#at this point i should just. create an art ask blog for them or something /j

[linawritesocs]

seth's new design!! wow!!

SO YEAH this is the seth redesign i was talking about in my last post!!

basically i was like "hey.. so rapunzel's hair changed color in the end, right. and it got shorter. so what if we did the same with seth, except in his case it's getting longer". and. yeah, here i am.

i think it's good for my ocs to have redesigns actually! i want them to age and i want them to change!!

and yes. yes, i know that he looks so much like riku and arata. i know. i blamed myself for not being creative enough but then i was like "well. all of them have different personalities and backstories and arata is especially different from seth and riku". so. yeah👍 i just have my fav tropes and styles and aesthetics and obviously i try to include them in my oc designs as much as possible! my vidia boy is probably going to join this dark-haired boy gang hehe.. i will introduce him. one day. give me some time.

some design notes + bonus drawings under the cut!

seth's redesign notes:

as you have probably already noticed, his hair is getting longer. he doesn't really want to cut it and he actually wants to grow it out. he's not sure if he wants it to be as long as it was when he was a child, but.. we'll see. it's actually a huge deal for him because he was afraid of his hair getting longer and he tried to cut it as often as possible since luna claimed that she thinks seth looks better with long hair, so.. he's finally able to move on :)

it's not so noticeable here bc of the filter i used but seth still has purple highlights! they're just more subtle now.

what is not subtle at all, however, that he has even more piercings and tattoos everywhere now. he has some on his back and legs too, they're just not visible here.

the tattoo on his neck is actually supposed to look like a chameleon's tail.

he has a new choker too and surprisingly, it's more pastel compared to the rest of his outfit.

he decided that he's too cool for the nrc uniform, so now his uniform doesn't have that many similarities with it, he doesn't wear his jacket anymore and his shirt has shorter sleeves. the thingy on his vest is kinda supposed to be a reference to the dark mirror.

again, not that noticeable here, but seth is wearing new colored contacts and his eyes are actually supposed to look like a purple and pink sky full of lanterns. he's still refusing to wear his glasses more, haha.

his nails are hot pink most of the time and they look more bright compared to the rest of his design.

Y E S he's wearing matching rings with rollo >:3 i am so insane about this concept, STOP ME BEFORE I START RAMBLING ABOUT IT. i actually think seth would wear a matching accessory depending on who he's dating at the moment/in this universe/timeline. and since i'm in a very strong seth x rollo mood as always, i went with this one. but i'm sure i'll get to draw the rest of them in the future!

and now. just take these silly doodles bc i had this redesign opened on my tablet when i pulled for rollo and. he didn't come home (he will. he will i am dragging him as he's screaming for his life) and i was like. at first i was like "did he not like it :(" but then i came to the conclusion that this repressed catholic school boy just. needed a moment to process it.

[elitadream]

Hi guys~! ⛅👋

Long time no see! Much longer than I ever intended, in fact. Truth be told, I wanted to make a public post sooner, but I've had a lot to catch up on in terms of notifications and messages since logging back in a few days ago. I've also made some changes that I will address shortly, but first of all I wanted to thank those of you who have reached out with so much care and understanding during my absence. Adjusting has been a slow and fragile process for me -still is-, and I sadly haven't responded directly to everyone yet because of it, but I wanted to say how much I appreciate your patience and support nonetheless. 🥹 🙏

Long story short, I was gone for five months due to a huge burnout, then progressively found my spark again somewhere along the way and have since mostly recovered. It was my wonderful friend @drones-of-innocence who reached out to me outside of Tumblr, and her sense of initiative is largely the reason why I managed to make this post in a somewhat reasonable delay. 😅💖 With that said however, I must also mention that I've deleted a lot of stuff from my page and have removed most of my work from the public eye as well. This may seem quite drastic and frankly a little unsettling, but I assure you that it was a thoroughly considered and reasoned decision! The thing is that I was still getting lots of notes on these drawings everyday and… To put it simply, I didn't want that anymore. 🙇‍♀️ Experiencing popularity was very detrimental to me in the long run and I needed to put an end to it for the sake of my own wellbeing; at least for now.

Which brings me to my next point.

After mulling it over for a while, I've decided that I would not be returning as an active creator in the Mario community this time around. 👐 Making fanart for this franchise (with such a high and continuously maintained degree of involvement) had a lot to do with my health's decline and I've come to realize that I wanted to direct my focus elsewhere going forward. For that reason, there are things which I know will never be repeated again in the future, both in regards to my art and online presence in general, but that's alright. Things change, as they do and should. I'm looking forward to reuniting with folks and would be very happy to stay in touch with those of you who wish to message me privately. Like my lovely pal @istadris said, what matters most about any fandom are the friends you make in it. ☺️

And speaking of which-

@ody-and-fanatu That's so sweet of you, thank you! 💗 I'm glad you've enjoyed my contribution to the fandom. It was fun while it lasted! 💫 My visual ideas may be gone from my page, but most of my written posts and replies are still there for anyone who wants to revisit those at least, so there's that! And I'd also like to answer some of the asks I still have in my inbox at some point. Knowing that you hold my art in such high regard makes really happy! 🥰 Unfortunately, the other account that I have is reserved for my professional work and I prefer to keep them separate from one other, but the good thing is that I intend to go back to this blog occasionally. Hoping to see you around! Cheers! 🥂

@heiressofdoodles Thanks, I appreciate that! ✨ I'm honestly doing much better than I was earlier this Spring. Back then, I was running on empty and on the verge of crashing without even knowing it. Being in constant physical pain was one thing, but feeling mentally and emotionally drained on a daily basis was another entirely, and something had to be done. It took me a moment to really figure out what was wrong, but thankfully I realized very quickly what was causing it and applied the breaks with all my might. One of my main priorities now is to be more alert and respect my own boundaries to make sure that this never happens again. 🥲

@keakruiser Thank you. 🙏💐 I'm just glad to have found my footing again. Feels good to be able to create freely.^^ Hope you're doing well too!

Special thanks also to @pianokantzart, @jelly-fish-wishes, @katlyntheartist, @triniji and @wahooitsamee for their kind words. 🫂 Your graciousness and consideration means a lot to me. 💝

As for all the nice people who sent me anon comments and well wishes, I tried to summarize my thoughts as best I could in this update, but if there's anything else you'd like to say or know, don't hesitate to ask me anytime! Now that I feel like myself again, I think I'm gonna hang out on Tumblr for a little bit. I'll be excited to see what you guys have been up to in the meantime! 🤗 Wishing you all a very good day and pleasant Fall. 🍂

-elita 🌸

[olderthannetfic]

Genuine question: what's the point of writing fanfic? As in, what's the purpose? No one in the fandom I'm in comments on fics and I even got told off by one person for doing so, as it "encourages bad writers and makes them think they're good". So it seems that it's a lot like book writing, where people work hard and are creative, but instead of getting paid and getting comments on the work, you just sit there silently hoping someone will press the kudos button and make a number go up. I feel like that time and work could be better spent on making something you might get some kind of profit off of. Don't get me wrong, I love doodling fanart, but I don't post it, as I'm aware that there's no point to doing so, and while it's a nice way to fill the time on a commute, it's not something that takes me as much time and effort as fanfic does. So... why do people bother? Sometimes I describe ideas I have and people I know in my fandom will tell me I should write it, but I don't see why. I get more interaction from just saying "imagine if [thing here]" than I would by sitting down, writing for hours, editing and posting [thing here], so what would the point be? I'm not punching down or going "haha women and their fanfic lol!", I genuinely do not get what the point is and this blog feels like it might have someone reading who knows the answer.

