#designed to bring style and functionality together.

[lumenniveus]

Simmers, I bring you gifts once more. This time the stuff smells like bamboo and green tea on simmering coals.

According to legends, the Onryō is a vengeful spirit. "Resentful, ruthless, and determined to pay back wrongs done to it in life" huh? Sounds like it fits me just right. This set is my revenge. It is what I had hoped and wanted from Snowy Escape that EA did not deliver. While I am not Japanese myself, I have great respect for the people living there and hope the love I put in it shows through. Greetings from central Europe!✌️

For Onryō I focused on functionality and simplicity over grandeur. If you expect this to be an anime set, it is not. It's tagged as "basic" and "modern" design styles, but don't let that stop you from being creative. This set was made with as much love as it was made to show EA that, yes, not everything has to be the same normed re-mesh over and over again.

Download: Merged version Zip Folder version

Look below the cut for more previews and the catalog

This set comes with a lot of interactive furniture and some build objects that are designed to blend and mix with as many other sets and packs as possible. Some highlights are:

Blinds that open and close

Zaisu and chabudai styled chairs and tables

Functional bags that double as dressers

A working irori fire pit

Two butsudan, each a different size

Here is the set mixed together with some furniture from Snowy Escape. Works well together, nah? I'm personally really happy with it and I hope you find it useful.

[cy-cyborg]

Tips for drawing and writing amputees: The prosthetic needs something to hold onto

Prosthetics need to be able to hold on to the body.

If you're giving your amputee something similar to 99.99% of modern prosthetics, this will be done through a socket. This is a ridged cup made perfectly for the amputee that holds the prosthetic onto the body. Older prosthetics (mostly anything before the 90's) made the prosthetic socket intentionally tight in spots, which is what held it in place. Some people with sensitive skin still use this style of prosthetic but they've mainly fallen out of use in favour for suction sockets. These sockets create a vacuum seal that holds the prosthetic in place. These can work in two ways, either just by forcing excess air out of the socket and creating the seal that way, or for some legs, sucking that excess air out and into an "ankle" mechanism to offer some extra suspension and padding in the step.

Some prosthetics will also use additional measures as well as suction, such as pin-locks, where the amputee wears a sock with a screw at the bottom that clips into a mechanism at the bottom of the socket, or a prosthetic with movable panels that can be tightened via cables running through the socket.

I've used all of these except the pin lock socket, and they all have one thing in common: The sockets need as much space as possible. For prosthetics using suction in particular, this is to spread out the amount of force being applied to the leg. If all the suction is being applied to the end of the stump, it's going to get sore and could even damage the skin. If that same amount of suction is applied to a much wider area, it's going to feel less intense. Likewise, older prosthetics needed as much space to work with as possible too, as applying tight pressure to a small area as opposed to a larger surface to keep the tension isn't good for your skin or muscles in that spot.

For this reason, the sockets will take up all of the space available without limiting movement, meaning they will go all the way up to the next major joint. An amputee who lost their hand through the wrist will have a socket that goes all the way to their elbow. An amputee who lost their leg through or above the knee will have a socket that goes all the way to their hip.

Sometimes, if an amputation is particularly close to a major joint and there isn't a lot of space left between the stump and the next major joint, prosthetists will opt to immobilise the closest joint and take the socket all the way up to the next major joint. This was something I've actually discussed with my prosthetist. My left leg is amputated below the knee, but I only have a few centimetres of space below the knee. That leg occasionally needs revisions, meaning they take the very tip off of the stump to help correct issues with weird bone growth, scarring, infections etc, but if I get another revision, my leg will be too short to comfortably wear a socket, so my knee will need to be immobilised and my leg will become, functionally, an above knee amputation, despite still having the joint. This is rare, but it happens on occasion, showing that sometimes that need for space trumps even the use of a still functional joint. It's really important.

I wanted to bring this up because I see a lot of people draw sockets on their amputee's prosthetics, but they're much too tiny to be comfortable!

I did mention most prosthetics use a socket, but not all do. Some old prosthetics did not have sockets and were held in place using other methods.

This is a "prosthetic" my prosthetist found in his company's back room. He's not sure when it was made, but together we came up with an estimate of it being made around the 70's for a through-hip amputee (meaning someone who's whole leg was amputated with no stump at all)

It's designed so that the user would rest their hip on the cushion and use the handle to hold it in place and move it in time with their walk. This kind of mobility aid isn't often used anymore (me nor my prosthetist have seen one out in the world), and seems to have faded in use during the 80's as sockets were invented that could better hold onto the hip and pelvis for through-hip amputees and the use of wheelchairs for amputees became less stigmatised.

There's also A new type of prosthetic has been developed called the Osseointegration prosthetic, which also doesn't use a socket either. These are very rare as they are incredibly expensive and still very risky, but these prosthetics bypass the socket and implant the prosthetic directly into the body through a rod planted inside one's stump bone. This rod has a clip at the end of the stump, so the external part of the prosthetic can be removed as needed (and replaced). The reason they are risky though is that they are EXTREMELY prone to infection. I only know one person who had this implanted successfully, but he has to be very careful to keep his leg clean or else it will get infected (and it frequently does, he's constantly on antibiotics). Everyone else I know who got it had to get it removed.

With time these implants will get safer, but we are a very, very long way off from that right now.

[sapphicmsmarvel]

acotar characters and getting mad over silly, silly things

these are the things the characters get mad over, except they are super silly. 

This is a short one!

i.e. the only times they ever get mad at you, but it’s not toxic ❤️

Azriel

Just let this man zip your dresses up. He gets you want to be “independent” but just, let him zip the damn dresses. 

He also loves lacing up your corsets. 

He’ll press a kiss between your shoulder blades. Kiss the spot between your neck and shoulder. 

He loves the intimacy within the action, loves knowing that you are for him. 

Wrapping you up as a gift is just a plus. 

Cassian 

He gets mad when you open a door for yourself. He will race you to the door. Even shove you out of the way. 

it’s the gentlemen-like thing to do. 

He loves seeing your ass when you walk past him. 

He doesn’t want his babydoll lifting a finger. 

Rhysand 

if you don't let this man pull out your chair at a dinner table or function��. 

What a pouty bitch. 

It’s a simple claim of “they’re mine.” But also he just simply loves doing it. He loves to help you whenever he can, even if it’s something small like pulling out your chair. 

Plus, when he does it, he usually kisses your head or brushes his fingertips across your shoulders, making you shiver. 

Feyre 

Don’t you ever do your nails yourself. 

She loves working on a smaller canvas and painting your nails intricate designs is like therapy to her. She loves doing cheesy things like putting your initials together in a heart. 

Morrigan 

Let her do your makeup. It brings her so much joy to just stare at your face when you aren’t looking. It’s the one time she doesn’t feel like a creep doing it even though you’re her wife. 

When you close your eyes as she dusts some sparkly shadow across your lid, it making your skin tone pop.

And if you’re dark skinned? with metallic colors? That would kill her. 

Amren 

Putting your jewelry on for you. She’s a simple woman, just let her do your jewelry. You have hundreds nearing thousands of pieces she has given you. 

She knows what compliments your skin, or what looks good with an outfit. As well as what gems you like the most and what metals irritate your skin. 

When she puts your necklace around you, she’ll kiss the spot on your neck where the clasp is.  

Nesta 

She loves closing the clasp on your heels and tying your shoes. 

It’s the only time anyone will see her bow to someone else.  (besides the bedroom but they don’t see that). 

If you do it yourself, she literally makes you undo them, or she undos them, then she redoes it. She’ll be damned if you buckle your own shoes. While she’s down there, she’ll press a kiss to your thigh, calf, inner knee, ankle. Whatever she feels like.

Elain 

She loves doing your hair. Even brushing it after a bath, she doesn’t want you doing it. She wants to do it. 

She loves weaving flowers through it, braiding, any type of style. It’s therapy for her, to just sit there and play with her girl's hair. 

Lucien 

He doesn’t like you doing ‘boy jobs’, as in the dishes or some ridiculous shit like that. 

It’s not that he thinks you’re incapable it’s just, you’re his spouse you deserve better than taking out the trash! 

The definition of “my hands look like this, so theirs look like this” but again, not in a toxic way. Just a “my baby is my baby and i’ll be damned if they lift a finger.”

Eris 

He gets mad when you refuse to let him walk on the more dangerous side of a sidewalk or sleep in the spot closest to the door so he can protect you better if need be. 

He’s a natural protector and you are the love of his life. He’s not going to put you in danger even though you’ve told him nobody is waiting outside the bedroom door to kill you. 

But, you can never be too safe. 

Tarquin

Washing your hair, it’s really therapeutic for him to wash your hair. Even if you get embarrassed because if you have a flaky scalp it embarrasses you. But he loves just taking care of you. 

Nothing with him is embarrassing. Every hair wash day he’s there with your products as well as adding his own new thing, such as a mask or new leave in product.

[youremyheaven]

The Absorbent Nature of Venus: An Astrological Exploration

I was inspired to make this post when I saw pictures of Bella Hadid with her new boyfriend, Adan Banuelos.

For context, Adan is a professional cowboy and Bella Hadid used to be an equestrian (she trained for the Olympics back in the day). Bella's new pictures (after a long absence from social media) feature her in all her horse girl glory. But I couldn't help but notice how Bella has a tendency to morph into her boyfriend(s).

This is not to say that she adopts a persona that is entirely alien to her, but more so that she channels one aspect of her personality and lets it take centre stage. With Adan, she is the laid-back horse girl, channelling the side of her that grew up on a farm in Santa Barbara riding horses.

Prior to this, she was dating Marc Kalman who is an art director. Idk how many of you are familiar with those "pov : you're talking to an art director at a party" reels/shorts/tiktoks but Marc fits that bill to a tee. He's the edgy, weird alternative androgynous guy and in the 2 years that Bella was with him, she morphed into a caricature of him almost.

her y2k style had a huge impact on fashion trends/pop culture but it soon kind of became a parody, as it seems a bit over the top to be wearing 25 things that do not belong together.

There was also a drastic shift in Bella's public image; she was more earnest & open; this period also saw her at her fashion nerdiest as she openly spoke about her love of finding and collecting "vintage" designer pieces from the 90s and 2000s. He was the weird edgy art director, she was the weird edgy art kid.

The only other man she dated publicly before Marc was The Weeknd and if you look at her style/persona from this period, you can see a tendency to opt for darker, grungier aesthetics. She herself has called this her "sexbot" era.

