#Too bad I didn't save that Usagi post

[randomnameless]

Honestly, if people are going to wring their hands over the idea of nobility maybe Fire Emblem isn't the franchise for them

FE is a series were you whack people with swords and axes - there's usually a "traditionnal" story of a prince/lord being chased out of their home and they must recruit allies to return home, with, sometimes, secret dragons popping up.

I think some people might want to play a game that is all about setting up a government - but yeah, that's not FE.

I think there was a post circulating some months ago about how some people took wrong messages from games/animes and used the Sailor Moon example : Usagi is sekrit royalty, but no, Sailor Moon isn't a "pro-monarchy" series or saying "feudalism" (because that's the trendy word nowadays?) is better than every other system. It's a series about magical girls, talking cats and some sort of weird time travel shenanigans.

ASOIAF, rather, GOT's recent popularity might have a hand in this phenomenon, iirc Martin once said something about LotR not dwelving that much in Aragorn's tax policies ? But, that's not what LotR is about ? This isn't a story about absolute monarchies or which form of government is the best!

Anyways, it's just like some people early in the FE16's life who were discoursing like ardent r/atheists redshiters - sure, legit! However, afaik, a lot of "fantasy"/JRPG games/medias often involve a healer or a character who prays to get buffs etc etc. In all FEs, there's always a priest who prays to heal people - FE Elibe we have Elimine, FE Tellius we have Ashera, FE Valentia Silque often mentions Mila, FE Magvel's local saint is Latona but Natasha "prays", etc etc. Sure, Fe Fodlan tried to flesh the "religious" aspect a bit more, but if nobility and the sheer idea of "people praying to a higher being to be healed" is not for you, then you won't enjoy the saga.

[angelpuns]

Official references with colors/age/extra info for Finch in the Window!

This is more or less a master post to keep everything organized!

These are just the rough refs but lined and properly colored, along with one for Splinter that shows him in his suit ( I'll add a ref of him in his naval uniform later ).

Anyway this is gonna be the master post for this au since the comic is coming out soon!

The ROTTMNT rural au is set in 1930s-40s Japan and is essentially just an au about the boys living in the Japanese countryside and dealing with the effects of pre-war ( and then later postwar) Japan. I'm making it in the same vein as Grave of the Fireflies, This Corner of The World and The Wind Rises in that it mostly deals with the effect of the war on citizens and how it upended their lives in the smaller ways ( rationing, losing loved ones, etc )

I'm putting a lot of research into this au, but of course if there as anything that needs to be changed or is wrong please let me know.

Time to ramble about some design choices!

Starting with Splinter: he's totally human in this au, but has much of the same personality as Rise Splinter, save for the movie star thing. He's a lot more contemplative, I think. His first outfit is a simple suit - Japan in the 1920s and 30s was starting to introduce more westernized fashion, at least for the men. Many women still wore kimonos, even in the cities. Since Splinter is a decently high ranked officer as well as moving from the city to the countryside, he would definitely have a suit. I also think that color wise, he has a more subtle blue-grey palette than everyone else. Because I just thought it looked nice. Later on in the au, as he settles into country life, he typically wears a yukata around the house. He also has another outfit, which is essentially just an old naval uniform that er wears to work in the garden. He's 30 at the beginning of the au, in 1932, but since that's when we see him the most I haven't added his later looks just yet.

Raph: so Raph is kind of the main character in this au. He's the eldest and originally he's the only one who really knows what's going on. In my original design he was a bit shorter, but realistically he's probably a lot bigger than all his brothers. Design choices! So, when they were kids Raph typically didn't wear a shirt at all, though sometimes when they went to the village he would wear a yukata and some simple monpe pants. He prefers just wearing an undershirt and the monpe pants, since he's ripped a lot of yukatas with his spikes. He also tends to roll his pants up because he doesn't like when they touch his ankles.

Donnie: so Donnie is the older twin to me always. He's a little taller than Leo, too, but it's barely noticeable. He has super thick glasses that Splinter had to really work to find when he was young , thankfully the prescription was good enough. Nowadays there's a yokai doctor in the village that can help with that stuff. He gets cold easily and tends to bundle up with a more traditional yukata, except he ties the sleeves up to keep them out of the way. He also typically wears monpe pants to do the housework. He does most of the household chores along with Mikey. They're really close due to spending so much time together. He also sucks at sewing.

Leo: Leo is hard of hearing, but usually only has trouble when someone speaks too quietly or there is too much stimuli, like the rain or thunder or things like that. He also has a tendency to wander around their farm at night and frequently falls asleep on the roof. He wears a combination of undershirt + monpe pants and a regular yukata. Typically its the undershirt and pants combo, even when he goes to the village. He also gets cold easily and has a bad immune system, but he still helps Raph with most of the outside labor. Mostly cause he's reckless. He has a long-standing friendship/rivalry with Usagi Yuichi, who I have left out of this post for now since we won't really see him in the comic til later. Leo is great at sewing and has made most of their clothes/patched them up.

