#but they can only sleep with each other

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

wintersberg i drew during a stream

[technically-human]

To relive a death

@williamvapespeare commissioned me to draw anything with the boys being gentle to each other and Edwin comforting Charles in general, so we went with this!

The idea of a character who is dead having to go through it once a year is very dear and near to my heart (how many dead blorbos do you have, I hear you ask. Too many) but at least these two have each other

[s0fter-sin]

trans!soap taking his baby and running away from his rich abusive husband

(cw angst, financial abuse, single threat of child abuse, single mention of transphobia)

he's owned soap for years, since he was a teenager; paid for his medication and all his surgeries and tied them so deeply, soap’s lost hope of ever getting away. he gets even worse when soap falls pregnant. he was always controlling; blowing up at him if he spent too long out of the house or did something without telling him. but he becomes utterly possessive during the pregnancy

soap knows it has nothing to do with his safety or the baby's

he knows he sees his baby as an investment; another being he can control and hold over him

he gets worse and worse but there’s nothing soap can do. there's been nothing he can do for a long time. then a few months after the baby is born, soap doesn’t watch his tone closely enough and his husband threatens to drop his baby in punishment for it

soap doesn't think. he doesn't plan

he takes his baby and runs

he sneaks out of the servant's quarters of the sterile mansion he's been forced to live in for almost a decade and walks down the street without a backwards glance; his baby the only thing in his arms. he knows all of his husband's cars have trackers, all of them in his name since he never lets soap drive or go anywhere by himself, so he walks far enough to be out of view of the mansion's cameras and steals one. it doesn't have a car seat and all he can do is clutch his baby to his chest as he drives

he doesn't know where he's going beyond away

he doesn't know what he's going to do; he doesn't have any money, no supplies for his baby, he doesn't even have water for himself so he can reliably breastfeed him. he's terrified his husband will find them; he’s always felt omniscient, always everywhere and seeing everything he did. if he didn’t have eyes somewhere, he paid someone who did and they always dutifully reported back to him

soap just keeps his eyes forward. just keeps driving and driving, lost to the road and numb until the low gas light pops up on the dash and it all hits him at once

he turns into a gas station he can't pay for, in a car he stole, and parks behind it and his baby immediately starts getting fussy

he can't even call him by his name sometimes; too afraid to get attached, too afraid to lose him. as if he doesn’t love him more than life itself

even throughout his pregnancy, as happy as he was to finally have a baby, he didn't know if he could carry to term and that fear just let his husband dig his claws in even deeper; paying for extra scans he could never hope to pay for, favours on top of favours so he would aways owe him and isn’t he such a loving husband? taking soap in when his parents kicked him out for being trans, looking after him for all these years? you can’t even take care of yourself john, you’d still be a woman without me, john, what is this tantrum about john-

soap tugs his shirt up to let his baby feed, drops his head back and cries

he can't stop it; wails loud and uncontrolled, chest heaving with his sobs enough that it sways his baby, occasionally breaking his latch and he can't even do this right-

he can't save him

a light knock sounds on the window and soap flinches, curling over his baby to protect him from his huband's cruel hands

but it's not his husband outside the window

soap blinks tears from his eyes and looks at the large stranger standing beside the car. a neck gaiter covers his mouth and it should be off-putting… but something about him stops the feeling in its tracks. the stranger takes a half-step back and lifts a chilled and sealed water bottle, pressing it towards the window

soap quickly swipes his face clean and rolls down the window. "sorry 'bout that," he apologises with a choked laugh, the careful front he’s built over the years cracked and bleeding

the stranger gives a dismissive but somehow not diminishing shrug. "long day?" he asks

"could say that," he gives a shrug of his own and pats his baby's back as he makes a disgruntled noise, unconsciously swaying him

he politely keeps his gaze up on his face. "looks like you could use a break."

soap's breath hitches, anxiously darting his tongue out over his bottom lip. "could say that," he repeats uselessly and takes the water with a quiet “thanks,”; his throat dry and screaming for it after crying so hard

the stranger hums, watching him down the bottle and soap doesn’t notice his eyes drifting to the backseat and footwell of the passenger side. doesn’t notice the slight tension in his fists at what he sees. "how long you been runnin', lad?"

soap freezes, the water settling in his stomach like a stone. he swallows thickly and the bottle falls from his lips

"not long enough."

the stranger just nods, looking idly back down the highway

"you know, this place is connected to a garage,” he starts, nodding back to a building attached to the station without taking his eyes off the road. “lotta people drift through 'ere on road trips; too many to keep track.”