Its crazy but almost every picture of the two of them together feature both of them wearing black😂😂

This brings me to what I hope to discuss today, which is the absorbent nature of Venus.

Bella Hadid is Purvaphalguni Moon & Rising and is a Venusian. Venus is the planet of beauty, harmony, love, creativity etc. Venus exalts in Pisces ("exaltation"= it functions at its best). Pisces being a watery sign and the final sign of the zodiac is very telling in this context. Pisces is the culmination of the zodiac and contains the qualities of every preceding sign (this is why they're so chaotic lol, they have too much going on) and in water, which is where life originated, everything is at home. Pisces thus has the unique ability to find beauty in everything; water signs are known for their empathy, intuition and psychic abilities, this is because water holds the qualities of everything within it. Scientists have purported about "water memory" and water's ability to remember is linked to its natives high sensitivity, more than literal memory, its a kind of cosmic memory or inner knowing that I refer to in this context. Pisces natives tend to report psychic abilities more than any other sign in my observation and to be psychic/clairvoyant/clairsentient/claircognizant/ clairaudient is essentially to have a higher degree of empathy/sensitivity than most people. Although in some cases it may apply to tropical Pisces natives, what I'm speaking of here primarily applies to Sidereal Pisces natives.

Its easy to see how water absorbs information and retains memory but we must ponder upon why Venus, the planet of love, beauty etc exalts in a water sign and why so, in Pisces specifically. Pisces' all consuming all absorbent nature is the essential or true nature of love, beauty & harmony, to absorb, hold and possess all that there is and all that there will be, without trying to restrict it or limit it (water has no shape or form, it takes the form of whatever its poured into, pointing to the adaptability of these natives to get along with anyone or belong anywhere). Understanding love as devotion means allowing yourself to be consumed by it, it borders on religious fervour because you're losing all sense of yourself and giving your all. Its to give until you yourself are lost in it, with no sense of boundary between you & God or you and your lover (Sufi poetry extols this).

Only someone who has the ability to have this kind of all encompassing, profound divine kind of love for others, for creation, for source has the ability to connect to the ether and make art. there is a reason why the most spiritual art often tends to be abstract, there is much that cannot be expressed logically or in a straightforward way. much can be said without using language or words, some things are understood in a far more abstract way, its understood by the senses, by the subconscious, not the rational, thinking mind.

Beauty then, is the ability to perceive beyond the surface, there is nothing shallow or superficial about it, it is to understand the sum or whole of something, its essence, its core and understand its value and why its separate from the rest. True beauty then is rare but there is immense beauty all around us. Both these things are true. This is the true nature of Venus which is also the planet of refinement, it sees value in things that are unpolished, raw and original wholly but also in what is practiced, deliberate and refined. Venus is a planet of immense contradictions as the themes associated with the planet itself are contradictory in nature. To know or experience love, beauty, creativity etc one must also be well acquainted with its opposite. There's no middle ground and there's nothing lukewarm, you have to go all in. To understand and appreciate beauty truly, one must face brutal ugliness, to know the nature of creativity or to access it, you must first experience the lack of it. Its out of nothingness that things manifest but this means nothingness must first be experienced.

Sorry to have gone off on a tangent (me with everything I post lol) but its important to understand the nature of Venus in this specific context because its not the other attributes that makes Venus so absorbent of others influence. Its such a creative energy for the same reason, it absorbs and is influenced by absolutely everything. However, it can be hard for Venusian natives to feel as though they have a strong sense of self.

Granted that the "self" is an illusory concept and we are all an amalgam of numerous influences (people, places, culture, literature etc), Venusian natives are more susceptible to lacking true individuality since they absorb projections far too easily. This is also why Venusians are so highly desirable. You can always tell when someone's Venusian or has an exalted Venus, they are projected onto HEAVILY by others, but by having desire projected onto them, they become more desirable. We fall in love with the reflections we see in others and dislike those who project our shadows (this is literally a Jungian concept, v fascinating pls look it up). Venus inspires others to project unattainability, mystery, romance, beauty and desire and the more they see it, the more it manifests.

However this has its pitfalls. Without solid grounding, Venusians turn into chameleons who are constantly morphing into their environment; they are known for their hospitality and pleasing demeanour because of their innate ability to pick up on these cues and behave accordingly. Bella Hadid herself is self admittedly a "people pleaser" (Venusian natives struggle with this a lot).

What does it mean to not have a solid sense of self and constantly be serving as a mirror to others?

We see Bella's shifting style/demeanour/persona with every boyfriend. There is rather embarrassing clip of her speaking with a French accent (juxtaposed against an old clip of her using AAVE). Venusians are more prone to picking up accents/emulating the behaviour of those around them.

The Venusian tendency to absorb can extend to picking up accents, mannerisms, style, self-presentation, persona etc it can sometimes be very superficial but in some cases natives immerse themselves in it so deeply than they live their lives under the guise of a pseudo persona borrowed from someone else.

This video of Bella is a good example. If you've watched her in other videos you'll know that she does not usually speak/present herself this way. If you watch this video of Carla Bruni also discussing her iconic looks (it came out in the same year 2021, several months before Bella did hers) you can see how Bella is emulating Carla in her video.

Now its quite well known that Bella Hadid "copied" Carla Bruni's face through plastic surgery. This is what I mean by some Venusian natives taking the absorption thing too far. We imitate the things we want to embody/what we're inspired by, Venus is a planet of constant refinement/self improvement, while its good to be inspired by people we look up to, it does not bode well for one to embody them completely, stripping yourself of your own identity. This is also why Venus in 12h (Pisces) is said to be illusory. Its hard for these natives to discern what love really is, since their natural inclination is to simply embrace things at face value. This is why they are susceptible to abusive and toxic relationships, simply because they are blinded by their own loving nature and cannot see the faults in their lovers even when its plainly obvious to others (think Bella & The Weeknd).

Let us look at Miss Ariana Grande. She has Mars in Bharani atmakaraka.

Ariana has gone from baby voiced teen star to blackfishing r&b singer to vaguely asian looking in the span of her career.

She's also changed her voice, speaking style & mannerisms MANY times.

I don't think enough people talk about how Miss Grande essentially stole Victoria Monet's mannerisms, voice tone, speaking style etc

Ariana essentially emulated this woman and that was her at the peak of her career. She's to Ariana what Carla Bruni is to Bella.

Its really unfortunate that Ariana changes races every few years like they're a passing fad and this is a really unfortunate manifestation of her Venusian influence.

Her Venusian influence is also really obvious in her music, especially her Bharani Mars because her music is very sensual but also straight up crass and horny, there's also a tendency for her to use revenge-y themes (break up with your gf im bored?? yes, and??)

Claire Nakti had spoken about how this purple blue-y iridescent esque lighting is very Venusian and consistently used in films by Venus natives. I found this true of Ariana's stage sets/design when she's on tour.

god is a woman is a very Venusian coded song/music video, from the colour palette to the Yonic imagery at display.

Brad Pitt is a male Bella Hadid in the sense that he has a tendency to morph into his girlfriends. He went from Cali stoner surfer guy when married to Jennifer to humanitarian serious filmmaker when he was with Angelina. He likes to switch up his persona based on his partner at the moment. He has a Purvashada Stellium (Mercury, Mars & Ketu)

Johnny Depp is known for his broadly European/British accent despite the fact that he's from Kentucky/Florida. He's a Purvashada Moon

Madonna is another celebrity who is notorious for her fake accent. She lived in England briefly after marrying the British director Guy Ritchie and spoke with a British accent.

Many have accused Madonna of being a wannabe Angelina Jolie when she started to focus on humanitarian work & adopted several children in the mid 2000s. She is a Purvaphalguni Moon and Rising.

Camille Rowe (Purvashada stellium; sun, mercury and saturn) is often accused of having a fake French accent as she mostly grew up in America.

Hilaria Baldwin (Purvashada sun) is infamous for pretending to be Spanish, speaking with a fake Spanish accent and giving her numerous children Spanish names despite the fact that she's a plain old white woman.

Austin Butler is by now infamous for speaking like Elvis (he's now working with a coach to lose his Elvis accent lmao), he has Mars in Purvaphalguni as his amatyakaraka.

Lindsay Lohan (Bharani Moon, Mars in Purvashada amatyakaraka) has also switched accents and often spoke with an Arabic accent and has had an on & off relationship with Islam. Its unclear whether she's still practicing the faith but at one point she did convert. I do not mean to ridicule someone's faith or use it as an example of Venusian persona switching but a lot of Hollywood celebrities have a tendency to experiment with Eastern religions/traditions/culture like its some trend or fad and drop it when they lose interest. I do not have enough information to make a clear judgement but LiLo has had an unstable public image to say the least. I sincerely hope she is peaceful and safe.

John Malkovich is another celebrity who passes off as a European even though he's from mid-western America. He has a hard to place accent. He is Purvaphalguni Rising

Aishwarya Rai is known in India for being fake or "plastic" (I'm Indian) she has an unnatural non-Indian accent despite the fact that she's lived in India her whole life. She is a Purvashada Moon.

Numerous celebrities whose public image/persona is incongruent or at odds with their real personality also tend to have major Venus influence in their chart.

Charlie Chaplin is the father of slapstick comedy and is very well known by the persona he created for himself but irl he has been described as "sadistic" (by Marlon Brando and others) and he's known to have been a terrible person all over (multiple teen wives, abusive to his children among other things). He has Bharani Venus conjunct Mars and Jupiter in Purvashada conjunct Ketu

Elisabeth Moss is known for having played several iconic feminist characters but irl she's a scientologist. She has Ketu in Purvashada

This absorptive quality of Venus can also manifest positively. Meryl Streep, Bharani Moon is known for her uncanny ability to do just about any accent and completely blend into her character.

I will add more examples as I find them but for now this is it!! If you think of any others do let me know!!<33

[herhangisey]

Onestohome - Platin

Coffee tables, side tables and tv unit are essential pieces of furniture for any living room. They provide a great way to organize your space and add a touch of style to the room. Whether you're looking for something modern or traditional, there is sure to be something that fits your needs. From sleek glass coffee tables with contemporary designs to rustic wooden side tables that bring a cozy atmosphere, you'll find something here that will make your living room look amazing.

Coffee table are a great addition to any living room or office space. They provide the perfect place to put your coffee, books, magazines, and other items. Side table are also great for placing lamps and other items you may need close at hand. TV units are perfect for displaying your television and all its components in one convenient location. All these pieces of furniture can be used together to create a stylish and functional living area or office space.

