#be careful out there its so rough

[dayurno]

sorryyyy for bringing some type of discourse to your inbox but I just giggle whenever anyone brings up the fact that nora soad andrews a misogynist and their only argument is the fact that he's friends with renee and dating neil who said women are the strongest ppl i know, like i don't personally think he's a misogynist, but i feel like there has to be better arguments for it😭

maybe it's bc the fandom gets on my nerves so I'm more sensitive to any attempts a defanging and making characters more palatable bc I'm not a fan of the widespread fanon versions of the characters also it's sad I feel like the fandom made some sort of progress where discussions were being had about the problems in the series and now after tsc came out it feels like we're back to where the author can do no wrong and it's hard to criticise anything

what do you think about tsc being a triology, I feel like two books can hopefully give Jeremy the depth he needs i remember you found him a bit flat as well when you read the book, I see a lot of people saying he needs to have a mean side or a traumatic past but I feel like a kind, nice character can be interesting without those things and not every kind character needs to have this secret mean side anyway, personally I groaned out loud when I found out it was a triology bc that would mean the fandom would be alive for longer and it's so crazy out of any book fandom I've ever been in for some reason the aftg fandom feels the most obnoxious maybe it's bc the books deal with heavier topics close to the heart so there's more feelings involved🤔the only book fandom who has pissed me off a comparable amount would be asoiaf but that's a whole different thing

I really do try and be happy I'm not even in the fandom anymore and I've never followed aftg twitter accounts and I don't even check the tags I just go on certain blogs but i still see things it's horrible💔like I can't believeeee we're still discussing if Kevins a coward or not and how selfish he is for leaving the nest like we've already argued about this to death on tumblr back in like 2016 now it's the same thing again💔

LOL i understand honestly so many of these discussions are repackaged wide-spread 2015 opinions which don’t reflect the original text that it’s hard to do anything except use the we have this thread every week comrade image and let it go. andrew being misogynistic is not even hard to come to terms with considering it’s not an interpretation or a headcanon it’s the author’s own words and will for the character incorporated into canon. there are things to disagree with nora sakavic for, but ultimately there is a difference between disagreeing with the author and willfully ignoring the intention with which a character was written

& i didn’t really care much for the news, i think the lack of planning and the rushed way the books are coming along are grating on both the author and the fandom, but i don’t blame her for wanting to get this done and over with. it will show more insight on jeremy hopefully, but unfortunately i already don’t care 😭 i think the route tsc took was in general uninteresting and pedestrian enough to not warrant a second thought, and i’m not particularly interested in any plotline beyond what pertains to kevin and the ravens. what surprised me really is the total lack of impact tsc had on the fandom, which is to say, i think it was so in line with the same 3-5 headcanons passed around the last 10 years that it has genuinely done nothing for anyone aside from the people who were already very invested in jean and/or jeremy. it feels like a different fandom from aftg altogether, which i’m happy about if only because it keeps us all locked in different cages, but it still baffles me to see people dedicate so much thought to a book whose characters bar jean are, as of now, the very definition of Nothing burger. all in all the answer to that question and most questions pertaining to tsc is Who cares. because literally who cares

LMFAO staying away from aftg twt is really good for you & honestly all of us. it’s still so funny to me that not even nora sakavic herself wanted to touch that mess. mentally ill white suburbanite teenage shut-in echo chamber ass fandom

[xxplastic-cubexx]

obligatory beach divorce doodling

bonus rough cover redraw of x-men #41 (1995) But Beach Divorce below cut

[humans-are-tasty]

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

some misc Barn & Wally doodles from the past week or so <3 i heart them

[suntails]

🐙⚔️

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

i... wrote a smol fic (っ´▽`*)っ

also!!!!! If you haven't seen it - shoutout to first ever published fic in Ninja Showdown/My Immortal Soul tags - Lustrous Red by @missadmyre !!!

[rox-of-iu]

ayo guys guess what time it is again :)) 💜💜

spoiler warning for cultivate ch 41-46

hehe finally scrambled brain enough to be able to catch up and cultivate makes me go 🥰🥰😌🤗😊😊

cultivate of course by @neonghostcat beloved

[b4kuch1n]

and the storm he was driving/washed it away/in the eye there was a silence

[1captainjordan4]

Procreate vs rough animator

Did some animation tests for both programs to see how it works :]

[motherforthefamicom]

redrew an oc thing from last year :3

[weirdmageddon]

how do people even find partners. i dont want a bullshit answer, like really

[not-your-bro]

on the one hand the until dawn remake is super unnecessary. on the other i need a climbing class revival so bad like it's dire

[wizardlymilf]

just experimenting

[rxttenfish]

Omg what DOES Aaravi do as a monster slayer?

the short answer is that it varies with how much of my own stuff im willing to bring in, im afraid

mostly im waffling back and forth on this point right now because if i was a little closer to monster prom canon i might be able to have more fun with it and include a wider variety of situations and it wouldnt be such a downer as it would be in the other case...

