#and although fanart for words is super hard

[canmom]

when robots got muscles

You can blame @centrally-unplanned for this post. She(?) wrote...

The ‘chrome’ designs pioneered by illustrators like Hajime Sorayama (Sexy Robot from 1984, for example) tended to be more in vogue at this time (or just…a  hot girl, who is apparently a robot, trust me bro), you don’t see designs like this too commonly until later (ask resident robo-fetishist/animator expert @canmom for details on that timeline).

After a challenge like that how can I refuse? Although the question is ‘when did robots get muscles’, this turned into something of a historical survey of robot designs from the 80s on with a throughline of biomimesis.

(Originally this was just going to be an excuse to talk about Ghost in the Shell... but I gotta be thorough.)

This was all brought on from this picture from a 1989 fanart magazine...

by an artist going by ‘Facepunch Tatebi-kun’ (顔面強打たてびー君, Ganmenkyouda Tatebii-kun). I remarked that it was interesting to see these kinds of ‘robot muscles’ in a picture from 1989, since I thought that kind of design became popular in the 2000s.

On some reflection, I think I gotta revise that opinion! I think ‘robot muscles’ became a thing around the mid 90s in anime; in the West I think it took a bit longer. But you can also see precursors already before that.

So. One thing artists are super into is biomimetic robots. That is, robots whose form (and perhaps function) is similar to animals, especially humans. The word ‘android’ referring to a human-like automaton dates all the way back to the late 19th century, but the modern ‘android, robot, cyborg’ taxonomy apparently became established around the 40s.

There’s two types of humanoid robot that get a lot of play, especially in anime. One is the convincingly humanlike cyborg, which is the same size and shape as a normal human; the other is a what we call in English a ‘mech’, i.e. a big robot you can sit inside.

Of course, if your androids just act like humans all the time, then there’s not much point having them be robots. To really create the frisson of contrast between human and mechanical forms you have to show the mechanism somehow. This could be because the machine isn’t perfectly human-like, and has visibly mechanical joints - take a look at the works of @sukabu89​ for very inventive depiction of this theme - or, the android could be damaged or undergo maintenance.

When you attempt to translate biological forms into a more mechanical design language, the traditional way has been to use hard, rigid shapes, since these make the contrast especially clear. In more recent designs, particularly as we started to see real robots with ‘artificial muscles’ such as the ones created by Boston Dynamics, we get another sort of design language to express ‘mechanical parts’, and robots start having more biological forms with exposed plasticy muscles.

So let’s tell the story. We begin at the end of the 70s.

the dawn of mechaguro

For an early example of ‘mechaguro’ (a term I’m applying very anachronistically!), when a robot gets smashed up, we have Alien (1979). This film did a ridiculous amount to define sci-fi design language, and of course the alien itself blends mechanical and biological forms, with its glossy black surface allowing it to seem to melt into the exposed pipes of the spaceship. But let’s focus on the character Ash, a secret android who is broken apart in the second half of the film.

When Ash is torn apart by the alien, his insides consist of weird white plastic beads and a milky fluid that seems analogous to blood. It’s not clear what the function of any of this tech is - it’s intended to be vague and mysterious. The outside is biomimetic but the inside is anything but. He has a kind of artificial skin which resembles a latex mask.

The Terminator films are another major touchpoint for 80s science fiction. Late in the film, Arnie starts taking damage which reveals the Terminator skeleton underneath his fake skin.

The stop-motion Terminator model is basically designed according to the principle of ‘replace human bones and muscles with hard metal bits’. So you have a metal skull, metal clavicles (which are pistons for some reason), metal shoulder blades, hydraulic pistons generally in the places where muscles are. e.g. in the above picture you can see pistons that stand in place of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and in this picture...

...you can see metal scapulae and piston biceps and triceps and a piston. The shoulder joint by contrast built in a very non-human-like way. Also there’s random tubes everywhere lol.

That’s generally how androids are portrayed in the 80s. The ‘droids’ in Star Wars are similar; C-3PO is an arrangement of metal plates with gaps suggestive of underlying mechanical details and rudimentary joints and pistons.

In Blade Runner, we have the Replicants, humanoid robots - but by the premise of the film, they are essentially indistinguishable from humans. So when the Replicants die, we never really get to see their robo-innards.

and now, anime

OK, that’s the big four Western 80s sci-fi movie series; what of anime? Of course, androids in anime go all the way back to Astro Boy. But most of these early designs don’t really focus on mechanical details all that much. Super robot designs are more like tokusatsu suits than anything. There were certainly instances of impressive mechanical animation in the 70s, with early experts including Kazuhide Tomonaga on Space Battleship Yamato. Then there’s Hayao Miyazaki’s episodes of Lupin III Part 2 which featured proto-Nausicaa flying a prototype of the robots from Castle in the Sky. It would be some years before anyone could come close to matching these!

The original Gundam in ‘79 famously started the ‘real robot’ movement [Animation Night, so let’s take a brief look at how a Gundam fits together.

Generally speaking, the way Gundams are drawn in Gundam ‘79 is kind of rough. The methods to animate these rigid mechanical systems in super accurate perspective were just not yet established at the end of the 70s, certainly not on a TV budget. The actual joints on the Gundam are left very vague, but it broadly speaking seems to move like a human in armour.

But the OVA boom was about to begin, and while it would be a while before we saw the heights of Headgear/Production I.G./Gainax, things were going to change a lot. Mechanical design and animation was about to get much more sophisticated very very quickly.

In 1982, we have Super Dimension Fortress Macross, with robots that transformed into fighter jets. Its robots are designed by Kazutaka Miyatake, who cut his teeth doing mechanical design for Space Battleship Yamato and Daicon. The Macross TV series introduced the world to the animation of Ichirō ‘Missile Circus’ Itano. [AN64] A plane with legs... honestly looks kind of goofy, but Itano’s ambition to have a highly mobile 3D camera that could move in ways that would simply be impossible in live action marked a huge step up in how robots are animated. And this would get refined even further in the film Do You Remember Love.

In terms of design, we’re really moving our inspiration from ‘tokusatsu suit’ to ‘military hardware’ here. A Macross suit has to look like something that could transform into a plane, so its silly little arms and legs have to look kind of plane-like. In any case, we are definitely still in a world of hard and rigid robotics.

Dallos (1983-4) dir. Mamoru Oshii is known as the first OVA, if not the first successful OVA [AN115]. It features a variety of mining robots on the surface of the Moon, which are generally less humanoid, taking their design cues from JCBs...

...as well as humanoid robots with fairly clear joint patterns...

...and more humanoid robots too.

The eponymous Dallos, however, is a huge humanoid robot that looks like this...

Here we have a pile of mechanical shapes that vaguely calls to mind a human face. It’s suggestive of motifs we’d see later in works like Akira.

A year later in 1985, Megazone 23 really kicks off the OVA boom in earnest [AN 103]. It also has a robot, in the form of a transforming bike that can become a humanoid piloted mech...

You can see mechanical designs and shading have become considerably more detailed; its motion is a lot more complex as well with a ton of indulgent background animation shots. The actual details of the bike -> robot transformation are rather brushed over. But to sort of sum up the design language: we have organic but hard-edged shapes contrasted by inorganic but round shapes. (These terms ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ refer mostly to symmetry and a sense of ‘flow’ in the shape.) There are few right angles as such, but a lot of broadly boxy topology. The shapes are broken up by elaborate specular highlights in complex shapes, a motif of the later Kanada school.

OK, but that’s all variants on ‘rigid robot’ so far - what about the androids? What about the more directly biological designs?

Following the enormous success of Megazone 23 Part I, Toshiki Hirano got the chance to adapt his favourite lesbian cosmic horror hentai manga Fight! Iczer One into a rather more tame OVA which released from 1985-87. In terms of mechanical design, this starts to do some interesting moves towards blending biological and mechanical forms...

Of course it has a robot in addition to the requisite bishōjo and lightsabers. In contrast to the boxy shapes we’ve seen so far, the robots in Iczer-One have a much more curvy organic sort of design language. Still, there is not a lot of emphasis on the precise details of mechanical articulation outside of select shots. (It is however notable for the first ever Obari punch!)

Despite the change in shape language, these are still very clearly animated as metal plates and not yet muscles.

In 1984 we have a very important film (for this narrative, and in general), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the film that created Studio Ghibli. Here we have the ‘God Warriors’, giant humanoid weapons with the ability to shoot a massive laser out of their mouth. Rather than robots, these are very much biological in nature, having to be grown in a kind of cocoon. In the film version of Nausicaa, an incomplete God Warrior is released, leading to an iconic scene animated by Hideaki Anno in which the God Warrior attempts to blow up the oncoming wave of Ohmu.

The God Warrior’s melting flesh is gorgeously animated, bubbling and sloughing off in great big lumps as the skeleton pokes out from underneath. Throughout, Nausicaa is full of beautiful and impressive animation of both machines (mainly planes) and biological (the giant insects), but the God Warriors, as human-made lifeforms, bring the two together. However, this strand wouldn’t be especially followed up on for a long long time.

Right, but what about Bubblebum Crisis (1987-91)? That is, after all, the iconic 80s robot girl OVA. It’s inspired heavily by Western robot-related films like Terminator and Blade Runner; here we have ‘Boomers’ (never stops being funny) as androids that can appear convincingly human. Like the Terminator, the underlying metal parts can burst out. Here we have a metal frame designed to resemble muscles, and also metal tentacles.

The shapes of these robots are a lot more organic. The robot neck has tubes that sort of resemble the neck muscles, metal plates that resemble pectorals and abs and deltoids and biceps and so on. You’ve even got a direct riff on the Terminator ‘fleshy face falling away to reveal metal skull with glowing red eye’! Under the plates there are clusters of tubes which also heavily resemble muscles. Also you’ve got the classic ‘three small circles’ motif there.

Contrasted against them are the Knight Sabers, who aren’t cyborgs as such but fight in powered exoskeletons which fit the design motifs of robot girls.

These suits are quite form-fitting, with a rubber under-layer and metal shells on top. There is definitely some attention paid to how they’ll articulate around the joints. One very recognisable 80s motif is the sort of extending spike thingies you can see on her hat there; there’s also the jets that extend out behind the suit. And, you have that multi-layer shiny highlighting of course!

Still, the way the characters move in Bubblegum Crisis is still very squarely Kanada School poses; big movements, lots of held poses accentuated by flashing and line boil, not a lot of concern for conservation of momentum or anything like that.

For a contrasting strand we can look at the rise of the ‘Otomo school’ (if you will) of realism. Around the end of the 80s, a pool of talented animators were gathering around Katsuhiro Otomo. Their most famous work is Akira, but I’m actually going to begin with Robot Carnival (1987), a wonderful anthology of short films from 1987. This features a huge variety of interpretations of the concept of robots.

For example, for Kōji Morimoto, later co-founder of Studio 4°C, the robot is a kind of cobbled-together steampunk Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a very cool design with all sorts of asymmetries and exposed parts suggesting its cobbled-together nature. And although all the robot does in this short is stand up and then fall over, a great deal of attention is paid to the little details of its articulation and its movement through space.

Presence, directed by Yasuomi Umetsu, is notable for its steps in the direction of realism - Umetsu’s characters are hyperdetailed and in some ways over-drawn. The opening shots establish this is a world where lifelike androids are common, when an android gets his head kicked off and stolen by children. Here the robot-as-doll metaphor comes in, something that will be increasingly central in the next decade. The robot girl is essentially a human-sized doll in a room full of other toys. Her creator smashes her to pieces with a wrench; later her ghost visits him as an old man. We see the girl attached to a bunch of wires, but she bleeds like a human.

Cloud by Manabu Ōhashi features another humanoid robot, an Astro Boy-like child recognisable as a robot based on his segmented torso and legs and robotic ear... cones. Here the robot is a standin for human emotions, the boy’s struggles projected onto the constantly changing sky as he walks against the wind.

Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture: Westerner’s Invasion by Hiroyuki Kitakubo (later to direct Golden Boy, Roujin Z and Blood: The Last Vampire) is a sendup of mecha shows in which two very goofy looking steampunk robots operated respectively by Japanese and Western crews duke it out, laying waste to the city around them. The Japanese robot is basically a big wooden samurai...

and the Western (more specifically American) robot is, uh

sorta big barrel with little eyes on top? I’m not entirely sure what the deal is with this design!

That’s really not relevant to our story tbh I just think it’s a neat short.

Chicken Man and Red Neck, by Takashi Nakamura, features especially distinctive robot designs. The film is kind of a dream sequence in which a terrified drunk man witnesses the revels of the machines of Tokyo, transformed into robots; the robots are extremely shaped, moving through a world that is pretty much just pistons...

These robots call to mind the dancing demons in Fantasia’s Night On Bald Mountain sequence, or even Bosch.

Otomo’s own segments feature the Robot Carnival itself, a vast mechanical structure built as... well some kind of entertaining spectacle, but which now drives around the post-apocalyptic wasteland dropping robots which explode as bombs. It’s cute.

OK, to wrap up the 80s, we gotta cover Akira (1988) [AN34]! Akira has plenty of impressive mechanical animation of helicopters, hovercraft thingies, satellite lasers and of course the famous bike, but it doesn’t really feature robots as such - but what it does have is a blending of mechanical and biological forms in its climactic sequence where Tetsuo’s psychic powers go out of control. First, wires start to spread like the roots of a plant from his robot arm - less an actual machine and more something he assembled with his psychic powers...

He takes a bullet, and the mechanical wires and muscles start to blend together and spread out like a slime mold...

...which he can extend as essentially a giant tentacle.

When his powers fully go off the rails, he bulges out into big blobs of flesh which have both veins and wires running over them. These burst out of the metallic parts as well.

He turns into essentially a giant biomechanical baby.

Did Akira invent these images of blending biology and machinery? Probably not, but I’m not really familiar enough with manga of the time to say. What can at least be said is that Otomo’s absurdly meticulous style could really sell it. Otomo was truly a god of perspective and detail; Akira the film was an enormous, prestigious production that threw ludicrous effort and resources towards realising his vision (which doesn’t mean it paid its inbetweeners much more...). A lot of the animators who worked on Akira would go on to be prominent in...

the 1990s

So, the 1990s. If the 80s was dominated by the later Kanada School, the new movement of the 90s, at least as far as film animation goes, was ‘realism’.

But before we get onto that, let’s take a brief look at Gunnm (1990). Known as Battle Angel Alita in the West, this manga by Yukito Kishiro depicts a world in which most people are cyborgs; it was adapted to an OVA by Madhouse in 1993 and became wildly popular overseas. Its protagonist Gally, aka Alita, starts out the story as a wrecked cyborg body like this...

Looking at this design, you can see similar patterns as we have so far. We have metal clavicles, metal sternocleidomastoid muscle, metal pectorals, metal spine. There aren’t robot muscles, per se, but there’s a lot of attention to detail on mimicking biological shapes.

Before long she is rebuilt (twice in the manga, once in the anime). Her new body is like this...

...which is to say a skintight bodysuit in the middle, and metal arms. These arms, although designed in a way that indicates hard surface and with a hinge joint at the elbow, are designed in a way that mimics the flow of muscles in a human arm. By contrast, her sorta-love interest Yugo has a body like this:

which gets mashed to pieces in the finale of the OVA. There’s a striking mechaguro scene in which Gally catches Yugo, but leaves him hanging by a fraying arm, which snaps, leaving him to fall to his death. Compared to later iterations of the ‘robot arm torn apart’ device, this one’s relatively light on detail...

Cyborg bodies in Gunnm are used as a visual indication of character type. Gally has curves but also sleek robo muscles: she’s a Beautiful Fighting Girl, sweet but also extremely powerful. A huge ‘muscular’ cyborg with wide shoulders is likely to be a brute. Yugo here has much more plain, simple shapes with visible bolts, not precision pieces like Gally.

I don’t know how much of this originates with Gunnm. I’m sure the idea of cyborg girls was in the air long before, but this became an influential example on the tail end of the time of the 80s bishōjo. One device that is notable here is the idea of a ‘full body cyborg’, which is only human down to the brain (or perhaps not even that). Body swapping is a major theme in Gunnm, something that would be expanded on before long...

And if that was going out, what was coming in? Let’s look at Patlabor, which traces the evolution of the Headgear artistic collective and IG Tatsunoko into Production I.G.. This is about as down to earth as giant robot stories can get, with robots as just everyday machines used for work and by the cops. But where things really go nuts in animation terms is the opening to Patlabor 2 (1993).

Here you can see some of the most impressive sequences of mechanical animation ever drawn. We see pilot Noa testing out the robot, and especially notable are the scenes of the hand flexing and of walking. Enormous attention is paid to the articulation of joints. The robot’s hand can swivel 360 degrees, unlike a human; however, like a human, the articulation of the fingers seems to be controlled by hydraulics in the forearm (whereas in humans, the muscles and tendons in the forearm control our fingers). When the robot’s foot steps, it flexes like a real human foot, with believable joints, and a sensible arrangement of pistons to absorb force.

It’s not imitating a human’s muscles, but the attention to the details of the robot’s mechanical design serves precisely to draw our attention to the ways it’s like/unlike a human - the robot’s hand impossible motion immediately contrasted with its pilot shot from the same angle. And the perspective drawing is absolutely impeccable. The robot is made of purely rigid structures, and the way rigid structures articulate is not at all how a human’s joints articulate.

The sequence above was animated by Atsushi Takeuchi. But across the board, the bar was getting pushed for mechanical animation. For example, observe this cut from Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996-1999), in which the robot tears off its own arm and beats up another robot. The precision of the way the joints are animated and the way the robots move in space is just completely on another level compared to what Gundam had been doing a couple of decades prior.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about robot muscles, and we’re just a few years out from that now!

The year that robots got muscles, at least as far as anime is concerned, is 1995.

You can probably guess the next part. In 1995, we get Eva and GitS. Let’s start with GitS, to continue the Production I.G./Mamoru Oshii thread. The opening sequence of GitS, animated by - who else could it be? - Hiroyuki Okiura - has to be one of the most iconic segments of video ever drawn. Here’s a merely 720p youtube upload but go and find the place you have GitS stored on your hard drive and watch it in proper quality eh.

OK, yes, a lot of it is a naked lady floating around, sue me or whatever. But the sense of form. We see early on an appearance of ‘robot muscles’, here closely resembling real muscles...

We can see from the way this is drawn that it’s made of a combination of artificial muscles, solid segments, and flexible, fabric-like panels. One of my favourite shots at the beginning shows the solid segments of the skull clicking into place. Here we have a very clear contrast between the angular, hard edges of the mechanical pieces against the organic forms of a human body.

Elsewhere in the film, we see various incredibly cool bits of ‘wouldn’t be fucked up if a body did this‘, like the fingers...

Here, what we expect to be soft biological fingers is contrasted with unexpected rigidity, mechanical joints under a shell.

Also in this scene we encounter a robot body that has been stripped of her arms, legs and hips but is nevertheless still alive...

most extraordinary hacker in the history of cybercrime and you have your titties out and yet you still can’t get them to stop misgendering you, smh

For the Terminator, having its body smashed up and continuing to walk was a demonstration of its strength. Here, as would become perhaps an increasing motif, having a robot body is a source of vulnerability: people can do things to you that would kill an ordinary human but you keep going through it. Not surprisingly, ‘robot body maintenance’ is a recurring porn device. (One that GitS deploys in SAC s2).

But of course this all builds up to the all time classics of mechaguro scene at the ending where the Major attempts to tear off the hatch of a spider tank. Muscles ripple individually under the surface of her skin, her arms bulge in exaggerated contraction, and then her arms fully tear apart under the force.

Here, we’re showing her as mechanical not by contrasting rigid forms with biological ones, but by exaggerating the biological ones to the point of doing something extremely unnatural. Human muscles do not generally flex in such an individual way, nor are they strong enough to tear the arm apart, but robot muscles? Yeah, they could do that. This sets up the next scene where the Major lies unnaturally still, but can still exert control through hacking through her union with the Puppet Master.

Robots holding onto something so hard their arms explode has become... if not a recurring image, then at least one that was called back decades later in Violet Evergarden.

The final scene of GitS brings back the image of robot-as-doll, with the Major’s consciousness now uploaded into a black-market robot body that resembles a child in a dress.

This is further expounded on in Oshii’s second GitS movie Innocence (2004), with its Ballade of the Puppets in the soundtrack as Batou and Togusa (and eventually, the Major) are attacked by essentially an army of ball-jointed doll gynoids. The puppets’ movements are extremely unnatural and erratic acrobatics, constantly flipping all over the place; when hit by bullets, panels pop open to reveal the underlying brass skeleton. It’s a very cool image. (The thing that lets the sequence down is the extremely dated CGI and aggressive digital compositing.)

It also has Donna Harraway as a literal cyborg!

Now, the GitS movies didn’t drop fully formed out of nowhere, but draw on the work of Masamune Shirow. The manga has a somewhat different design sensibility than the movie, distinctive and shiny as all Shirow’s art. It is more rounded and organic, less cold.

So, the basic design of a cyberbody originates with Shirow. You can see it on this page (unfortunately from a flipped version, translation Dark Horse):

You might be able to determine from how the nurses are dressed that, yeah, the GitS manga is in significant part fetish porn. But really nerdy fetish porn, which is the best kind. This chapter is almost entirely dedicated to explaining how cyborg bodies are constructed in great detail, from the ‘sensory film’ (that’s what’s being applied in the opening to the 1995 film) to the hair implantation.

It’s interesting seeing how some of the more out-there designs of the manga, like Chief Aramaki, are transformed into the realist style of Hiroyuki Okiura. It’s Okiura, so it works great of course.

I don’t know if there are manga examples of such detail about cyborg bodies that predate Shirow.

Anyway, that’s just one of the two punches dropped in 1995. The other is Neon Genesis Evangelion. To the pedants: sure, the Evas are not actually robots, but they’re giant cyborgs that play the role of ‘robot’ in the story and they look like robots so I’m counting them.

Anyway, the thing about the Evas is they are incredibly lithe. They run, rip and tear and swing heavy objects around in a way that’s both weighty and distinctly biological. Their bodies are extremely flexible compared to prior mechs (look at how much the spines bend in that Iso cut from EoE!), but not without hard, rigid components such as the shoulder towers. Their jaws are bestial but feature mechanical-like components like interlocking hexagonal teeth and jet-like vents. They are in short a fantastic design that blends biological and mechanical features.

The impact of Eva on just about everything can’t be overstated, but as far as robot design, well. There certainly were works that leaned on the precedent set by Eva, as for example RahXephon, which also treats robots as something spiritual, prone to popping into a blob of weird little bubbles just like in Eva.

There’s a great deal missing from this account. I am very focused on anime because I’ve watched a lot more anime than I’ve read manga or played games from this period. So I’m sure there’s major foundational works I’m missing here!

the 2000s

When did the West start to catch up? eh that’s subjective - David Cronenberg was way ahead of the game! - but specifically in the sense of robots with mechanical muscles, I think the major points in the timeline go a bit like this.

In 1999, there’s the Matrix, which leans heavily on anime. This features a similar ‘robot takeover’ premise to Terminator, but here it’s biomimetic robots modelled after squids, with clouds of constantly moving tentacles that sweep behind them. After making a cool half a billion dollars, the Wachowskis decided to pay all their favourite anime directors to make short films. I’m not going to comment on every part of the Animatrix, since most of it isn’t really relevant, but I will point to this horrifying cut by Takeshi Honda in The Second Renaissance in which a robot woman has her clothes torn and then skin bashed off by a mob. The framing, motion, her expression of abject terror, and the ‘reveal’ of her ‘true’ nature, all viscerally call to mind a trans bashing.

On the manga side, a big one to mention is Gantz, a gory nihilistic seinen manga which ran from 2000-2013. The characters in Gantz fight in special latex-like suits which take on the appearance of muscles while engaging superstrength, but can also sustain damage that causes them to drip fluids from ports located at the neck and become fatal to their wearer. Gantz was adapted to anime by Ichirō Itano in 2004, but I haven’t seen it so I can’t comment on any notable animation.

Cyborgs are a favourite subject of games, but in the 2000s, games are really pushing art direction and biopunk stuff is in. Half Life 2 (2004) has its spider-crab like Striders and dropships and so on. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997) bases its whole concept around the sheer variety of weird creatures that would inhabit its dystopian factory. And I gotta give a shoutout to Septerra Core (1999) - in case one other person has played that lmao

At some point after 2005, Boston Dynamics became a viral sensation thanks to their robot BigDog. BigDog is just welded steel and hydraulics, but its lifelike hopping movement style definitely brought to mind the idea that the future of robots is going to be in biomimesis.

So, 2007, here comes Crysis to melt your PC! This is an FPS with the not-uncommon premise of being a supersoldier fighting (country America hates) and also aliens, but its gimmick was that you have a special exosuit that wraps around your body with artificial muscles, making you much stronger and manlier or whatever.

This is indicated by a visualisation that could be right out of a toothpaste ad, where tiny little balls drop into the character’s pores and somehow go straight into the bloodstream which is of course a void full of flying red blood cells. And so on. It sold the game, though! The ad there focuses almost entirely on the suit and not the character wearing it, who is basically an irrelevant soldier man. What it entailed in gameplay terms is that you have a mode switcher so you can have strength or armour or invisibility or whatever. But it’s cool military superscience, you see!

Anyway. Not like my preferred flavour of cyborg is any less stupid I guess x3

In the same year, Bayformers started. These films’ robots are honestly just visual noise, there’s so many moving metal shards going every which way that it’s next to impossible to discern any sort of underlying mechanical principle. A similar ‘overwhelming business’ visual effect would be applied the next year in Iron Man, kicking off the MCU. So mechanical muscles definitely weren’t the only expression of ‘hyper-advanced robot’ in Western visual media in the late 2000s.

I’m going to end my story with two more games: Horizon Zero Dawn and NieR Automata.

Horizon features a world inhabited by a large variety of robot animals, using the peak of AAA rendering techniques. The robots are designed to be biomimetic after both modern animals and prehistoric ones, and feature a combination of hard surfaces and softer biological muscles. For example, a robot horse:

The discipline of making designs like these now has a name: it’s called ‘hard surface modelling’ and it involves boolean operations and bevels and other techniques designed to create a balance of hard edges on a surface against the smoother parts. The design language of Horizon says that the hard plates are white, the soft parts are very dark and may be patterned like a cloth texture, and there can be small colour accents here and there.

I think you can definitely see the influence of Boston Dynamics’s robots (and recent military tech in general) in these designs, iterated on through a decade and a half of increasingly intra-referential concept art. They are visually very busy designs, but there are a couple of recognisable features that draw attention by being inorganic, such as the cylindrical fuel tank at the back. Vitally, the silhouette is very readable.

This robot T. rex for comparison serves as a world boss monster, and you can see it’s got a bunch of military looking attachments that look like radars and missile launchers and so on. As real tech evolved, so too did our idea of what a scary robot ought to look like.

So, that’s where this kind of design pattern has gone in mainstream games.

Now to finish, a brief comment on NieR Automata. Its designs draw hard on those of Ghost in the Shell. Visually it draws a strong contrast between the Machine Lifeforms, who have inorganic shapes (spheres and cylinders) and very visible and plausible mechanical joints, and the doll-like androids, who might as well be human (although A2 provides some contrast in an android who is damaged enough for the underlying materials to show through). The mechanical nature of the androids is communicated by the acrobatic way they move and the interface elements, and dead androids you find in the field - and later when they start losing arms and stuff, it’s a whole thing. But just like humans in Yoko Taro Games, they’re capable of dying in a puddle of blood.

(I guess if you take one thing from this post it’s that if you’re a robot, don’t expect to keep your arms.)

Robot muscles gives you a chance to give both the ‘anatomy porn’ of drawing something very precisely right, with the added bonus of giving you a reason to draw the muscles écorché, and the chance to make it weird and defamiliarised by splitting it with mechanical elements. In short... they look cool!

In this whole post I’ve basically not touched at all on illustration. I can point to a variety of illustrations of robot girls, but in terms of periodising them, I just don’t think I know enough. Though it’s safe to say that cyborg bodies in various states of construction or disrepair are now a mainstream of concept art - and that Ghost in the Shell is usually cited as an influence. I don’t know if robot muscles ever truly became the mainstream way to depict a robot, but it does feel like they’re increasingly common.

One artist I will briefly mention (besides sukabu), mostly bc I think they’re neat, is Haruyo Megurimu, who draws these very intricate designs of ‘necrotech’ which is sort of very biological robots extending out of human bodies - limbs extended on long spindly insectoid strands, jaws splitting open, that kinda thing. Can’t say who influenced them or anything but it’s a compelling extension of the idea into a particular corner of aesthetic space.

And that’s all I’ve got I think. There’s definitely big gaps like. More recent sci-movies. Western comics. Nevertheless, that’s an arc.

If you’ve read this far: thank you for indulging my autism.

[jellolegos]

I love your Rhaenicent fanart of them with their baby but I do find it interesting you made Alicent the birther when in canon Rhaenyra’s the one who wanted children whilst Alicent was forced to.

I think Alicent’s happy ending is the poem: “in a dream i saw my mother with the love of her life and no children it was the happiest i'd ever seen her”.

With Rhaenyra on the other hand she needs her boys, that’s why most fanart of her death is her running to them.

Either way I’m loving your fanart, I just wonder if the reason you think Alicent would be the one giving birth instead of Nyra is because she tends to be portrayed as the “feminine” one in the relationship.

I mean, the baby is just sitting in Alicent’s lap, i didn’t/don’t conceive of either of them as necessarily birthing the baby so you’re welcome to interpret it as you wish (they also have white hair and are reading a book about dragons, although it got washed out, so they’re definitely rhaenyra’s kid).

I think the only thing going through my brain was that it would be cute for rhaenyra to greet her wife and kid after a small council meeting :) a monarch is busier than their consort, always!

I wrote a little bit about this on the twitter post of this art but I agree with you, I really hard time with fitting rhaenicent kids into my own interpretation because I don’t really know if either of them but especially alicent would want kids. I’ve been drawing them for 2+ years and I think this is the only baby I’ve drawn for them! (So like less than 2% of the time, lol) it’s definitely been something I’ve watched and have watched evolve over the course of the show.

here was what I wrote in the thread, which is probably the extent of my thinking into rhaenicent kids (as always, subject to change):

*I would probably change my phrasing from ‘not space or even a vernacular’ to ‘alicent lacks completely the ability to conceptualise or express her thoughts on motherhood or potential queerness outside of her circumstances’.

I think Alicent’s repression is pretty intentionally designed as a foil to rhaenyra’s expressiveness. I’ll default to something Emma has said which is that Rhaenyra is a ‘super-embodied’ character, and so I think even if, in a perfect world where she wasn’t forced to marry and birth the babies of an older man, alicent did really crave motherhood, would we know? Whilst rhaenyra is able to, to me, enjoy motherhood and express both a dislike and an acceptance of it despite constraints placed on her, we don’t really see anything of that magnitude with alicent (I think she struggles with her motherhood, but would she have in another world?).

The same goes for their respective queernesses. Rhaenyra may not know the word for what she’s feeling with mysaria, she’s willing and able to explore it, Alicent isn’t; she finds spiritual relief from it in extreme religious zealotry, emotional relief through her husband (‘my husband would not wish for the death of his daughter’), and physical relief through Rhaenyra’ ex lover, but she is unable to take that final step. Maybe she will though! i could totally see rhaenicent being DINKs and absolutely being the rich gay aunts for gwayne’s kids tbh, that’s my usual headcanon for them

[therentyoupay]

Hi Kris! I just wanted to say that after reading chapter 7 you and Callie have left me in utter SHAMBLES and AWE with how devastatingly gorgeous the pictures you can paint with literature are. I’m desperately excited to see how you two will be continuing the story although I do have a question that I’m unsure if you’ve answered before. After this broadway oscar winning fanfic has been completed are you and Callie thinking of possibly doing more collaborations or simply just yourself doing more collaborations with other artists and bringing more delicious stories to life?👀👀💞💞

thank you so much for taking the time to leave such a lovely message in my askbox, for saying SUCH NICE AND LOVELY THINGS, and for sharing with us the impact this story has had on you!! 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 calli and i have been working so hard on this project for two months, and it really means a lot to hear how much you're enjoying it. 💕💕💕

future kriscallicollabs??? we haven't answered this question before, and it's a lovely question!! currently, calli and i are 1000% focused on finishing more than you know and getting part ii of the jelsa video ready to post (SO MANY GIFS), so we haven't actively started planning any other collabs! however, when this idea was first planted back in the summer of 2023 or whatever, we braindumped SEVERAL ideas into the original majestic KrisCalliCollab google doc... (more than you know was actually only one of several ideas! 🤣)

there's a jelsa!wildward collab that we really wanted to do but didn't have time to do fully, so we made a bunch of LORE, and i made a baby fic, and some edits: one of our other ideas that we really wanted to do was a jelsa!prequel to her wildward series and establish some lore for the first aegis users! we definitely did not have time to create a full-fledged fic, but LORE WAS HAD (pages and pages on the google doc), and in the end, i made two edits and wrote a little micro-fic for it! in the time of the first keeper... maybe one day we'll expand? 🤣

when?? oof, not anytime soon, because life is upon us 🤣🤣🤣 BUT, calli and i are creative counterparts for life (TWIN FLAMES), so who's to say??? maybe sometime within the next five years?? FIFTY YEARS?? to be determined, but i do not doubt that it shall happen eventually! calli has also been pushing for a zelda/link!jelsa AU for ages and i have not forgotten 🤣🤣 in the meantime, we'll just keep supporting and devouring each other's other projects!!

(also, not sure how many people know this, but i beta-read for wildward! i have been beta-ing the series since its early chapters!!)

other collabs? i've been super lucky to be able to collab with @knightsquall (my name twin) for our kris/xris edit+fic soulmate!AU creation, not in so many words! we made it for the prompt: “the first words your soulmate will say to you will appear as a tattoo on your body at a certain age.” that two-shot is still one of my favorites. 🥹🥹🥹🥹

i haven't done any other collabs, though!! i feel like both collabs just happened organically because i was already friends with both xris and calli before we actually started working on our projects! collabs definitely require a lot of trust, for me, and so while it's possible that other future collabs might happen, i'm not actively seeking any out. 💕💕💕 there are SO MANY TALENTED fanartists out here!! so it's definitely not for lack of good company, haha, but rather just that i'd already gotten to know both people really well, so doing a collab was just, like, the natural thing to do, once we had time for it. 🤣 fic fanart? i am, however, so so so fortunate that so many fanartists have been inspired by my stories 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 i am really lucky and grateful to have been gifted so many gorgeous fanarts, fanvideos/AMVs, gifs, and doujinshi comics across multiple fics and fandoms.🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭💕💕💕 you can find (most of) them here, or on my tumblr tag (therentyoupay fic fanart) but BE WARNED, there are massive spoilers. 🙏🙏🙏🙏 proceed with caution, haha! i also desperately need to update the fic fanart page with all the new mtyk art, too!

🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🙏🙏🙏🙏 thank you so much for this ask!!! we hope you enjoy the final installments of more than you know and part ii of the jelsa video!! 🥹🥹🥹 thank you!!! 😭💕💕

[black-moon-bunny]

The un-fitting sister. (Multi-pairing)

After being handpicked by Sister Imperator, one of the newest sisters in the church gets a room right next to the library and a job to do. She turns that room into her personal sanctuary and tries to live there in peace, drowning the feeling of being an outcast. But the stress of the job comes soon to her after catching the attention and curiosity of some of the Ghouls in the abbey.

Chapter one, Chapter two , Chapter Three

Couples: Fem!Reader x Ghouls (In this chapter is just Swiss)

Warnings: Y/N used. Swiss is a bit of an asshole and a tease, dub con if you squint really hard. A bit of feels. Masturbation (Male) Some dynamics from the omega-verse (heat season and scents and blah) NSFW. +18. Minors DNI. All of the pictures were taken from the internet so credits to the people who made them.

Word Count: 5725.

A.N: I want to give special thanks to Skar and Banshee two of my IRL friends, classmates from the university and best friends who help me with the edition and comments (Specially Skar she beta-read this and did some editing.) And also I want to give special thanks to @i-foundued @copias-girl @violet-lazer @theblogghoulette @writingjourney @sweetandwoe and @whatawonderfulexistence--blog who without maybe knowing it made my end of semester less painful and gave me a lot of comfort with their writing, and also inspired me to write again. (Please people go check their work is AMAZING ) And finally I took inspiration for the physique of the ghouls from a wonderful fanart from @feuvyper

When the retired teacher first entered the abbey, she felt at home. She felt like this was going to be the place where she could finally be fully accepted, but sooner than later she started to get this feeling of loneliness again. She didn’t feel as a total outcast between her sisters and brothers of sin, most of them were really nice, caring, and comprehensive of her quirkiness, but she still felt like she didn’t fit in the mold not even in a place like this where most things were accepted.

When did this feeling of not belonging start? If she can recall, it was during her teenage years when she started to feel weird between her peers. Although she was smart, she didn’t quite fit between the “smart kids”: She was too loud, too talkative, and too rebellious to fit with them and while she was amiable with everyone, she did not tolerate the obnoxious “popular kids” who bullied almost everyone who did not fit in their status quo. She was never bullied but did not have enough privilege to be completely left alone either, they picked on her because she was too interested in the weird, unsettling things; in the mythos, in the darkness, in the weird books of the library and usually mingled with the “emo kids” without being one of them. One of their favorite ways to annoy her was telling everyone how she was so weird that not even the “emo weirdos” wanted her as a friend.

Kids are so mean sometimes, but her teenage era ended, and she decided to study at the University as she wanted to become a teacher. While entering her twenties she could be seen jumping between your average mainstream things and super weird hobbies and likings. As her mom used to say, one day she could be listening to the cheesiest k-pop song and the other she was listening to the dirtiest heavy metal. She sometimes felt like the whole rainbow, and, in others, she looked like a scale of grey. This helped her a lot while teaching, she could get along well with her students but not with her colleagues who talked behind her back as how undefined and weird could she be and how it was unprofessional from the way she talked to the way she dressed, and this ended up making her quit the job after only a few years after starting. So, at the end she didn’t fit in completely again, and decided to leave everything behind on her 26th birthday, bought a plane ticket and traveled around visiting places that interested her. That’s how she found the abbey.

Now, an entire year after joining she was fine, but still feeling like she did not belong here completely. She puts her whole heart during masses, she gets along fine with her siblings in sin, she has a job in the enormous library in the domains of the church and she really enjoys her life… But she felt empty and alone most of the time especially now that Sister Imperator changed her room arrangements after a couple of “night intrusions” into the library.

—I know that you are quite fond of books, and you have been taking diligent care of the library, and lately there has been a sort of late-night intrusions to the place. So, I need to ask you to move your room into the one next to the library. It is smaller but you won’t be sharing a room with anyone so you will fit there nicely.

—Sister I’m honored to be in your thoughts regarding this problem but, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do such thing… We have really expensive and antique material in there, and if some of it went missing it would be a huge problem to our clergy. It is a huge responsibility and…. —As the sister tried to give her excuses, Imperator was losing her patience. So, she cut her middle sentence.

—Sister y/n, are you underestimating my ability to judge? I believe that you have the perfect fit for this job, you could still work in the library and at night you should only keep an eye if there is some strange movement and inform about any encounters to me personally.

Imperator was determined to give her this position. She knew that any other sister would be incapable of doing it. Being the head behind the shadows of the clergy she was completely aware of who were the ones intruding the library. The ghouls and one of the Papas, they used the place as another one of their bedrooms to indulge in sin with the sisters and brothers. Going behind her back or at least trying to, she was annoyed by the situation and needed a solution. That’s when Sister y/n crossed her mind. She was different and quite charming, but was no fool, too self-aware to indulge in the charms of the sinful flesh of the ghouls and Terzo. It was perfect, unfitting enough between her peers to accommodate to this job without any problems.

—Do you understand? The accommodations are going to be ready today before the sun sets.

—Yes sister….—She lowered her head— I’m sorry for upsetting you

—Don't worry child, you are going to be just fine. And I’m going to let you pass this one, but if I chose you, it was because I know that you are capable. Never doubt me again, Sister—She said with the same frightening tone— Go now, you are excused from the rest of your day. Here is the key to your new room for you to get a first look at it.

—Thank you, Sister Imperator, if you excuse me…—She made a small bow and turned, but before going Imperator said something back

—Oh, and dear child, the room has some interesting secrets. I hope you get used to it and use the accommodations in your favor.

She had been living there for a whole month, and nothing remotely interesting had happened. She did not find anything weird in the room. It was, as Sister said; perfect for her, but until that moment she did not find any “secret”. She still worked at the library during the day and at night she spent her time reading on her bed and listening to some music. She felt free, lonely but free. The library and her room were on the opposite side of the rooms and after the midnight curfew not a single soul went to the wing of the library, so she was free to listen and watch her cheesy songs and shows without being judged by her roommates. She can sing and dance alone in her room without anyone there to see or listen to her and, during the day, she could still be “normal” to the clergy and its standards. Nevertheless, she still felt lonely from time to time, and in the back of her mind she still felt like she did not belong completely there. She was still too colorful sometimes, too talkative, too energetic…

Unaware of it, the sister was not the only one enjoying the peaceful corner of the abbey. There was a curious ghoul who had been wandering outside her room since a couple of weeks ago. Sodo was trying really hard to enter the library at night. He was the one to find how marvelous was the place at night to enjoy himself and some sister or brother of his liking, and then the rumor spread to Swiss, Papa, Aether, Cirrus. Even Rain and Mountain decided to try their luck on the silent library passed the curfew. It was wonderful until Sister Imperator cut him off by moving one of the sisters to the room next to the library, and he was fucked. But she needed sleep at some point, right? So, he decided to wander around the library hoping to catch the moment in which the annoying sister in the room finally fell asleep so he could enter the forbidden room again. But when he listened through the door, he did not hear a snore or some signal of a sleeping sister. He listened to a sweet voice singing at the beat of a song he did not knew. And he liked it, the curious nature of the fire ghoul wanted to know who she was, and what she was listening to, and most importantly why Imperator choose her to be here, all alone keeping an eye on the next room. So, he kept the secret and wandered some more nights outside her door, wanting to discover who was behind the voice who kept him apart from his delicious library spot. Each night, he returned to their den without answers.

—Could you finally break into the library? —Swiss was not pleased with loosing that spot either, so every night after Sodo returned to their den he pressured the ghoul to finally do something

—I already told you, she kept most of her night awake and there is no other entrance to the library than the one right next to her door! Imperator is going to punish us again if she finds out that we break the curfew and entered the library…

—Well… There is indeed another entrance, two if I can recall correctly —The voice of Emeritus the Third entered the room companied by Cirrus and Rain who were coming from a party outside the clergy’s domain— Si, one of them is behind a painting of the old man upstairs on the second floor and leads to the upper part of the library and the other I have no knowledge of it. Maybe is in the gardens of Primo, he usually goes to the library when he is not taking care of his garden…

—Excuse me Papa but if you knew about this… Why didn’t you tell us? —Swiss scoffed — It was our favorite place to sin!

—Because I was almost sure that our “dear” Sister Imperator had blocked the entrance upstairs. I don’t have the time to go and check but if it’s still available you could use it… And tell me if it works.

—So, you don’t get in trouble with Seestor? —Sodo mocked in nihil tone while talking about Imperator.

—Yes, she can be quite scary and the old man is completely under her control, I don’t want to mess around and find out what her punishments can be. Even Primo fears her. —He laughed a bit at his own confession and left the room, the ghouls looked at each other with smirks of anticipation on their faces. Who was going to be the first one to test their luck and enjoy the pleasures of the desert library?

Swiss decided that it was going to be him, so the next day he waited patiently for the library to open so he could "pick a book” from the second floor. As he walked into the library, he saw a couple of sleepy eyes in the reception corner. He assumed that she was the sister who lived next door and was messing up with his plans… If he could manage to seduce her, Sister Imperator would kick her of the job?

—Good morning, Sister…—Swiss smiled at her, showing a bit of his fangs while at it.

—Good morning…. — She looked at the ghoul and froze a bit. It was not the first time that she had seen the ghouls. Usually, she saw them at dinner seated next to Papa and the upper clergy, in the mass or the rituals. And they were amazing on stage, full of energy, moving the masses and being devoted to giving the best of them each time. But she had never seen one right there in front of her, and she was stunned. His greyish skin peeking through his hands and neck, the smell of musky cologne; probably not even cologne, just his own scent. It was intoxicating. Now she could understand a bit how easy it was for them to seduce both sisters and brothers in sin. His sole presence was intimidating yet at the same time magnetic.

—Oh, we have never met before, right? It’s a pleasure Sister…. —The smell grew stronger as the ghoul took a step closer to find the name in the desk — Sister….y/n?

—Eh…Y-Yeah…—She took a step back. She felt lightheaded with the smell, but at the same time she could not avoid the desire to keep indulging in the scent of the ghoul.— Nice to meet you…—She tried to make eye contact, but when her eyes locked with the ghoul, even through the mask, she felt like a scorching sensation growing from her stomach and traveling to her head. She lowered her gaze to the desk trying to find the registry book.

—Swiss, you can call me Swiss. —His grin extended a bit seeing how easy it was to flood her mind with his scent. It was a dirty trick but he was having a lot of fun with her. Maybe his plan of going to the second floor could wait a bit. Maybe he could tease her enough to make her fall. — I was wondering… Would you be bothered if I stay here and read some books? I would love to read something but in the ghouls den is a bit… difficult, you know? They are most of the day screaming and creating mayhem…—He tried to capture her gaze again and his voice made a soft change to a lower tone — And don’t get me wrong, I love mischief myself —He licked his lips before continuing, passing his tongue over the tip of one of his fangs. The poor sister was like a bunny in headlights, mesmerized with the sight in front of her. — But sometimes you need a place more… private and quiet to relax, right? —Taking a step closer to the desk, the ghoul pressed both of his hands onto the wood, looking at the hands of the sister who fidgeted with the pages of an old book. — Do… you… mind?

—O-Oh! Ehm…N-No! Not at all, I mean this is the library anyways and you have the same right as everyone here to use it. I’m just here to make paperwork and also organize a bit. It is really calm here so you could be here all day reading if you wanted to….—She took the book and opened in a new page, she wrote the date and then she looked at Swiss— Here, you need to sign here and then you have to bring the books that you are going to be using so I can take the register and before leaving, you need to sign again. That’s all.

Swiss watched how the sister wrote with wobbly hands his name next to the date and moved his hand slowly to take the pen from her and sign. When he brushed her fingers, he noticed how her heart rate increased, and how her cheeks blushed slightly. She was such a cutie; how could he tempt her even more? He was barely touching her, and she was already blushing. He was sure now that this was going to be completely amusing.

—Thank you, Sister… Would you recommend something? I know my fair share of books, but I don’t have any particular likings. —He was trying his best to keep eye contact, but she kept avoiding his gaze. But her body spoke volumes to him, her scent was sweet but as he kept talking, her body scent shifted a bit, a sweet and acidic smell, like a pomegranate. She was reacting as he expected and that delighted him.

—Eh… Well… Maybe something of Science Fiction if you want to. We have a bit of everything… Even gardening books. Papa Primo usually reads them while attending the garden...—She was talking a lot again, but she couldn’t stop it. Even if she wanted to, his sole presence made her keep talking — Or maybe some horror literature? I have a few favorites… Some Gothic literature could interest you also…

—Whatever you prefer Sister…—Swiss took some distance from the main desk while the sister moved towards one of the bookshelves searching for a specific book, The Picture of Dorian Grey, one of her favorites, but she couldn’t reach it. Before she could even ask for help, she felt Swiss body behind her, pushing her slightly against the bookshelf, trapping her between the books and his chest. The scent of the ghoul grew stronger flooding her lungs and leaving her lightheaded again. Swiss’ arm moved upwards and took the book, but kept his position and lowered his head to speak right behind the distraught sister ear.

—Is this what you want?...—He asked in a low deep voice, his breath colliding with her ear and sending shivers down her spine. She felt her thighs pressing against each other ever so slightly, as a way to control the pressure growing in her core. Swiss felt the change again in her smell, even more sweet but strong and acidic. He couldn’t help getting aroused, her scent was different of what he usually smelled in the sister’s. Her scent was stronger, and more addictive. At this point he could totally forget going to the second floor and find the door from the inside of the library. — The book?

—Yes…—Her voice was almost a soft whimper, her breathing was deep, almost like she wanted to drown in the smell of Swiss. She felt the heat of his body pressed against her back, and if she pressed a bit against the ghoul, she could swear that he was well built underneath his pants. Now she knew why it was so easy for them to seduce. Was it something natural to them?

—Well, thank you…—With more will that he thought he would need, Swiss backed up from the sister. Finally, she could breathe air again, but at the same time she felt a bit empty. — Do you mind if I sit there? —Swiss pointed a small armchair facing the desk, he wanted to test her will even further. He was having a blast and also, he wanted to have a small taste of that sweet, scented bunny who looked at him with her big eyes and blushed cheeks.

She went back to her desk, and he took a seat opening the book. The air felt heavy, and the tension was thick enough to be cut with razor, but she kept doing her work, trying her best to cool down a bit and keep her mind away from the ghoul in front of her. But her mind was betraying her; She thought on how would it feel being underneath him while he grabs her hair and pushes against her. Would he be like a beast? Maybe sweeter? How big it was? He was a ghoul! Maybe their proportions were different? Each one of those thoughts flooded her brain while trying to do her paperwork.

Her body was also betraying her; Her legs felt like gelatin, and she knew that her underwear was getting wetter by the minute. She couldn’t help it, it was like all of that scent drugged her, her whole body was feeling sensitive, but she needed to keep a straight face. She could not let go of herself. She needed to do her job and if she failed, Sister Imperator would probably kick her out of the abbey. She tried to focus on her papers until she looked up for a brief moment to where Swiss was seated, and then she got lost in the picture. Swiss with a couple of loose buttons in his shirt, seated with his legs wide open with the book on one hand and the other in his left thigh, going slowly from his knee close to his crotch and down again.

It was a slut move. He knew it, he wanted to keep going. Fuck the second entrance to the library, he was enjoying this so much. Her scent grew and he could almost taste her, her arousal. He felt the tightness in his pants. He was getting horny too, even his glare began to fail. He was going to take it even further. He took off his mask and left it on the table close to him, brushed a bit of his hair before returning to his "reading".

She almost choked when he took his mask out. If she already believed that he was handsome beneath the mask, reality hit her like a truck. He was gorgeous. He had a beard not too long but enough to cover his chin and jawline. His human glare was fading, and she could see the lines between his hair where his horns were and his skin, a warmer tone of grey, began to fade black towards his temples and hands. It was breathtaking. He couldn’t handle it as well as she thought, her arousal was making a pool between her legs. Damned ghoul, if she indulges, she was going to get in so much trouble with Sister Imperator.

Swiss was fully aware of the reactions of the sister. Her scent now was intoxicating him, he could feel her arousal, his glare giving up slowly and his pants were becoming tighter by the minute. But he still could play it cool. He moved a bit from the seat to accommodate himself and, without any shame, he grabbed his crotch and fixed his erection to release some pressure, moving it a bit inside his pants. And when he did this, he looked right into her eyes with a growing smirk.

—Is everything all right Sister y/n? You seem quite… uneasy —Uneasy was an understatement. She was dying from the inside; her legs would stop working at any minute; her lungs were burning, and her pussy was squelching as she pressed her legs tightly to relieve some of the pressure.

—Y-Yeah, it is fine, I’m just… It is really hot in here, maybe I should open a window…—She tried to walk but her body was making it difficult. When she left the desk, she could feel the gaze of the ghoul going up her legs.

—You know… Something about ghouls is that depending on the element we possess…We can change our body temperature. If you are so hot… Maybe I can cool you down —He pated one of his thighs with a sassy smirk.

—I don’t think that… it’s going to cool me down…—She walked closer to the armchair, almost hypnotized by the ghoul. She really wanted to let herself go, worship the ghoul in front of her, an almost primal desire. She was not a “prude” or anything, she has a couple of encounters under her sleeve, but she never felt something quite arousing as this weird play with Swiss, and she was about to fall into it.

—Just trust me, Sister… I’m a lot of things but not a liar…—When she was close enough, he grabbed her arm an made her sit in his lap. She let out a small moan and Swiss’ hands squeezed her thighs growling —I’m cold? … You are trembling…—He had this mischievous grin on his face. He knew exactly what he was doing to her, but he hoped that she didn’t know what she was doing to him. His cock was pressing so hard against the seam of his pants, leaking precum and leaving a wet spot on the fabric. His tail was fast to travel beneath her back and positioning itself between her breast, cupping one of them. He needed her, his body was reacting like crazy. He was pretty sure that his “heat” season was far away, but he was feeling like he was in heat. Even thinking of keeping her a secret and just for him.

—Swiss, don’t, I can’t….

—Oh, why not? Seestor is not going to know… And I’m going crazy here… You smell delicious…—His face was hidden in her neck, taking deep breaths of her scent while caressing her legs. — Don’t lie to me Sister… You want this as much as I want this… I can smell it…—He moved one of his hands closer to the seam of her underwear, trying to pull it aside to touch, feeling in the fabric how wet she was; his fingers impregnating with her fluids.

—Swiss… N-No…I can’t. Y-You…. Sister Imperator is… is going to kill me…—She tried to move his hands away but couldn’t. Why was it so hard to say no? She wanted it so badly; her whole body was on fire. And his hands were cold, touching her so right. It has been so long since she let herself be caressed like that.

—I can smell how your scent drops from here… Right here —He was about to move her underwear aside finally touching her, he wanted nothing more at that point.

And then then someone moved the door, knocking a couple of times

—Sister y/n, I brought back the books of vegetables of the season.

Papa Emeritus the First, Primo.

She jumped from his lap as quickly as possible and went behind the desk again. Swiss walked into one of the corridors full of books, hiding from Primo’s sight. He was completely out of his human glare, with a hard on, sweating and gasping in complete heat. He was so close, she smelled so sweet. His frustration grew quickly. He remembered why he was there in the first place and got even more annoyed with the whole situation

Her legs were about to collapse, her underwear beneath her skirt was almost falling from her ass down to her knees. She felt how wet she was. She was completely flustered, gasping for a bit of air.

Primo was old, but not blind. And he was no fool. He knew exactly what was going on, but there was no one there besides her… and the suspicious ghoul mask. One of Copia’s ghouls.

—Sister… Are you okay? You seem quite… unwell…. —Or too well, but Primo was a gentleman, and he knew that she could get in trouble with Imperator.

—Yeah! I’m just… Is really hot here, and I been working…

—Alone? —He pointed out the mask with a sly smirk.

—O-Oh, eh…S-Swiss was helping me to … eh, reorganize some books of the upper shelf and well, he was more comfortable without the mask… B-But he …

—Here, Sister…. —Swiss’ voice was low. He was angry. — I finished. I’m leaving… Thanks for letting me… help. If you excuse me, Papa…. —He grabbed the mask and left as quickly as he could. He was pissed, he was horny also. He needed to take that anger out, and he needed to fuck. He had an amazing idea. He went up to the second floor of the abbey looking for the painting of the old man. When he finally found it, he tried to move it, trigger something to open that allegedly “secret corridor” but nothing happened. Until he realized that one of the eyes of the painting was sinking out slightly from the painting. He poked it looking at his surroundings, but it was early and most of the hallways were empty; the majority of siblings were preparing for the mass before lunch. And Sister Imperator was probably with the old man. The painting moved a bit, letting Swiss enter a small corridor. He followed and found that, indeed, it was connected with the library. He entered the library from the second floor, careful not to be discovered. And he overhead a conversation between the Sister and Primo.

—I-Its okay, Papa… I swear, Swiss was just helping me.

—I know, but if he oversteps, you should put him in his place, ghoul or not. You have my protection…—He was serious about that; he had a soft spot for her. When she was not working at the library, she would spend some time with Primo taking care of the garden. She looked at him as a fatherly figure between the clergy, even reminded her of her own grandpa who passed when she was younger.

—I will Papa, don’t worry… Besides, it’s just a ghoul. He is just… charming to the other sisters. —She was trying to put dirt on the fact that the ghoul almost fucked her. She needed to pretend that she didn’t care or even feel attracted to Swiss, even when down her legs she still was wet from her previous encounter. She knew that getting involved with a ghoul in that kind of way could mess her relationship with Sister Imperator; and the job, and keeping the room for herself, her own little sanctuary. Now that Swiss was gone, that his scent was gone, she was thinking with more clarity— He is just a ghoul like many others of the abbey… N-Nothing special…. —The aftershock of her body was killing her. Even though she felt wasted after the interaction, even when her whole body hurt and her legs felt stiff, she was doing her best to keep a smile and good position to avoid Primo of suspecting more of her situation, but in her insides one part of her was cursing the ghoul who put her in that position.

Swiss heard everything from the second floor. Even the lame advice from Primo.

Just a ghoul? Like others? Nothing special? Swiss sissed under his breath. He was going to show her that he was THE ghoul, he took that personally. Specially after almost fucking her. He flooded her mind just moments ago and now she said that he is “just a ghoul”, huh? Well, that ghoul was determined on fucking her, or hating her. Who did she believe she was? She is the main reason why they lost their soft spot at the library! If she wouldn’t move next door and accepted the job of “night guard”. And she was such a mess so easily, so eager for touch, for his touch… Her scent was still lingering on him. He went back to the den, complaining loudly about how annoying she was.

—Who does she think she is? She is just the new puppet of Imperator! A simple ghoul? Like she was not about to moan my name… That old bag of Primo screw me over, I swear… I’m going to go back to that fucking library and show her who is a “simple ghoul”.

Aether and Sodo were watching a movie, trying to prove a theory about Godzilla, really invested in a heated discussion when they heard the door slam and Swiss going off about something. They only picked a few pieces before the ghoul locked himself in the bathroom. They looked at each other and laughed a bit. Swiss already had troubles with the library sister? Sodo kept thinking to himself why she was so special, and how special, she didn’t let Swiss flirting pass? She mocked him. She managed to annoy him! And that already gave her good points. Aether was thinking in what type of trouble Swiss gave to the poor sister.

Swiss undressed and went into the bathtub, feeling the scorching water soothe his skin. He still smelled like her… His hands specially. He could only picture her with her big doe eyes that looked all flustered.  How sweet would she taste? How many times could he make her cum? He was sure that he could make her pass out of pleasure. He closed his eyes and let his imagination wander around. Her smell was so delicious, so sweet and also acid; her voice was so sweet and that little moan she let out, he was sure that she would sound even greater moaning his name while he thrusts inside of her. And he didn’t even see her naked. He was sure that she was a piece of art underneath the dress. He took one of his hands to his face to wash it and then the smell on his fingers hit his nostrils, the sweet scent… He was hard again. He blamed himself for being so aroused, maybe his heat season started early. That sister could not have such power over him. Maybe she didn’t even smell that good and it’s his heat that made him react like that to her.

He lowered his free hand to his cock, stroking it under the water. With his eyes closed he tried to think in any of the sisters or brothers that he fucked with, trying to erase her from his mind but, after a couple of minutes the scent from his fingers returned. He kept that hand close to his nose and mouth, sniffing like a wild animal. Hating himself for being so heated just by her smell, he strokes his cock faster, thrusting his hips into his hand while gasping for more. In his mind, she was with him in that armchair; he was fucking her reverse cowgirl style, squeezing her breast that bounced at the rhythm of his thrusts. The water in the bathtub was spilling from the sides every time he moved his hips; his moans and growls were loud, his tail was going over his chest, moving and pressing the tip of his dick every time he pushed up.

—Mngh… y/n… I’m going to…

He kept his thrusts, and he could swear that he heard her moans, her slutty mouth moaning his name while bouncing on his cock, looking cock drunk and asking him for more… How she needed him to fuck the devil out of her, him knotting her down leaving her as a fucking mess on that fucking desk. With a few more thrust and a deep growl he came, almost all of the water was spilled so he ended up seated in a hot puddle of water with cum all over his chest, gasping a bit for air. After the bliss went out, he took a cold shower and cleaned his mess (before Sunshine scolded him for leaving the floor all wet).

He got prepared for the night mass, and while preparing himself, his mind was thinking about how he was going to get his revenge on the doe-eyed sister. He needed to prove to himself that it was a heat thing, she was nothing special. Just another sister. And in that moment, he thought about the perfect revenge. He couldn’t wait to see her at the mass. 

A.N : Hey! I finally got some time for myself; university took the best part of my time and mental health that's for sure. But one of the things that kept me going was the marvelous amount of fanfiction that I had been reading from the ghouls and the Papas. So now that I have some time, I finally decided to give it a go. English is not my first language so, again it is a bit of a challenge. Some information about the fic and the chapters that are coming; I do not plan to give this fic a "monogamous" treatment, reader is probably going to have encounters with most of the ghouls and Terzo/Copia (I have a special plan for Secondo and Primo) but I do want to give it a sort of "pick your own ending". This fic has plot, but also there are going to be chapters of full smut no plot or some full plot no smut chapters. I'm really exited about working on this. Thanks again to everyone who I mentioned earlier and thanks to everyone who read likes and support this fic.