[the-curse-of-neoclones]

Moderneopets Artist Mistreatment

Edit as of 11/16/23 10:40 AM NST:

Removed names where I failed to do so before. I'm very sorry to the affected parties, this snowballed so far out of my intended scope.

Edit as of 11/16/23 5:30 PM NST

Please see this post for a small update.

As of 11/16/23 10:10 PM NST, Hazer the site owner has formally and publicly apologized to myself and Velu, the other affected artist. As far as I'm concerned he has officially handled the situation as best as he could, and I hold no further qualms with Moderneopets. I hope to hear of its management continuing in this direction.

The following post is left up for archival purposes only.

*****

Hello, I’m wren. I'm an artist responsible for some of the pet assets on the neoclone, Moderneopets. I'm just going to get into it.

Hazer was extremely lucky to somehow cultivate a dense group of largely professional artists to work together to make assets for his site. When it comes to his own management as a site runner, he’s largely hands-off of the art department, which is a good thing! If he can’t be active in the art panel enough to know what goes on in there, he shouldn’t be running it— we have many strong, capable artists on the team who are passionate about recreating the neopets style, who work together on every pet that has been released ever since critique became a requirement. 

It makes sense that, with a project this large, Hazer should have to designate moderators to enforce rules when he is absent. Choosing to bring on moderators was also a good decision. Unfortunately, he chose poorly. 

Art panel issues should have separate Art panel moderators to take care of them. People who are not overburdened with generic moderation duties from the many other channels of the server, for example. In the same vein, artists should not be moderators. When an artist has an issue with another artist, who happens to be a moderator (which has happened many times, with many people— If the mods actually open threads for all complaints they receive, they should have evidence of this & if they don’t they are not being truthful), the artist would likely not feel comfortable approaching that same artist-slash-moderator to complain about what happened. It breeds an aura of fear and discomfort any time there is an issue with an artist/mod, and that is why the two moderators on the team should have to choose one or the other if hazer wants to cultivate a healthy atmosphere in his panel. 

I’ve created many pets for this website. Neopets has been a passion of mine since the third grade. I’m also one of those professional artists I mentioned— my work is also art, industry or otherwise. I care about breaking neopets down into their core, recognizable shapes. I care about keeping them on-model and in the spirit of the original TNT art team, with improvements made where I and the other panelists think they make sense. I have redlined for other artists to an even greater degree, just as other artists have redlined for me and helped me finalize each pet into something simply good: something that made sense to get put on a little passion project website for other people with a similar passion to enjoy. I found the panel to be a community of likeminded artists with which to discuss our favorite childhood petsite while we made art for a clone, as if we could pretend we were making art for neopets-dot-com. It was nice. 

It wasn’t perfect, though. In fact, shortly after I joined in 2021 I took a hiatus because the art panel was fairly dead. I came back a little while later to see we had several new species, as well as an art director, and lots of activity! That was very exciting. Over the next year I would reach out to the panel or, if nobody was sure of how to proceed, I would reach out to the art director to propose ideas for how to make the panel a little more functional; quality of life updates, if you will. I don’t take credit for all of these alone, there were other artists with similar ideas all communicating to the director in private, but some examples: 

A designated “collab” zone where artists could seek out other artists to complete pets with. 

“The Purge,” in which the team was whittled down to ~25 current, active artists to refresh the team and allow for new artists to join. 

“The Approval System,” which I first sat down with in my workshop (public to all artists) to hammer out the details with as many other artists as wanted to give their input— a method for pitching new ideas to eventually break through the “new species/color freeze” that had been plaguing us.

Speaking on the approval system: like most things that required Hazer’s direct input in the art team, it was left without response for a very long time. Artists with ideas for custom species or colors would occasionally murmur about their excitement for the system to get a look-over by hazer, to see if our approval system pitch would be approved. But hazer is busy, as we all know, and the pitch sat for a while. We had new & returning artists on the team to keep everyone busy. 

What I would expect from a years-old panel of artists, when new additions arrive, would be some manner of tutorial. New artists would need to know the pipeline (here’s your workshop, you can post WIPs and anything else in there; here’s how you ping for critique, here are the spaces in which to ask for it; make sure you always ping before your work is submitted on-site), and there would likely be some acclimating on both sides. What I did not expect (but should have), was pushback from new artists on things that hadn’t had pushback in a long time. Why can’t [x] color be a posechange? Well, we’ve created many already and none of them were posechanges. Why can’t I use colored lineart? Well, that isn’t in line with the style standards set by this color; see, nobody else is coloring their lineart. 

Suddenly there was a divide between veteran artists, the director, and the new blood. The divide felt greater when Hazer came to his new artist’s aid to say, approximately: “Eh, if someone wants to go above and beyond and make better art, they shouldn’t have to adhere to the guidelines.” Then he threw the art director under the bus for not somehow knowing that his intentions were always to keep the panel loose and unstructured. But don’t worry, that isn’t the first bus and won’t be the last.

My personal investment in the panel waned around that time. I think a structured “work” environment with easily accessible rules and deadlines is necessary to any project of this size. If we didn’t want to enforce color standards, nor prioritize certain colors for release, and anyone could just submit whatever Nice Art they wanted, why not open it up so any user could submit pet art? Why have a panel at all? Isn’t Hazer taking any opportunity to dunk on Leopets because he wants his site to be better? How is this different? 

But I stuck around. This was a hobby I really enjoyed, after all, and I really believed it could get better. It had a good core, and despite my grievances with individual artists, none of them were bad people. 

But I noticed some trends. New artists would receive feedback that they didn’t agree with and retaliate by bringing in their emotions or personal preferences. Any disagreement where multiple veteran artists stepped in to say their piece would escalate to the point of very long messages on both sides, and would need to be left to hazer to give a final input. Often he didn’t come around to it, because he’s busy, as we know. I didn’t step in to every argument; they became cyclical after a while, and I didn’t have the time or energy to spend simply tapping the proverbial sign (or style sheet). I would try to give positive suggestions when I could, for example: I don’t think this color needs another alt for just one single design, but we did talk about eventually making this color that your design would fit into really well. 

I’ve done my time having arguments on the internet. I really just want an art environment where the rules are set and people actually enjoy following them, because I do— I see art rules as helpful guidelines at best and obstacles to cleverly navigate at worst, which is still fun. But of course not everyone is going to feel the same way, that’s normal; that’s life. 

On 11/9 I was given this message by Hazer: 

It reads:

Hello wren,

I am reaching out to you today to inform you that effective immediately you are being dismissed from the Artist and Consultant Panels. This decision has been reached through discussions and based on repeated offences in the form of user harassment and subjecting the panels to a toxic atmosphere, after multiple reports and concerns brought up to us by other users.

While we understand concerns regarding panel management, there is a distinct difference between criticising and condeming the way the panel does things and criticising and condeming users that are on the panel, and we believe this line has been crossed one too many times, further supported by concerns brought to us.

We appreciate the passion and drive of our team—all of them—and we understand you have been very passionate about the panel. Given some of the messages we see, we have also concluded that due to things in the panel not working out as you have wished, it has caused you much stress and upset as well, which we do not want. All in all, we've decided that the atmosphere of the panel and your own enjoyment of the website are hampered by your presence on it. Because of this, we have decided it is best to have you part ways with the staff sections of the website.

Effective immediately after this message, we will be permanently removing you from the panels. While normally we do a temporary removal, in this case we've seen that your compatability with our management and handling of the panel will not improve, and it will just bring stress to both sides.

We understand you have put a lot of passion into the projects you have been working on for release in Moderneopets, and in lieu of that, we offer you the option of having the project(s) still be released even after dismissal. Rewards will still be granted for releases per usual, and credit will still be given. If you decide, due to dismissal, you do not want your unreleased work to be released on Moderneopets, simply state it as such, and we will discard all progress on projects you have been working on to respect those wishes.

This decision is final and will not be revoked.

Best wishes to you,

The Moderneopets Team

[end caption]

My response:

It reads: 

No warnings huh?

[end caption]

Hazer didn’t have an answer for me. I was already removed from the panel. 

This came as a shock. I’d been there for over two years, I felt I had a good rapport with the other artists, I felt I’d been a helpful and active addition to the team. Like I said, I’ve done my time having arguments on the internet… what toxic behavior? Discussions over style guides? Giving redlines to people with permission? Working with the whole team to bolster several new color releases? I had an entire species that Hazer wanted ready to go since March— I just pushed through the Swamp Gas release, I just created the Mystical alt? 

No warnings?

Let me reiterate: I have never been spoken to by any staff about my behavior. Hazer, his then-four moderators— none of them have ever been in my DMs to issue a warning. I have spoken TO the mods about others’ behaviors, and nothing ever came of it. The one time (and I mention this for full transparency only) the art director came to talk to me about something I said, it was stated clearly that it was not a warning, and even so I adjusted my behavior around said issue accordingly. And that was well before the purge. 

But, don’t take my word for it. Here it is from hazer himself, speaking over his mods who were busy telling the rest of the panel that they always issue warnings: 

It reads:

No in this case I do agree that this has been an abrupt situation and I understand the blind-sided-ness of it. No official warnings were given out regarding the actions that resulted in the removal of artists today and that’s on fault of myself and deebs not working things out properly despite the moderation team bringing issues to a us a few times – also due to our lack of availability recently.  [end caption]

So… What happened? Well… here it is from Hazer, in longform: 

For those who use screen readers, above are several enormous discord screenshots; I've placed it in a paste bin here: https://pastebin.com/dHLiBRTF

Two other artists immediately stepped down. Hazer admits here in his message that he and the mods had multiple tickets opened about my behavior, that they had known they wanted to remove me. They never gave a warning, never talked to me until the moment of my dismissal, but they had known it was coming for months? 

Why did Hazer and his gang of mods let me continue working on art for their panel? Why did they let me work so hard to pull Swamp Gas together for an official release? Why did they let me put together a whole custom Alt and workshop it for so long? I’ve been active this whole time. Why did you let me keep working if you knew you wanted me gone? 

I am a professional artist. My work is art. Hazer made the knowing decision to exploit my time and effort for his website. He’s not paying me, he’s not paying any of us. It’s volunteer work. But I did not volunteer to be mistreated like this. To not even be given a chance to defend myself. To him, artists are disposable. To him, if someone has worked on your team for years but speaks up when your friend tries to overturn the system, even civil discussion is cause for disposal. Civil discussion negates years of effort, passion, time and care. 

I didn’t have to make art for you, Hazer. And you don’t deserve the team you have. How many artists have voiced their discomfort with your actions? How many artists are taking a break from the panel because of how you handled this? Ah, wait, you wouldn’t know… you’re busy. 