--

Do you make art for profit? Genuine question.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being motivated primarily by external factors, but it's not actually why a lot of people create things, whether it's books or recipes or doodles in a notepad.

I enjoy the actual process of writing.

I think many people lose sight of that aspect in an era where tons of <500-word fics that are mostly outlines and "Imagine if..." posts get disproportionate attention for being easy to consume. But the satisfaction of doing a bigger art piece and doing it right is real and motivates a hell of a lot of creation.

I suppose you might be thinking "Okay, but why not just write it alone and never post?", but I like sharing. Showing off my finished creation is part of the joy, and sharing with other people like me is too. But those aren't quite the same thing as worrying about kudos. It's like dressing nicely when you leave the house because you feel great when you know you look good vs. needing another person to tell you you look good.

To be honest, though, this type of feeling has grown in me the better I've gotten at a craft. The closer my finished projects get to the vision in my head, the easier it is to find them fulfilling and to be excited to share them. When I fall short of my own ambitions, it's discouraging no matter how much attention I might get from others.

I feel like it's time for my regular reblog of Adam Westbrook's video essay series The Long Game.

The third and least known in the series is all about this idea of who you're making art for if you're not getting material rewards in the short term. It talks a lot about autotelicity—being internally driven instead of externally.

--

But if you really just want clicks, anon, start a blog that accepts anon asks and posts about wanky stuff. Actually tag things, unlike me, so people can find you.

No, writing for attention isn't worth it.

The time investment is too great and your brain will always fixate on the times people didn't respond instead of the times they did.

But that's not actually why most people write.

[lullydoesstuff]

Tips on how to create a Demon Slayer OC

Hello guys and welcome back on my side-blog! Today I wanted to talk about something that might be useful of you want to create a good KNY OC and just... vibe with them or create art, write about them... everything. If you want to see mine you can find all of them on @bluespiderlully (that is also my main blog), but for now let's just talk about some things you have to keep in mind while creating.

🩷 Design

This part is very important when it comes to art and descriptions, I'll start to say that I've seen MANY original versions of the Demon Slayer Corp uniforms and that many of them look good, so if you design a totally new one, go for it and slay. Another important thing concerning the uniform is buttons, there's plenty of characters redesigned out there, they have colorful buttons in their uniforms and they all look so cute, but in canon we see that the buttons' color is used to define the rank of someone, common slayers have silver buttons, Hashiras have golden ones. We're talking about a military thing, so rank is pretty important and this should be kept in mind. Last but not the least: it's 1920s Japan, so maybe having your character wearing some ballet shoes or sneakers might result cringy, avoid that.

🩷 Backstory

This is maybe one of the most important parts. When you write a backstory you should consider the period of time where the story takes place and the general rules of the world where your OC is living. For example, Taisho Era: your character could have lost their parents due to WW1, or they could come from America or other parts of the world used to interact with Japan (selling/buying stuff), possibilities in this case are infinite and this era gives you the opportunity to create the best backstories ever. Next, Japan had major tensions with China and Korea so this gives you the opportunity to insert this in your OCs backstory (this is something I didn't use, I just have an half-American character but I regret not using any of this political tension for any of my characters, please of you're out there and trying to create an OC, do it, it's very interesting).

🩷 Personality

Don't make your character a Mary Sue/Gary Stue. If you don't know what a Mary Sye/Gary Stue is I'll explain very quick: it's a too perfect, too kind, too sweet characrer, without any flaws and loved by everyone... I think the reason why this characters don't work is clear, the lack of internal and external conflict is very important, since we're talking about Demon Slayer let's take Tanjiro as an example. Tanjiro is kind, but he's not perfect and he keeps asking himself if what he's doing is morally okay, he keeps tormenting himself about the fact that he's actually killing people just for his mean to turn Nezuko back into a human and he blames himself for other people's deaths... this is the demonstration that you can write a kind and sweet character, but focus on thier psychology and ideas, if they're already perfect they won't have any evolution, and once they had one maybe at the end of the story, don't make them perfect either, especially since you're talking about a world were your OC would most likely be a soldier, if they end up being alive they'll have traumas and let's be honest, no one will ever be perfect.

🩷 Power

Okay, so this is maybe the main point. DON'T. MAKE. YOUR. CHARACTER. OP... thanks, here's a cookie for you 🍪. If your character is an Hashira like mines, they ABSOLUTELY need a reason why they're one, okay? They can't be weak of course, they need to be very very skilled at something. We all agree about that but making your character extremely powerful, extremely strong and skilled, "they're the strongest Hashira ever", "they can solo Muzan" doesn't make your character interesting, it makes your character cringe. But of course they can have skills that others don't have, let's take one of my characters as an example: Ayumi Shinazugawa, my favourite child. She has a bow, no one else has one and she's really skilled with it, no one is as skilled as her... with a bow... because Ayumi is a 1.50mt schizophrenic blueberry with anxiety, she's not stronger than other Hashiras. If they need a sniper, okay, they'll take Ayumi, if they need anything else they'd take someone else, definitely, and she's not the kind of character to be sent in a mission alone, it's just unsafe.

🩷 Relationships

We're now at the last point. Having characters that are siblings with other characters in the show can become very very interesting, because you can explore more the canon character too, I personally love this trope everytime. But now let's come to romantic relationship, ships, the best thing on Earth after white wine mixed with strawberry juice. First, if your OC is an adult please leave Muichiro, Tanjiro and every other minor alone, if you want your character to date one of these the way is very simple: make them a minor too, shipping a minor with another minor is fine and it's realistic too, if you think it's wired just think about your first romantic relationships and crushes... how old were you? Probably 14/15. There's another thing you must consider, the fact that many characters in the Demon Slayer universe have a rude personality, I mean, you could totally ship your character with people like Obanai or Sanemi, but their personality should at least match theirs or being similar, to date someone you have to get along with this person, so consider this, it's not something to ignore, and it absolutely counts for friendships too. Consider that if your character is very kind they could have disagreements with characters like Obanai or Sanemi, and the disliking would probably be mutual.

I hope this post was useful for you, and I hope you all come out with amazing OCs, I love to see them and I love how much creative this community can be so please don't spare your creativity and give life to the OC in your head that just wants to be drawn or written.🩷

[jonathan-cranes-mistress-of-fear]

Hey, I just wanted to thank you for supporting Scarecrow x OC/self-insert. I'm tired of people who hate on creators who try to have fun or tell they own stories. As much as I like comics characters I'm sucker for OC's and what they bring to the table, because each is unique and brings different dynamic to the table! I Recently found two blogs with Oc I observe with interest. One being @mask-knife-is-scarecrows-girl, I find they Oc Meg Crane cute and I have great fun reading they posts. There is also @amor-god-of-love, of which I saw the picture of "I'll cut your throat..." from Princess Mononoke involving Jonathan and they OC and I fallen in love with it. Seems they Oc is love based and I'm sucker for good love Vs fear dynamic. Anyway sorry for rambling, but could you give your opinion on why people hate OC x Scarecrow so much? We should encourage such creativity not put creators down because of it.