soap frowns slightly, shifting his hold on his baby

“funny thing is, plenty of 'em just abandon their car when they break down. like yours,” he adds and finally turns back to him with a pointed look. “got a whole junkyard of 'em. just rustin' away. be pretty easy to convince me to trade ya one."

soap’s mouth parts in a gasp as he realises just what the stranger’s saying. "how easy?" he whispers

he shrugs and even with his face hidden beneath the gaiter, he doesn’t feel afraid. "i'd say this car'd be a good deal. would blend right in with the rest of ‘em; no one’d ever notice it. what say i take it off your hands?"

soap's breath shudders out of him, his whole body going limp with relief. his baby's eyes fall shut with a satisfied hum and for the first time he can remember, he feels the gentle touch of hope

"i think we can work something out."

🧼💀

ghost owns the service station soap pulled into. he wanted something quiet and isolated after he retired and you can’t get much quieter than a backwoods servo surrounded by forest. he hasn’t had anyone pull in in days so he’s quick to notice soap’s car. he’s also quick to notice soap's subsequent breakdown in one of the cameras. the sight of him crying, desperately clutching a baby like they’re all he has left in the world, is so familiar he felt sick with it

he knows someone running when he sees it

if he didn't check on him, if this lad disappeared one day and the baby along with him, he'd never forgive himself. the lad doesn't even have a baby bag or car seat with him, and the personalised sticker on the back window of a lady and a dog is a dead giveaway that the car is stolen

but the lad is terrified. and when he startled him, he didn't turn. didn’t lift his arms to protect himself. no

he covered his baby

like he was afraid he'd be hurt

that's enough for ghost

🧼💀

i'd wanna set this in the 80's or 90's, just to make it even harder for soap to get away from his husband. he's a trans man with a newborn; he has no one to run to and no resources to help him. his husband's bought and paid for everything for him since he was 17; a few whirlwind weeks of unbelievable dates and extravagant gifts and he was living in his mansion, getting married the day after his 18th birthday. he thought it was love. thought he was being looked after and cared for the way he’s always wanted

he was in pain and alone and naive enough to believe the first person who came along and promised to make it better. nothing's in his name, not his insurance or his meds, he doesn’t have a bank account or savings; other than a birth certificate, nothing even ties him to his baby. his husband could take his world away from him with a snap of his fingers and he made sure soap always knew it

he never had a chance of getting away

but ghost is ex-military

he doesn’t know the lad’s story, doesn’t know the details of what he’s running from. he doesn’t need to know

he decided he was helping him the second he pulled into his service station

[kurthummeldeservesbetter]

tbh I don’t think therapy would have fixed Jayce and Viktor lmao. maybe would have softened their self-destructive tendencies but there’s no fixing that co-dependent relationship. Heimerdinger Mel and Sky are told “yeah, I can help treat their individual depressions but nothing is gonna reduce their co-dependency. I’m pretty sure separating them makes it a lot worse for not only them but much worse for everyone else. for everyone’s safety I suggest they’re not allowed to be more than a buildings length away from each other and even that is pushing it.” That therapist then quits on the spot cause now they’ve literally seen everything.

It’s like that scene in Brooklyn nine nine where all the physiatrists are observing and talking with Gina but instead it’s a whole crew of therapists and neurologists and physiologists trying to find out how these two men literally mind-melded together. They go to couples therapy but it’s literally just individual therapy held together because why tf not it’s the only way to get them to go.

[deoidesign]

One of my first digital pieces (2010) versus one of my recent ones (2024)

We all start somewhere!

[mekk-u]

there's nothing to forgive

[turtleblogatlast]

I still think about how Leo’s ideal day out for the fam’s venture into the Hidden City was basically just an effort to get some rest and relaxation because boy does he never get that ever.

[muzzlemouths]

Wait! So Sun and Moon can talk to each other!?! (DFtR au)

Not only that, but they're usually conscious/aware no matter who's fronting. Consider the moment in chapter 1, when Sun appeared distracted after seeing you there, and again, in chapter 2, when he went quiet but reacted like he was being scolded. These are both scenes where he and Moon were talking to each other.

They often disagree on how to go about handling certain situations, especially when Sun fumbles and says or does something he shouldn't (like the rambling fish metaphor, for example).

This results in moments between them that often look something like this 👇

[darling-birdie]

missing falling asleep next to someone… being all tucked up beneath the blanket, nose against their collarbones…breathing in their smell with their arms wrapped around me…. all cosy and warm…

[scoriarose]

Trying to get pics of your pets be like

[feroluce]

“-and that's why I ain't allowed in Pier Point no more!” Boothill throws his head back and cackles, somehow completely comfortable on the bare floor of the archives. He's the very picture of ease, his arms behind his head, his legs bent and crossed.