Hazer and his mod team are just another corrupt group of individuals unfortunately heading what could have been a fun and promising petsite. Everyone who speaks praise of modneo does it by and large because of the new and unique art. Hazer was extremely lucky to cultivate a dense group of largely professional artists to work together to make assets for his site. 

If Hazer wants to show any sign of his potential to be a better person, I believe he needs to formally apologize to his site for the misuse of his power and the mistreatment and exploitation of artists on his team. He needs to apologize to you, the players of his game, the subscribers to his patreon, for allowing this to happen under his watch and under his word. You know you fucked up, hazer. You shouldn’t have sided with your friend without any actual evidence of misconduct. You shouldn’t have spoken about me like I was a toxic, subhuman hindrance to your art team. You shouldn’t have treated me like that. I didn’t deserve it. None of us did. You can apologize to me and the other lost artists publicly.

[braxlrose]

Modern bill request modern bill request

How about Bill and his gf being opposites in the sense of 💅💕✨🎤 bill and 🖤✨🎸🐈‍⬛ reader, someone who dresses a bit more masculine in a way too! I love bill sm i love when people accept how he is now

modern!bill dating his polar opposite

• I feel like he totally loves your style. I think he's totally into the black cat/golden retriever relationship and loves you so much.

• even though he's much more 💅 ✨️ 💖 now, he still is really good at shopping and your styles are much closer than you think they're. bill is just way more colorful.

• whenever you two go shopping together, he picks out the best clothes for the both of you. you both get studded jackets but yours are usually black and his are either black or pink, or an assortment of colors for an outfit on stage. he's also really good at picking out skirts for you.

• you're much more quieter than him, and don't talk as much in interviews and are a lot more introverted around people than he is. so if you guys are doing an interview, you are usually just adding things into conversation. but bill doesn't mind at all and he loves that you're so good at listening while he rants about random shit.

• there are tons of pictures taken by paparazzi of you just standing there holding onto bill by his jacket while he smothers your face in kisses, and in each picture you're slowly smiling more

• he loves hearing you rant about music you like. you don't go on rants like this a lot so when he hears you talking like this he knows it's something extremely important to you and will listen to you talk for hours. my personal favorite is Siouxsie and the Banshees (4 any baby goths, yall should to them)

• he's pretty experienced with makeup, especially dark makeup and he loves doing it. it's so much fun for him and for you.

• he loves seeing your new tattoos, if you get/have a lot of those and he's always excited to see what new design you got. same goes for piercings, he has a lot of piercings himself, so I think he'd like a s/o with piercings too. I think he likes people with tons of ear piercings ngl. like double studs, industrial, helix, etcetera etcetera.

• even though you're not the most affectionate person, it doesn't matter to him. he will sit on top of you for hours just kissing your face and tickling you just to hear you laugh. and wraps his arms around you all the time. he's totally fine with being the one who initiates affectionate things

• he literally loves your alternative style so much, because he loves people who aren't afraid to stand out in a crowd. he thinks it's boring to be normal and he thinks you're one of the coolest people ever for just being yourself and not letting anybody tell you otherwise.

• loves going to concerts with you just to hear you scream to your favorite songs

• he loves going to gothic clubs with you because he finds all the different dances so fucking cool. and he asks you to teach him out to do dances so he, ironically, can fit in with everybody else.

• whenever bill brings you to a function or something, there's always interviewers asking "how you two are dating" when you seem so different even when in reality you guys are a lot alike in tons of ways. he just rolls his eyes and answers something like "we both actually caught this crazy disease called we like eachother, crazy right?!"

• he fell in love with you the moment he saw you. the first time he saw you was at a club, you were dancing out on the floor in a tight black dress, your hair looked absolutely amazing; think amy lee on the Fallen album, and you had a red solo cup in your hand and you looked like the most beautiful woman on the planet. there were tons of women all around you but bill could only see you.

• he loves it when little kids come up to you and compliment you because no matter how much you deny it, it always makes you smile

a/n: i am obsessed with modern bill and I'm much more of a 🖤✨️🎸🐈‍⬛️ kind of girl myself sooo 😈 I also added a little bit to this, personality-wise as well

taglist: @hearts4kaulitz @burntb4bydoll @spelaelamela @bored0writer @fishinaband @billsleftnutt @tokiiohot @bluepoptartwithsprinkles @saumspam @5hyslv7 @killed-kiss @memog1rl @80s-tingz @billybabeskaulitz

[nikolliver]

My personal interpretation of the DCA [that I'll be using for my Geppetto AU as well]:

"Sun and Moon being such extreme opposites to each other just make them even more similar to one another" thing tickles me.

The more differences noted between them just make one a reflection to the other.

Like- They literally complete eachother "0 + 0 = 0" style.

One of my favorite things about their dynamic is when people write them like rivals/enemies.

Not necessarily 'I hate you. I want you dead.' style [those are interesting to see too tho], more like 'Why can't I have what you have?'

Sun being placed on the "Hero" role brings him the love, praise and admiration from the public since script. Yet, he must be like the good guy. He needs to behave, follow rules, if he messes up anything that's out of his role people will change their thoughts on him. Moon makes a scene, Sun saves the day and a shower of praise falls upon him. But even tho, Sun doesn't have an actual reason to act different from what he was already doing since he gets the attention he wants.

Moon being place for the "Villain" role makes people automatically be wary of him. Is already expected of him to act like a bad guy. But still, he has no boundaries to follow. He can do the chaos he wants, with such freedom that Sun doesn't have. Moon doesn't need to worry about what people think of him, at the end he will be the villain anyway. He just enjoys the attention.

"What makes you so special?"

As theater jesters, both of them just need reactions from the public. And they're fine with that.

And then daycare happens in their lifes.

They aren't supposed to be there. They are not made for that place. They weren't taught to be there.

As much as different the reactions they get from the children by their new works. They are stuck together in the same situation. Negligencied by the company that brought them to life being submissed to be fools. Turned into pacifiers for little children at the Pizzaplex. [And they are kinda bad at it by design (literally scaring the kids with their uncanny valley features), but at least they tried to go along]

No matter how distant they want to get from eachother, they NEED eachother to make this work.

If one falls, the other will be dragged along.

When Moon was forced to stay off, Sun was forced to function 24/7 with no rests during the day until closing time [which is still not much since Moon comes out once per hour (in theory)]. Moon lost his freedom and Sun was even more pressured to keep his new duty at double rate.

And the daycare closed.

The Mega Pizzaplex fell down.

Both of them are doomed in the same abyss. The only thing they didn't completely lost is the body they are forced to share. Constantly fighting for control whenever they have a chance.

But at what cost?

Whenever Sun or Moon are in control, they are alone, stuck in the ruins of the place with lurking withered animatronics like them. Left to rot and be replaced soon.

"If I was programed with the knowledge to fix it, it would've already been done."

They are both stuck in that place. Together.

[even as separated people or one split mind they complete eachother so well]

[someinstant]

So I turned my ankle taking out my trash this evening and it's swelling up beautifully-- I did a number on that ankle back in college and it regularly betrays me because of the Dumb Things I did without seeking medical attention when I was twenty-- so I've decided to prop it up on the couch and ice the hell out of it and watch the special features on my ANDOR Blu-Ray.

Here's a short list of Cool Things I've learned:

Diego says that it was important to show Cassian being nice to B2EMO in the first bit of episode one, because you needed to see Cassian show care and kindness for someone-- because he's not a particularly awesome guy at the beginning.

The set designer for the Andor house on Ferix made macrame door curtains out of metal scrap and bolts because they wanted a 1970s feel with an industrial twist. Also, the set designer pronounces "macrame" with the accent on the second syllable, and I've never heard it that way before? British folks, is that standard on your fair isle? Because hereabouts it's MAC-rah-may, or maybe mac-rah-MAY if you're fancy. But it sure as hell isn't mah-CRAHM-eh.

Just so many gorgeous shots of Ferix, man. And all the costumes and details-- it looks SO GOOD, even when it's clearly just a set and not the finished version. The actors all clearly adored working in the physical space.

During the Aldhani arc, the Aldhani rebel cell actors worked extensively together with the director to train, rehearse, and develop chemistry-- and they deliberately didn't bring Diego Luna in until they were ready to shoot for real. So the Aldhani squad had this rapport and inside jokes and relationships, and THEN they dropped Luna in so he would feel properly like an outsider.

And they did the SAME THING on the Narkina 5 arc. All the prisoners rehearsed together well before they brought in Luna, so he wouldn't have the same understanding of the space or tools or way the actors related to each other. Love it. Really smart decision, and it paid off.

The visual reference for what the Eye would look like when you were flying through it was a close-up of a human iris, and actually-- yeah. They did that really, really well.

They made the prison on Narkina 5 the same shape as the planetary shield generator on Scarif, and I have no idea how I didn't notice that before.

Stellan Skarsgard was clearly DELIGHTED by Luthen's big speech in "Nobody's Listening." He talks about how when he read it, he was like, "Absolutely, this is the dilemma, isn't it? How far can you go in the name of change?," followed immediately by, "Now, how in the world do I SAY that?!"

The musicians in "Rix Road" are really playing on set-- they did ADR over top for sound quality but in order to give the actors the right feel, the musicians are really playing and the instruments all are fully functional. The musicians are a mix of studio musicians who are on the final recording and some talented amateurs who also work as background actors, so you get the imperfect, community-band style tuning, which is what they wanted.

And there's a bunch of other cool stuff, but my ankle is throbbing, so I'm going to go take a painkiller and go to bed I think.

[antialiasis]

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: all of my thoughts (part 1)

All right, this is me, watching my way through my current obsession The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the umpteenth time and rambling about everything that comes to mind as I go, which ended up with me typing over thirty thousand words because I am incapable of shutting up. Because that is truly excessive, I will be posting my thoughts in three parts; this is part one (covering roughly the first hour and thirteen minutes of the Extended Cut, up through the end of the desert/carriage sequence), and I'll probably post part two in a few days to a week, pending editing and such and some of the other things I should be doing.

Because that's a lot of reading to commit to without knowing what you're getting into, especially if you're here from the tag, here's what to expect in brief:

This is all of my thoughts, simply whatever comes to mind, but my thoughts on fiction tend to be heavy on in-depth analysis of characters, their motivations and how they tick, so a lot of this falls into that general category.