Love your blog <3

-Anon

Hi! I love this ask! OCs are frequently disliked or at the vesy least, ignored in the fandom. The best advice I could give anyone with a self insert or OC is to never stop creating. Your audience will come. I did not start out with nearly 7k followers, it took me nine years to get to these numbers.

Fandom loves regular posts. Case and point, I watch game grumps every day and have made it part of my daily routine to watch new episodes at lunch time. Becoming part of a persons routine is a VERY high complement and I'm sure there's people who are checking my blog in the same manor. (I mean, I know there are, I see the notifs)

It's not that people HATE Scarecrow/selfship/OCs it's that people don't want to jump into something that they can't relate to, for whatever reason. If could be their sexuality, gender, etc..or simply that they don't know this OC and the creator has not pushed them enough.

I had an OC in the past, and I always got questions about her. One, because I made a lot of posts about her, and two because I had followers who luckily enough, wanted to know more. Give them some breadcrumbs! I don't really talk about this character anymore, but maybe one day I will bring her back.

Also! Mask Knife is great btw! I adore reading her posts!!

I absolutely agree we should support creators but OCs are like original art, you gotta post frequently, until your audience finds you. And they WILL find you, but you can't give up. If I stopped posting in 2016, I imagine the fandom-scape for Scarecrow would be different.

OCs and Self inserts are nothing to be ashamed of, we've been self inserting since the beginning of fandom way back into the star trek days. Also, I don't know ANY OC who isn't at least A LITTLE bit of a self insert. OH! And if that one weird artist can self insert himself into the freaking PPG reboot, then y'all shouldn't feel shame making fanfic and fanart

[justladders]

A Thing About Asks

Just wanted to talk about something that's been happening to me a lot more as of late and figured it needed to be its own post.

I get your all's asks. I see them and get an idea for something to say back. Since this is an art blog, a lot of the time the ask is something art related, which means drawing something to answer them.

I have a lot to do irl, outside of the internet, outside of this site. When I get on Tumblr, I want to look at/laugh with/share art and whatnot. This is basically the one place I go for that. When I'm free at home, I get to spend some time of that time drawing for myself, for projects, and even for answering asks.

I like getting asks. I like when people have something they're curious about, want to share, or want an opinion on, and it's nice to know there are people that are comfortable with bringing some of those questions/ideas to me. And yet, asks are not my #1 priority. I have things I already want to make. It's why I do any art at all. I have jokes, designs, concepts, and stories that I want to put down and be able to share. Replying to asks that bring something new to the table is fun too, and sometimes that's what I feel like doing when I get my free time.

I have some very old asks that I still haven't gotten to. It's not even that I don't want to answer them, but I find motivation to create certain and specific things to be extremely fickle. I'll answer asks out of order: some very old, some literally as soon as I get them. I don't try to pick and choose, I just draw whatever whenever I have the drive to.

But.

Spamming the inbox doesn't make me answer faster. In fact, it makes me want to not answer at all, because I don't condone or want to reward that kind of behavior.

An ask is not a free pass to *demand* art. I should make a point that I don't think of a lot of asks I get as being like this. I understand that the thing about being an art blog means lots of questions for/about/of characters that I draw, and I like that. It's fun to create interactions and that kind of thing. I don't think everyone that has an ask about potentially drawing something is "trying to get free art," there are just some people that will repeatedly hound as if they are owed something. (It's sometimes hard to tell if an ask even sent -I know, I use this site too- so I don't consider it badgering if you're like, "I can't actually tell if that worked so sorry if this is a repeat.")

Asks are not a contract. And certainly not a timed one. In relation to the last point, I and other artists are not "obligated" to get to asks "on time." Receiving an ask doesn't mean the artist has to drop everything to go answer it, use up their free time, etc. If they want to respond, they will. You might not even know them. You might just be a complete stranger to them. You might not know what their day or schedule looks like. They don't have to set aside whatever they're doing to answer.

This isn't because I'm mad, it just feels like this doesn't ever get addressed and needed to be.

[thatneoncrisis]

DID YOU KNOW: BULLYING is not the correct way to start a discussion about the treatment of people of colour real and fictional in fandom spaces?

DID YOU KNOW: white knighting usually ends up badly?

DID YOU KNOW: that when you create an environment where it's acceptable and even expected to gang up on the people you dislike and their art that you are BEING RANCID? that you're ruining fandom culture for everyone by creating an environment of fear?

DID YOU KNOW: that pounding feeling in your heart right now, the anxiety in your stomach when you open any inbox and find the number of messages in them WILL GO AWAY when you grow up, take responsibility for behaving really inappropriately, and take some time to think about why you're lashing out at strangers on the internet about PENIS SIZE?

DID YOU KNOW: 20k words of hate fanfic is basically fanfic and a sign of being A MEGA ULTRA CRINGE HATER

Did you know: it's more fun to create out of love and joy? that fandom is about sharing something you like with others who like it? that it's not a space to spray shit like a gassy hippo and ruin everyone's good time?

ONLY YOU: can take some time to reflect on YOUR BEHAVIOUR! Only you can find the joy within yourself and chase out the lame stank ass hater.

Go for a walk and name five bugs you see.

god bless, namaste, llap

why are you acting like im denying any of this. why are you acting like you know anything about what i do or how i feel outside of this one instance. why are you acting like i named the fics i dont like or that theyre unique in any way outside of trends that are common in literally every fandom. why do you act like ive never expressed frustration with how gideon and others are written on my blog. why are you acting like feeling upset or nervous when i see someone mad at me is irrational when i understand they have a reason to. i havent told anyone theyre being unreasonable or acted like they should just move on

i cant stop you from feeling like this. i dont want to. but there is literally nothing that can be done. ive explained it fifteen times at this point either you like it or you dont. and the fandom already had hostile people in it- i saw people sending rude anons and talking about a good friend of mine on twitter because it didnt like their ship and called it weird after specifically being asked about it. and as for the 20k thing. it doesnt take me that long to write. i write very long things this felt incredibly brief to me because my perspective is skewed and i wanted to write a complete story even outside of the critical element

[canmom]

canmom's notes on fixing the colours

ok so if you've been following along on this blog for the last week or two i've been banging on about colour calibration. and i feel like it would be good to sum up what i've learned in a poast!

quick rundown on colour spaces

So. When you represent colour on a computer, you just have some numbers. Those numbers are passed to the monitor to tell it to turn some tiny lights up and down. The human visual system is capable of seeing a lot of colours, but your monitor can only display some of them. That's determined by its primaries, basically the exact colour* of its red, green and blue lights.

(*if you're wondering, the primaries are specified in terms of something called the CIELAB colour space, which is a model of all the different colours that humans can possibly see, devised by experiments in the early-mid 20th century where the subjects would turn lights at different frequencies up and down until they appeared visually the same. Through this, we mapped out how eyes respond to light, enabling basically everything that follows. Most human eyes tend to respond in pretty close to identical ways - of course, some people are colourblind, which adds an extra complication!)

Now, the problem we face is that every display is different. In particular, different displays have different primaries. The space in between the primaries is the gamut - the set of all colours that a display can represent. You can learn more about this concept on this excellent interactive page by Bartosz Ciechanowski.

The gamut is combined with other things like a white point and a gamma function to map numbers nonlinearly to amounts of light. All these bits of info in combination declare exactly what colour your computer should display for any given triplet of numbers. We call this a colour space.

