#anyways shoves this in mouth

[naffeclipse]

Hi, hello, I'm rattling this art like a very normal person and I'm rattling you! AAHHHH! I am obsessed with your blood mer Eclipse design and I love how you captured the flare of their fins and their long, winding tail! The dotted bioluminescence light up their arms is gorgeous! You really nailed their alien essence!

I'm screeching about the scenes! I love the red slipping through Eclipse's hands and how they hold Y/N before attempting to get them to drink (also the size difference ahhhh!!) The crumpling sub with its crushed pieces falling away and how Eclipse pulls Y/N away from their impending doom is a beautiful visual. I also love the small hints that they're already changing!

The orbs of lights and the speckles of stars and worlds are beautiful in the red ocean. I love how ethereal it all feels, giving Eclipse and Y/N a sort of diety vibe while maintaining wonder! Also, Y/N with a tail like Eclipse with different fins is *mwah* I am kissing your art and running away with it into the woods!

Thank you so much for sharing! ♥

Hi @naffeclipse I'm very normal about your fic. Have some frantic midnight sketches as extra kudos along with some tag rambling :)

[thechibilitwick]

there needs to be more slightly fucked up shidou tbh

[edorazzi]

It's the last Tintin Day of the year! ❄️

Just a quick piece since I've been super busy this month, but I'll always make time for my favourite day. There's so much space in the Marlinspike grounds to build the perfect boozy snowcaptain! ☃️🍾

[slateblueflowers]

Look at me. Look at me. Kepler brings up two separate analogies related to schoolyard bullying.

Episode 51: Shut Up and Listen:

And again in Episode 53: Dirty Work:

You wanna know how Kepler got to be the way he is? You wanna know how he learned to be always on his feet, always planning ahead? How he got to where he is now by eradicating every part of himself that didn’t serve his job - that didn’t let him fit in? How he learned that masking and mirroring was his best bet at survival?

In both of these examples he casts himself (via the human race or as the remaining SI-5) as the bullied. The underdog. Kepler’s no stranger to the schoolyard. He knows exactly which tactics will keep him (and his friends, his team) safe in the schoolyard. How do I keep the bullies away through blunt force? When that doesn’t work, how do I outsmart them?

If you’ve ever been bullied you know you constantly have to be on your guard. Keeping your eyes peeled for threats, always planning ahead to keep yourself safe. You might learn that it’s easier to just blend in. To sand down or erase any part of yourself that attracts attention, that isn’t palatable to the bullies. You learn how to adapt. How to survive. And maybe you get really, really good at it.

[jaidoodles]

"Time to trust ME, detective"

[lovesickeros]

lord its so dark in here the sahara desert of tsaritsa content you are like a shining oasis. your characterisation of her compels me & mihoyo would be hard pressed to top it imo.!! caaaaan i humbly request yr thoughts on her first meeting w a reader of any kind, or maybe even multiple kinds (sagau, sagau god au, isekai, etc) if you so desire...

it really is like a desert here. being the fan of a character we aren't getting until the last damn nation is driving me up a wall but i will persevere bc if nothing else i support morally bankrupt women in media. we r in a severe drought over here but i do my best. unfortunately nothing i say is ever coherent so pull out your translation notes its abt 2 be messy

also this got out of hand but thats bc first meetings w the tsaritsa are tricky to write + a LOT of her characterization lies in deeper exploration then just surface level yknow...NOT A DIG AT YOU this is just my excuse for rambling. gently pats the tsaritsa she can hold so much complexity i do not have the word count to delve into it completely :]

gonna talk cult au for a bit here though because that's 99% of my content. and honestly? she thrives in sub au's of the cult au like villain au + imposter au. it's basically made for her. i mean, early days, the imposter au had been going around for a little while but one of the first few ideas was the Fatui taking reader in so like. it kinda technically actually was. pretty sure cult au Tsaritsa popped up because of the imposter au. a lot of it's writers kinda left though which. man am i getting old or.

anyway.

there isn't much of a chance her first impression is all that positive. at best it's usually neutral, imo, but rarely if ever positive. specifically because i view the Tsaritsa as someone who isn't as fanatical as most of the acolytes typically are towards the creator. she's not exactly going to worship the ground you walk on unlike a certain geo lizard. which is partially why i think she thrives in the sub au's i mentioned.