In particular, there will be a whole lot of thoughts on Tuco, Blondie, and their evolving character dynamic, which is my favorite part of the movie. I will not be looking at it through a shippy lens, for what it's worth (romantic shipping is not generally how I personally engage with fiction), but I hope anyone who finds their dynamic compelling in whatever way might still enjoy some of my thoughts on them!

In between, there's also a bunch of other commentary on stuff like the narrative function of scenes (especially on the scenes that were cut in the International Cut of the film and whether the film is better with or without them), directorial or editing or production design or storytelling choices, acting choices, foreshadowing and parallels, as well as some lighter commentary on bits that amuse me or bug me or that I particularly enjoy.

Sometimes I will just be making observations about random things I didn't necessarily notice or pick up on on my first viewing; many of them are probably kind of obvious, but if I didn't pick them up seeing it once, probably there's at least a chance they might be interesting for other people who have only seen it once.

This is not a recap of the movie, but I do try to quote lines or explain bits that I'm commenting on, so hopefully you can follow along if you've seen the movie at all. I don't know how coherent this would be if you haven't seen the movie, but if you choose to read a post like this about a movie you haven't seen anyway, godspeed to you.

Tuco's introduction

The opening scene sure is a microcosm of Sergio Leone's directorial style. Slow, silent close-ups, wide shots, unclear exactly where the scene is going initially, these unnamed characters eventually converge on a saloon -- and then instead of following them inside, Tuco comes crashing through the window and we freeze-frame. It's very drawn out (I had a bit of an "Is the whole movie going to be like this" moment watching it for the first time), but the comic timing of Tuco and the freeze-frame is great; instantly we go from this super slow, dramatic buildup to this fun, humorous subversion that really sets a tone. All that buildup was actually for introducing this guy.

In the process, we learn that 1) Tuco is someone at least three different people want to kill, 2) he's someone skilled and resourceful enough to manage to shoot them first and then make his escape through the window even after being caught unawares during a meal by three people working together, and 3) even in the process of doing that he brings his food with him -- probably actually pretty revealing about his background of poverty, not wanting to waste food when he has it. We'll of course see him introduced further a little later, but this really says a lot for only actually containing about ten silent seconds of him, and also benefits from being funny.

It's kind of amusing how bloodless most gun deaths are in this movie, considering it doesn't shy away from blood in other parts. The surviving bounty hunter does have some blood on his hand as he tries to shoot after Tuco, probably to convey that he's injured despite still being alive, but the others are just cleanly lying there with no signs of damage. Maybe it's paying homage to what other Westerns looked like -- the actual cowboy gunslinging specifically is very idealized, sanitized and almost cartoonish, compared to a lot of the other violence in the film. I remember being a kid and hearing about the trope of people in old Westerns getting shot and dramatically going flying as a result, despite that normal bullets are far too small for their momentum to send a person flying anywhere -- you don't actually see too much of that in modern movies, where everything tends to look much more realistic, but this movie definitely has a lot of very dramatic flailing and spinning around when people get shot in a way that looks pretty distinctly silly and cartoony today. Ultimately it meshes pretty well with the overall tone of the film, though; this movie is gritty in many respects, but it does not aspire to realism.

Angel Eyes' introduction

The way Angel Eyes just silently waltzes into Stevens' home and helps himself to some of his food while maintaining eye contact the whole time is so weird and uncomfortable, it's delightful. What an entrance.

Stevens has a limp. People who have fought in the war tend to be visibly scarred by it in this movie -- truly something that just permeates every background detail, that you don't really think about on a first viewing when you think the Civil War is just a setting backdrop.

There is zero dialogue in this film until more than ten and a half minutes in (though the first three minutes of that are the opening credits, so it's seven and a half minutes of actual movie with no dialogue). I think this is a very fun choice which contributes to the viewer really feeling how unbearable the silence is for Stevens by the time he starts asking Angel Eyes if Baker sent him - half of that silence wasn't even technically part of this scene, but it really intensifies it by making the silence here feel even longer than it is.

When Stevens says, "I know nothing at all about that case of coins!", Angel Eyes looks up with interest from where he'd been casually looking at his food. Evidently he had had no idea there was any case of coins involved, only that he was meant to collect a name, but once Stevens mentions it, his interest is piqued.

Angel Eyes casually offers, "Well, Jackson was here, or Baker's got it all wrong," while cutting off and eating a piece of bread with a large knife, sort of implicitly daring Stevens to try to say Baker's got it all wrong and see what happens. When he's got Tuco captured later, Angel Eyes does a similar thing of staying friendly-threatening as he casually asks questions, but once Tuco actually refuses to talk of his own accord, out come the claws. This time, though, Stevens does not take the bait, probably sensing that that would lead nowhere good for him.

He says, "Maybe Baker would like to know just what you and Jackson had to say about the cash box" -- this isn't the info he came for, but maybe Baker would be interested. Really it's Angel Eyes himself who is intrigued -- he'll go on to tell Baker that that's my bit. But he doesn't really bother pushing Stevens for it, instead moving on to admitting he's being paid for the name specifically. Probably he figures once he gets the name, he'll have all the info he needs to track him down anyway by his usual means (which it turns out he does).

The casual, grinning confidence of Angel Eyes' assertion that if Jackson weren't going by an alias he would've found him already, "That's why they pay me," really makes you believe it, doesn't it. It's exposition about what Angel Eyes does, but is also executed to work as a nice character-establishing moment about his competence.

Christopher Frayling's otherwise fun and informative commentary on the film talked about how Angel Eyes' missing fingertip was provided by a hand double in the final truel -- but you can see in this scene that Lee van Cleef's own right hand is definitely missing that fingertip (though I did not notice it at all until I thought to specifically look for it). Very curious where the notion of a hand double came from -- he even named a specific guy.

Angel Eyes casually announces that when he's paid, he always sees the job through, even though that's just going to make Stevens desperate -- Angel Eyes knows he can shoot first, no big deal.

He shoots Stevens through the table and the food, even. How does he aim.

Angel Eyes grabs his gun and turns around to shoot Stevens' son before he actually comes into view (specifically, we see him start to react to something about ten frames before we can first see the tip of the son's rifle). Presumably, in-universe, he heard him coming, but we don't hear him coming at all over the blaring background chord, so it feels like Angel Eyes just knows he's coming by some sixth sense. Very effective at making him seem even more threatening, especially since there's also generally a conscious decision in this movie to act as if the characters can't see anything that's out of frame for the viewer -- Blondie and Tuco get caught out by that rule a couple of times in amusing ways, but Angel Eyes actively defies the auditory equivalent.

(It's neat how the family photo, used for Angel Eyes obliquely threatening Stevens' family, also serves as foreshadowing for the fact he also has this second, older son we hadn't seen yet at that point.)

The fact Angel Eyes sneaks into Baker's bedroom when he's sleeping to report back is so extra. A normal person would just arrange to meet him the next morning, but no, Angel Eyes does the creepy stalker thing. Probably makes the murdering him in his bed bit a little easier, though, which also suggests he was definitely intending on that bit the whole time and didn't just "almost forget".

Baker's brow furrows and his eyes shift uncomfortably when Angel Eyes mentions the cash box; clearly he was hoping Angel Eyes would never find out about that bit (very reasonably, given what happens next).

All in all, Angel Eyes' introduction is super striking. The casual veneer and smug grins painted over a deeply tense sense of threat; the absolute deadly confidence; the fact he shoots Stevens' son too so easily and presciently, almost as a footnote to it all; casually walking out with the money that Stevens offered him for sparing his life; and then, on the ostensible basis that when he's paid he always sees the job through, casually killing Baker too.

Although he explains the murder of Baker as simply seeing the job through, though, Stevens didn't actually ask him to kill Baker; all he ever suggested he wanted was to be left alone, and all he said about the money was that it's a thousand dollars, after asking what Angel Eyes was being paid for murdering him. I expect Angel Eyes simply chooses to take it as payment for the 'job' of killing Baker for motivated reasons; that way, he can act as if the money is still 'payment' for him even though he rejected Stevens' attempt to bribe him, and it's much easier to go after the cash box himself if Baker's out of the picture, after all.

This creates an interesting ironic sense that while Angel Eyes effectively presents his own introduction as being all about his unassailable professional principles about always performing the job he's been paid for, and I took him at his word on my first viewing, he's not really all about those principles at all -- and as the movie goes on, indeed, he's simply pursuing the cash box for his own reasons rather than because anyone's paying him for it. His 'professional principles' don't come up again, because that's not really what this intro was telling us at all.

Which isn't to say he doesn't always see a job through after being paid (I can definitely believe that; if he has a reputation for getting the job done no matter what, that makes people more likely to pay him in the future, and he sure has no qualms about completing any job), just that that's not at all the main thing driving his character, as you might initially assume. The thing his intro is really telling us about him is that he's ruthless, terrifying, extremely competent, very interested in this cash box, and has absolutely no trouble casually murdering whoever might be standing in the way of accomplishing what he wants. And I think it's very effective at showing that.

Blondie's introduction

This scene opens with Tuco on a galloping horse in a way that naturally invites the viewer to assume this is following directly from when he flees from the saloon in his intro, and that's what I assumed on my first viewing -- but nah, not only does he not have the food and drink, he's wearing different clothing. Given the surviving bounty hunter from the intro will be appearing later and indicating that was eight months ago, and this is decidedly the most obvious place for the bulk of the timeskip to be happening, probably this is actually several months later. This film is not at all big on time indicators -- for the most part, we have no idea how much time is passing, everything feels like it's happening pretty much in sequence, and we can only vaguely infer that there must be longer gaps between particular events.

The straight-up photograph on Tuco's wanted poster is pretty hilarious. There's even a scene later with a little gag about the long exposure times for photographs at the time. Probably this is just a funny prop for two scenes to make it very obvious to the viewer that it is absolutely him on the wanted poster even as he adamantly denies it, but it's also very funny to imagine Tuco patiently posing for his own wanted poster.

Framing through it, all three of the bounty hunters surrounding Tuco when Blondie comes along are in fact going for their guns when Blondie shoots them, which makes sense -- for all that Blondie is not much of a noble hero, he generally does not tend to shoot people until they're at least starting to draw on him. (There's one notable exception, which will come up in part two.)

I enjoy Tuco's weird little nervous, disbelieving grin as he realizes this stranger just shot the bounty hunters but is sparing him. Tuco's own worldview, as shaped by his background, is dominated by self-interest; it's every man for himself, and it's up to him to do whatever it takes, tell whatever lies, betray whoever he has to, to get ahead. And yet, there's this endearing naïveté to him, where he's not really suspicious of other people's motives accordingly -- he's surprised Blondie would save him, but his brain doesn't immediately go to this guy just wants to be the one to collect my bounty. We see this a lot throughout the film.