Mikey: baby of the group, and spoilt rotten by EVERYONE. Mikey wears mostly a yukata with monpe pants that he rolls waaaaaaay up. Leo keeps telling him to just wear shorts, but Mikey is stubborn asf. He does a lot of the cooking, since Donnie taught him. He is also the closest with their father, if only because he used to spend the most time with him. Yoshi gave him his hat for safekeeping and Mikey has barely taken it off since. His favorite food is watermelon! Mikey is very interested in humans and likes to sneak away to the nearby human village. He also likes to go into the yokai village with Leo when he can.

So that's just me rambling about design choices, clothing things, stuff like that. If anyone has questions I'd be so willing to answer! Keep an eye out for announcements about the comic within the next week or so!

EDIT: here's some helpful links for this au

Finch in the Window comic

Apples Leosagi fanfic

FITW Comic (social media version)

[terrapin-might]

Leo really said "is anybody gonna else gonna have a crush on a guy, learn everything they can about street racing and become this guy's rival?" And didn't even try and wait for an answer.

When being some guy's #1 fan isn't enough so you have to become his rival. Many such cases.

But seriously, I've thought more about this and now I know how I want this au to go down. (Strap in, I won first place in the yap-olympics)

It mostly consists of one sided rivals to lovers (my favorite) and happens a bit before the S2 finale and the year between that and the movie. And if wasn't obvious from my other post, it involves street racing (something I know nothing about why'd I choose street racing ugh—)

Pictures are kinda in order too.

Leo sees Usagi race, gets a crush, gets interested in street racing. Has to see every race he competes in from now on.(Top right)

Talks about it to anyone who listens, weirdly only focuses on Usagi hmm, Mikey draws the mystery man. (Don't tell Raph, but the next time Leo called dibs on the last pizza he gave to Mikey so he could have the drawings) (Top left)

Either buys or makes his own merch but I don't think Usagi's the type to make merch or anything like that (doesn't know how, probably wouldn't get the point) tbh so we're going with made. I think April helped. (Bottom left)

And I said they meet because of Usagi saving Leo from some baddies on my last post, that still happens here, it's the first time they meet face to face (or face to Helmut) probably some of Big Mama goons Leo couldn't really fight off because weapons aren't allowed at the races so he and Usagi get to have a romantic bike chase where they try not to crash and die.

Leo deciding if you can't be their boyfriend beat them, be their rival. He trains until he can race Usagi himself. Who is actually happy to have a rival, the weirdo lol. (Bottom right)

I haven't named this AU, so I'll be taking suggestions if you have any (pls give me ideas I don't have any)

After the read more is just an update(?) about my art and posts for people who follow me.

For some reason I've seem to become allergic to digital art, so other than some comics I already planned on posting, this might be my last digital art post for a while. I can draw on paper no problem, I guess drawing on my phone has gotten tiring and my brain hates it for now. We're going traditional baby!

Which is fine because my traditional art is better imo, digital is just easier to color and I'm bad at taking pictures. Like really bad. But I still wanna post art so it'll have to do.

Luckily I was able to finish this but this will be the only nonconic digital art for a while. Had to switch it up though cause I was really struggling the first 30 mins so it's more colorful than my usual art.

Alright that's all bye!

[hotwaterandmilk]

I started writing this last week, then my tonsillitis floored me so @bunnymajo beat me with her own post on the topic (it's v. good, check it out!!), but I still wanted to share a few of my thoughts about why y'all should consider picking up the Discotek release of the Kaitou Saint Tail anime series on blu-ray.

I'll be honest, Kaitou Saint Tail wasn't my favourite magical girl series growing up in the mid-90s, I found myself far more drawn to Sailor Moon, Wedding Peach, and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne (in that order). However, as I've grown older and re-watched the anime series a couple of times, I've grown to appreciate a lot about it that perhaps I didn't so much when I was young and had a million anime series vying for my attention.

The anime

If you've never seen the Kaitou Saint Tail anime, Haneoka Meimi is regular teenage student by day who rights wrongs by night as the thief Saint Tail. How does she know about what bad things have gone down in the local community? Why her BFF (Mimori Seira) is a nun-in-training, of course! So when Seira hears about things being stolen etc. she relays this information to Meimi so she can set things right.

Complicating the situation is Asuka Daiki, the son of a local detective who notably failed to catch a previous phantom thief (hmm!). Asuka Jr. wants to stop Saint Tail no matter what and luckily the local mayor is cool with giving him the status required to do so. Meimi slowly finds herself torn between how she feels about Asuka Jr. (whom she bickers with but ultimately cares about) and how Asuka Jr. feels about the thief Saint Tail.