Dan Heng barely looks up from his notebook, not much surprises him anymore after the first few tales of lawless exploits. “So they really have that many laws and restrictions there.” 

“And prob’ly a few more now that I've been through there! Heck, ya think they named any after me? I'm hopin’ so.” There's so much smug cockiness seeping through his voice Dan Heng could bottle it.

Silence settles in, stretches out. Dan Heng doodles pensive circles in the corner of his page.

He shouldn't ask. It's a private matter. It's none of his business. He of all people should know-

Something pokes his shoe, and when he looks up, Boothill has stretched one arm up to tap metallic fingertips against his foot. “Ain't like ya to hesitate.” With his head tipped back on the tiles and gazing at him upside down, Boothill's hair is out of his face and spooling out all over the floor, offering a rare view of his right side. His right eye is sealed over with a pitch-black patch, stark against his skin. Dan Heng wonders what he looks like behind it. “C'mon, then, out with it. Spill the beans, brother, just say it.”

“What does ‘Boothill’ mean?”

The man blinks at him, the crosshair in his cybernetic left eye flickering. Dan Heng shifts, smooths out his long coat. “I tried to look it up once. It's not in any database as a name...other than your wanted posters.” There's a thread beginning to fray near the hem, he should sew it up. “I couldn't find it anywhere.” 

He nearly takes it back, but- “Heh, ya that curious about me, darlin’?”

Dan Heng quickly levels his face into the most impassive, nonplussed expression he can muster, but Boothill has already turned away, head pillowed on his arms and face once again turned to the ceiling.

“But nah, ya wouldn't. Hah, like they'd allow any record of the language, fudgeheads.” One arm sweeps around blindly until it finds the edge of Boothill's hat, sets it back where it belongs on his head. Dan Heng shuffles around, scoots a little closer, but the brim is pulled too low to see his eyes anymore.

“It's ‘cause it's not a name. It's a noun.” All that's visible of his face is a sharp grin, pulled too tight at the edges.

“It's my people's word for a grave.”

Dan Heng's pencil stops.

“It's the kinda grave fer someone who died with their boots on. If ya catch my drift there.” Boothill's foot starts to bounce. “There was a war, and it got reeeeeal intense, yup. Folks started droppin’ like flies, ‘n’ there was bodies faster'n what we could bury ‘em.” A cooling fan kicks on somewhere. Dan Heng is pretty sure it's not any of the Express equipment.

“We lost some real good people there, real good. Mighty shame.” His hidden Vidyadhara ears detect a quiet metallic click, a whir, pressurized gas. Boothill's next words waft steam from his angry circuits into the air. “When I left, I decided to leave my name there, too. Didn't feel right otherwise. The life I lead now is a whole ‘nother existence.” And then Boothill turns his head, raises his hat, and Dan Heng suddenly feels pinned dead center, caught in that crosshair.

“Ya know what I mean, don'tcha?”

Dan Heng swallows.

Does Boothill know? Who he is and who came before him? There had been that moment in the Penacony Grand Theater, after he activated the Jade Abacus… Dan Heng had tried to shoo him out, keep him from seeing anything, but Boothill has the astounding ability to turn up exactly wherever people are trying to keep him away from.

If he did see, does he actually understand it? Does he know what a High Elder is? Does he know about the sedition of Imbibitor Lunae, the transmutation arcanum, everything Dan Feng had done and Dan Heng was punished for?

He doesn't want to explain it all. Not now. Possibly not ever, truth be told.

And it's not the same as Boothill leaving behind his old identity when whatever event happened that caused him to leave home. Not really. But…

But so far, Boothill has slid so easily into Dan Heng’s routine. His presence never feels like an intrusion. He's already figured out what he can push and when to back down. And even Dan Heng finds himself able to roll with whatever punches Boothill throws with baffling ease. They share too much in their methods and ideologies, and sometimes Dan Heng knows what Boothill will do seemingly before even Boothill himself knows.

“...Tell me about Talia and the Nailscrap Town.” Boothill must know he's avoiding the topic. He must. But the man just throws his head back and cackles, melting easily back into what they had been doing before, as he speaks fondly of a planet that Dan Heng has never visited.

Not today. But.

Dan Heng inches just a little closer, just enough to nudge his foot against a metal leg. Boothill doesn't pull away.

Maybe someday.