We cut (with great comic timing) from Blondie sticking a cigar in Tuco's mouth to Tuco spitting out a cigar while tied up on his horse as Blondie takes him into town -- an edit that suggests continuity, like only a short time has passed and it's the same cigar that he just hadn't had the chance to spit out yet (sort of dubious if you really think about it, since surely it would've taken a bit for Blondie to tie him up and get him onto his horse). This reinforces our initial assumptions about what's happening, where Blondie would just have tied him up before riding straight into town, but given the con they turn out to be running, there must have actually been an offscreen conversation about it and the cigar is there as a bit of cheeky misdirection for the audience.

(It probably makes sense that when Blondie put the cigar in his mouth, he was actually about to propose they run this bounty scheme together -- as the movie proceeds, we see that Blondie generally shares cigars in more of a friendly sort of way, after all.)

"I hope you end up in a graveyard!" yells Tuco. They sure do all end up in a graveyard! This is some very cheeky foreshadowing and I love it.

Tuco yelling ineffectual threats about how Blondie can still save himself by letting him go, while actually tied up and completely at his mercy, is just extremely Tuco.

Then he shifts tack very abruptly to saying he feels sick and needs water, only to then spit in Blondie's face. Later he furiously calls the deputy a bastard just for walking out of a building, only to then immediately shift to saying he's just an honest farmer who didn't do anything wrong. Tuco often does this, shifting from one approach to the next in a way that makes it really obvious he's bullshitting, but he keeps doing this, just throwing shit at the wall to see if anything sticks, even when this is counterproductive to the whole effort. He is presumably playing it up a bit here, but it's still in its own way pretty representative of who he is and what he's actually like. He's so characterful.

"Who says so? You can't even read!" says Tuco about whether it's him on the wanted poster, which is some delightful nonsense hypocrisy/projection given we will later see that Tuco himself can only barely read. I love him. (And why would reading even have anything to do with it; he's obviously looking at the plain actual photograph of him right there. Love Tuco's absolute nonsense.)

Another absurd change of tactics: "Hey, everybody, look, look! He's giving him the filthy money!" - as if he's going to rally onlookers against the sheriff and Blondie somehow on the basis that money is exchanging hands, isn't that suspicious.

Tuco calls Blondie Judas for accepting the money (referencing the thirty pieces of silver, of course), which will get a fun echo later.

"You're the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you!" I love that Tuco has invented compounding recursive bastardry just for Blondie. Not only is he a bastard, all one thousand men his mother slept with were also bastards. Glorious. (You can see Blondie's amused by this one; he actually smiles a little bit before throwing a match at him.)

I wonder if Blondie actively encouraged him to go quite this hard on the insults, to make them look less associated, or if he just did this. One would think it would be risky, on Tuco's end, to be this over the top in literally spitting in the face of the guy who could just let him hang if he happened to change his mind -- but then again, Tuco genuinely doesn't expect Blondie to double-cross him.

Tuco's crimes, as of this first hanging, are: murder; armed robbery of citizens, state banks and post offices; the theft of sacred objects; arson in a state prison; perjury; bigamy; deserting his wife and children; inciting prostitution; kidnapping; extortion; receiving stolen goods; selling stolen goods; passing counterfeit money; and, contrary to the laws of this state, the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice! All this paints a picture of a pretty colorful backstory, but most of it is relatively petty; other than the murder (possibly of people like the bounty hunters we saw him dispose of in the opening), we can gather he's been scrounging up money through anything from cheating at cards up to armed robbery and kidnapping, he lied under oath (checks out), he set a prison on fire (presumably to escape), he ran off from his wife and kids and then married someone else he presumably also ran off from, and then there's "inciting prostitution" which I'm guessing means offering someone not previously engaged in sex work money for sex.

It obviously checks out that he'd do anything for money, and bigamy and deserting his wife and children rhyme with his off-hand mention at the monastery later that he's had lots of wives here and there; in general, it tracks that he would make big commitments and then just break them. So all in all, these seem like probably a bunch of genuine crimes that he actually committed. (He also nods somewhat smugly at the marked cards and loaded dice bit.)

Blondie's MO seems to be to first shoot the whip out of the hand of the guy who's meant to be setting the horse off and then shoot the actual rope (and then random attendees' hats, for good measure). Better hope that first shot doesn't spook the horse.

It really is very reasonable of Tuco to want a bigger cut for being the one running the risks; you wouldn't generally want to do a job with a significant chance of getting you killed without being very well compensated for that. Unfortunately, Blondie doing the cutting means he's the one with all the power here -- if he's dissatisfied with his share, he can just pocket all the money and let Tuco die -- which puts him at the advantage in the negotiation, and he knows it.

I enjoy how in the middle of "If we cut down my percentage, it's liable to interfere with my aim," Blondie offers Tuco a cigar, this casual friendly move in the middle of what is effectively a threat.

Tuco does a little understated, "Hmm," of acknowledgement that makes it feel like this was genuinely unexpected. But then he just returns the threat: "But if you miss, you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco." Which sets up his quest for revenge on Blondie after the double-cross, obviously, but is also fun to recall during the final scene: Tuco actively advised Blondie not to leave him alive if he was going to double-cross him.

Tuco why are you eating the cigar

Next time he's in the noose, it's for a whole new list of crimes that ends with, "For all these crimes, the accused has made a full, spontaneous confession." Yeah, he probably just went off spewing confessions to a string of colorful invented offenses as Blondie brought him in, didn't he, maybe hoping it would raise the bounty. (At the cinematic screening where I saw it for the first time, I missed the spontaneous confession thing due to no subtitles and spent half the movie experiencing some jarring mental dissonance over Tuco's growing goofy likability versus the offhandedly having been convicted of multiple rapes near the start thing. But it's actually pretty strongly telegraphed that the new crimes here are simply bullshit; a spontaneous confession to a variety of new things that were decidedly not on the earlier list, that he could not possibly have done in the implied presumably not very long timespan between the first and second hanging, mostly distinctly more dramatic crimes than the original set, all sounds strongly like a Tuco throwing shit at the wall thing.)

Tuco looks a lot more restless during the second hanging, where for the first one he was pretty calm -- probably a little bit nervous about Blondie's "liable to interfere with my aim" remark, even though they'd presumably come to an agreement to stick with the 50/50 split.

He notices a woman being scandalized, seems sort of put out for a second, but then growls at her to scare her more. What a Tuco.

Another minor character presumably disabled in the war: Angel Eyes' incidentally legless informant. (Whom he calls Shorty, like the guy Blondie teams up with later, who is definitely a different guy because that guy has legs -- sort of a funny aversion of the usual one Steve limit. Genuinely a bit puzzled by why they did that -- is it like that in the Italian version or just the English dub?) I wonder if the bit where he moves around by holding a couple of bricks and using them to walk on is something inspired by a real person or people at the time.

Calling him a 'half-soldier' is pretty rude, Angel Eyes.

Look, I'll accept that we're calling Blondie Blondie, sounds like that's what you'd call him in Italy, but there's really no excuse for "A golden-haired angel watches over him." The man's hair is brown. It's not even a light brown. What are you talking about, Angel Eyes.

But to not get too distracted by that part of the line: Angel Eyes obviously recognizes the con they're running. I think that's probably because he knows of Blondie and that this is a thing he does (he's presumably done it with others before), so when he notices Blondie's around at a hanging, he's like ah, yes, there's him doing his thing, guess he's running with Tuco now. My own feeling is Blondie and Angel Eyes basically only know of each other, though -- no direct evidence they're not more familiar or anything, but they don't really act like they have a personal history, I think, compared to Tuco and Angel Eyes who obviously do.

After the threat about a pay cut being liable to interfere with his aim, I originally figured Blondie missing the rope (or rather, it seems to have grazed but not severed it) might have been deliberate, meant to scare Tuco a bit and make him think twice about proposing that again. But ultimately, on a closer look, I'm pretty sure he really did just miss, both because his expressions and body language feel more in line with that and because Tuco's rant after they escape indicates that Blondie's explanation to him was that anyone can miss a shot -- if it was meant as a warning, probably he wouldn't then go on to actively make it sound like he'd just happened to miss.

(That line also indicates it probably wasn't that he did hit it dead-on but the rope was just sturdier than expected -- if Blondie said anyone can miss a shot, that sounds like he at least believes it's because he missed, and I don't see any sensible reason he would lie about that here.)

That said, I think it's fun to imagine that the reason for the miss was that that discussion really did interfere with his aim -- that little bit of tension with Tuco led to him being a little careless this time, even though he didn't mean to miss and thought he had it.

The thing that actually prompts Blondie to stop and leave Tuco is Tuco's rant about how nobody misses when I'm at the end of the rope and When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass. For all that he explains it as being about how there's no future in this with a guy who'll never be worth more than $3000, there's a specific point where he stops his horse and decides to ditch him, and it's when Tuco's complaining turns into guilting him about missing and the experience of being on the other end. Blondie will not be guilted and does not want or need this; just going to ditch him and wash his hands of him and find somebody else. I get the sense that Blondie doesn't really want to think about that miss too hard, at this point, and Tuco won't leave him alone about it, and so he leaves him.

More echoes in Blondie and Tuco's relationship: Blondie specifically says, "Adios," when leaving Tuco in the desert, which Tuco will say back to him at the inn.

Tuco's reaction, once again throwing shit at the wall, goes from insults to angrily ordering him to cut the rope off and get off the horse (as if he has any power to make him do anything, standing there unarmed with his hands tied), to a series of hilariously off-the-wall threats ("I'll hang you up by your thumbs!"), to disbelief/desperation: "Wait a minute, this is only a trick! You wouldn't leave me here! Come back! Wait! Blondie! Listen, Blondie!" before the final ¡Hijo de una gran putaaaa! The last couple stages once again get echoed in the final scene. I enjoy the "You wouldn't" - Blondie's supposed to be better than this, even after he'd threatened his aim might suffer if he got less money. They were supposed to be friends, damn it! (Tuco really wants to believe that people actually like him, and often chooses to live in the world in which they do.)