There are various standard sets of primaries, the most famous being the ITU-R Rec.709 primaries used in sRGB, first defined in 1993, often just called the sRGB primaries - this is a fairly restricted colour space, intended to be an easy target for monitor manufacturers and to achieve some degree of colour consistency on the web (lol).

Since then, a much wider gamut called Rec.2020 has recently been defined for 'HDR' video. This is a very wide gamut, and no existing displays can actually show it in full. Besides that, there are various other colour spaces such as AdobeRGB and P3, which are used in art and design and video editing.

What you see above is something called a 'chromaticity diagram'. the coordinate system is CIE xyY with fixed Y. The curved upper edge to the shape is the line of monochromatic colours (colours created by a single frequency of light); everything other colour must be created by combining multiple frequencies of light. (Note that the colours inside the shape are not the actual colours of those points in CIE XY, they're mapped into sRGB.)

In this case, the red, green and blue dots are the primaries of my display. Since they are outside the green triangle marked sRGB, it qualifies as a 'wide gamut' display which can display more vivid colours.

Sidebar: you might ask why we didn't define the widest possible gamut we could think of at the start of all this. Well, besides consistency, the problem is that you only have so many bits per channel. For a given bit depth (e.g. 8 bits per channel per pixel), you have a finite number of possible colours you can display. Any colours in between get snapped to the nearest rung of the ladder. The upshot is that if you use a higher gamut, you need to increase the bit depth in order to avoid ugly colour banding, which means your images take up more space and take more time to process. But this is why HDR videos in Rec.2020 should always be using at least 10 bits per colour channel.

in order to display consistent colours between different computers, you need a profile of how your monitor displays colour. Yhis is something that has to be measured empirically, because even two monitors of the same model will be slightly different. You get this information by essentially taking a little gadget which has a lens and a sensitive, factory-calibrated colour meter, and holding it against your screen, then making the screen display various colours to measure what light actually comes out of it. This information is packed into a file called an ICC profile.

(Above is the one I got, the Spyder X2. I didn't put a lot of thought into this, and unfortunately it turns out that the Spyder X2 is not yet supported by programs like DisplayCal. The Spyder software did a pretty good job though.)

Wonderfully, if you have two different ICC profiles, and you want to display the same colour in each space, you can do some maths to map one into the other. So, to make sure that a picture created on one computer looks the same on another computer, you need two things: the colour space (ICC profile) of the image and the colour space (ICC profile) of the screen.

Now different operating systems handle colour differently, but basically for all three major operating systems there is somewhere you can set 'here is the icc profile for this screen'. You might think that's the whole battle: calibrate screen, get ICC profile, you're done! Welcome to the world of consistent colour.

Unfortunately we're not done.

the devil in the details

The problem is the way applications tell the operating system about colour is... spotty, inconsistent, unreliable. Applications can either present their colours in a standard space called sRGB, and let the OS handle the rest - or they can bypass that entirely and just send their numbers straight to the monitor without regard for what space it's in.

Then we have some applications that are 'colour managed', meaning you can tell the application about an ICC profile (or some other colour space representation), and it will handle converting colours into that space. This allows applications to deal with wider colour gamuts than sRGB/Rec.709, which is very restricted, without sacrificing consistency between different screens.

So to sum up, we have three types of program:

programs which only speak sRGB and let the OS correct the colours

programs which aren't colour aware and talk straight to the monitor without any correction (usually games)

programs which do colour correction themselves and talk straight to the monitor.

That last category is the fiddly one. It's a domain that typically includes art programs, video editors and web browsers. Some of them will read your ICC profile from the operating system, some have to be explicitly told which one to use.

Historically, most monitors besides the very high end were designed to support sRGB colours and not much more. However, recently it's become easier to get your hands on a wide gamut screen. This is theoretically great because it means we can use more vivid colours, but... as always the devil is in the details. What we want is that sRGB colours stay the same, but we have the option to reach for the wider gamut deliberately.

Conversely, when converting between colour spaces, you have to make a decision of what to do with colours that are 'out of gamut' - colours that one space can represent and another space can't. There's no 'correct' way to do this, but there are four standard approaches, which make different tradeoffs of what is preserved and what is sacrificed. So if you look at an image defined in a wide colour space such as Rec.2020, you need to use one of these to put it into your screen's colour space. This is handled automatically in colour managed applications, but it's good to understand what's going on!

(*You may notice a difference in games even if they're not colour managed. This is because one of the things the calibration does is update the 'gamma table' on your graphics card, which maps from numeric colour values to brightness. Since the human eye is more sensitive to differences between dark colours, this uses a nonlinear function - a power law whose exponent is called gamma. That nonlinear function also differs between screens, and your graphics card can be adjusted to compensate and make sure everyone stays on the standard gamma 2.2. Many games offer you a slider to adjust the gamma, as a stopgap measure to deal with the fact that your computer's screen probably isn't calibrated.)

For what follows, any time you need the ICC profile, Windows users should look in C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color. MacOS and Linux users, see this page for places it might be. Some applications can automatically detect the OS's ICC profile, but if not, that's where you should look.

on the web

Theoretically, on the web, colours are supposed to be specified in sRGB if not specified otherwise. But when you put an image on the web, you can include an ICC profile along with it to say exactly what colours to use. Both Firefox and Chrome are colour-managed browsers, and able to read your ICC profile right from the operating system. So an image with a profile should be handled correctly in both (with certain caveats in Chrome).

However, Firefox by default for some reason doesn't do any correction on any colours that don't have a profile, instead passing them through without correction. This can be fixed by changing a setting in about:config: gfx.color_management.mode. If you set this to 1 instead of the default 2, Firefox will assume colours are in sRGB unless it's told otherwise, and correct them.

Here is a great test page to see if your browser is handling colour correctly.

Chrome has fewer options to configure. by default it's almost correctly colour-managed but not quite. So just set the ICC on your OS and you're as good as it's gonna get. The same applies to Electron apps, such as Discord.

To embed a colour profile in an image, hopefully your art program has the ability to do this when saving, but if not, you can use ImageMagick on the command line (see below). Some websites will strip metadata including ICC profile - Tumblr, fortunately, does not.

For the rest of this post I'm going to talk about how to set up colour management in certain programs I use regularly (Krita, Blender, mpv, and games).

in Krita

Krita makes it pretty easy: you go into the settings and give it the ICC profile of your monitor. You can create images in a huge variety of spaces and bit depths and gamma profiles. When copying and pasting between images inside Krita, it will convert it for you.

The tricky thing to consider is pasting into Krita from outside. By default, your copy-paste buffer does not have colour space metadata. Krita gives you the option to interpret it with your monitor's profile, or as sRGB. I believe the correct use is: if you're copying and pasting an image from the web, then sRGB is right; if you're pasting a screenshot, it has already been colour corrected, you should use 'as on monitor' so Krita will convert it back into the image's colour space.

in Blender

Blender does not use ICC profiles, but a more complicated system called OpenColorIO. Blender supports various models of mapping between colour spaces, including Filmic and ACES, to go from its internal scene-referred HDR floating-point working space (basically, a space that measures how much light there is in absolute terms) to other spaces such as sRGB. By default, Blender assumes it can output to sRGB, P3, etc. without any further correction.

So. What we need to do is add another layer after that which takes the sRGB data and corrects it for our screen. This requires something called a Lookup Table (LUT), which is basically just a 3D texture that maps colours to other colours. You can generate a LUT using a program called DisplayCal, which can also be used for display calibration - note that you don't use the main DisplayCal program for this, but instead a tool called 3DLUT Maker that's packaged along with it. see this Stack Overflow thread for details.

Then, you describe in the OpenColorIO file how to use that LUT, defining a colour space.

The procedure described in the thread recommends you set up colour calibration as an additional view transform targeting sRGB. This works, but strictly speaking it's not a correct use of the OpenColorIO model. We should also set up our calibrated screen as an additional display definition, and attach our new colour spaces to that display. Also, if you want to use the 'Filmic' View Transform with corrected colours (or indeed any other), you need to define that in the OpenColorIO file too. Basically, copy whatever transform you want, and insert an extra line with the 3D LUT.

Here's how it looks for me:

in games (using ReShade)

So I mentioned above that games do not generally speaking do any colour correction beyond the option to manually adjust a gamma slider. However, by using a post-processing injection framework such as ReShade, you can correct colours in games.

If you want to get the game looking as close to the original artistic intent as possible, you can use the LUT generator to generate a PNG lookup table, save it in the Reshade textures folder, then you load it into the LUT shader that comes packaged with Reshade. Make sure to set the width, height and number of tiles correctly or you'll get janked up results.

However... that might not be what you want. Especially with older games, there is often a heavy green filter or some other weird choice in the colour design. Or maybe you don't want to follow the 'original artistic intent' and would rather enjoy the full vividness your screen is capable of displaying. (I certainly like FFXIV a lot better with a colour grade applied to it using the full monitor gamut.)

A 3D Lookup Table can actually be used for more than simply calibrating colour to match a monitor - it is in general a very powerful tool for colour correction. A good workflow is to open a screenshot in an image editor along with a base lookup table, adjust the colours in certain ways, and save the edited lookup table as an image texture; you can then use it to apply colour correction throughout the game. This procedure is described here.

Whatever approach you take, when you save screenshots with Reshade, it will not include any colour information. If you want screenshots to look like they do in-game when displayed in a properly colour managed application, you need to attach your monitor's ICC profile to the image. You can do this with an ImageMagick command:

magick convert "{path to screenshot}" -strip -profile "{path to ICC profile}" "{output file name}.webp"

This also works with TIFF and JPEG; for some reason I couldn't get it to work with PNG (you generate a PNG but no colour profile is attached.)

It's possible to write a post-save command in ReShade which could be used to attach this colour space info. If I get round to doing that, I'll edit into this post.

video

In MPV, you can get a colour-corrected video player by setting an appropriate line in mpv.conf, assuming you're using vo=gpu or vo=gpu-next (recommended). icc-profile-auto=yes should automatically load the monitor ICC profile from the operating system, or you can specify a specific one with icc-profile={path to ICC profile}.

For watching online videos, it seems that neither Firefox nor Chrome applies colour correction, even though the rest of the browser is colour-managed. If you don't want to put up with this, you can open Youtube videos in MPV, which internally downloads them using Youtube-DL or yt-dlp. This is inconvenient! Still haven't found a way to make it colour-corrected in-browser.

For other players like VLC or MPC-HC, I'm not so familiar with the procedure, you'll need to research this on your own.

what about HDR?

HDR is a marketing term, and a set of standards for monitor features (the VESA DisplayHDR series), but it does also refer to a new set of protocols around displaying colour, known as Rec. 2100. This defines the use of a 'perceptual quantiser' function in lieu of the old gamma function. HDR screens are able to support extreme ranges of brightness using techniques like local dimming and typically have a wider colour gamut.

If your screen supports it, Windows has a HDR mode which (I believe) switches the output to use Rec.2100. The problem is deciding what to do with SDR content on your screen (which is to say most things) - you have very little control over anything besides brightness, and for some reason Windows screws up the gamma. Turning on HDR introduced truly severe colour banding all over the shop for me.

My colorimeter claims to be able to profile high brightness/hdr screens, but I haven't tested the effect of profiling in HDR mode yet. There is also a Windows HDR calibration tool, but this is only available on the Microsoft store, which makes it a real pain to set up if you've deleted that from your operating system in a fit of pique. (Ameliorated Edition is great until it isn't.)

Anyway, if I get around to profiling my monitor in HDR mode, I will report back. However, for accurate SDR colour, the general recommendation seems to be to simply turn it off. Only turn it on if you want to watch content specifically authored for HDR (some recent games, and HDR videos are available on some platforms like Youtube). It's a pain.

is this all really worth the effort?

Obviously I've really nerded out about all this, and I know the likely feeling you get looking at this wall of text is 'fuck this, I'll just put up with it'. But my monitor's gamma was pretty severely off, and when I was trying to make a video recently I had no idea that my screen was making the red way more saturated and deep than I would see on most monitors.

If you're a digital artist or photographer, I think it's pretty essential to get accurate colour. Of course the pros will spend thousands on a high end screen which may have built in colour correction, but even with a screen at the level I'm looking at (costing a few hundred quid), you can do a lot to improve how it looks 'out of the box'.

So that's the long and short of it. I hope this is useful to someone to have all of this in one place!

I don't know if we'll ever reach a stage where most monitors in use are calibrated, so on some level it's a bit of a fool's errand, but at least with calibration I have some more hope that what I put in is at least on average close to what comes out the other end.

[markantonys]

PSA: reposting gifs is stealing!

i'm directing this specifically at the wotshow fandom because i've seen this rampantly in the wot on prime tag in the past week, but it applies to all fandoms.

gifmakers spend hours creating gifsets for you all to enjoy. if you just save their gifs and repost them in your own post without crediting them, as if they were your own gifs that you made, that's extremely disrespectful. it's equivalent to reposting art without crediting the original artist, which as we all know is a big internet no-no.

so, what to do instead?

1) Just Don't Repost Gifs. if you like the gifs so much, just reblog the original damn post. it's not that hard.

2) say you're making a post and you want to use someone else's gif to illustrate your point. use the little gif button within the text post editor. this will allow you to search for gifs on tumblr and insert them into your post, and doing so will automatically put the creator's name at the bottom of the gif and link back to the original post.

3) what if you have a certain gif you really want to use in your post, but you can't find it in the tumblr-wide gif search feature? then provide the same crediting information, but manually. tag the OP of the gif (this will give them a notification and give them the opportunity to ask you to remove their gif from your post, if they wish) AND link to the original gifset (so that if someone's looking at your post and thinks "wow, what a pretty gif! i'd love to see the full set" they can do so).

(also, i can't speak for all gifmakers. i used to not want my gifs reposted at all, but i've accepted that's a losing battle, so my official stance now is that you may use my gif in your own post IF you properly credit my blog AND my original post using either method 2 or 3 above. but that's my personal stance and other gifmakers may have different ones.)

(also, i should add that methods 2&3 are, for me at least, only if you want to use a specific gif or two for illustrating your point in a text post. if you're thinking of reposting an entire gifset of mine and just, like, giving it a different caption or something, do not do that. just reblog the original gifset.)

what about reposting to other platforms? well, that's also subjective for each gifmaker. i saw one of my gifs reposted to twitter a couple weeks ago and i was kinda pissed about it, although i would've been a little LESS pissed if the tweeter had credited me, which they did not. on the other hand, made-for-tumblr gifs look like ass on other platforms, so i also don't really care that much if twitter users are looking at a tiny shitty compressed version of my lovely gif whilst tumblr users are enjoying to its fullest extent.