imposter au, for example. she meets you at your lowest. there's no gaudy extravagance or pampering from the acolytes waiting for you because your own acolytes have turned on you. for all intents and purposes you aren't a "god" at all. which is why i don't think she meshes well with normal cult au reader. the Fatui are made up of outcasts, basically, and imposter au slots right in just perfectly. you're weak, at your lowest, when you meet the Fatui in the imposter au. and the Fatui can help you, too.

a mutual exchange, really. the Tsaritsa sees a tool she can use to one up the rest of the nations and especially Archons, and she has no qualms about you using her and the Fatui in turn. you both want something out of it, after all. whether you just want to be safe from the rest of the acolytes, or you want revenge, or whatever else..she'll give you the power to fulfill it, and she gains the strongest piece on the chessboard when all is said and done.

the best way i can describe the first meeting is "practical", i suppose. she sees an opportunity in you. the ultimate gamble. because if she "saves" you, and you dont trust anyone else because they tried to kill you, well..she holds all the cards, doesn't she?

but the Tsaritsa, imo, is just as capable of being just as fanatical towards you as anyone else. she just won't worship you as the creator. but as yourself? clawing your way back to your divine power and taking back what belongs to you? the Tsaritsa is, to me, a character who's character flourishes in long-term fics more because she changes a LOT between "just met reader" and after having been with reader for some time. she's practically apathetic at the beginning but a lot of her character, in my characterization, shines through LONG after the first meeting.

[kwillow]

Hello! This is really random I'm sorry. In your recent comic with the toy store shopkeeps, one of them is a bird! Inquiring bird nerds want to know, are they based on a specific species? My first thought was Canada jay but the white outer tail feathers don't match perfectly, and my boyfriend guessed they were some kind of tit! Very curious and would love to hear if you had a specific species in mind for the birdy when designing. :]

I DID! I'm pleased you asked.

Canada Jay's a great guess based on the markings, but he was indeed based on a kind of tit. A Long-Tailed Tit, to be exact!

I knew I wanted to pick a round-shaped bird with this kind of head marking (to evoke male pattern baldness haha), and just looked at different species of birds that live in colder environments until I found one I liked the look of. Not the most precise resemblance (I still need practice drawing birds), but I'm happy that I captured the look well enough that his tit-ness was recognizable.

[hammerbonk]

Vertin the type of person to go ‘Hm. It’s alright.’ While scranning the whole meal

[totaled-drama]

Screenshot redraw doodle :) their difference in reaction in this scene is great

[danny-chase]

Who is the “best” Robin fights/arguments/claims are inherently unfair, because they’re often times put forward by someone who has very clearly only read 1 of the Robin’s main appearances, and like. That’s fair i’m not gonna go read all of Dick’s Golden Age appearances and I don’t expect anyone too, but before you go shitting on other characters maybe you should idk um like read a couple comics with them instead of just assuming based on fanon + there’s the issue of Steph never getting a fair shot as Robin so she’s been in 3 issues + there’s DC’s racism in the way they write Damian getting in the way of everything including him being able to rightfully have his time as Robin + Jason was pretty much a copy paste of Dick’s robin in a blond wig (which got retconned out) + intelligence isn’t a single metric or how well you’d do on an IQ test (standardized testing is racist bullshit) + personal bias is literally just too big for any of these arguments. I will always argue that Dick’s the best Robin, because he’s my blorbo, I will always hold in my hands the panels of him speaking like 10 different languages to prove to you he’s smart, and will always have comic recs ready for you to go read, and most other comic reading stans will have the exact type of thing ready for their favorite character. Does this keep me from getting involved in these fights? No. For the honor of blorbo- *transforms into she-ra*

[mixxdpunch]

tecchou drinks like this to check the temperature first, and its the real reason why he has fingerless gloves

[mdhvnly]

these two are SO MEAN TO MY LYNX

[mr-president]

one thing that’s just kind of funny in street fighter is you’ll see a lot of chun li and ryu fanart, or hell noncanon official comics, of them being like >////<;;!!! kyaaaaa~~!! does he/she like me @m@;;?!!?!?!!! desuuu (or just like ryu being ooc pervy)

and then you’ll see ryu and chun li in canon and it’s just like. “hey nice seeing you again :]” “nice seeing u too :]” and that’s it.

you really would expect something between them, being (probably) most iconic ftg characters of all time but no. just two aro ace bitches devoted to the grind.