[wardingshout]

Hi!! I just wanted to say that the way you draw characters/use colors in your art is an absolute dream, I've never seen anything prettier. Do you have a specific way you pick/use colors, or any advice for coloring? You inspire my art so much, and I'd love to learn how to color like you someday :)

@braventheninth gonna reply to both of you here hope that's cool!

aaaah thank you so much I'm really honoured to hear you both like it and that it inspires you anon !! ;v; I don't actually know much about art theory-wise, aside from very basic colour theory that I always forget so most of my choices are pretty instinctual and based on my own preferences!

i can do my best to explain my thought process though! uuh it is. lots of text though just as a warning.

one thing I tend to do with almost everything is pick what kind of colour mood I'm going for! usually, since I love orange and also warm feelings, I'll aim for some kind of warm tone and when doing that I try to slide every colour I pick towards the warm end of the colour wheel. Blacks and whites are especially good for this! As a general thing I almost fully avoid picking any colours along those edges of the colour picker

instead I'll move all my colour choices a nudge into the square for the colours towards the tone I want (in this case warm) (the white is there be warm too I just forgor to type it).

and since I wanted warm colours for this drawing I desaturated the blue of Brain's pants so it would fit in better. I once heard someone say you should always pick one main colour and saturate fully and the further away from it on the colour wheel you got, the more desaturated your colours should be. I don't really do that bc I like my colours to stay bright but I do keep it in mind to mess around with sometimes.

I'm not always great at keeping this consistent, but I think it usually makes for pretty decent results... Other things I keep in mind are that when I pick the colour for my shadows I always make a little slide on the colour wheel towards the opposite tone of what I based my main colours on. oh and picking the right base colours ?? no clue tbh I always put every colour on it's own layer and then I spend a couple minutes adjusting them all seperately until I feel like they go well enough together. I usually avoid the bottom to right section of the square fully, bc I find they often get oversaturated and muddy, but that's just a personal preference I guess.

also since I enjoy the way coloured lineart works for my stuff I tend to mess around with layer settings for my lineart! usually the end results will look something like this:

where the clipped layer is clipped on to my colours folder. lineart is the only place where I just use plain black since I'm gonna change it with these layer settings later. it often still shows up as black for darker colours (and especially blues?) but it keeps a slightly coloured edge that I enjoy. if the blacks of the end result don't look good, messing around with the layer opacity usually changes stuff up. sometimes I'll also erase part of the lineart from one of the layers as a way to adjust.

I think what might be more relevant though, is the way I've been picking my colours for most of my recent posts though, which is. very differently. and also quite dependant on the fact I've been drawing on Tegaki! Tegaki has a limited colour palette that looks like this

only the 6 colour slots next to the bottom greyscale can be replaced by your own colours. As shown here I only bothered to add something to half of them; mainly the beige-ish colour I like to use for whites, a brown that I never use bc it's ugly with everything else here and a purple? that I only Think I added. both the brown and purple suffer from being too desaturated for the rest of the palette, which makes them stand out in a pretty bad way when used tbh.

I have. absolutely no idea what I'm doing with colours on this site though ngl. I think it just automatically pushes you to be a little more chaotic with the choices? a simple example is the green I picked for Link's tunic here doesn't really have any good, easy choice for shading imo. most of the "darker" green tones just feel more saturated, and it sticks out pretty bad as a shading colour for the more muted green I picked for the tunic. Removing those, the choice was either a mossy green or a blue.

and while the mossy green is still green, it feels far too dark a shading colour compared to what I picked as shading for the rest of the drawing. The blue has the added bonus of being closer to the purple I used for the black-ish parts.

I think my point is that it's really easy to push yourself to make some fun new choices when the tools you're using limit you a bit in a way? Looking at it now, I'm also seeing that the hands were lined with very different colours. I remember just thinking that I couldn't be bothered to find the exact same purple I used for the first hand so I just went with the first thing I landed on, that being a pink. But now I think it works pretty well since the one hand is lifted a bit more into the light and that goes well for a bright colour like pink. happy accidents and all that right ?

I am fully just yapping at this point 🧍 but the point still goes for most things drawn on this site.

like there was no reason to add the blues or reds or pinks to the heather here but I only had so many purple shades to work with. it might be less realistic but I don't think it would've come out as well if I had stuck to only the purple shades from my reference photo.

