#and i kind of missed the mark

[medicalunprofessional]

d’amor

[katabay]

original thief series basso & garrett :)

ngl, it's about quality over quantity for me. an npc can have a total of three minutes of screen time, but if they have a cool name, they can live rent free in my head and I'll spend several hours trying to decipher drawable features from a blurry screenshot of pixels

there is a vague hint of a story here, and that's because every time I try to play thi4f, I get incredibly frustrated with how Not Fun the game play is. like, is the story good? well. but it has a PLAGUE. that should've given it instant 'I'll replay this once a year' status in my heart, but the game play sucks so bad that I've never finished it. I can't believe Not Fun gameplay beat out my obsession with narrative plagues.

anyway, the idea is basically if the original era had a game with a plague centric narrative and some other stuff I liked out of thi4f thrown into a narrative blender, with a heavy dash of horror thrown in because some parts of the thief games were scarier to me than entire dedicated horror genre games.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Broken Roofs and Fixed Perspectives

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[sforzesco]

ALRIGHT okay I will attempt to explain this to the best of my ability, which is currently being held together by tape and coffee

so I have a long running post philippi story focusing on the octavian-antony divorce arc conflict and it's heavily dramatized and full of dead people. it's one part historical, one part my own invention, and one part fucking around with ideas (or the lack there of) in movies about antony and cleopatra. many of which are bad! however. there is a bad one that's actually good. like, I wouldn't recommend it except that I talk about it constantly.

it's the 1953 movie, Serpent of the Nile and I have not known peace since watching it. it's one of the more interesting takes on antony and cleopatra (TO ME), and more importantly: I'm obsessed with the plot point where antony helps lucilius escape egypt to warn octavian.

this scene is partially inspired by that! this scene is partially inspired by several things, but that's the one to mention bc I haven't published any of this story except for the periodic scene I've drawn for fun so listing the rest of it will not add to this experience and also I’m very sleepy right now

the egyptian wall backgrounds in the first page and the last page are of a tomb wall painting, the third page uses an illustration of the death of antony for shakespeare's antony and cleopatra, and on the second page is actually my own painting of antony and cleopatra after giambattista pittoni's painting of antony, cleopatra, and the famous pearl incident

additionally, that last page. the floor. that's a relief commemorating the battle of actium. I'd been reading about depictions of actium and it is. intriguing, especially since my first thought wrt to all of that is usually abt the bodies in the water and how they'll never be buried or antony's parthian fuck up setting the stage for all of this.

also this specifically. fascinating.

Representations and Re-presentations of the Battle of Actium, Barbara Kellum

[helenofsparta2]

Hot take, but something about this scene with what it does to Annabeth’s character, and what it represents really bothers me.

For context, she, Hazel and Piper are being cornered by Octavian and two other roman soldiers at Charleston Harbor. At this point they are the only enemies present, but they know others are quickly approaching. They have to get back to the Argo II, so that they, Frank, Leo, Jason, Percy and Hedge can escape and continue to safely sail/ fly to Rome. So, Annabeth drops her dagger into the lake and calls on Percy for help, who then easily defeats Octavian and the others.

My question is why make her do that?

It’s a three against three fight.

Even if we assume that, at this point in time, Piper hadn’t trained much and wouldn’t be able to hold her own in a fight (even though she has spent around 6 months training in camp halfblood), Annabeth and Hazel on their own should have been able to defeat Octavian and two no-name roman soldiers fairly easily.

Hazel is probably the second or third most powerful demigod after Percy and maybe Nico, and Annabeth is a war veteran, who has trained in Camp Half-Blood since she was seven years old and has been part of three quests. Yet, they need Percy to bail them out?

I understand that this is simply supposed to be a cute moment, and Rick Riordan probably didn’t think much about it, but it represents a very annoying trend in his writing, in which he focuses more on portraying Percy and Annabeth as the "perfect couple", than on developing their individual characters, and honestly the more I reread hoo the more tried I get of it, and the less I like Percabeth as a romantic relationship.