[roo-bastmoon]

Incredibly lucky to even be here

I just realized, exactly one year ago today (May 11th) I was diagnosed with endometrial stromal sarcoma and given less than a 34% chance of survival. I'm incredibly, miraculously lucky to be well and cancer-free today. I owe that to my amazing doctors, and also in a small way to BTS.

The moment I got told I had cancer, I immediately decided to only entertain thoughts of complete health and victory. It was a pure and immediate defense mechanism and I stuck to it. So no sad songs or movies or TV shows. No online drama. No negative nellies or naysayers. No stressful projects at work. No arguments, no entanglements, no regrets.

For months, I would focus only on laughter and quality time with loved ones and things that brought me joy, even as I had to deal with practical stuff like creating a will and a pet trust and filling out life insurance forms and undergoing test and surgeries.

BTS (and Jimin, as my "recruiter") gave me moments of grace and beauty and art and warmth and giggles--and kind ARMYs gave me a sense of belonging and community, especially during a dark and terrifying time, when in the quiet of the early morning hours, the sense that my own body was my worst enemy would eat at all my mental defenses. I could switch on my phone, go to the timeline, and ARMY and BTS would be there.

If I seem to be very Pollyanna-ish or boringly polite these days, it's because I decided one year ago to focus on what I want instead of giving energy to what I don't. I know bad things are very real and they need to be confronted--of course! But I also know that depression, anger, and fear can erode the myelin sheath wrapped around our nerve endings and weaken the walls in the chambers of our hearts; that toxic emotions can bleach our hair of color and rob our nails and skin of suppleness; that negativity can lengthen our immuno-response times to bruises and cuts.

So if other folks get a thrill, a hit of adrenaline, from drama and trash talking in our fandom, more power to them, I guess. It must serve them in some way I don't understand. Me? I find meanness and pettiness draining and damaging. So I'll never do that. I'll never rudely call someone out in public or go on their blog to rant or snipe openly about members or fellow ARMY. I will just keep myself to myself and do my best to be authentic and kind and hard working.

Doesn't always work. I'm human. I will absolutely make mistakes (case in point--the campaign idea yesterday that could have really harmed Jimin. I didn't think about all the consequences and I'm so grateful to the people who patiently set me straight.) Please know that if you ever feel strongly I'm going in the wrong direction, you can always speak to me--I'll ask a million questions, I'll hear you out, and I'll try to be flexible in my mindset. You don't have to hide behind throw-away accounts or talk to others about me. I will do my best to always be kind and act in good faith with everyone. (But I'll likely still make some mistakes, because my intentions are good but I myself am not perfect.)

By and large, I feel I'm just really astronomically lucky to be here. I know the kind of cancer I had is very sneaky and could come back at any time. So how I spend my time left in this life matters to me. I want to be a source of good in the world, help other people, experience bliss and celebrate good things. I don't want to be selfish or destructive. If I start to go that way, I know good friends will gently call me back.

Like BTS, I want to connect with people and help build something worthy. So if you're on board with that, let's be friends. And if you're not, let's part amicably.

I just... figured I should probably say that... out loud. So that's that on that.

Love you guys,

Roo

[rjalker]

I'm trying to think of what else I can offer to people who donate, I've had two people follow up for the public domain art rrequests so far...

maybe I can offer to make audio books of public domain things that don't have audiobooks yet or whose audiobook they don't like?

Yeah let's go with that. For every $10 you've donate to literally any fucking mutual aid fund, I will record 30 minutes of an audiobook for any public domain thing of your choice. Or if you've written things, I will record half an hour of an audiobook for your thing.

It's almost 4:00 a.m. but anyways, feel free to just tell other people that I am offering this.

Somebody who's not me should make a blog that's just dedicated to sharing the things that people are offering in returns for donations.

I don't know how many words I can read in half an hour, I guess we will find out if somebody takes me up on this offer.

Also if you miss the memo, for every $10 donated, you can send me a design request for a character and I will create a new public domain character based on your request, which could be as detailed or vague as you want.

This will just be my new pinned post. You are encouraged to tell other people on donation posts and tell your friends and whoever that if they have donated at any point they can request these things from me. Or ask for other things, I'm sure there are other things that I can be offering I just can't think of them at the moment.

And if you can't donate $10 but you can donate less than that, just send me a request anyways we can figure something out.

So far I am offering:

To create original public domain characters based on design requests

To record audiobooks in sections of half an hour for every $10 donated.

If you donate literally anything at all, the next time I am growing a plant from seed that is a long-lived perennial, you can pick a name and that will be the plant's name and the names of any of its clones. This includes canna lilies, crab apples hopefully, and purple passion flowers.

I guess let's say that if you or a group of you and your friends donate at least $200, you can pick a full-length public domain movie and I will novelize it. And the novelization will be public domain which means you and all of your friends and everybody can do what ever you can imagine. For reference, from the one thing I have novelized so far, it can be assumed that for every minute of the movie, it will equal around 300 words in the novelization.

I can also novelize radio plays and audio dramas that are public domain.

This place will be actually organized properly tomorrow it's 4:00 a.m. Good night.

[luckytidbit]

Food for thought.

Ok so I've seen an anonymous ask on someone’s blog recently about people being rude in the unwind community, (which first of all, if you’re being rude, shame on you.) I've seen mention of, actually no I’ll take it verbatim. “I like scrolled by multiple of peoples posts and fics about like theories and stuff, and most of them have people getting mad over them or feeling the need to prove it wrong? Like I get it, but it's just an idea 😭”  This community is pretty small and I haven’t seen any other unwind theory posts lately (Unless this person is talking about ao3, I’m not on there.), so I’m left to assume this ask is about the “Connor’s brain coping after his unwinding theory.” And the reblog I left on it, so let’s break that down shall we?

Personally, I grew up on Film and Game Theory so I’ve never seen debunking a theory as something that’s rude, just a part of a community helping another have the correct facts. Which by the way, @korokeea, if I’ve upset you, I am deeply sorry, it was never my intention to do so. My reblog was supposed to be seen as playful banter. (Side note, dream endings are very amateur, don’t do them unless you know what you’re doing. Even I wouldn’t do them, (I think I’m amateur anyway <:D.))

Also wanted to add that I should be using tone indicators, and that also I’ve seen examples of people whose first language isn’t English not understanding Western satire, so my apologies if I’ve confused you.

Now that I’ve addressed the main point, there was also something else I wanted to bring up.

This is obviously a parody of LIVE SLUG REACTION I used to add to my reblogs of Conland content (Connor x Roland), I also might have confused people doing this. I don’t think Conland is anyone’s cup of tea, personally, I see it as a crack ship that lives rent-free in my head, but I can understand how I could’ve confused someone. I honestly do like A Dog With A Bird At Your Door A Lot, even if the notes say “I hate gay people.” (Like, C’mon now Kuromi.)

Honestly, I came here to create art and not be judged for it, I have one to two irl friends that I see almost daily. The rest of it are just classmates that will turn on me the moment I say something that doesn’t fit their dialogue. (If you get what I’m saying, I have to say the right thing or they’ll look at me funny.) I’m honestly super stressed and pretty prone to anxiety right now, graduation, prom, removal of wisdom teeth via going under (anaesthesia), you name it! So you can see why I find a great sense of escapism in Tumblr.