I truly love the fact Blondie gets the freeze-frame and onscreen caption of "the good" just after ironically admonishing Tuco for his ingratitude after Blondie has double-crossed him, taken the money they were going to split, and left him in the desert with this hands tied. As I wrote in the post with my initial impressions on the movie, this is the most uncalled for, mean-spirited thing he does in the entire movie, and getting the caption right here makes it really drip with irony, which is exactly the right thing to do with it, compared to if they'd put it earlier when it might have looked like it was meant to be played straight. There's no gallant hero here, only this guy, who is kind of a bastard. Blondie genuinely grows to deserve the title more as we go on, and that's one of the fun things about the movie, but we have established that the base point is low.

Blondie's intro tells us a number of things: he's a very good shot, casually confident, silent and stoic and unruffled by most anything, happy to be a conman ripping off bounties by bringing in criminals and then freeing them again to repeat the same scheme elsewhere, willing to make oblique threats to get his way and to shoot first when anyone seems about to pull a gun on him, and enough of a bastard to leave Tuco behind in the desert. But he's definitely the most enigmatic of the three main characters; he doesn't talk or emote much, leaving exactly what's going on in his head pretty vague and open to interpretation, even as some of his actions are pretty striking and interesting. This has nerdsniped me, because I enjoy thinking about what's going on in characters' heads; please be prepared for an excessive amount of analysis of what might be going through his mind in almost every scene he's in.

Angel Eyes and Maria

The choice to open this scene with Maria getting thrown off a carriage with a bunch of drunk Confederates and the choked-up yell of "You filthy rats!" after them is probably largely just to get across the suggestion that she's a prostitute, making it easier to connect that she's the one Angel Eyes' informant told him about. But I appreciate that it gives her a little bit of a tragic existence outside the confines of the plot and makes her sympathetic even before Angel Eyes starts beating on her. (A secondary purpose for this is also probably to show some Confederate soldiers just being assholes; the film makes a point of featuring both sympathetic and asshole moments from both sides of the Civil War.)

Like with Stevens, while Angel Eyes makes his presence very threatening, he starts off nonviolently (well, relatively; the way he pulls her inside is not exactly gentle), just telling her to go on talking about Bill Carson -- but when she refuses to volunteer any information and just says she doesn't know him, the claws come out instantly. There's none of the veneer of casual friendliness he had with Stevens, though, just an intensely scary stare and threatening demands. (The scare chord playing in the background doesn't help.) All in all, Angel Eyes was already terrifying but he is even more so in this scene.

I do also appreciate that while the interrogation is brutal and deeply uncomfortable and thick with the danger of sexual violence, it does not go there -- he's physically but not sexually violent, he's only interested in the information, and once he has it, we see him just leave. This is a completely sexless film, and I think we're all very lucky for that; it's one reason The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has aged relatively well, compared to for instance some of Sergio Leone's other films. (That's not to say I have anything against portrayals of sexuality or even sexual violence in media in principle, but I've gotten the sense that back in the sixties, media that did portray it tended to be profoundly weird about it.)

Tuco returns to town

We don't get to see Tuco suffering in the desert, only making his way across the rope bridge and then stumbling toward the well and finally indulging, but I think it does get across that this was an ordeal for him, and that becomes easier to appreciate on a rewatch, after seeing Blondie go through it later. Tuco's skin has fared a lot better than Blondie's, but his lips are pretty cracked.

The gun seller looks so proud of his little selection of revolvers and is so eager to please him by showing him more. It's painful how long he keeps trying to be helpful in selling him a gun even when Tuco just grabs the bottle of wine out of his hands and dismantles half of his guns to put together a custom revolver. And then Tuco just uses the gun, with a cartridge the owner gave him, to rob him of the money he has in the till, oof.

Man, those targets just casually in the shape of Native Americans.

Sergio Leone just has a thing for characters shoving something in somebody else's mouth unbidden, doesn't he. Blondie sticks his cigar in Tuco's mouth during his intro, then Tuco puts the sign in the shopkeeper's mouth, and then it happens very memorably in Once Upon a Time in the West as well. I forget if it's in A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised.

The gun store scene is theoretically skippable (Christopher Frayling's commentary indicated it was cut in British prints of the film, though I gather it survived in the US cut), but it's pretty fun in its audacity, and is also doing some good setup work for Tuco's character. So far, apart from his intro suggesting some degree of scrappy ability to shoot before he gets shot, he's been shown in a pretty ineffectual light, getting ambushed and captured and raging helplessly with his hands tied. But here we get to see that Tuco really knows his way around guns and has implausible trick-shooting skills to rival Blondie's -- and, of course, that he really is an unrepentant bandit who thinks nothing of doing this when he wants a gun and some money, lest we were left too sympathetic to him when Blondie left him.

The cave

Tuco presumably bought the chicken with some of the $200 he robbed from the gun store; he presents it like having a single chicken by itself is amazing riches. Does say a lot.

I enjoy his very blatant talking to himself about how oh, he's so lonely, but he's rich, wonder where his friends are now. He clearly figures that Pedro/Chico/Ramon are there listening and just avoiding him. He talks like they were such great friends, but somehow the fact they don't come out until he starts loudly talking about how if only they were there he'd give them $1000 each doesn't make it seem like they ever had a relationship that went much beyond assisting each other in committing crimes to their mutual advantage -- and Tuco clearly in fact knows this, since he knows exactly what line to go for to lure them out. (But no, Tuco definitely has great friends, because he is a cool and well-liked dude who has definitely made good choices in life.)

I've seen people online suggesting that Blondie and Tuco ran their scam a lot more often than the two times we actually see, but this scene seems to make it explicit that they only did it exactly those two times: Tuco specifically indicates Blondie has $4000, which is simply equal to half of the first $2000 bounty that they split plus the entire $3000 bounty for the second time that he kept for himself.

This is one of the scenes added in the Extended Cut, despite having been cut even from the Italian version of the movie after its original Rome premiere. The primary ostensible purpose of it is just to establish where Pedro/Chico/Ramon came from (the featurette on the restoration makes it explicit that the guy overseeing the Extended Cut, John Kirk, just thought it was a plot hole and decided to reinsert the scene when he discovered it existed because of that, despite Sergio Leone himself having decided to cut it for pacing reasons). It is true I think I would probably ask myself some questions about Tuco's buddies if I'd seen a cut without it; Tuco's seemed like a lone wolf so far, and without it there's no indication at all of who these guys are or why they're working for/with him for this.

On the other hand, the scene kind of sets them up as if they're a lot more important than they are, and its internal coherence feels a little off: them only coming out when Tuco tempts them with money, despite that Tuco's been there for a bit talking at them about what good friends they were, actively suggests they don't actually like or trust him (which makes good sense!), but then it also has this dialogue about how they thought he'd been killed, which feels as if it's randomly offering up an unnecessary and somewhat contradictory second explanation for why we haven't seen them with him up to this point. The bit about them thinking he was dead doesn't actually connect to anything and seems to give undue weight and improperly conserved detail to Tuco's relationship with these guys, who are ultimately just some throwaway goons that exist in one scene before dying and never being mentioned again. I think probably the movie is actually better off without this scene, as Sergio Leone apparently concluded himself.

The inn

More of the war in the background -- this time with the innkeeper privately opining about how those rebels are cowards and it'll be better when the Yankees have beaten them as the Confederate army retreats out of the town, only to then yell "Hurray for Dixie!" as they're passing by. Not the only character in this movie who just pretends to support whichever army he's currently looking at. (We see more injured soldiers in the background here.)

Love the tension of the buildup here. Blondie's gun lying dismantled on the table at the start, the brothers approaching in the midst of all the noise, the close-up of Blondie's hand freezing and eyes narrowing at the clink in the sudden silence, straining to hear as there's nothing (the fact it stopped when the army did actively suggests someone's trying to be sneaky), then frantically loading the revolver with a second-third-fourth bullet as the background noise restarts and then juuuust managing to finish and shoot the three of them in rapid succession as they burst in. These silent close-up shots of his hands and eyes also deliver a rare moment of tangible alarm from Blondie; he's legitimately scared for a bit there and you can feel it, which is greatly appreciated from a character who spends most of the movie being stoic and enigmatic.

Enjoy Blondie choosing to explain how he knew they were coming by going, "Your spurs," just before firing the final shot (just giving this guy a little tip about where he messed up before killing him, as you do), but also I deeply enjoy that him firing that last smug bullet, which he probably didn't really need to when the guy was collapsing anyway, leaves him defenseless when Tuco draws attention to himself at the window. Blondie is very smart and competent, we've just watched him survive three people sneaking up on him while he's cleaning his gun because he managed to notice the tiny sound of a clinking spur and put together what it meant and load his gun in time, but then he makes this near-fatal mistake by getting a little too cocky about it, and that's definitely tastier than if he'd obviously needed all his bullets there.

I have seen it suggested that Tuco intentionally used the brothers as cannon fodder here, but I'm not sure the movie necessarily suggests that; presumably the idea was for them to successfully sneak up on Blondie and catch him completely unawares without the unexpected silence exposing the rogue spur clink, which wouldn't have had to involve any of them getting killed (heck, if they'd happened to be just a little earlier, Blondie would've still been in the middle of cleaning his gun). Tuco and the others had clearly talked about their approach ahead of time, so they were perfectly aware that they'd be going up there by the door and Tuco would be coming in by the window and presumably thought that sounded like a good plan. And we have no idea exactly at what point Tuco managed to make his way in, so we don't have any indication either way on whether he theoretically could have intervened to save them in some manner -- my first assumption would be he got in after Blondie had stood up, which is after he shot them. Sneaking up on him from two different directions makes sense either way. I wouldn't necessarily put it past Tuco to figure the brothers will probably get killed and do it anyway, but I don't think we can say that for sure.

Either way, I enjoy Tuco doing his quick little sign of the cross when he says "Those that come in by the door." He did in fact just get them killed by bringing them here, and while he's not going to say anything about that to Blondie, it shows him acknowledging it in a small way. Tuco's religiosity is a great little character trait that has no impact on the plot but just adds more color and dimension to him as a character -- it adds a really fun bit of visual irony to punctuate some of his various decidedly un-Christian actions, and it has a rich sense of being rooted in his background given his family was presumably religious.

Blondie's shrugging, "It's empty," feels like he's initially kind of expecting them to just talk: he takes Tuco wanting him to remove the pistol belt as a practical thing, just telling him to remove his weapon so he can put his away, and so Blondie removes it but tells him that's not really necessary because he can't shoot him anyway. Tuco could have shot him already if he were here to kill him, right? He probably expects, initially, that Tuco is just here to get his half of the money, or possibly all of it.

Instead, Tuco responds with, "Mine isn't" -- he's deadly serious and he's not putting his gun away at all.

