make our own hell with our guilt. Lucifer said so in A Season of Mists, despite it contradicting DC continuity and some stuff Gaiman himself did, such as Nala being condemned to hell by Morpheus. It is still consistent in most of his depictions of Hell. The angel Remiel is corrupted by being forced to punish sinners, but it’s the sinners’ own guilt that demands punishment, not a directive from God.

Desire is capricious and dangerous. Desire wants to destroy Dream for reasons we are never given. Alone of the Endless, Desire is never shown in a positive light. (Despair is, in places. Desire, never.)

Predators deserve to die or suffer a fate worse than death.

This is important to note. A lot of Gaiman’s villains don’t really suffer much of anything; their ability to do harm is removed, that’s it. Such as John Dee, who murders an entire diner full of innocent people. But predators and people who betray people who look up to them and trust them… they suffer.

In Sandman, Richard Madoc, a writer who can’t come up with ideas, catapults to fame when he takes the Muse Calliope as a sex slave, imprisoning her, dominating her, and repeatedly raping her. Morpheus punishes him by driving him mad, with a torrent of so many ideas he cannot express them all, and he ends up destroying his own fingers trying to write the ideas down on the wall in blood. This is a particularly horrifying fate for a writer, and a particularly horrifying fate for a writer to imagine.

Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia, in A Study In Emerald, is an eldritch abomination, as are all the royalty of Europe in this particular AU. He is brutally murdered by two of the most beloved characters in the canon of English-language literature. One of the two explains how Drago was lured to his death, in a way that the character (and the author) intend to justify the murder: he was promised a virgin girl, raised in a convent, who had never seen a man. The sight of Drago would have pitched her into “a perfect madness”, which Drago would have feasted on while raping her. For being the kind of entity who would want to do this, and probably has done it before, Drago was eviscerated. We are intended to sympathize with the murderers.

There are other examples, of people looking up to someone they respected, only to discover that person was lying, or betrayed them. These people are killed, or their plans are ruined. I’m not going to list every instance of that here. But this is a thing Gaiman believes, a theme that appears multiple times.

Gaiman also believes that we make our own hell. It wasn’t until I watched the Lucifer series, and had some experience with people who do awful things, many of whom have managed to twist things around in their head so they are the victims, that I thought: if you know what you’re doing is evil, why are you doing it? Many of the people I know who do terrible things simply don’t recognize that what they’re doing is bad. Like Rowling and Card, both of whom think they’re doing the right thing. They’re not going to punish themselves in Gaiman’s Hell. Maybe someone who murdered in a fit of rage, but not someone who thought of themselves as the victim, or as someone entitled to do what they did… which seems to be a lot of bad people.

And Gaiman believes that Desire is the cruelest of the Endless, and has nothing positive to say about them.

Gaiman told us what he believed, and we were calmed, and pleased, because we believed those things too. Trans women are women. All people deserve dignity. There is no one we have the right to look down on, and everyone has their own reasons for doing things, even evil people. Demonstrate empathy for all. This sounds like the beliefs of someone who is very, very safe. Like… a year ago I would have put Neil Gaiman on a list of “Least Likely To Have Problematic Skeletons In The Closet” creators, which just tells you, I pay too much attention to what writers believe when I think about what they do.

Because people don’t always do what they believe.

Sometimes they know what they’re doing is wrong. Sometimes it goes against everything they believe. And they feel hellish amounts of guilt for it. But they still choose to keep doing it. Maybe telling themselves they’re slaves to their own desire, that they cannot stop themselves. Maybe telling themselves it’s okay, fooling themselves that people they overpower with force of personality could have said no if they hadn’t wanted to. Gaiman at one point admitted to impostor syndrome. To not being able to quite grasp how successful he was, how people looked up to him. Maybe he was able to fool himself into thinking that if you pressure someone who looks up to you, who you have economic power over, into having sex, you’re not raping them because if they’d really fought back they could have stopped you. (Never mind that you had too much power over them and they were lulled by your public persona, sure you were safe, until you weren’t.)

Trust me, I am not here to praise Neil Gaiman, but to bury him. (And unlike Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s play, I sincerely mean that.) The fact that he knows better, that he believes people who are doing what he’s doing should die or suffer fates worse than death, that his writing strongly implies that he feels intense guilt over it… but he does it anyway.

Anybody got that gif of Chidi Anagoyne from The Good Place saying “But that’s worse. You get how that’s worse, right?”

No one could have read Gaiman’s work and thought, this is a sex predator into domination and rape. Because Gaiman has consistently condemned people who do that, in his writing. And his writing is all we knew about the man.

You know how you read some fanfic authors, and you can see their personal fetishes glaring out at you? You can’t do that with Neil Gaiman. He’s a better writer than that, and he’s good at hiding the things that turn him on, because he’s felt guilty about them from the beginning. He’s told us what he believes, not what he thinks is sexy.

He knows what he did is wrong. He feels guilt over it, or he did when he was writing Sandman and having fantasies, maybe. He knew it was wrong when he did it. And he did it anyway.

The only hint we could possibly have ever taken was that Gaiman thinks the people who do terrible things know it, and feel guilt over it, and demand to be punished for it when they get to Hell. When we see a world around us of people who feel no guilt whatsoever for the terrible things they do, maybe we should have questioned?... but it could have been the naivete of a young writer (young-ish, at least…) who genuinely wanted to believe the people who do terrible things feel guilt for it. I know I wanted to believe that, and I was horrified at how not true it turned out to be.

I hope he burns in the hell of guilt he’s made for himself. Because he told us what he believed, and we all believed it too. We forgot that a person can do things they believe are wrong.

[vlyapewi]

VicSi

[lavenoon]

So I dyed my hair! My bathroom looked like a battlefield, oops

@naffeclipse next time the hair gets dyed to match a fool the bathroom gets cleaned up before said fool gets home </3

*self insert Aster is not a girl (he/ she)

og detective au by sunnys-aesthetic!

[salamispots]

rug hook edition of color combos I liked but didn't quite work out

[frothingatthemaw]

kinda crappy photos but whatever! the makeup i put on vess :]

[twin-chains]

Fierce Deity art!

(With Mask for scale)

[liquidstar]

a friend who'd wait :)

[loki-ioki]

Volo but he's a Silvally (tech still a Type: Null but i couldn't be bothered to draw the helmet. so he "evolved" only for this)

[neversetyoufree]

Ok this is so self-indulgent, but it just occurred to me that, given how many people use tumblr largely on mobile, a lot of y'all have probably never seen my extremely cute desktop theme.

Look at her!!

[drysauce]

ok so. i got a contact lens (only one lol) so unfortunately getting ones that change the eye color will have to wait until 1. this one becomes unusable and 2. i figure out if there are non-corrective lenses in the same colors as corrective ones because otherwise the whole plan will not work

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

prom tomorrow !! <3

[applejarjar]

The first sleeve I made for my costume! I'm going as a Druid who can shift into a dragon 🐲

First time making chainmail and actually building a costume myself!

And of course included in the photoset is the necklace that inspired my scalemail, it was a gift I got from my family

The lighting in my house makes everything look so blue but it's all pride themed! Can't wait to take some pics in the sun so the purple can really shine through!!

[joshuamj]

Real life painting of this! First time using acrylics

Spirit of a Swordfighter

Alt colors

[cheswirls]

downloaded the raw of episode 1 so i could do as much as i wanted with it. i cant believe how good it looks!!!!! it looks so much better than i had expected, so i'm really happy :) i haven't had the urge to do graphics outside of coursework in such a long time, but i rly want to do as much with this series as i can if this quality keeps up