So obviously if you like magical girl-type series and you're keen on a cute lil tween romance with some wacky kids' show thieving then you're going to be keen to watch (or read, the manga is adorable) the series no matter what. If you're on the fence, here are a couple of things I found to be stand-outs in Kaitou Saint Tail that you might like about it too.

Saint Tail = Seira & Meimi

Saint Tail the thief is really a team of two people. You've got Seira who gathers all the intel & helps plan, then you've got Meimi who acts as the muscle and executes the scheme. If you removed either of them you wouldn't have the legendary phantom thief everyone talks about in the series. Seira is never magical herself, she goes between God/Meimi/the community to help save "lost lambs" but her role is vital and Meimi's feats as Saint Tail are truly part of a team effort.

I've honestly always loved this about the series, that Seira isn't some friend kept in the dark nor is she another magical thief to team up with, she's got her own unique role to play that utilises her skills just as much as Meimi's role relies on her talents too. Together they are a phantom bigger than any one tween girl could ever be.

Meimi is physically adept

There's room for all types of magical girls in the genre imho and these days we've seen lots of magical girls who can land a solid punch as well as those better suited to intellectual challenges. However, in the mid-90s at a time when Tsukino Usagi and Hanasaki Momoko said it was OK to be clumsy and not great at athletics, Meimi said it was just as OK to be athletic and have excellent fine motor skills.

One thing I didn't note in my above summary of the series is that while Meimi does a whole lot of VISUALLY magical girl things like transform in the anime, she doesn't actually have any supernatural abilities. Meimi is instead adept at stage magic thanks to her father's profession and she plays a lot of tricks to get the job done (while following in her mother's footsteps as well). Meimi can't punch a bad guy through a wall like a Precure, but her strength allows her to frequently save other characters or pull herself out of tricky situations.

Asuka Jr. provides a great contrast

While Asuka Jr. can ride a bike pretty fast he's not that physically strong, which is a contrast to a lot of love interests in the genre who are tough enough to give the heroine enough time to finish the job (Tuxedo Kamen and Limone, for example). Asuka Jr. is more of an intellectual who despite managing to figure out a lot of what's going on with Saint Tail's capers, can never seem to get pin her down (and yeah yeah we know Meimi looks like Saint Tail but this is a cartoon for kids, being in on that while Asuka Jr. goes mad trying to find Saint Tail is part of the overall charm of the thing imho).

I think a decent chunk of what I like about Asuka Jr. as a male lead in Kaitou Saint Tail is that he's not some older, mysterious guy who helps solve problems; Asuka Jr. is a brat who causes most of Meimi's problems and because of his clueless youth he's also quite oblivious to her burgeoning romantic feelings for him. But I love that? They both feel like they're young kids challenging each other on an equal playing field.

While Asuka. Jr doesn't necessarily disagree with Saint Tail's objectives (to right wrongs), he doesn't support her methods (stealing is baaaaaad) and he's following his own moral code which is perhaps a little more conventional than hers. Meimi and Asuka jr. certainly bicker, but they have a lot in common that becomes apparent over time and their differences do indeed prove to be complementary to each other's in the long run.

The stakes are fairly low

Wait, isn't this a bad thing? Shouldn't the stakes be super high in order for us to care about the series? No, I don't think every magical girl series needs to have high stakes to leave an impact or be meaningful. I love that Kaitou Saint Tail isn't about a potentially world-ending event or magical abilities that could change reality as we know it. Heck, there's an episode where the entire goal of Saint Tail's elaborate scheme is to get back a notebook that a classmate gave to her crush accidentally before he can read it.

In that sense, it harkens back to a lot of older majokko shows that, while having some supernatural gifts for the heroine that Meimi doesn't technically have, still chose to focus on the lead solving personal problems or issues in the local community rather than fighting to save the planet.

This isn't to say there are no stakes at all or anything. Meimi's greatest problem lies in her diverging identities and the fact that, as ostensibly a criminal to those not helped by her talents, Saint Tail being unmasked would ruin her life. I know they're not huge stakes compared to galactic evils, but Saint Tail being an outlaw and the way the persona is both a blessing & curse to Meimi certainly is present throughout the series.

Kaitou Saint Tail's stakes might not be as high as those in Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, Tokyo Mew Mew, or any number of Precure seasons, but there's definitely a place for that in the genre and if you'd like something a little more laid back (that's still plenty of fun & with twists and turns a plenty, mind you) then this series might be worth checking out.

The anime doesn't overstay its welcome

The Kaitou Saint Tail anime is a fairly tight production that deftly balances fun filler (remember when we were allowed to have filler eps???) with more emotional story touch points and doesn't feel at all drawn out, which was certainly an issue even for some of my favourite series of the period. While I wouldn't say the anime is perfect or anything, it really doesn't have any majorly weak arcs or huge dips in quality overall.