[kittykov]

Hello, I'm addressing the situation here as I did on Twitter but going a little more in depth since I have more space :)

My intent was not to hurt anyone while making this au, I should've done more research on the procedure itself and honestly I shouldn't have made the au at all! I regret doing it and now I am learning from my actions which I am ok with I think that I deserve the backlash for what I did, although I wish people wouldn't DOXX me I guess it cannot be helped.

As for the reference I used for the one art, at the time I was a little intoxicated (not saying this excuses what I did) , I didn't exactly see anything wrong with doing that since the picture was already on the internet for everyone to see but! I know now not to do that it is very disrespectful to the people who actually suffered through the procedure and I shouldve thought before acting. I didn't have any intent on mocking or making fun of the people who were hurt :(

"Romanticing Lobotomies" : THIS was NOT what I was trying to do. There is nothing okay about what I made Betty do to Simon. There is nothing "HOT" about it. It is supposed to be disgusting, the way she treated him is supposed to turn your stomach. Like someone said previously they mentioned "Killing Stalking" which was a horror book that I was VERY obsessed with a while ago and it made me want to make something of my own. Due to my hyperfixation of Fionna and Cake I decided to make it an au... In that book there are dark themes having to do with codependent relationships and there is murder and SO much more. I wanted to make something that was just as bad as that since there is NOTHING (at least I cant find anything) like Killing Stalking. Just because there are toxic relationships in the horror genre does not mean you're romanticing whatever is going on, was the creator of KS romanticing abuse and murder?? No. I KNOW the au could have been depicted better, there couldve been better words to use on the art but once again I cannot take back the things I did once they're already done.

Please think about other people first before doing things (I know this is kind of hypocritical :( but I should've done this too) I know I've hurt all of you with my art but this is hurting me too very badly and two wrongs in a situation like this doesn't make a right. I wish that some of you could be more reasonable and realize that im a human too, but I understand you want me to learn from my actions. Although SOME of you are actually wishing literal death upon me which is NOT good for my brain which leaves me to my last statement.

I am leaving the internet for a while. I am discarding the au completely, I don't want anyone to make any fanart and I don't want it to be mentioned to me again. I apologize to everyone I've hurt and I hope you can all understand.. I'm not very good at apologies but I tried super hard on this one, I just don't want anyone to see me as an awful person although that's something I can't control :(

Goodbye! Thank you to everyone who supported me and was kind to me! I love you guys, Ill be back sometime.

[stars-tonight]

Hi hiiii! I came across your blog from another blog I requested a matchup for! I really like your style of writing matchups so I wanted to get in the mix! I'll go with the emoji: 🍈 (honeydew!)

🍈 Long, romantic matchup!

🍈 Pronouns, paired with guy or girl- she/her, paired with a guy

🍈 Ideal partner- mature, responsible, independent, hard-working, loving, caring, and kind with a soft and funny side! >_<

🍈 Description of self- I'm sociable and I like to laugh a lot! But most times I'm down-to-earth, self-sufficient, empathetic, nurturing, and resilient!

🍈 Hobbies- I really love playing tennis, pickleball, and basketball. I also go to the gym regularly! Arts and crafts are my downtime hobby :3 I love decorating photocard holders, building modeling kits, making keychains, and DIYing party gifts! :3

🍈 Love languages- Words of affirmation for both giving and receiving!

🍈 Ideal date- I'd like to do something active first like play pickleball or go to the arcade! Then go for some food to replenish! :3 Afterwards, we'd take a walk at the park to digest the food while we continue talking and getting to know each other on a deeper level <3

🍈 Extras!

My MBTI is ENFJ

My zodiac Sun sign is Virgo, Moon in Cancer, and Rising in Capricorn (if you're into that kinda thing, cause I sure am!)

I'm a fan of Bachelor Nation!!! hehehe

I love watching movies, my favorite is White Chicks hehehe

And I'm super good at claw machines!!! Most times I can win stuff in a couple of tries ^-^

I saw that you currently have nine matchups lined up for you to write >.< Please take your time writing mine! No rush hehehe I hope you have as much fun writing it as I will reading it!!! You're doing so great! Your headcanons are literally soooo cute! 🥹🤍 Thank youuuuu~

headcanons

🥛 so iwa-chan fits your ideal partner list pretty well: he's mature; responsible; independent; hardworking; and caring

🥛 and definitely secretly has a soft side

🥛 iwaizumi definitely likes being active outside of playing volleyball (probably has a premium gym membership and frequents the place multiple times a week)

🥛 so you'd definitely have lots of active dates together where you try to teach each other your sports

🥛 he's awful at pickleball but decent at basketball (i think this would be because you have to contact the ball with your hands in both volleyball and basketball and there's a racquet in pickleball and this kind of throws off depth perception or timing)

🥛 he's okay at tennis because he just likes slamming the ball as hard as he can over the net (and he thinks it's easy bc the net is so much lower compared to in volleyball lol)

🥛 i'm sorry if i got anything about the sports wrong, i only play volleyball 😭

🥛 he also likes it when you can just sit next to each other and do your own thing

🥛 he's fascinated by your artistic ability because he doesn't have an artistic bone in his body (ig his hands are too clumsy for things that require individual finger movement / precision??)

🥛 iwaizumi definitely has a way with words

🥛 like he's not akaashi level of comforting but he knows how to pick someone up and encourage / inspire them, which he's shown to have done many times with oikawa before

🥛 also since oikawa is a big sensitive baby he definitely knows how to say things nicely (although tbf he says things specifically made to tick oikawa off sometimes)

🥛 iwaizumi definitely likes active dates, and he's definitely really good at arcade games (will touch specifically on claw machines later hehe)

🥛 and he'd also like taking walks with his partner and getting to know them

🥛 he'll probably keep your relationship on the dl for the first few weeks or even months because he knows oikawa would just be popping up everywhere trying to catch you two together if he finds out

🥛 i saw a really cute piece of fanart where oikawa demands iwaizumi win him one of the stuffed animals in the claw machine and i realized it just makes sense that iwaizumi is godly at those things

🥛 you two could probably clear out a whole machine if you tried hard enough lol

runner up for you was sugawara kōshi!

A/N: hi 🍈anon! thank you for being so patient and sweet while waiting! i hope you liked your matchup 🫶

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

Character Hyperfixation Talk: Cravings

[I talk about Character Hyperfixation, Maladaptive Daydreaming (potentially fictive??), Neurodivergency, and what it's like for me personally - in terms of Hobie Brown]

(Actual footage of me staring at a picture of Hobie Brown)

One of the things that happens a lot when it comes to Character Hyperfixations are cravings.

Although it's super common to get the compulsion to look into things that trigger your fixations - but with character fixations, it can be so much stronger, and even moreso - emotional when we get these cravings.

Some days its easier, for me at least. Sure, I'll still be thinking about Hobie and how much I appreciate him - but I won't need to see him.

And then there are days like today - where I experience 'cravings' for lack of a better word.

I REALLY wanna see Hobie. Like I can't stress this enough.

It's hard to describe HOW visually and mentally stimulating Hobie is to me during times like this. And although it may sound like a humorous exaggeration, I do genuinely feel the urge to stare at these photos, and to focus on nothing but them.

During these times, pictures of Hobie, or watching his scenes are extra stimulating to me, and they can make me excited or just really happy. Like seeing someone you grew up with come home from the military - literally that mental and physical response.

Sometimes I can feel it in my body, like a light or happy feeling in my chest.

The details draw me in more - even small unnoticable details, or ones that don't matter at all.

For me, this only really works if it's art OF Hobie - as in direct screenshots of the movie. And although I love fanart - only 'Actual' Hobie helps the urge any.

Today, this photo was particularly interesting to me.

For small details like the shading on his ears - the three different shades of brown they use. Or the shading of the tendon in his neck. I wanna touch it. Or the studs on the back of his jacket and how realistically they're placed. Or his eye color which we don't get to see often. The lighting of the orange light so close is GREAT and the earring-

I can go on and on.

It's not like this everyday - though I do have to look at Hobie and set aside time for daydreaming everyday.

But cravings are also really hard to satisfy.

Photos help, and videos too. But, to understand where I'm coming for, I have to explain that there is a fully-formed Hobie in my mind. As in a whole personality, independent of a lot of my control.

He exists in his own detailed space. He tells me what he wants about his character, and if I don't know something, it feels more like not knowing a fact that you know exists (like not knowing how tall a celebrity but knowing they have to have a height) vs a creator who can't think up a detail to give a character.

If I don't know Hobie's favorite color - I can't just decide it's purple. I have to ask him. And if I decide something without asking him, it feels wrong.

Sometimes he may tell me an answer I don't like - too bad. He said what he said, and because he's independent enough in my psyche and daydreams to do that, I have to deal with it.

The photos and videos I watch will never exactly replicate the form of Hobie inside of me, so they'll always be a sense of longing there, so long as I can't be in the same room with him - which NOT POSSIBLE.

So cravings are moreso a feeling of longing that with character hyper-fixations that you kinda have to wait to pass.

If you're lucky, maybe the form or fixation in your head is fully formed enough to comfort you on this front, or if you can daydream them vividly enough that can help. But it's never fully gone until it passes.

A lot of time I can't tell how much of a 'Daydream' it is.

I know what's reality and what's in my head - I just don't know how much of it I'm consciously coming up with.

Because a lot of times I don't feel in control. Sometimes Hobie will do or tell me something that surprises me, or that I kinda feel iffy about. Or Diane will have an emotional response that..I be like 'girl...'

Recently I even had Hobie introduce me to another character, who can talk to me directly. He chose to do this. For a long time I wanted to meet his character - his MJ - but Diane was scared, and Hobie was hesitant. So she wasn't in the picture.

But then yesterday Diane and Hobie rushed through a couple daydreams showing Diane growing emotionally through a dark time, and then boom, Hobie is like okay i think its time and suddenly his MJ is there, basically fully formed, her relationship already pretty solidified and defined.

Without me doing anything. Like I'm just sitting there like I'm sitting in the middle of a room at a party with people talking at me.

Whatever they are, the forms seem to have distinct personalities, wants, emotions, and feelings about each other. And towards me too????

Yesterday Hobie and Diane were extremely quiet. Okay, so I asked them what was up and they showed me all that stuff with Diane that was pretty heavy. Makes sense why they were so quiet.

But then today, Diane is like 'I miss Hobie, I want to see Hobie. Let me be with him-' a.k.a hey go daydream I got stuff to do.

And in doing so - I don't know if it's me craving Hobie so she does as a reflection of my behavior cause she's not independent or real or idk if she wants time with him because yesterday she didn't get a lot of time with him even though I was fine not daydreaming a lot yesterday, only curious - SO I'm???????????? HUH??????

And now MJs here and that's another person 'on the houseboat' where they live AND ITS A LOT

Anyway. That's me ranting and talking about hyperfixation cravings and daydreams and the gang doing things realll suddenly and yeah.

If you relate to any of these experience ID LOVE TO HEAR like if you experience cravings or if you have daydreams, if the people in them are independent/can do things you dont want etc etc

Bye.

[ravangie]

hi hello!!

i adore your art so much. i love el dorado, but you have such a unique view on the characters and story that i feel like, seeing your fanart, is falling in love with another story entirely and all over again

i would really love to support you and have something of your art in real life! have you ever thought about opening a shop? although i know how much work would be needed to do so :(

Hello!

Ah, thank you for such kind words! I also feel like i have been leaving so much of myself with The Girls that they happened to become their own, separate from the movie, people. Thank you for confirming that! It's hard for me as a creator to objectively understand what exactly you mean by saying that i have a unique view of the characters, just like it's hard for me to understand what someone means when they say they like my art style, but i think it all comes down to the fact that i unconsciously project my own experiences and personality onto the women that i draw, so they get their own little quirks and views from me. And with all the love that i put into them, they can't help but become alive in their own ways.

As for your question - yes, i have thought about opening a shop. To be honest, it is a bit of a dream of mine - to be able to support myself by doing what i love and what keeps me sane and what i do on a daily basis anyway. I imagine it would be super fulfilling to see my artwork matirialised and to know that the love that it contains could reach another human being in a physical form. I'm not scared of the amount of work it would take, since i've been balancing a 9 to 5 job with commisions and drawing for myself anyway. But it does take a lot of time and energy - resorces that i could be spending on The Girls. So it would be nice if one of those points of income could be through The Girls.

What's stopping me is the fact that i happen to be from Russia, so most of the worldwide transactions are unavailible to me at this time. I do have an audience from Russia and it is very lovely, but it's not big enough yet to start making merch, it just wouldn't pay off money vise. So in the meanwhile i'll just continue doing what i've been doing: keep drawing my ladies, keep expanding their world, keep creating more girlfriends for them. Keep sharing bits of happiness that they graciously gift me with all of you. And hope that things will get better in the future.

Thank you for reaching out to me, it really means a lot, please have a good day❤️

[twotangledsisters]

How do you decide which fics to base fanart on? Does inspiration just hit?

Hello, first, thanks for the ask!

And the answer is... sometimes.

Sometimes I read a fic and inspiration hits hard, such as with The High-Wire! (Probably helped by the presentation of such beautiful stunning visuals through words!!)

Other times I spend a really long time trying to think of the perfect fanart cause I really enjoyed a fic such as with BTK!

And sometimes there's a community event like NDAW, I see fics getting super low notes and just going unappreciated and decide I want to TRY and give as many fics as I can the appreciation they deserve and so I pick out a cute visual from each one and draw four fanarts in a week xD

And sometimes I just enjoy doodling while reading a fic. Although I haven't actually shard any of my fanarts from my sketchbook in a long time. Maybe one day I'll start doing it again but right now I mainly only share fanarts if the author is a friend or a mutual of mine, I fluctuate with how comfortable I am in a fandom and online and right now I'm definitely on the lower side which is why as far as fanarts go it's mainly just been close friends.

But anyways, I do hope that answers your question, thanks a lot for asking! And for anybody looking for some fic recommendations well, there you have a few XD

You can check all the fics on my blog under Fanfic Recs (In Sketchbook Format)

[riot-in-bloom]

for the ask game!! 18, 40 and 56! (unrelated, i didn't know your tumblr theme was pink and had little sparkles when you move the cursor!! its super cute)

aw, thank you! i do like that shade of pink a lot, and i did want a sparkly cursor, although that took a bit to figure it out. i'm glad you also find it cute! ask game here 18. do you title your fics before, during, or after the writing process? how do you come up with titles?: definitely after! the titles for the documents i write said fics are, to say the least, incredibly unhelpful in terms of figuring out which fic it is. as for titles, i try and see if there's a phrase that clicks in my head. if nothing comes up in twenty minutes, i resort to a lyric. 40. if someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?: oh, man, this one's really hard! off of the top of my head, there's two: my gochase fic, specifically the beginning where go's lying on the carpet and chase is hovering above him, because i definitely did not do enough justice for how absolutely purple, lilac and lavender that whole scene is supposed to be. the other one is the fic where the trisquad tries to set up hiroyuki, but no specific scene here, because the entire fic works well for it. 56. what’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?: these are only for select fics, but i do like the word choice i put in some of them. stark imagery is something i strive for (given i can't visualize things, i like imagery that can have a good mouthfeel, and can show others what i'm trying to go with), and it's something i've gotten complimented on a few times, so i'm happy with it.

[talesfromthegasstationexchange]

okay this is the whole rules tm for the exchange

To participate in the Exchange:

1) Fill out the application.

3) Confirm gift pairing within 48 hours of receipt.

4) Notify mod of all tumblr URL changes.

5) Complete a gift by December 22nd.

We recommend that you follow the exchange blog (here) for updates, however, this is not required :))))

Gift Requests*

No OCs or crossovers Alternate Universes are allowed

In the event that an applicant asks for gifts that are too difficult to fill or violate one of the above rules, mods will contact recipients for amendment.*

Gifts

Fanart: Must be a finished drawing, coloured, or rendered black and white - not a sketch. Fanfic: Must have 1000 words minimum, with no obvious spelling or grammar errors.

NSFW: out right im not allowing nsfw related stuff unless someone else wants to mod it. i will be allowing gore related junk since im okay to moderate that gore: although i am allowing it based off of what the source media is i am going to put a 16+ barrier on this one. you can also opt out of making content for these types of gifts if they come up.

Not allowed:

Hateful or abusive content like ship bashing, racism, transphobia, bullying, etc. spam applications will be blocked

Posting.

Put content warnings if applicable. Tag applicable characters and ships. Post between December 23th and 31st. DM or @ mention your gift recipient when you post! Mention @talesfromthegasstationexchange and use #tftgs23 in the first five tags! (Just in case.)

Gifts that do not meet requirements or break rules will not be reblogged.

some may be missed through time zones and tumblr being tumblr but feel free to reach out on here or through my personal in DM,

   What is the tftgs Exchange?

A Secret Santa-type event where like minded fans create content for tftgs.

   What kind of content is allowed?

Either a finished drawing (as determined by the artist) or a fanfic with a minimum of 1000 words.    Can I ask for my designs from tftgs to be used ? Yes you may do so. though you will have to have easily accessible references publicly available for your gifter to use     can I ask for another set of designs that are not my own ? again yes, of course but they do still have to be openly available online and you need to mention the artist/ blog that has them in the application

   Can we ask for gifts with tftgs ships?

You can ask for any ships, as long as it is with canon characters

Is N.S.F.W. Allowed?

hard lines no. i allow gore based on the source media but nothing beyond that. as well if the gift you create does contain gore it should be tagged and cropped accordingly, and the full piece put under a read more or linked off to another page

If you post something in violation of these rules, we will ask you to fix it prior to reblogging it :)

Can I ask for a gift featuring my tftgs OC?

No. ocs are super valid and i love them. but i do feel though it is very unfair to the gift maker to try and visualise a character they may not know well enough to depict.    Can I ask for a gift featuring book related spoilers?

yes! applicants will be separated out into 2 main categories, the audio series and the books. So that no one ends up getting asked to draw or write from part the either haven't read or heard.

  How are pairings made?

Applicants will be paired with other tftgs Gift Exchange recipients. it will take preference into consideration; further, i will not force people into making content for their NOTPs and hated characters. Outside of that, please be open to exploring new people and pairings to spread the happiness this holiday season.

   i dont want the same person to make for or to be given from last year

thats completely fine, ill try my best to work around it an make sure you get someone diffrent.

   I’m not sure if my recipient will like the gift I want to make them. What should I do?

Easy! Anon ask your giftee if you need clarification about what they would want.

If their anon is off, contact me explicitly explaining this, plus any questions you may have. We will reach out for you :>

    What if I have to dropout?

it’s sad to see you go!

In the event that you cannot finish your gift, OR something comes up that will delay your gift (even writer’s block!), please DM either ASAP so that we can find a substitute.

   Okay. You’ve convinced me. Where do I sign up?

Applications open November 14th! aka today

   I posted my gift hours ago, but it hasn’t been reblogged. What gives?

feel free to dm it to my main. ive probs just missed it because my brain is fried @theredheaddevil

Disclaimer:

i cannot be responsible for any applicant that falsley claims to be a legal adult, if you are found out to be lying about your age you will be removed and banned from any following years that i continue to run this. and your pairing from the exchange will be remade

[pumpkin-spike18]

✨Weekly Progress #51-52✨ +Happy New Year 2024✨

I've been thinking about the past year for the last few days and struggled with how to talk about it.

But, let's start with the weekly progress reports, before I miss the ability to do it for 2023.

Weekly Progress #51

Linearted 4 SYVNH BGs

Answered more BWOBK edit comments

Yes, it's the same image as last time since... the 4 linearts were done by the time I posted the last update.

Weekly Progress #52

Scripted BWOBK S1-S3

Submitted the demo for The Beauty Which Only Beast Knows to Winter VN Jam and Once Upon a Time VN Jam

The demo is now available for download here!

...Oh my god, I forgot I start my weeks on Mondays. My brain got really confused for the twitter version of this update 😅

I'll be making a separate post for it tomorrow (or Akua would), but BWOBK is finally out! ...Well, the demo for it anyways. The last week has been a blur of editing, scripting, and final playtesting. I was working quite frantically so I didn't record all of my tasks for the past week.

...Which, to be fair, didn't amount to much other than working on BWOBK. Our team wanted to accomplish a lot for this jam, but as the final week approached, we knew we had to cut back a bit if we wanted to submit anything to the two jams so we discussed and agreed to submit a demo.

Please look forward to a full release in January 2024!

Looking Back at 2023 ⏳

Visual Novel Development

Last year I made this tweet to celebrate what I accomplished in 2022.

A total of 5 VNs was an amazing feat I didn't think I'd accomplish. I was prepared to never beat this record again. Yet, lo and behold...

This year, I submitted nine projects.

1 Updated Demo:

I counted this as a submission since my update was about 50k new words, all new BGs, and like 14 CGs (I forgot the exact number). Sadly, I couldn't make it to the finish line of a full game. That'll be 2024!

4 Solo Projects:

These are four short visual novels I did for a variety of jams (three of them were for about week long game jams). They're all playable in browser and shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes each to play.

one last time. is a standalone entry.

kill your feelings., spirit killing curse, and Exorcist Killing Lie are separate stories set in the same world of ghosts, unreliable gods, and exorcists. I've been calling it the Kill Series and I hope to work on it more in 2024.

4 Team Projects:

I participated in another four visual novel projects this year! Two of which were demos, and one even won second place in the Spooktober Visual Novel Game Jam!! That was a real surprise! Although everyone in the team worked super hard, I don't think any of us expected it. So it was really a great and amazing surprise that had all of us shocked with happiness!

The Beauty Which Only Beast Knows is a demo I'm the main writer for. I also wrote one of the routes for The Final Prize is Soup, which is the second place Spooktober 2023 winner!

I provided the art for For the First Time.

And I did the programming for Saintess Alasdair is Dead.

All of these visual novels (plus more from previous years!) can be found free to play on my itch profile!

I think, next year, I won't be able to beat this record 😂 In fact, I hope I don't... As happy as I am to have performed such a feat, it was very exhausting and took a lot of energy out of me. I just hope to finish my ongoing projects in 2024.

Other Creative Goals

Here is another tweet from early 2023:

I wasn't able to spend a lot more time animating, and it's hard to gauge improvement on my own, but...

I did it! I completed 24 illustrations!

This has been a mix of OC art, fanart, a couple gifts, and a couple commissions. Hopefully, next year I'll be able to not "cheat" by adding commissions to the mix... 😂 I'm very proud of my commission works, but I did say it was supposed to be personal art.

I actually spend the last three months drawing 10 of the illustrations. To be exact, I drew 14/24 drawings in the second half of 2023... This was alongside working on a variety of CGs and BGs for games, a couple fancomics, and some design work that didn't feel quite "illustration" worthy.

Other

As a number of you might have noticed, or if you're one of my closer friends in devtalk... I quit my job!! Which, may sound like a bad thing, but I'm actually quite relieved. I finally freed myself from something that felt like it had been chaining me down for years.

I did it with no plans, just enough savings for a short while. Hopefully, this will be the wake up call I need to improve my life and find a job I enjoy. I took a few months off so I'm ready and back for the job hunt in 2024! (...So in about an hour from me writing this, haha)

Speaking of the job hunt... I also started accepting commissions on vgen! I don't know if I want to pursue a creative career, but it isn't out of the question.

If you're interested, I'll be opening for a week or so in 2024 before I close to work on projects again until June or something. (wink wonk 😉😉)

Finally, I'm really happy to have joined the Ace Attorney fandom this year. I started replaying the games around September and searched for a fandom discord on a whim. I've met some really great writers and artists since! Everyday getting to talk about gay lawyers have been great and reminded me of an almost lost fun from my childhood.

So if any of you from there see this post, hello! Thank you for giving me such a warm welcome! I really enjoy spending time with you all!

And someday, I WILL kidnap you guys into making a visual novel with me.

I participated in my first online fan event thanks to everyone there and it was a lot of fun. I hope to do more with everyone soon!

Well, that's all! If you made it all the way down here, thank you for reading! 2023 has been an interesting ride and I look forward to 2024.

It's currently 11:12PM for me here (I made it, I finished writing before midnight!) but, this is probably as close as I can get before getting distracted by a video or other work so...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

This is an extremely good point and it's probably time to derail the humorous intention of this post to bring up how polycules and polyamorous relationships are often actually extremely complex and are often reduced when it comes to fanfiction and fanart.

The reason I pointed out that Texas and Nearl were "masc-leaning", regardless on one own's opinions on whether they are masc or not, is to basically subtly hint that a lot of times people are actually portraying what they believe to be a harem relationship rather than a polyamorous one per se.

(Note: I do not like using the word harem here, I really wish we had an alternative. It itself is a corruption of the actual Islamic word haram, and the word's origins are very Orientalist in nature, being used to derisively explain a societal structure in Islamic societies (particularly Ottoman ones) in a way that over sexualized them. But, unfortunately, this word has become so common parlance it is the only word to describe the bastardized structure, so yeah.)

This is why you might see a lot of art that focuses on Texas or Nearl and their relationships to other Arknights characters, but comparatively little between the other characters that isn't usually considered pre-established (Shining and Nightingale for instance). FLC in the replies is exactly right in that they are very often because they make for very easy nucleation points when wanting to explore polyamorous relationships in fanworks. It can be hard to know how Lavinia and Croissant would really interact, or how Viviana and Platinum would.

But it's pretty likely in a proper polyamorous relationship that they would, at least in some way! I wanna use my own relationships as an example of how this nucleation structure can make for a pitfall.

I have five partners, C1, H, N, K, and C2. My relationship with N is polymono, although open, so I have no issue with N pursuing other people either romantically or sexually. I'm in a relationship with C1 and H, but they are also in a relationship with each other, and C1 has a dominant relationship to a lot of other women in an off/on fashion. K herself has a number of relationships herself, and at one time had several more than I did, and C2 is also poly.

Who really is the nucleation point? Is it me? K? C1? C2? None of them! That's the point! It's like pointing to a specific carbon in a molecule of sucrose and going "that's the important one".

Polycules are often very informed by the dynamics of their members. Exusiai is probably the reason they all got together in the first place, because she's super chatty and always says what is on her mind, but it also means that for a character like Mostima, her involvement in the polycule is probably considerably less than the other characters.

In conclusion: polycules are cool, please make interesting and dynamic ones that aren't lesbian harem situations OR one person two hands type shit.

(Also if you're curious, yes this is also why for example Nearl is often the one depicted with a penis. She's the one that is read the most as "masc" after all.)

It's interesting how characters like Texas and Nearl get put into these roles where they are the nuclei of a polyamourous relationship, because they tend to be super confident and masc leaning. I reject this. From experience it tends to be more the cute fail girls this happens too.

So it should be like, Lavinia and Platinum who have rizz beyond their understanding.

[bloodraven55]

I saw a post recently where someone else analysed how Luz's love language is acts of service and Amity's is physical affection, and it got me thinking so in light of today's incredible episode I want to do some serious digging into Luz's feelings for Amity. This is probably gonna get pretty long but hey, these two are more than worth it.

I'm going to go through three key episodes for Luz and Amity's relationship so that I can properly illustrate my points, starting with Lost in Language.

First, I want to talk about how, despite the fact that Amity had been nothing but objectionable to her so far, literally all it takes for Luz to decide she wants to befriend her anyway is reading about Azura befriending Hecate in her book and seeing Amity reading to kids at the library. This clearly establishes that Luz is intrigued by Amity and willing to go out of her way to connect with her, even when Amity hasn't yet given her any particular reason to do so.

Next, let's talk about the manner in which Luz tries to save Amity from Otabin later in the same episode. This is one of the first times we see Luz attempt to be Amity's hero, as she chooses to make an unnecessarily dramatic entrance dressed as her own version of Azura, playing the role of the dashing knight come to rescue the fair maiden albeit not quite as gracefully as is usual in these stories lol. She even takes the time to doodle Amity being impressed by her performance too, introducing the idea that Amity's perception of her means a lot to Luz.

Finally for this episode, we get another example of both these things: Luz putting in a substantial effort to bond with Amity, and Luz wanting to impress Amity or get specific reactions from her. After impulsive plan to get them away from Otabin works, Luz finds the time to be a good even when they're running for their lives and actually manages to make Amity laugh which was an impressive feat at that point tbh, looking extremely pleased when her comment is received positively.

These next two moments provide a neat link to the next episode I want to discuss, Adventures in the Elements, so I'll cover them in one go. We see Luz's first Act of Service for Amity when she offers her the Azura book she's missing to show that she wants to be friends, and then when she meets Amity to get it back we see how important the gesture was for Luz. She's very eager to hear Amity's thoughts, loves it when she finds the fanart Amity drew, and in general it's just obvious that this was another attempt to impress Amity on Luz's part.

This only continues as Luz proudly proclaims that she's going to join Amity's class at Hexside, even winking at her in the process, and solidifies the significance of her giving Amity the book even more by suggesting they start a club to talk about it further. Like, seriously, this entire episode is pretty much just Luz being adorably excited to share classes with Amity and flat out learning a whole new spell just to make sure it happens.

The interesting thing here, though, is that Luz gets really nervous as soon as the twins suggest they all train together, enough to lie to them in a moment of panic, and then gets super embarrassed when she sees that Amity is also practicing at the Knee. This doesn't seem to make much sense since Amity is being pretty nice by this point and not at all mocking or condescending, and Luz has given up on trying to look cool to the twins by now too. But it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider that this is another instance of Luz wanting to impress Amity and worrying about looking inept in front of her.

There's also the way that Luz is just... so clumsy and awkward around Amity in these episodes. The girl knocks a book to the floor and falls off a rock just trying to say hello, for crying out loud, complete with stammering over her words. Yeah, it's safe to say Luz is lowkey crushing on Amity here.

Don't worry, because I saved the best for last. Enchanting Grom Fright is basically the culmination of everything those two previous episodes set up. Not only do we get two Acts of Service from Luz, with her offering to face her own worst fear for Amity with zero hesitation and then happily offering to go to Grom with her so that Amity wouldn't end up alone, but she also brings out some dramatic flair when she declares herself Amity's “fearless champion,” like a knight in shining armour vowing to protect her princess although she still hasn't got the graceful part down lmao.

Plus, there's the fact that in both of their Lingering Eye Contact in Close Proximity with Romantic Tension™ moments in the episode, Luz's expression is the exact same as Amity's, wide-eyed and curious like she's not quite sure what to make of what she's feeling. And that's even before she just full on starts flirting with Amity later on. I'm sorry, but those smirks and fancy show-off moves while dancing are not remotely heterosexual, Luz.

All of this brings us to their current situation: Amity is aware of her crush on Luz but thinks that Luz only sees her as a friend, and Luz is subconsciously flirting with Amity as well as trying to show off for her and be her hero but remains fairly unaware of her crush on her and thinks that Amity likes someone else. So in conclusion, teenagers are useless, but we been knew. Rather, the point I want to end on is that there's a reason why Luz and Amity were so in sync with such amazing chemistry during their dance when they weren't talking, and it's because they both have different ways of communicating their emotions but when they let their actions speak for them they were finally on the same page albeit briefly.

tl;dr - Luz and Amity are both crushing hard on each other, they just need to realise that the other has a different way of expressing their feelings and find the courage to be honest with each other. Amity's crush is more glaringly blatant, what with all the blushing and gay panicking and wanting to ask Luz to the school dance, but Luz's crush on Amity is also pretty evident in the way she tries so hard to impress her and often steps in to help her out with grand gestures, which she never does to anywhere near the same extent with any of her other friends.

[silima]

Do you have any tips for small artists?

i have no idea what level of technical skill u have so these are some pretty general tips but here u go! these are also mostly focused on fanart lol cuz that's what i like to make.

number 1 rule of art is that people like art that is interesting!!! it's gotta make them feel something or they will ignore it!! i used to draw so much art that was just like, a character standing there doing nothing. and i would try very hard to have nice lineart and pretty shading and all that good stuff but in the end a character standing there doing nothing is boring. if you have really good technical skills, then some people will still be like "wow pretty art!!" or "so photorealistic! how cool!" but generally speaking it's gonna take soooooo long to actually reach that level of technical skill if every drawing u make looks like this 🧍. if you wanna improve fast, you're much better off experimenting with all sorts of types of art.

so, what do people find interesting? lots of things!

ship art is an easy way to make an "interesting" drawing, b/c people like ships and b/c you've got a character interaction happening there. even if they're just leaning on each other or holding hands or something, there's personality in that. even when i was really shitty at art i always noticed that my ship art got more notes than art of just 1 character.

in general, character interactions always make things more interesting. u certainly don't have to only draw romantic ships--draw some characters who are friends hanging out and having fun, or draw characters who are family hugging each other, or something. or draw people fighting!!! if you're not yet used to drawing characters interacting, it can be a bit of a pain at first, but it opens up so many fun possibilities (and reference photos can always help you!! google images is honestly the best of all resources for that lmao although more specific stuff like adorkastock is great too).

even without character interactions, u can make drawings that try to evoke an emotion of some sort. dark and angsty? lonely? happy and cute? this is one of my favorite drawings ever and i think it's super, super visually interesting and tells a story without the need for more than one character or any sort of words/dialogue, just from the pose and the background and the whole vibe of it. it feels so peaceful and lovely. of course, it makes a difference that this artist clearly has a lot of technical skill, but if this same artist drew a picture of aang looking like 🧍 on a boring white background i would definitely not love this art nearly as much lol.

screenshot redraws are also pretty popular!! personally i would strongly advise that if ur gonna redraw a screenshot, you should be adding something interesting to your version. if you colorpick the exact same colors from the drawing and try to copy the style as closely as possible, it's a little boring, right? why would i want to see the exact same picture twice? one artist who does screenshot redraws really well is viorie (who i think has removed/deactivated a lot of her stuff, thus the repost, sorry):

like this is very clearly an artist that had something of her own to bring to the screenshot she was redrawing!! that's what makes it cool, appealing art, even though it's "just" a redraw.

and of course my absolute favorite thing to make drawings "interesting" is to make comics. comics are the best!! u get to draw a whole story!!! lots of types of comics that you can make, too. a lot of the comics that i've made lately are my own writing and tend to be more serious, but if you're looking for something easy, fun, and simple, try drawing incorrect quotes or make art/comics that are based off of other people's posts, fics, or ideas that you thought were really cool (w/ appropriate credit obviously).

on that note, drawing fanart for other people is especially effective for putting yourself out there because it's often hard to get your foot in the door on social media when you literally have 0 followers and no one is seeing your stuff. you draw something for a popular fic writer or a humor blog, they're happy because they've gotten fanart and they reblog your art, you're happy because now all their followers are seeing ur stuff. lol this sounds so transactional but it's really a lot more fun than it sounds. make art for other ppl! make some friends! join discord servers, join group chats, comment nice things on other peoples' work, & check out fandom events, like big bangs or ship weeks or whatever. it's good stuff.

also, use different social media. it might seem like what tends to be popular in one corner of the internet is gonna be pretty well-received everywhere else but that's not always the case lol. tumblr, for example, usually puts a lot of emphasis on consuming content "from a fandom" rather than consuming content "from an artist"--it's hard to build an individual brand, people just want More Insert Popular Fandom Content and don't really care who it comes from so long as it fits a certain type of art; in my case, atla is a way more popular show than lok, so my atla art gets significantly more attention than my lok art does, despite the fact that i don't make that much of it. on the other hand, on instagram, people really like my lok/red lotus art because that's sort of my "brand" and my atla art tends to get less attention. (this works out for me because i like lok way better and i also have way more followers on instagram than i do here.)

& ofc when you talk about becoming a "popular" artist... i mean, i'm not gonna be the person who tells u "oh you should ONLY be doing this for yourself!! if you're doing it for attention you're doing it all wrong!" because obviously i love attention and i love making art that people like. i would not draw nearly as much if i didn't have fun sharing it! but if you let yourself get too sucked into the idea of making "popular" art, you're gonna feel super drained and fucked up and you eventually will burn out hard (ahaha.............). there's a balance to strike between "i'm making this art because it's fun" and "i'm making this art because i know people will like it." on tumblr, my atla art is way more popular than my lok art, but i don't care abt atla nearly as much as i care abt lok, so i'm never gonna like, make an in-depth comic about the atla main cast the way i have for the red lotus, the lok main cast, and kyoshi. what a waste of time! even when you're looking for advice about how to become a "big" artist, ultimately, you've gotta make the art that's fun for you, and with luck you'll eventually find an audience that also enjoys that type of art.

[ask-legion-fjsj]

this is towards the mun but your art style is so aesthetically pleasing i wanna kiss it mwah

((Thank you so much!! I’ve been trying really hard to improve my art and this blog’s helped a lot with that!! It’s made me try a lot of new things, especially with comic stuff. Making comics of my own is a life goal of mine so being able to practice with something I love is great.)) ((I also just wanna say I really appreciate all the support and interactions I’ve received. I know I’m not a super talkative person (still learning to use my words haha) but I read everything and I’m doing my best to respond!!)) ((Also!! If you’d like to see more of my art, my art blog is @roryem!! It’s mostly fanart of different stuff although I’ve been posting a lot of Hades fanart on there recently. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!!))