This ended up way way too long and I have no idea if any of it made sense or was helpful at all, but it was surprisingly fun to reflect on my own choices a bit more! especially since I often just do whatever I feel like I think it's helpful to sit back and consider what instinct actually tells me it's the right thing to do.

in an attempt to do something actually helpful uuh I recommend messing around with 2 specific things and switching around with them a bit; namely limited colour palettes (like 1 or 2 main tones imo) and then just going absolutely ham and just using whatever colour for everything (make them orange! put some blue and purple on the bark! leaves can be blue if they want to! (go more ham than I did tbh))

I think just messing around does so much for making some kind of sense of colours even without Knowing how they work. it's easy to say we should all study, but personally I'm pretty bad at it and it's more fun to just trial and error it... errors do happen a lot though omg do they happen, but that's helpful for figuring stuff out too!

[mae-i-scribble]

tonight i was thinking about orv’s theme about how yjh as a character, and to a larger extent people, will in some ways always be unknowable. (orv spoilers following, read at your own risk)

i feel like i’ve seen a few posts on here that somewhat take this theme to an extreme, leaning *hard* into that “kdj doesn’t actually know yjh like at all” which while on the right track, i feel completely misses the point. Orv goes out of its way to showcase that kdj actually understands yjh to a scary degree, even once they’re out of the early scenarios and the gap between kdj’s knowledge and yjh’s personhood grows larger, there are still things about yjh that *only* kdj can fundamentally understand. And I don’t think that the novel does anything to discredit that understanding, only says that there is much more to yjh. In the same manner, even if you’ve known someone for years, spent all your time with them, there can and will always be new things for you to learn about them. The danger that orv speaks of is trusting in that assumption, that your understanding will be enough and you don’t have to keep an eye out for more developments. That the person you know will forever stay the same. And this isn’t a kdj problem either, fundamentally a lot of the big disagreements that happen between kdj and yjh in the latter half of the novel are born from both of them misconstruing what the other is thinking, trusting that their understanding of the other is deep enough to base their judgements off of. (Post first murim destruction, divorce arc, yjh thinking kdj scattered his soul on purpose, etc.)

As always with orv’s themes, we can view it in a meta sense as well. Kdj’s understanding of yjh as a character is so complete that it’s nearly flawless- until the story begins to deviate and a yjh grows outside the parameters that kdj’s judgements are based on. Even before then, there was always more to yjh- but as readers, we can only understand a character as much as we see them. What you come away with from a story is your complete understanding, there is no growth outside of those boundaries because then it wouldn’t be an understanding of *that* character, you would be putting your own ideas and such into it. But talk to another person, and suddenly the same character you understand so clearly becomes someone else. Talk to the author, and they say something completely different. And can one truly claim to understand a character when the story will never talk about them in every conceivable way? What does it take to truly understand such a thing? Learning that 1863rd round hsy wrote ways of survival with such limited resources and knowledge on who yjh even is, and yet despite it all, still manages to write a story that captures so much of his essence. As orv readers, we know it isn’t everything- it could never encapsulate all of yjh, but the idea that even when one knows nearly nothing, you can still put on a facade of understanding.

We can get into a chicken or the egg argument with this, as 1863!hsy dictates how yjh acts with her writing, and that yjh in the 1863rd round is the one she comes to know before ever starting this story, but when it comes to this theme of the unknowable in the people around us, I don’t think this sort of debate is worth much. We know that yjh exists outside the story written, and how much of him is determined by hsy’s writing is negligible because no matter what, he always grows beyond it. Whether as 1864 or secretive plotter, it all comes back to that same point of there is always more to see within a person.

I don’t know quite where I want to go with this, only that I wanted an outlet for some of these thoughts inside my head, but one of the best things about this theme for me is how it answers itself. When the people around you become unrecognizable, what should you do? And orv says to reach out. To try. To understand. Kdj loses access to omniscient reader several times but always, always gains it back in orv (as far as i remember), because at the end of the day, he is not someone who stays trapped in his idea of who he knows yjh to be. Yjh too, even at the end of orv, is trying to learn more and more about kdj. Only when you are willing to hear out the other person, to learn about them every day, does this unknowable aspect become something less daunting.

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

so. I just got to Maruki’s attempted persuasion of Ren before the deadline and. hey what the fuck. what. what.

Akechi is the sole bargaining chip? Akechi’s life and their continued connection is what Ren wished for?

[moeblob]

Huevember 11

Karen and Rick but in the DND AU. (I just look at this and think 'Barbie learned eldritch blast' but ya know. Whatever.)

[vimbry-moved]

jumping off the back of the post about genres of song lyrics, another thing about tmbg's lyrics in particular is that even when they write about pleasant themes, they still manage to frequently do so through a sinister lens:

the experience of having children and looking after them:

a nice little nightlight protecting a child muses on the shortcomings it would have outside its assigned responsibility:

fantasising about getting high in the park with your crush: