#can’t have a normal guy in this world

[haveyouthoughtaboutcomicstoday]

I don’t have time to write up something properly on this topic this week, but here’s an incoherent ramble.

It’s so important to me how it was as an end point for Guy’s new52 character to be him as a Blue Lantern. The blue ring is about healing and faith (in yourself, the people around you, in things bigger than you), and is rooted in belief that things can always get better. That Guy gets to spend his future going around healing people in a universe where he didn’t get the opportunity to pursue that as a career initially is so rewarding.

His role as community leader/teacher/public servant is so integral to how he was first introduced. And through the ups and downs of his story arc in the years following, his ability to forgive people for anything, even to offer that forgiveness first, is what makes him such a good person. We see this most often in his relationship with his family and with Hal, but it’s definitely not limited to them.

There’s also something about Guy opting away from any of the rings that give him strength to do violence in favour of one that is powerful in taking down enemies in other ways. He still carries them with him, and knows sometimes he might need to use them to save people, but thats not his first instinct anymore.

Social worker Guy, psychology student Guy, the version of Guy that is gentle and timid and doesn’t like violence at all (that we only ever saw as a joke in JLI) would all be so proud of him for getting here in the end.

[rystiel]

rewatching season 3 for the first time in forever rn and. the doctor and jack make me so sick dude. i feel sooooo unwell about them. like imagine you meet rose and the doctor, these amazing people that you find yourself traveling with and coming to care for, then one day you end up left behind by this man that you trusted, alone and fundamentally changed forever—back from the dead. you wait for over 100 years, searching for him, and when you finally find him you learn that he abandoned you on purpose. that he views you as something wrong, something that he can’t stand to look at. a fixed point, something not meant to exist. this guy that you loved and trusted, telling you all of this right to your face. like that’s crazy

[makotonaegiunderstander]

something I’ve been thinking abt is how many people think Makoto is immune to despair. I don’t think he is. I think becoming the ultimate Hope was BECAUSE he felt despair. He wouldn’t have fully reached that point without Junko. Makoto becoming such a beacon was his last attempt to avoid completely falling and it wasn’t because he didn’t feel despair, it was because he was too damn stubborn to allow everything to go to waste and he refused to sacrifice his beliefs for someone else’s. His inner monologue tells me he DID experience the same new low the other suvivors did in the final trial, but at the point where he had the choice to give up and die, he looked at the others and he looked at Junko and he couldn’t allow it to happen, not out of self preservation, but because the idea that Junko would have control over their lives made him FURIOUS. and that utter refusal to die kicked in, wether luck or otherwise, and he made the concious effort for one last push while something in him was breaking. He had to be broken in order for the Ultimate Hope to come through so aggressively, bc it could only exist in the face of the Ultimate Despair. He snapped the same way she did, but in the other direction. In what could have been his final moments he chose to embody everything Junko wasn’t, and every single optimistic and luck fueled ideal in him suddenly charged forward and pushed him. It was a combination of the final straw and a choice. Makoto isn’t immune to feeling despair, he’s just too stubborn to fall into it of his own volition. I think that’s why I like that scene in DR3 so much. People were SO SHOCKED Makoto actually fell for the tape, that he actually became despair for a moment. I saw people getting mad or disappointed, saying it was pathetic and Makoto seemed to fall from some sort of pedestal for them. Honestly part of me wonders if that sort of mentality, which clearly people had in universe, affected Makoto a bit. Like he started to see himself as less of a person, subconsciously. Prompting him to take more risks, less self preservation, act way more bold. It seems he has to be reminded a lot not to put himself in danger by his friends, to not do something too reckless. All over the place I would see in regards to that scene either this frivolous ‘oh this was just angst drama with no meaning behind it’ or ‘he can do better than that. he’s so weak’ or ‘come on, there’s no way he’d fall into despair, he’s the Ultimate Hope!’ This kind of mentality, which was kind of ironic considering Ryota was there the entire time saying the same thing and treating Makoto the same way. Like Makoto was superhuman. Like Makoto didn’t feel despair the same way ‘normal people’ did. In a way that was also how Munakata saw Makoto. Makoto stopped being a PERSON to the world when he became Ultimate Hope, he became a concept, a belief system, much the same way Junko ascended beyond herself. But the difference is that treating Makoto that way is the opposite of the reason Makoto became such a representative for hope. He wasn’t doing something no one else could. He was doing something everyone had the chance to, he just… was a little more optimistic, a little more stubborn, a little more ‘gung-ho’ about things. He just took the lead where no one else did, where no one else knew they even COULD in the face of Junko’s unstoppable force. She had overcome the biggest threats and obstacles in the world, what could one person do? And the answer Makoto found was, anything. Everything. It doesn’t all rest on Makoto, he’s just the one that was inspired to try to do what seemed like the impossible. But as evidenced by the change in his friends after that trial, it’s clearly not something only Makoto is capable of. The others pulled out of despair thanks to Makoto, but it was their choice to do so.

“But… this world is so huge, and we’re so small. What can we do…? No, we can probably do anything. Yeah! We can do anything!”

[kittykatninja321]

Is it possible for superheroes to be good parents (or lovers or friends or anything else)? If you’re truly going to martyr yourself for the pursuit of justice doesn’t that mean that at some point you’re going to have to choose the world over your relationships? Yes it’s for the greater good but what mean for the people you love? Did they agree to that sacrifice? (Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t)

[ceramicbeetle]

never going to get past matrix resurrections choosing to make neo someone with a distorted perception of reality being gaslit and manipulated into compliance by his therapist, i’m so normal about it

[starscelly]

[extremelycaffeinatedbird]

Thinking about Odin and Loki again bc when am I not. A list of songs that make me want to wail about them in no particular order and with little to no explanation:

Allies or Enemies - the Crane Wives (Regret ™️)

Liar - the Arcadian Wild (let’s be real both of them)

Wander Wonder - the Arcadian Wild (Odin)

Tongues & Teeth - the Crane Wives (Loki)

King and Lionheart - Of Monsters and Men (what they both think Could Have Been)

Bad Blood - Bastille (yeah.)