[camzverse]

Nooo cam u dont want to analyze the psychology behind mikes actions in the bite of 83 even though scott didnt put anywhere near your amount of thought into it noo dont do that. freak

[djevelbl]

Ok. I now understand what that one person here was saying about doctors treating their patients with a clinical consideration (or lack thereof) that seems to be particular to the profession — or I now understand it more... personally, I guess. So I'm at the dentist (or whatever the specific type of doctor, idk about doctor pokemon types dude they're all the same to me) bc they had to put something on a badly decayed/fucked up tooth (hello bilingualism, how I loathe not knowing how to communicate properly) and she starts cleaning it bc of my, admittedly, bad dental habits

This is where the fucked up thing comes in: she notices that I'm tensing up and clenching the armrests on my grasp real tightly; I have this thing where if I'm grabbing onto an armrest and I'm scared/in pain/deeply uncomfortable I'll dig my index and middle fingers into it, the others circling around it — kinda like how you'd measure someone's pulse on their wrist, but I'm instead trying to strangle the shit out of an inanimate object. So she decides to inject some anesthesia on the general area so she can work better and I'm calmer — situation resolved!

Except, it doesn't work.

I've had problems with dental-related anesthesia in the past — I had to get my wisdom teeth removed and let me tell you, even if I didn't feel the pain that didn't mean I wasn't feeling it; I can only assume what I felt was discomfort, some sort of sensibility or something like that, but trust me, that operation was hell on Earth and I hated every second of it. Coming back to the present, I felt. Every. Fucking. Time her shooty mc watergun thing came anywhere close to my fucked up tooth — she had to clean around it? I felt it. She had to clean within it? Yep, I felt it. She moved the instrument around and it just so happen to soot water into the tooth? BOOM I was clenching the armrests like they owed me money. It was SO. BAD I started shaking at some point like I had hypothermia, it was HORRIBLE

The worse part was whenever she asked me if it hurt. The repeated chant of "it hurts? No? Of course not, I gave you anesthesia!" Will forever haunt me, in just the same way that doctor who took out my wisdom teeth does whenever I remember the pain and his question of "you can still feel it?" Whenever I said that I still felt pain from the needle entering my gums. I can still hear the befuddlement in his voice every time I shaked my head one way or another, clearly in a manner that did not align with The Good Patient Manual he'd been taught to learn. I don't think I'll ever forget her sort of upbeat voice as she cleaned my tooth and I was made to lay as still as the tremors allowed me to be, clenching the armrests and getting my head manhandled by my top front teeth with her finger — I didn't even think someone would ever do that.

Like. What the fuck

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Small Tears of the Kingdom changes that could have done a lot

(at least according to me, the one singular flawed person writing this post)

In my desperate attempt to close off the Tears of the Kingdom season on my side of the internet (failing so far), I wanted to join the proposals of a couple of small restructurations/rewrites I've seen on my dashboard. These wouldn't change much of the game, but enough to boisten some of the themes and make the experience both more open and more streamlined. They try to ignore a lot of my own biases towards what I would have loved to see explored within the game and focus on what already exists (I said try). These changes are not only story-driven but also focus on quest design and narrative reward logic, which puzzled me even more than the story itself.

It's obviously not the end all be all of everything, there's a ton of small things that aren't fully adressed, etc.

Here are the 3 main tenants of this proposal:

We know about Fake Zelda by the end of the tutorial section. We see glimpses of her all the way, even though Rauru doesn't seem to be aware she's here, and most of our obstacles come from us trying to reach and save her. Then, by the end, she tries to kill us in the Temple of Time, and we realize she's fake and a lure (it could be a small mini boss, nothing too severe; just something to prove we understand combat). It could also be an earlier occasion to have Ganondorf shit-talk us using his creepy voice through her body, that could build up a better sense of rivalry going forward and make the betrayal of him using her body sting much more than it does in the current version.

Ganondorf, using Fake Zelda, tries to antagonizes each region of Hyrule towards their princess --and, the very important part, it works. The kingdom is splintering apart as he plans his return and his invasion. The goal in each region is not to vaguely solve the weird local problem, but, using the regional hero that knows and trusts Link, to prove that whatever is happening isn't Zelda's fault. This allows to build some sense of tension and stakes, makes us deeply empathize with an overwhelmed Zelda trying to step up as a leader in the aftermath of the Calamity and isn't here to defend herself (and then when we learn where she is and what she did it hurts so much more). The camp where Purah is could also double-down as the beating heart of Hyrule trying to reconnect with the suspicious regions suffering the turmoil isolated from each other.

The Dragon's Tears questline is overhauled, and that can happen in two simultaneous ways. Some of these memories remain Zelda's, but now only some of them, perhaps those who are connected to Zelda's decision to become a dragon without ever spilling it out (and could even focus more on her insecurities as a young ruler and her relationship to her ancestors), remain sprinkled into the land to reward those who want to understand more about her motivations. But now, each of the secret stones collected along the way also function as tears, and instead of being treated to another delicious serving or The Imprisoning War? The Demon King??? we get to discover a little bit more of the mystery. The way it could work is quite simple: the Sage introduces us briefly to their own perspective into the war outside of a voiced cutscene to give the writing more flexibility regarding what the player already did to avoid repetition ( :) :) ), and then plays a pre-determined cutscene in a linear fashion, which is one of Rauru's memories embedded within the secret stone and tells the story of the fall of his kingdom to Ganondorf. (also bonus: now Zelda's tears don't embody the entire kingdom anymore, which was very strange and never sat right with me)

So what we did is to separate the different stories while intertwining them: Zelda's struggles and sacrifice on one hand, Rauru's regrets and bitterness on the other (lololol sorry), and Ganondorf's attempt to break the kingdom apart --which would feed into both Zelda's anxieties and Rauru's long winded defeat. The bonus to this approach would also be to question Hyrule's legitimacy: the various races would then need to decide, after having actively questioned the young princess, that they actually still believe in Hyrule and a future they all get to live in together.

This would also give a little bit more teeth to Ganondorf's motivation, his deep envy for the power of Hyrule and the fact that his own people chose it over him, let alone everyone else. As for the Link's motivation, trying to have everyone see that Zelda is worth it and stop that evil force from shattering her image while also acknowledging the faults of the past could make the player invested in wanting to bring Zelda back down after everything she went through and all the sacrifices she made to prove herself a worthy ruler (Rauru's forcefulness in assimilating the realm under his banner even though he meant well being his actual character flaw that Mineru could eventually acknowledge, to give her something to do instead of... feeling bad for no clear reason!! Also just *give emotional weight* to that time she holds Rauru's hand again when she swears fealty to Link, this was so simple and obvious how was it not given the time it needed for us to care about what was lost!!! aaa)

Yes, it's still about the power of love and sacrifice over ruthless domination, but now characters have a little bit more agency and we feel a little less like they have a zonai knife under their throats the entire time forcing them to always be happy and enthusiastic about swearing fealty to the immortal kingdom. They find out about the past but get to redefine their future instead of falling over themselves in worship; literally using pieces and bits of the past in the form of zonai tech to rebuild their own kingdom and their future dreams. Together they are stronger; but because they all chose to believe in that mantra instead of having it being imposed by long dead kings and faceless ancestors expecting them to die for a war that shouldn't concern them.

(Also, obviously, the gerudo region has to reckon with the Demon King being particularly angry at them for betraying him, and them deciding to reject his rule a second time and embrace their own path, because in the original TotK Ganondorf being gerudo could be removed entirely without any consequence, which is pretty sad since it's basically an enormous part of what makes him compelling as a villain for a lot of people and keeps him from being a completely generic Nintendo stock villain!!)

And honestly? Beyond a couple of dialogue changes and slightly different setups and reasonings for Link to do certain things, especially in the various regional quests? Most of everything else could stay roughly the same. The bones are here! They're just arranged in a really weird way.

(except for Ganondorf surviving as a big bad dragon in the end through the sacrifice of his mind to immortality because that's just much more interesting than turning him into a supernova --but that's really a bonus honestly)