mostly, the thing that monster slayers are in the redesign universe is a hate group, plain and simple. a particularly violent and nasty one too, at that - they're focused primarily out of human-majority societies and cultures that have much smaller minorities of other sophonts and/or that contact with those sophonts is new and recent, hence why there's such a strong sorting between "humans" and "monsters". "monsters" isn't a real category in any sense of the word, it's just a social marker for an out-group that is seen as particularly dangerous and frightening and, thus, "not normal". this is also why it doesn't really specify between monsters that are sophonts and monsters that are just normal animals...

primarily this hate group arose out of existing environmental/hunting groups, semi similar to things like forest rangers, and has even common ancestry with witches (or, one of the definitions of "witch"... witch can refer to a human with some innate workable magic, witch can refer to anyone who works with/studies magic as a job, or witch can refer to a supernatural concept/creature which is basically just the trope we have of the witch, as any malignant supernatural person who uses that supernatural prowess for evil. this is different from magic, because magic in this universe is just... another Thing That Exists, not necessarily any different from, say, engineering as a job or study, and belief in the impossible and supernatural is of course going to exist unrelated to that).

as in, there's a fairly universal need in most communities to be able to manage magic somehow. usually there's wildlife or plants that have their own innate pools of workable magic, and those need to be treated and handled differently as a different form of danger in the world, or there's magical aquifers locally, which means that all of that magic is just available as free energy to be used by anyone who has the chance to grab it, and if workable pools of magic aren't regularly maintained to recycle the magic that makes it up, then it can build up wild magic and tends to explode particularly dangerously... so you need someone who has learned how to deal with all of that, and so you get the origins of witches, and the origins of other people specializing to deal in magic and magic-heavy things, and from that you get people specialized in hunting or otherwise managing animals that utilize magic in their biology in some way.

(which, to be fair, nearly everything on this alternate earth is, in some way. magic really is just... free energy for anyone who can grab a little of it, and most life will be able to at least do a little bit of that. humans are a prime example, since even non-innate magic users will still hold and maintain very small pools of magic internally, utilized primarily for metabolism and to offer a slight boost to the immune system and other such things. this is even what souls and ghosts are - just the pools of magic inside of a person that can get shaken loose through particularly traumatic events, although the systems that lead to ghosts are poorly understood (and also different from a soul, the animating supernatural concept... theres a lot of confusing terminology in this universe, and i do that on purpose). it's just that species that either live in or around magical aquifers or are uniquely adapted for it that are magic specialists, where it makes up a much larger part of their biology, and who cannot live without that magic. a human without magic might just be slightly immunocompromised, a demon without magic is dead!)

this is where you get monster slayers, though. because they were a specific movement within this larger group of people who focus on magical life, where they particularly focused on the danger posed by magic specialist wildlife during a time when nonhuman sophonts were being introduced to and "challenging" the dominant culture where they came from, and ended up connecting the two. it's a purposefully very messy grouping without a lot in common other than this specific group targeting them, and their primary goals might be similar to creating and enforcing a human-only community devoid of large, dangerous wildlife around that area that could possibly injure someone. the fact that this also ends up targeting a lot of disabled humans (vampires, zombies, etc, they're just humans who have a specific magic-derived "virus". there's very few benefits to this, it really is just a disability) isn't seen as a problem either in their eyes, mostly because they're also often stereotyped as being dangerous or endangering other people by their sheer presence, so they get sorted in with the other targeted groups as well.

there's also a lot of people and things that we have in real life that would get labelled "monsters" in this specific line of belief, even if i haven't gone into that as much, mostly because i worry that people will think that because i'm writing aaravi as sympathetic that i'm supporting her beliefs or the beliefs of monster slayers too - or that, again, i'm still just in the awkward middle ground where i'm not sure how much i want to go into this and REALLY kill the mood.

(also, because it does kind of miff me when people write fantasy settings but provide some kind of distinction between real wildlife and fantasy monsters in a way that shouldn't actually exist in that fiction. lions and tigers and bears should be considered just as dangerous and frightening as any speculative creatures you put in your work, especially when there's not any one unique feature that tidily separates the world into "animals" and "wildlife". hell this is even what i try to get at with my merfolk, since they really aren't any different from humans, as just another naturally formed sapient animal species.)

and, to be clear, i WANT this to be upsetting. it shouldn't be something comfortable or easy to talk about, let alone witness. it's something that also has to be seen and judged and understood in order to understand aaravi herself, just as much as how you can't understand miranda unless you understand what it actually means for her to be a genocidal monarch who expresses ultimate control over anyone who happens to be under her and is willing to do anything to maintain control in the groups of her equals. for both of them, they're supposed to equally be representative of those who suffer by and under the system they are a part of (aaravi is not allowed to leave the monster slayers even if she wanted to, her being discovered as half-human would mean her potentially being targeted and killed and her family potentially also targeted for association, having her entire self worth tied to her ability to lose her own personhood and perpetuate violence that no one else is capable of or wants to do, or else be blamed as the reason why innocent people get hurt and killed), while also actively perpetuating it (both have a vitriolic hatred of anyone who either "can't do their job correctly" or "isn't hard enough to withstand the pressures of their job", aaravi especially targets and is quick to punish other slayers to try and cover her also being "part monster", she upholds and feels incredibly defensive over her family name and how great her family was at being slayers, she hunts and kills a lot of other people just for them not being human that makes them even more guarded and scared of humans and more likely to retaliate in order to try and keep themselves safe, which also means its harder for anyone else to stop being a monster slayer because even more taboo gets connected to them or being one).

