#but not the exaggerated version of literally

[littleapocalypsekitten]

I am a gamer, but... lemme see... my favorite series is The Legend of Zelda. My first Zelda game was... literally the first one, from the 1980s. That series, let me tell you - that is Nintendo's "Let's experiment with art styles" series. Every game or directly connected set of games in the series has different art styles. I STILL love playing the little 8-bit limited graphics games of the 80s, and Ocarina of Time / Majora's Mask in the low-polygon style, although they look pretty nice in the re-release cleaned up versions, but they're never going to be super-realistic because they're just not designed to be. And, from there, they did stuff like The Wind Waker, which is purposefully a cartoon-style where characters have exaggerated features, big heads, Link with his big cat-eyes and everything "drawn" in a whimsical style, meant to evoke a cartoon or a children's storybook. And then they tried Twilight Princess, for an older audience, where they went with the attempt at hyper-realism and that "real is brown and gray" look. I love that game to death and back, and the color scheme fits it because of the themes of the story, with a twilight-world overtaking the light world, but even it had some stylized character-designs and a lot of Zelda fans really like other titles better. The much-beloved Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom run expressly on a "Ghibli" style, even something of "painting style" drawn from earlier title, Skyward Sword, which was purposefully made to look a bit like a watercolor painting. Some of the latest titles in the series (including what I just unwrapped for Christmas, Echoes of Wisdom) purposefully goes for a cute little toy-doll style on everything. And, generally, it does not overload a system. More is put into gameplay gimmicks and weird, fun things you can do in the games than into even attempting hyperealistic graphics. And the damn series is over 30 years old. Focusing in gameplay over graphics has staying power.

this is a controversial opinion and I’m not a gamer but I don’t need my graphics to be that good. I don’t need to see every individual feather on a bird. my poor computer doesn’t deserve to carry that weight either.

[just-slightly-chayotic]

@angreanyp on twitter

[sonknuxadow]

can they just say whos voicing shadow already so i can be free from the neverending cycle of random twitter users claiming to know who the va is and saying it with no evidence and people just believing it and spreading it as confirmed fact

[yanderespamton78]

Pinup!!!!! the baby!!!! the guy!!!!

sorry if this looks kinda iffy the majority of this was drawn between 11pm and 2:30am so i was very tired loll

also yes that is a totoro bag i dont care if totoro doesnt exist in cyber city he has a totoro bag come at me

Pinup belongs to @turntableart

[bi-shop]

i sometimes feel bad that my rtc designs are not too different from other fanon designs but also you cannot take my jane and constance design away from me .

[gregrulzok]

Love is when your DM writes you into the campaign as an NPC, then looks at you anxiously and impatiently as they wait for you to figure it out

[temsiik]

I usually like to keep this blog positive, but I saw something and I need to vent. Are we really still getting "omg Winry is abusive!!!!" posts in current year. Have we failed as a species.

[almonddirge]

I don’t know why I’ve seen so many people dislike Furina she’s so funny and I kinda relate to her on some level? Like it’s easy to project my feelings of learning to be an adult and all it’s uncertainties onto her relationship with being an archon idk there’s something there

Like obviously if you understand her character and she’s still not appealing yeah but the way some people talk about her,,,,

[suffarustuffaru]

so basically that one (1) scene of ottosuba in pride if is just. otto enters the room with a snarky sarcastic one liner… inwardly, ottos like god i fucking hate it here. lets get this over with. and prides like omg its u!! the cute dude with dead inside eyes… whats ur name… 🥰🥰🥰 and ottos like fuck you <3…. and prides like omg so true i loveeeee how dead inside u r babe thats like super relatable since i too am normal levels of dead inside. and ottos like hahahaha i hope we both die horribly. anyway im gonna go dispose of that corpse on the floor hahaha. and prides like hahaha i think we should both die too!!! …man….. we couldve been Great friends…. 😳😳😳😳😔😔😔😔 anyway its time to commit more atrocities :3333

[cruelsister-moved2]

God your post about how people treat masculine women in media and irl hit the nail exactly on the head. I also keep seeing these people rejoice when a masc woman is forced to present femininely bc it's now "genderfluid rep" or whatever which makes me feel kinda sick ngl bc it's so clear that they think being a butch dyke is a shallow uncomplicated gender experience but being forced to be feminine is more moral/attractive/complex. Haruka Sailormoon is like one of my favorite fictional characters ever but the amount of tepidly queer sm fans who openly hate butches while championing heterosexuality and gender conformity under a thin veneer of progressive language make me want to lose my mind

YES to everything!!! the weird delight when a masc woman does something feminine is actually so uncomfortable and it's like... they've literally BEEN being gnc every day of their life but it's not enough for you until its watered down to just like a generic androgyny its so weird anddd i think combined with the belief that butch women are doing that as some kind of statement and denying them the understanding thats afforded to other women that like they sometimes just do the stuff they do because they enjoy it and it feels natural. thats actually my favourite thing about haruka (and i liked it about utena too which actually comes out n SAYS it when wakaba is like "but this IS what's normal for you", and that still went massively over ppls heads) like she is so casually masculine and like she's just like that. not only is butchdykery so much more complex than whatever tepid futch androgyny people would prefer, even if it wasn't its like literally just how people are helloooo like butch lesbians arent there to be controversial and make a statement ... you should not be responding to the denigration of the gendered boundaries someone has set for themselves like ever in any context anywayyy. but let alone in the group whose boundaries people are probably the most determined to deny (not that people don't do this with all gender nonconformity but theres nothing like the desperation with which people want an unapologetically masculine women to make just one concession to femininity). the whole 'compensating for short hair with big earrings and winged eyeliner' girlboss in menswear industrial complex is why butchness is uniquely predicated on not JUST the embrace of masculinity but also the exclusion of coercive femininity completely at the same time like it's really hand in hand and its to do with a wider social labyrinth of coercion that every woman navigates so you can't just brush it off with choice feminism type platitudes because ummm we live in a society

[mechcity-skyline]

Oh wow. Two whole years of being TOME brained, huh?