Just One Yesterday - Fall Out Boy (yeag)

Icarus - the Crane Wives (listen the singer is calling to their brother cmon. Cmon.)

Francesca - Hozier (me, making romantic songs about platonic relationships again? Ahaha no *runs*)

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

there are now two games I can mark down for irrevocably changing me

[willowfey]

unexplainable feeling when u decide to check twitter after a long time and there’s always some debate going on about whether a beautiful woman is ugly or not and bc she’s slightly unconventionally attractive and has like yk normal human features everyone is like “i’ve never met a human that even kinda looks like this in my life” “i know this is weeeirrddd but i think she looks kinda good in a weird way?? am i crazy??” “we need to start letting ugly women be famous again, normal people are getting boring” and then a parade of people show up to say “yes, like her —“ posting pictures of the most conventionally attractive and stunning famous women ever. meanwhile everyone else is comparing her to the ugly duckling from chicken little.

does not feel good tho.

[makotonaegiunderstander]

thinking about my Tokyo Ghoul au I made for Danganronpa. It was meant to be kind of its own thing, not necessarily doing THH and not necessarily copying the plot beats of Tokyo Ghoul. Either way Makoto takes Kaneki’s place kind of, mainly bc when I read the opening I could not stop thinking about what supernaturally bad luck Kaneki had. And the way Kaneki ended up being the “bridge between two worlds” and represented justice and a means to an end for BOTH sides at different points gave me ‘Ultimate Hope’ vibes. At the same time Kaneki could EASILY be replaced with Hajime due to the conspiracy that Kaneki’s accident was done on purpose to basically experiment on someone to see if they could create the hope they needed. Only reason I didn’t jump to it is bc back then I was sticking Makoto in any scenario I wanted AND there’s another Tokyo Ghoul character that fits Hajime’s story. Anyway. I wanted to toy with the idea of someone who values life and helping others so deeply as Makoto being forced to do horrible things or else lose himself entirely. Becoming something you feared and only viewed as a monster until they revealed themselves to be people, but still horrified to find yourself in the middle. I think Makoto would have a unique reaction and I think he’d lean much more towards self sacrifice and helping try to get both sides to see each other’s humanity much faster than Kaneki did or Hajime would. But he’d also be ashamed and scared of what he’d become and desperate not to hurt anyone, which would be a disaster in the making as the longer a Ghoul goes without eating a person, the more beast like and unhinged they become. It’s not ALL that much different from a vampire au save the fact that there’s no option to just. get a little blood from a living person and leave them just slightly woozy or raid blood bags from donations. You HAVE to seriously injure someone or outright kill them to live, which is what separates the two.

[sammygender]

if i was shiv roy my anger would be biblical

[badolmen]

Love me a character that at their core is selfish. Even when they do good things it’s selfish and personal but still genuine because they believe in what they’re doing even if they’re only doing it for themself.

Anyways I failed to make a charismatic and likable BBEG he’s a lower tier villain who gets semi-domesticated instead.

[als-basement]

yaoi…

mhm.

Kicking my legs and giggling someone take me out NOW

moots don’t look at this please I beg thee🙏

tumblr can see this too i guess

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[insanechayne]

~ ~ ~

[existentialcrisis-24-7]

Oc posting time

Ramblings ahead!

This is Mac in a formal outfit I’ve been throwing around for a silly Cinderella themed episode that is like, the B-plot of several episodes (shoe’s not magical or anything so the Prince/Important Person remembers his face and starts a manhunt). I was also exploring some cultural world building with witches bc it was kind of a thing that cropped up any time I drew a witch (bar one character who has an excuse) that they’d always wear some kind of witchy coat with a simple dress/gown underneath and that became such a regular consistent choice that I unconsciously went “yeah Mac would wear that but fancy” the moment the question of formal wear came up. Like he’s not a witch anymore but you don’t really just forget the culture and the norms you were raised with even if he doesn’t have the opportunity to wear a witchy coat and a dress/gown in his daily life. Anyway take this man in a dress.

These are all the same guy. He’s a Prince from a long time ago who got cursed and who’s soul and body is now directly tied to his sword (not pictured bc I can’t draw swords). I want him to look like the stereotypical rich vampire. He’s not I just think it’s funny (especially given there is a vampire in the group but he got turned like a month ago and is still coping with the trauma). He first gets introduced with short hair but as the story goes on he grows it out. Also he doesn’t know what modern fashion is, be nice. I was also toying around with a formal outfit for him, but it’s much harder bc all the inspo I have for him is patterned and I’m not drawing all that in a sketch.

This is Rosemary idk her gender, she doesn’t either. Shes fuckinf going thru it rn trying to figure out herself while surviving on her own. Her story is completely unrelated to the other two dudes’ one. I don’t think they’ll ever actually meet in canon. I just drew her and wanted to share. Shes half human, half this world’s equivalent of dwarf, which is a kind of elf (called Umbram in-universe). She was also turned into a vampire a while back. I’ll go into Umbrams some other time, but vampires can access some blood magic that allows them to change form, usually into something more appealing to others, and she lives in an area with a high human and (tree) elf population (tree elves look different and they don’t Have a name yet).