a prime example is actually her grandma, who is still around. aaravi's from a line of monster slayers, which is to say her family was already in this hate group, they were born into it, and aaravi was just the latest in the long line of it all. her mom did work on trying to get out, did meet aaravi's dad and left to where no one else in the group knew where she was, where she could try to start anew and they wouldn't be able to find her, to have a family with someone who she had been taught to view as nothing but dangerous and frightening and not someone to be trusted... and then he turned out to be a garden variety asshole who just... left. never really was very interested in aaravi or salil, got bored with aaravi's mom once she tried settling down after getting out, didn't really do much to support her in trying to remake her life from a brand new foundation, and just left one day without a note or saying anything or anything at all, really.

all of which served as mundane trauma that pushed aaravi's mom back into the monster slayers even harder. it just confirmed a lot of old beliefs that she had burned into her mind after not really helping her to undo or confront them, and she had very little else left to go back to, and she had two kids now that if anyone else learned were the result of her having a tyst with a monster would get hurt and killed as much as she would, serving as a representation of the mistake that had just been confirmed in her mind as such.

it's why it came down on salil so much harder than aaravi, and why aaravi looking so nearly human is so important for the way the story functions. aaravi got pushed harder and harder to both try and make up for her mother's mistake, pushed to become another monster slayer and pushed even harder to be a GOOD one that would be great enough to make up for all that her mother had done while still living up to the legacy that her mom could only think of herself as having ruined, to shove all her monster parts into a deep dark little box that she would never tell anyone else about, who was told over and over how dangerous it was and what would happen if this got out. but salil... salil is much more obviously inhuman, much more obviously something that she can't hide or obscure, and so salil kind of...

well, already their mom was reverting hard onto "all monsters are dangerous and cannot be trusted and NONE of them are EVER going to be good, only lie about it to hurt you even worse", and there was a lot harder... fear, from her, that he picked up on. really, both of them picked up on it, and still aaravi doesn't know and is terrified of the possibility that their mom was scared of them, or thought that they would hurt her, or even outright hated them for being monsters. and because salil was much more obvious about it, a lot more got targeted and felt by salil, a lot more their mom tried a lot less with him, a lot more she just tried to hide him in the house and not tell anyone about him or that he existed. its why when he ran away one night, it was very easy for her to come to the conclusion that he had been found and killed by monsters, and it was very easy for that belief to be passed onto aaravi.

it's also why aaravi's grandma has such a... particular situation. she was also such a prominent monster slayer within that community and group for so long, and so many of the leaders within the community think back fondly of her, but its this very same reason that she can't talk about the amount of doubt she's also felt about it, the mounting regrets and guilt that has built up, the knowledge of what happened to her daughter and to her grandkids, and the knowledge that she can't really DO anything to help it either, even AS someone who holds such an esteemed position and even BECAUSE of it. she's effectively just built up more and more distance from the community over time, isolated herself more and more from these old friends of hers, gone quietly silent in her old age, but its also why shes never been able to fully shake it, and why that connection STILL exists and shes STILL expected to uphold it when it does. she's older than she used to be, more vulnerable, and she has a granddaughter who doesn't have a mom or a dad anymore to look after her, who is at least part of what monster slayers want to exterminate, and there's a lot at stake here that she just can't make herself risk.

so, yeah... i hope this provides a little bit of clarity as to what aaravi in the full redesign verse being a monster hunter MEANS and what she does, because it's not... very pretty, really.

if i write it, i'll likely end up focusing more on the animal side of it, least of all because i can't see aaravi taking miranda on a hunt for a person, but also because it adds in more layers of aaravi feeling disingenuous and doubting herself. she feels like she's lying to miranda, making it more palatable, more acceptable, than it really is, not showing her the full thing and letting herself be judged as is, but also aaravi is ABSOLUTELY not prepared for that conversation and doesn't know how to breach the subject of "i'm basically a serial killer for hire" with miranda, and is equally as scared by the thought of what if miranda actually DOESN'T have a problem with that and doesn't react. but it's also just close enough to still hit that uncomfortable realm with aaravi, just close enough to killing a person that she keeps seeing herself in the eyes of the wildlife, doesn't know which end of the gun she's more scared of being on and doesn't know how to handle any of it.

[synchlora]

bro I know we've all heard abt cloth mother vs wire mother but working in animal care its become so obvious everywhere

[front-facing-pokemon]