Like, it's insane how much more I like both characters when they are not around one another in that series.

[kintsugikalliope]

dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17 18...

old version that i still like but never went anywhere so here it is

[clotpolesonly]

Blue Lily, Lily Blue ch 20 // Mister Impossible ch 25

[edwinisms]

see I need ghost clothes to have properties more or less like regular clothes because wearing someone else’s jacket or shirt is one of the most important expressions of affection in existence and yes basically what I’m saying is i wanna see charles give edwin his jacket for one reason or another and see edwin get all flustered and giddy about it

[not-poignant]

Can I ask, why do you love BL romance better than het romance? What makes them better? I did not mean anything negative, and I know everyone have their own like and dislike but I want to know your thoughts....

Also what do you think that made Asian MLM (BL manga/manhwa/manhua/ danmei) romances better than western MLM romances?

Can I ask, why do you love BL romance better than het romance?

Because I had no choice for many years.

Because that choice was taken away from me by a homophobic, transphobic, queerphobic, acephobic society. So all the romances I read had to be heterosexual, all the romances I watched had to be heterosexual, all the romances I heard of had to be heterosexual.

Because I'm not heterosexual.

Because I never saw myself represented in any stories ever, for over about 20 years (queer stuff existed, but where I was situated in Perth, Western Australia, meant that I was not seeing it).

Because I was force-fed allonormative, heteronormative, heterosexual tropes, bullshit, toxicity, misogyny, patriarchal culture, rape culture and more, and because everyone assumed that was normal, which made me feel isolated, marginalised, alone, and bereft, and cut me out of knowing what a life could look like for myself, and made relationships harder, when you don't have the words or stories to latch onto.

People like me couldn't even be erased out of the media, we hardly existed in the media, and if we did, almost never under our real identities, and almost always having to pretend to be something we weren't, for many people who hated us, or wished we were dead, or simply didn't care about us at all.

So, when I finally got a choice, I made a choice.

And I do not want to read heterosexual content anymore, unless it's queer (like T4T). The only place I actually willingly consume heterosexual romantic content these days is like 80s and 90s and early 00s romantic comedies. It's the only thing I allow through my filter, because so many of them have a really strong bent of hurt/comfort in them, and it's rare to find movies that have this in general.

But yeah otherwise het is just not a thing I look for in fiction. Literally a squick. Literally reminds me of 20 years of oppression in the mass media. It's not inherently bad, it just wasn't good for me personally, to never have a choice.

So I made one :D And my life has been so much better for it. I'm never going back.

Also what do you think that made Asian MLM (BL manga/manhwa/manhua/ danmei) romances better than western MLM romances?

It's just better for me, anon! I find a lot of western published m/m (so not like m/m fanfiction which I still read) often feels stifled and too short for me, and the characterisation doesn't get as deep as I want it to get. I often can feel the rigidity of the novel structure on authors who are trying to rapid release, and the depth I'm looking for is rarely there. Sometimes that's what people want! Sometimes they don't know there's other options!

Sometimes that's true of some BL manga/manhua/manhwa etc. as well. Tbh it's probably true of a lot of it! Serial format doesn't always allow for depth either. But I find the visual format easier to read as well. If I reread western m/m it's almost always fanfiction. And tbh, I'm sure some amazing m/m was published last year, I just get tired of having to wade through it all to find something I like. It got to the point where I was reading like 60+ titles just to find one average read, and I gave up.

The recommendation systems for BL tend to be better and more on point for me, I find most people who recommend published m/m to me generally always miss the mark (which isn't their fault - I'm particular, there's a reason I write what I write - because I can't find it to read!!), but close friends like @morbidlizard who recommend BL to me almost always hit the mark!

I don't actually read much danmei, but mostly because I haven't had time to really sink my teeth into it. Aside from MXTX, I haven't explored much further.

But yeah, hope that helps! :D

[a-drama-addict]

actually art block is defeated. hawkebela phone doodle

[arolesbianism]

I caved and made them real. Obverse me losing more and more motivation to draw as I made each of these back to back lol

[wallbeatjournal]

can i tell you all about my conspiracy theory that roberto chose to do heathers as the season 3 riverdale musical specifically to SEO-bomb and suppress out of google-documented existence that horrible right-wing heathers 2018 miniseries that was developed as probably the most blatantly contemptuous cash-grab riverdale rip-off of all time so far

heathers the edgy tv reboot was essentially the evil (straight, boomer-oriented) version of riverdale that tvland funded. it came out in 2018, was hated by everyone and undoubtedly flooded the riverdale media team's google alerts during its whole short and notorious run

and nowdays. well. guess how many qualifiers you have to add to your google search to find reviews of that horrible 2018 heathers reboot where all the minorities were the real bullies because they could cancel people. it's a lot of qualifiers if you don't want to just see chapter fifty-one: big fun

[crescentfool]

saw this fun challenge on twitter by @/sapgoon_... had to do it because im a lover of experimentation! blank version under the cut!

[trainingdummyrabbit]

woe

Hod

thanks

SHES JUST A LITTLE THANG....

the first character to kick my ass when going through lobcorp for th first time... idk WHAT they put in her t . joke cancelled. They Wrote Her In A Way that utterly fucking destroyed me in such a strangely specific and uncomfortably well timed way that that was just IT for me after that. if im being honest.

theres something so painfully resonant about that deep-running guilt that drove her, trying desperately to reach the idea of "being a good person." its the type of character i dont really see written often, not in that way, and they hit it out of the fucking park with her. i adore how they set her up as a Token Nice One and then flesh it out so thoroughly with what happens in her past, and how she reacts to it in her present.

though, i dont think i could do much with that thread without simply reiterating whats already been said for her. but something i especially love, looking back, is how utterly strained she seems the entire time during lobcorp. drawing thin like a wire ready to break. that scene in part 5 of her segment, where she keeps trying to push forward with her usual upbeat attitude before suddenly snapping back, almost as if she were surprised to be doing it herself.. i think about it a lot.

in fact, that Entire scene was fantastically written. how hard it is to tell the difference between different voices-- even her own. its deeply, deeply compelling. and how they dont shy away from confronting the selfish source of her intentions, yet still dont close off the way forward.... head in hands.

and then seeing the difference in how she carries herself between lobcorp and ruina... still nervous and kind of uncertain, but she feels so much calmer there. icant really describe it in any way other than I Am So So Proud Of Her.

[aviivix]

three wishes

[notlacrosse]

i think the first reaaal fight andreil ever have is over neil's deification of mary where andrew just sees another abusive parent. he's technically capable of seeing the nuance of how desperately she was trying to keep neil alive but andrew is so binary strict with his moral code..

plus im sure as they get older andrew has become pretty sophisticated in his approach to therapy and mental health, and he loves his partner deeply, so it makes sense that he wants to broach with neil that he never deserved the violence mary used to control him in the process of hiding and running, but neil would shut that shit down IMMEDIATEMENT!! that is his MOTHER ur talking about she was a SAINT you wouldn't understand, etc etc. (he says this even as he continues dealing with c-ptsd around traveling and identity and general paranoia disorders well into his 30's.)

now i think andrew has developed significant patience but neil jabbing at his (absentee) mother issues is a bridge too far. im talking about spending more than a few nights in separate places for the first time in over a decade. shockingly to andrew, neil stays with aaron (another betrayal) where andrew stays with kevin. eventually resisting their lil co-dependent orbit becomes painful for both of them despite their incredible stubbornness and they reconcile but it becomes a genuine point of contention that they just Avoid until neil's actually ready.

it would maybe be the first time andrew sees neil cry, is facing the unbearable guilt that confronting mary's abuse would cause him. the ingratitude for his life that he'd see it as. she would be so ashamed. but andrew knows that if she was worth any salt as a person she'd only be relieved that neil has a name and a home and love in his life. it takes time because healing always does, but one day when neil looks in the mirror he doesn't see anyone's eyes but his own.