Lastly, I wanted to say that in this community it is almost impossible to create micro-communities because of our small size. You CANNOT be vague or make inside jokes because almost everyone follows each other. On the original ask post that I first talked about, the responder mentioned a “that one guy” and my poor mutual @bopeisdope thought they could be that one guy. (Which is completely wrong, she and @lazysailor are the sweetest people I have ever met here. Oof sorry side tangent.)

Anyway If you made it through this thing, thanks for letting me get this off my chest.

[mrs-monaghan]

Another entry. Firstly, Still With Me? Did JK release a new song that I didn’t know about? Secondly, I would rather speculate that a song is about someone then a hand gesture that a lot of people do.

I saw them coming at us for paying attention to numbers and 11/08 even though that's way more real than whatever tf this is. Like... aren't they embarrassed????

Anyway guys, I have an announcement to make.

Attention please!

Thank u ☺��

Okay so I've been getting alot of frustrated asks mad at tkkrs and antis on twitter, right? Unfortunately I tend not to post them because I don't wanna bring too much negativity on this blog. Especially when some of those things are vile AF. Anyway, the point of this post is, My friends and I are in a Jikook discord and a few of us do this thing on twitter where we fight antis and shit especially when they come to Jikook spaces.

As we know recently a big Jikook account with 15k followers was attacked the other day for liking a post from an anti. But she had no idea that person was one. She just liked the post coz it was Jikook related. It's an easy mistake to make, really. She tried apologising and explaining she'd blocked the anti but these assholes didn't listen. They went though her profile and started commenting under all her regular, normal tweets that she was an anti and should be ashamed of herself or whatever. They were determined to give her no peace whatsoever.

When called out themselves, one account shamelessly said that they were antis and proud. That they didn't pretend that they don't hate Jimin. This really made me mad. It's not the first time they've been quite proud of the Jimin hate they partake in. Tkk accounts will gets thousand of likes on a post hating on Jimin and this ain't right. An anon sent in an ask venting about us being cowards and I agree. They attack Jikookers and these jkkrs end up deleting their Jikook posts. THIS SHIT AIN'T RIGHT!!! Its not.

They do this thing where they move in balk. My friends and I tried to back this account up. Encouraged her not to let them get to her. But it dont matter that 5 people are on your side if 30 people are telling you to kill yourself its just... /sigh/

This account is still running. But they had to unfollow everyone they follow and start from scratch. This ain't right guys. Its just not fair no matter how u look at it. I think we need to start giving tkkrs the same energy they give us.

Simply ignoring them is NOT working. We don't go to them, they come to us. I think its time Jikookers fought fire with fire. Which is why I'm making this post. A few of us had the idea to create a Jikook fighting discord.

If you are reading this and are tired of taking shit lying down. If you have wanted to fight these people but you were worried that you are just one person and won't make a difference. If you see the Jimin hate and wish there was something you could do about it, I come with an offer. Fuck tkkrs. Fuck antis. Fuck solos and fuck ot7 accounts that call out the vermin but then delete their tweets when they start to loose followers. Fuck all these people. Lets do something about this, ourselves.

Tkkrs are the ones causing chain reactions. If they didn't attack Jimin, Jimin solos wouldn't attack V and JK. (Yesterday I saw an art of JK with a dirty diaper and I just...🤮) If they shipped in peace and didn't attack Jimin literally all this shit wouldn't be happening.

I say we give them a taste of their own medicine. So if you see this post and you agree that enough is enough, then come join us here.

If you can't join then spread the word. Time to defend Kookmin and Koominers. Fuck this shit. The vermin have ran rampant for long enough. Photoshopping Jimin getting blown by band pd wasn't enough. Now they're editing him into porn. Guys, they've go10 too comfortable. Let's do something!

1) Create a separate twitter account before you join us. Safer not to use your main

2) ONLY Jikookers allowed in this discord. If you are not one of us we will know.

See you soon. I hope some of you consider. This shit has to stop. Kookminers assemble!!

Bless 💜

[gallavichthings]

Hoping you can put this out for all of the artists and writers that participate in your events. Just wondering how everyone deals with the feeling of posting something and having it completely flop? Those of you that have had it happen, how do you come back from that?

Hello, dear anon! I'm posting this so that anyone who wants to reply may do so, as you requested, but I also wanted to include my own two cents.

First of all, let me tell you I absolutely understand your frustration. It can be very off-putting to post something you put effort into to just have no one apparently notice it. There are a lot of posts saying how we should write/make art for ourselves, and not for others, and while I agree with those to a certain extent, once you actually post something, the goal is clearly to have it noticed by your peers.

That being said, I do encourage you to try to redefine what a flop means. Is it no notes at all? Because I hardly think you're getting no notes at all, especially in this fandom (but if you are, maybe there's something off with the way you're "marketing" it, so let me know and maybe we can help).

I assume by flop you mean getting less notes than you'd expected, so I think it's a matter of expectations. Are you comparing yourself to others? Because let me tell you right away, that won't do. Some people are more popular, period, and who knows why that is. Sure, most of the time these people are really talented, but usually it's that they make something that resonates with people, but I couldn't tell you why some do and some don't. It's absolutely impossible to predict what the fandom will or won't like. Even if you compare your works with your other own works, that will happen. I can't tell you the amount of times I've written something thinking people would love it only to get just a handful of kudos, while some other fics I've written on a whim, thinking no one would care, got way more attention.

Number three: give it time. Sometimes things aren't appreciated right away, but eventually they get further. I still get daily kudos on fics I wrote 8, 9, 10 years ago.

Finally, and this is a message to everyone, not just the anon who sent the ask: this is why fandom is important, and this is why you have to share the things you enjoy. Leaving likes/kudos is a great thing, but once you reblog it or add it to a recs list, that's when other people get to know stuff. That's literally my main job here, that's the reason I created this blog, so it would be an archive for the fandom. Yes, I organize events as well, and I answer asks and all, but the main point of this blog has always been and will continue to be reblogging. (I unfortunately don't have as much time to go through the tags as I used to, which is why I have my dear @sickness-health-all-that-shit helping me out, but it's still possible we miss things, so you're always welcome to tag me or send me your posts if you notice it's been a week or two and we haven't reblogged them yet - please do wait a bit though, as we do have a queue to go through.) Also, please do leave replies/comments/tags, those are so important and encouraging to the artists/authors!

I hope this eases your heart a bit, anon. And I look forward to seeing what everyone else will say.

Cheers,

GT mod.

[gracieart]

You’re seriously going to take drawing requests from A Court of Thought?!? Someone who routinely lies, gaslights, bullies, and blocks Elriels? You were truly one of my fave people on this platform but watching you pander to Eluciens…whew, the respect I’ve lost.

Hello anon. I seem to have upset another one of you.

First and foremost, I am going to draw whatever I want and I'm not going to apologize to you. Let me just get that out in the air.

And for now, we are just going to ignore how you seem entitled to me, my art, my free time, and what I decide to do so we can quickly address your concern here.

I want to preface this by saying I sat on this ask for hours because I was genuinely so confused where this came from. I literally had no idea what you were referring to. I thought ‘A Court of Thought’ was you trying to criticize me for taking art prompts for A Court of Thorns and Roses and that you were saying I do all those things you mention. Which, as you can imagine, made me very sad.

But it finally dawned on me (after one of my friends pointed it out to me) that you were referring to the comment I replied to from the blog ACourtofThought.

After that realization, your comment started to make sense… for the most part.

Now, I have never once spoken to or even heard of this person before they commented on one of my posts. I know absolutely nothing about them. I’ve never even seen one of their posts. But if what you say is true, then you should know there is no possible way I could have even heard of them before, as I have a long list of anti tags blocked and have a strict no negativity policy on all my blogs. If you knew me at all, or if I was one of your favorite people on this platform, as you claim, then you should know that about me at the very least. I make it very very clear I do not deal with that kind of negativity.

And you know, not everyone in this fandom chooses to surround themselves with negativity. I hope you free yourself from this, truly.

I am not upset that you talked down to me, hurt my feelings, and insulted me. No, I’m mostly upset about the fact that you immediately jumped to the worst conclusions about me. The fact is I simply replied to a nice comment I saw on a post I made. That’s it. You saw that and thought “Wow, this woman is siding with this person I really dislike. And she obviously knows exactly who this person is and why I dislike them so much. So how dare she!”

…That is what you thought, am I wrong?

This is unwarranted and out of context. I am not “pandering” to Eluciens. I was simply asking my very kind mutuals, who happen to like that ship, if they had any prompts they wanted me to draw. And I tagged Elucien in that post so it reached other people. I have so many nice and genuine friends on here who ship all kinds of things, and I want to create something that makes them happy too. Is that a crime?

What if I told you I’m the exact same person I’ve always been? What if I told you that all the while I’ve been one of your “favorite people on this platform,” I’ve been doodling Elucien for some of my longest friends. Would you still have had any respect for me left to lose if you knew that all along?

I won’t talk about the ships here. If you want to know about that, go see my response to the other ask I answered yesterday.

When I first saw this ask, I’ll admit it upset me very much. So much so that I couldn’t get anything done for most of the day because I was so sad that someone would say something like this to me. But I’ve had a whole day to think about this, and I’ve come to one conclusion: I really don’t think you had much respect for me to begin with if you are so quick to turn around and talk down to me and insult me after I seemingly did something to offend you.

And if I did offend you, you could have easily just unfollowed me and moved on. But… you chose to go out of your way to insult me. Why?

I am sorry you are stuck in a place where you feel like you have to assume the worst of people. I’m sorry you have found yourself surrounded with so much negativity in this fandom. Fandom is a place for people to come together because they enjoy something, and I am truly sorry you’ve fallen into the part of the fandom that doesn’t comprehend that.

I’ll never begin to understand why people can’t see that kindness is so much easier. But at least I have a lovely circle of friends on here I can fall back on. Friends who have different opinions, who ship different things, or like other stuff. Friends who are in a completely different circle, but are the kindest, most compassionate people I’ve ever met.

Anon, I truly wish for you to find that for yourself. Try surrounding yourself with kind people who like different things. You will be so much happier. Trust me. There are so many nice people out there once you step outside your own circle.

[defining-skyology]

Defining Ancestors.

This was also going to be another complex topic to dissect, but fortunately, complication and technicalities are not supposed to be the point of these posts.

Unfortunately, that's still something I have a hard time understanding.

The point of these posts are to categorize specific themes into notable groupings, and give said grouping a Name. This course of action will create a Terminology, and one that we can continue to use for the foreseeable lifetime of this blog.

Ancestors.

I give myself so so much runaround with the term.

We are trying to answer quite a lot of questions surrounding these characters, such as:

Who are they?

What are they?

How are they?

When are they?

And why are they?

And though I could spend an entire article on each of those, the goal here is to condense it down into a single sentence broadly and tactfully answering only as much of them as deemed necessary.

So first let's talk about Who they are.

There has been more and more dispute over the concept of Beings during the kingdom's history, notably/generally over firstly the Elders, and then more recently with the presence of the Embers on the horizon. The Elders and Embers both have a decent amount of evidence or rationalizations behind them being special Beings; functionally a different 'species' from the Ancestors.

But I think that we, and by we I mean me, need to stop getting distracted by the fact that all of these Beings are 'different' from each other. What matters, is that they all lived in the same kingdom at one point, one way or another. All of their eyes, all of their hands, have worked and toiled and led this kingdom to the point where it had once mightily stood. This belonging to a community is important, and needs to be contrasted with one notable thing;

They are not creatures.

At this point in the kingdom's history (as well as within the mid-phase concept art of the game) there was a clear categorical divide between Ancestors and creatures of Light, and I think that we can retain this divide to be used for the blog today. If creatures are pure Beings and Ancestors are not, then it is because Ancestors are not properly Connected to the Light.

We will go into this in further detail on another vocab post, but if we note Creatures as the 'natural' life flowing throughout the world, then we can counter that with the idea that:

Ancestors are the 'unnatural' presence in the world, due to their separation from the Light.

We've got the first part of our Definition locked in with who and what they are, and the next question I want to ask is the last question I think we'll need, which I personally believe will be the most important:

When?

The term Ancestor should be a no brainer, and when we first hear the term in relation to a character it gives a pretty clear image in our mind almost immediately. Allow me to demonstrate the most perfect example that any kid who grew up on Disney movies will immediately understand:

[[[Scenes from Mulan, showing a man praying to his Ancestors to watch over and guide his family, and the Ancestors deciding how to help their descendant.]]]

Ancestor noun : "A person, typically one more remote than a grandparent, from whom one is descended."

It is still very up in the air whether ANY Beings physically/directly reproduce. They don't; I don't believe they do.

Due to this, we will assume for now that the term Ancestry in Sky refers not to a direct heritage of blood, but generational heritage. Even if Beings just materialize, fallen from the Sky, they are still found and raised by those who came before them, as we can see in Stargazer's memory. This heritage of raising the next Beings that appear is functionally "generational", and therefore once enough generations occur, at some point older generations can be considered a newer generation's ancestor.

But where do we draw the line? Where is the exact moment when our nearest/youngest Ancestors existed? Or more specifically, when?

Fortunately, the answer we need is pretty simple, even though it's about to help us all tie it together.

We know Ancestors possibly survived "the Event" at Eden, but we can't know if any were 'born' into the world after the apocalyptic fallout at the end of the war.

We don't know how soon the 'first' Descendants started appearing down in the world. While I'd argue the very first players at the beginning of Launch were the first Descendants, some theorists argue that this is not provable, and perhaps Descendants were canonically born even before the first players started playing.

The complications and the discourse is chaotic and uncoordinated as ever; what else is new? But I have an easy way to nip this in the bud and make a clear cut decision for everyone, that I believe TGC would clearly prefer us to have implied is the most direct "truth" to our "when".

Any Ancestors, Elders, or Embers that existed BEFORE the 'Explosion' occurred during the Eden Event, are definitively Ancestors.

And from here let's make it just that much simpler with that study we did earlier up there on what is Nature and what is not.

Unnatural Beings that existed before the 'Explosion' occurred during the Eden Event, are definitively Ancestors.

And there we have it! This is the Definition I think we can confidently leave this at for now. Of course it can get deeper then this, but I need to sleep, and the loyal one or two people who read this deserve a break. Thank you so much for reading, and have a good day/night, y'all!

I really hope I get on the next one (or two or three) soon and not get stuck again.