Kaitou Saint Tail has lovely music (I'm partial to the first OP/ED combo myself), some great 90s animators at work (Abe Junko, Ishino Satoshi, Kadonosono Megumi & Gotou Keiji, Watanabe Nobuhiro, Ochi Kazuhiro, Motohashi Hideyuki, etc.), and a cast of talented seiyuu (Sakurai Tomo as Meimi and Inoue Kikuko as Seira being the stand outs).

While there are some changes to the source material and a lot of the cute, whispy beauty of Tachikawa Megumi's original artwork is lost on screen, the animated version of Kaitou Saint Tail is worth picking up not just to support the release of magical girl titles in the US market, but because it is a solid little series that I know I always appreciate spending some time with.

Anyway those are my rambling thoughts on the series. It won't be for everyone, but if you're interested in magical girl classics then you might want to check out the upcoming US release from Discotek on blu-ray.

[galaxitix]

As promised, Sunny and Cass, I present to you...

✨Miyuki Usagi✨

Miyuki Usagi is Miyamoto Usagi’s adopted daughter(and Lavinia’s girlfriend later on in my Au timeline). She's a transfem bisexual. 

Nicknames

•Yuki

•Sagi-chan

•Cotton jr./Cotton

@chaoswithcausation @sunny-clover

(I have been sitting on this for too long and by that I mean it has been sitting in my drafts, I finish the drawing some days ago but I didn't want to just post the drawing alone so I saved it as a draft to add more to it later and then my dumbass forgot completely until I saw I had 2 drafts and saw it. My bad ಥ⁠‿⁠ಥ)

Name lore under cut

Miyuki Usagi was named that way to honour Miyamoto Usagi who saved her mother’s life.(note that Japanese names are backward and are written ‘last name, first name’ so her last name is Miyuki and first is Usagi. To tell them apart for the turtles since they are on first name bases, Miyamoto is refer to as Usagi-sama/Sagi-sama and Miyuki is refer to as Usagi-chan/Sagi-chan. Usagi-sama is also nicknamed cottontails by the turtles (mostly Raph) and Usagi-chan is nicknamed cotton jr (again mostly raph) or just cotton) 

After adopting her, Usagi-sama didn’t change her name and let her keep the name her mother gave her.

(I post some sketches of the pair together at a later date...maybe)

[cedarmochi]

First actual post: Jojolands Fanfic.

WARNING: SPOILERS. SERIOUSLY. IF YOU HAVEN'T READ JOJOLANDS (ALL THE CHAPTERS SO FAR) YET, DON'T READ.

This takes place right after chapter 7.

Mechanism: Upshifting.

Jodio came to a stand still.

Did Usagi...really say what he, Jodio, heard? Lava rocks? How did he...know about the lava rocks? There was no way Usagi knew about the lava rocks. No way in hell. He wasn't there during Jodio's interrogation at Rohan's villa, so how did he, Usagi out of all people, know about the lava rocks? Usagi, Dragona, and Paco were fumbling and turning the world upside down for the diamond while Jodio was interrogating Rohan...right? Or was there something more to it? The others assumed that the diamond was the most valuable thing in the villa; break into Rohan's villa, steal it, and cash in, and then cash out. That was their goal. The only goal. Except for Jodio. Only Jodio, it was the lava rocks which became the most important, right?

Wrong. Clearly wrong as now Usagi, the boy who had ran off and then suddenly returned causing a whole commation and just conveniently saving them.

The lava rocks were the most important object in the villa. If Rohan begged Jodio to stop breaking the lava rocks, they surely had to be more valuable than the diamond. So then how the hell did Usagi figure out the existence of the lava rocks? Jodio clutched onto the lava rocks, hiding it deep within his mind, behind all his cherished memories, behind his heart, to a place where even he never stepped foot into.

Only for Usagi to casually ask Jodio about the lava rocks.

Jodio stood there like he had finally succumbed to his fate, as if he was an old man that stood before a mass of graves and finally coming to terms with death. Rohan had engraved it into his mind. Strictly do not trust your friends or group. He would "lend" Jodio the lava rocks. But why? How? And most importantly, who?

Why did Usagi ask about the lava rocks?

How did he know about the lava rocks?

Who is Jodio supposed to trust?

End.

Writers note: man, my first fanfic in a while.

I sure hope it wasn't too bad. I hope it wasn't. Jojolands is really heating up now, and in only 7 chapters, we're already exposed with so much information. Araki, you've outdone yourself again. After reading Jojolion, I didn't expect Jojolands to have an equally, hell I might even say a stronger starting point.

Please please please, give me feedback! I appreciate all of it and it will help me.

Thank you for reading!