I should've made this post a couple days ago, but this is a very special date that still regards it.

Today marks the second anniversary of me meeting Zetto TOME. My heart, my staple, my legacy.

Well, seeing as I have nothing prepared for this occasion due to unprecedented events, it is with great pain in my heart that I may not post much more than my rambling about One Guy.

Get ready.

And be warned, this is not an in-depth analysis like my friend @/zetto-protection-squad can so eloquently put together; the following paragraphs are nothing more than the written affections of a boykisser. Reader discretion is advised.

Because oh my god, that cartoon man is the best thing to have happened to me. So, so very few things can even dream of coming so close.

The 2011 version of him- were it not for the horrors he was facing, he'd be a happy-go-lucky guy. So kind and selfless, so willing to grab the virus raw for the people he cares about. Much too wonderful. He's perfect.

RPG Zetto, however... Where do I even start. Long-winded, silver-tongued, too snarky for his own good; no one can even tell he's actually grateful for the place he has currently. The only reason why he's kept his fears hidden for so long is because no one wants to be around him for longer than five seconds. He pulls the villain act so well, and I adore him for it. He lives rent-free in my head.

Both are evidently close to my heart, as one can so easily tell by how I describe even the cartoon supervillain with a rosy tint. And to be perfectly honest, I cannot bear to even breathe their way with the intention of mocking them; they are the reason I can even write this right now.

Really, they're just... Beautiful. I love them dearly.

Rant over. Needed to get this off my chest before the day was done.

[apollos-boyfriend]

i hate to tell u this but in the caption of the family tree u said u added skeppy but he is not in the image,

HE WAS THERE IN THE FILE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE I WROTE HIM DOWN AND EVERYTHING I SWEAR I COULD NEVER FORGET SKEPHALO I DONT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED

[johnny-and-dora]

🚨OBLIGATORY MYTHIC QUEST SEASON 3 POST🚨

i’ve had some time to think about it and i enjoyed s3 overall - there was some really funny stuff, great performances (especially from charlotte and rob) and some really great episodes. it’s nothing that people haven’t said before (and probably a lot better), but if there’s one criticism i have, it’s the lack of character development/arcs for anyone other than poppy & ian. i love their dyanmic and it’s always been the central dyanmic of the show, but mq has such a great talented ensemble cast with such varied rich characters and most of them were criminally underused this season, ESPECIALLY brad in my extremely biased yet valid opinion. (more under the cut)

it’s just frustrating bc the s2 finale set up so many interesting things that didn’t really matter in the end. how did brad going to prison for jo not matter? why did rachel give up on writing so easily, espeically after cw died? why is dana suddenly just another version of ian now who somehow has the power and resources to start her own studio? tbh i’m mainly mad that they called an episode “to catch a mouse” AND had a brad/jo subplot and didn’t explore their wonderful unhinged mouse/shark dyanmic. it was right there!!! and why completely scrap the movie subplot in the last episode, becuase that just made it feel like a big waste of time. i think mythic quest: playpen is a great way of compromising and a great way to get ian and poppy to rejoin mq, i’m much more into the plot of mq vs another rival studio (i’m assuming we might see that with studio dana in s4) as i thought mq vs grimpop was going to be a thing this season that we...didn’t see at all

i really liked the christmas episode (reminded me of everlight, my favourite ep) and sarian (holy shit that was some insanely perfect casting for young poppy). charlotte was fantastic as poppy the whole season, she had some of the funniest stuff and she nailed the sadder scenes too. i just thought s2 built on s1 so perfectly by playing with new dyanmics and showing whole new sides to characters (specifically brad and cw) so it’s frustrating to watch what felt like a backwards step in that sense, especially when it comes to brad, who felt like he was just...there. the “oh i’m just the janitor definitely not up to something nefarious” and david being so paranoid thing at the start of the season was so funny, so why did that go nowhere? brad and rachel is a really funny dyanmic, but brad saying he manipulated rachel into abandoning her ethics for the rewards of capitalism felt so much like tell, don’t show. like where is the evidence for that? also fuck nfts lol but this post is already far too long

i really like this show, that’s still true after this season. i think the two season renewal was probably a blessing and a curse and season 3 will end up being a transitionary season, maybe it was a little directionless because they knew they had another one guaranteed, i don’t know. the s3 finale did set up a lot of cool potential arcs for s4, i’m paticularly intersted in how that brad/dana/jo dyanmic will play out and i also love poppy/ian/david as a trio so that could be really fun. i just wanna see more from the whole cast, there’s so much potential for comedy and drama too with all of these characters! 

[thepandalion]

infinite frustration times in the house tonight...

(why did I choose an instrument that has. No sheet music available)

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."