"Even when Judas hanged himself there was a storm, too." There's Judas again! Tuco originally called Blondie that while playing it up for the scam, but as far as he's concerned now, it's true actually. Love the furious energy of him sitting there having found this Biblical parallel and decided this is the specific revenge he wants on this guy and bringing a noose to arrange that. Blondie's never had a rope around his neck, never felt the devil bite his ass? Well, now he will. And he'll make him do it himself, because Judas hanged himself.

Blondie warily (and correctly) suggests the 'storm' is actually cannon fire -- because he decidedly does not want to be anywhere near the war, and by the time cannons are getting fired in the vicinity, he thinks they should probably be getting the hell out of there, and if Tuco agrees, then perhaps pointing that out is a ticket out of this pretty alarming situation he has found himself in. But Tuco, of course, is not really interested in entertaining that just when he has Blondie right where he wants him. He's going to hang him right here if it's the last thing he does.

Blondie goes along with it, slowly, silently, looking kind of wary and skeptical more than anything. When I was first watching this movie, I kept expecting him to do something, to distract him in some clever way and then lunge at him to disarm him or something, like you'd usually expect the main character to do in an action movie. But the thing is that's just not how Blondie operates. He doesn't do bold risky action-hero feats. He can absolutely shoot a gun with the best of them, but he has no particular physical skills, never even throws a punch in this whole movie unless you count the backhand slap on the tied-up Tuco earlier; when unarmed, all he's really got is his brains. Blondie gets by on being smart and careful and analytical. When Blondie finds a gun pointed at him, and has no leverage over the other guy, he will do what he's told, make no sudden movements, and wait until he sees some kind of actual opening, because otherwise he's just going to get shot. He buys what little time he can going along with the hanging while his brain silently whirs away evaluating his options for how he can get out of this, and that's about it for what he can do.

What are his options? He doesn't have a lot. Tuco is standing too far away to reach before he shoots but too close to realistically miss, never takes his eyes off him for more than a second, keeps his gun pointed squarely at him. It wouldn't be hard for him to get out of the noose -- it's a big noose, he's barely in it, his hands are free. But if he did, Tuco would presumably just shoot him instead. Probably his best chance, once Tuco says he's going to shoot the legs off the stool, is to try to make a move just when he fires, slip out of the noose and then probably make some kind of last-ditch attempt to overpower him before he's ready to shoot again, and I imagine Blondie was getting ready to attempt just that before they were interrupted. But even then, it's very questionable whether he could have actually escaped like that. All in all, things are looing pretty dicey for him by the time the rogue cannonball comes to his rescue -- but once it does, he's out of there fast, grabbing his chance now he's got it.

Either way, as little as he gives away as it's happening, Blondie's genuinely staring death in the face here for this whole sequence, and this experience clearly left enough of an impression on him for him to make a point of turning this specifically back on Tuco in the final scene, even though Tuco's going to torment him in a much more extended and agonizing way in the desert, so I'm enjoying the quiet implication there.

The cannonball is kind of interesting because this is absolutely a textbook deus ex machina. Usually I like the rule that a contrived coincidence can get the characters into a situation but ideally not out of it. This is definitely getting Blondie out of a situation, and definitely has that sense of being a little unsatisfying as the answer to how's he going to get out of this one. And yet, the fact Blondie really was helpless to do much about it is kind of the point here. If Blondie had actually won out in this encounter, it wouldn't have nearly the same meaning when he finally ends up turning the situation around in the desert, nor when he tells Tuco to get in the noose at the end -- narratively, we need this to be an instance of Tuco beating out Blondie and then toying with him for it to have the right impact, and hence, since he can't actually die here, he needs to get out without winning.

(It does also help a bit that the ongoing cannon fire was already set up and established, even if it just happening to hit the building is purely coincidental.)

Being saved by a cannonball, of course, is again the constant insistent presence of the war in the background, now coming into the characters' lives just a bit more directly.

Meanwhile, Tuco in this scene, man. He is finally the one in the position of power, just relishing having control and being able to order Blondie to do things and have him actually do them and the grim sense of justice in seeing him be the one in a noose for once. Cheerful lines like, "It's too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away." Grinning as he explains that he'll shoot the legs off the stool. But then when it comes to actually doing it… he takes an extra breath, with this kind of hesitant expression on his face, before echoing Blondie's "Adios." As he points the gun, it's shaking a bit. Tuco doesn't feel totally right here and I love it a lot.

Tuco does absolutely want to see Blondie suffer right now -- we're about to see him chase him down again so he can torture him in an even more drawn-out and awful way, after all. But once he actually kills him it'll all be over, and he just goes back to his usual shitty bandit life, one more person that he'd once thought was a friend gone. This has been a couple of minutes of mildly satisfying catharsis, but not totally satisfying, too brief, too easy -- and there's probably some basic squirm of empathy there, when he's been in that position, can vividly remember the squeeze of the rope -- but the bastard deserves this for betraying him, so he's doing it anyway.

All in all, this is possibly the scene I have rewatched the most. This is significantly because I happen to have a big dopamine whump button in my brain labeled 'HANGINGS', but it's also just a sequence of masterful tension leading up to this delightfully twisted, tense and thoroughly loaded character interaction following on the previous scenes between Tuco and Blondie in fun specific ways that build up to even more fun things later. What a character dynamic.

The fort

I don't have too much to say about this one. It's a very impressive set, the war is brutal, the sarcasm of the Confederate captain Angel Eyes talks to and the ease of bribing him with some booze is nice foreshadowing and a parallel for the poor Union captain Blondie and Tuco will meet, but ultimately this scene is mostly about filling in how Angel Eyes learns about Batterville. (Or is it Betterville? The subtitles say Batterville and that's what it sounds like everyone's saying, but Christopher Frayling and the subtitles on him say Betterville.) This is a restored scene in the Extended Cut, which exists in the Italian version but was cut from the International Cut.

Angel Eyes pauses and swallows looking at the injured soldiers and later lets the captain keep the booze he brought, vaguely suggesting a glimmer of sympathy for their plight, which is sort of interesting but also a little divorced from the rest of the movie. Villains having different sides to them is neat, but I don't think we get a great sense of why Angel Eyes would be sympathetic to these men but also treat the prisoners at Batterville -- who are soldiers from the Confederate army just like these ones -- how he does later with zero remorse, so I'm not sure this is actually doing much for the movie on a character level in the end, and if anything may be a little counterproductive to the kind of extremely cold-blooded villain that Angel Eyes is otherwise set up to be.

I suppose the idea might be that Angel Eyes is theoretically capable of sympathy, but also capable of simply discarding it the moment it's useful to him. Alternatively, the idea could be that at the moment he feels in some sense that if the war catches up with him he could be in these soldiers' place, but then he goes on to enlist with the Union army to get into Batterville, at which point he's on the winning side so who cares. Angel Eyes does display nerves later at the truel, once he's in a situation he's not in control of where he might very well die, so maybe it checks out that while he feels not totally secure in not winding up like these men himself, their grim conditions get to him a bit.

I do think it is kind of nice to have this scene in terms of keeping Angel Eyes' storyline going and maintaining the sense that he's still out there looking for Carson, even aside from the added plot clarity; without it, he'd just kind of not exist for a very significant chunk of the film.

I've also seen it argued that it brings out the horrors of the war too early, given the film's slow progression from the war as simply backdrop for the plot to eventually spending the leadup to the climax with it in stark focus. I think that's a legitimately interesting point, but also that it didn't stop me absorbing that progression just fine when first seeing the film as the Extended Cut -- soldiers are injured here, yes, but they aren't truly lingered on, and all in all it felt mostly just like a logical part of the established war-as-backdrop at this stage.

All in all, I have some mixed feelings on this scene and what it contributes, but I'm tempted to conclude the film might be better without it overall.

The desert

Tuco tracking down Blondie by finding his cigars at every campfire is pretty hilarious. Imagine what Blondie could have avoided if he just stopped smoking like a chimney.

(It's sort of surprising Blondie got so far ahead of Tuco to begin with -- he wouldn't have had long to get downstairs and to his horse while Tuco was recovering from the fall and getting out of the rubble, so one would've thought Tuco could've been basically right on his heels. I guess Tuco went in the wrong direction initially and had to catch up.)

Tuco forbidding Blondie to shoot down Shorty, oof. Once again Tuco is fundamentally out for himself, and right now he wants to deny Blondie this more than to let this stranger live, so down he goes. (Nonetheless, he flinches watching it, again bit of instinctive empathy despite that he mostly suppresses it -- it hits pretty close to home.)

Blondie continues to comply with the orders of the guy who's pointing a gun at him, but he clearly doesn't feel great about this, apologizing, gaze lingering on Shorty even as he's preparing to stand up. Clearly his moral line lies somewhere between leaving Tuco to fend for himself (where he might die, but sometime later in the desert where Blondie would never know) and letting Shorty hang, dying right in front of him when he was expecting a rescue. Perhaps Blondie didn't even know he had this line until now.

A moment of silence for Blondie's original horse, whom he probably rode out here, but who is presumably just left behind as Tuco takes him away and never seen again. This movie does not really give a damn about individual horses -- the characters' horses repeatedly disappear and go unmentioned only for them to later manage to get a different horse somewhere without comment -- but as a former horse girl this is the sort of thing I notice and wonder about.

Blondie presumably initially figures Tuco's just taking him somewhere a short distance away to try to make him hang himself again or something. But then Tuco shoots the canteen out of his hands, and the hat off his head for good measure (love Tuco casually replicating Blondie's little hat-shooting trick just to rub it in), and it starts to sink in that no, that's not it, is it. Where are they going? On a nice walk of a hundred miles through desert. "What was it you told me the last time? Ah, 'If you save your breath, I feel a man like you would manage it.'" Tuco's not taking him anywhere; this is just torture, once again a very specific torture. Blondie made Tuco walk seventy miles through the desert? Tuco'll make him walk a hundred miles, or however long it takes before he dies a slow and agonizing death, and that'll show him. I deeply enjoy how in this movie, between the two of them, it's never just generic revenge, but always this hyperspecific replication of the other's previous cruelties.

Tuco's cute pink parasol is such a choice.

He's so utterly gleeful watching Blondie helplessly stumbling until he faceplants in the sand. Tuco relishes power and control when he can get it, not only for the Blondie-specific reasons (Blondie had all the power from beginning to end in their bounty scheme, and exercised it to leave Tuco helpless) but probably also because of his background -- poverty sure is a way to feel perpetually helpless and subject to external whims, and escaping it through banditry probably represented a sense of freedom from all that, where he can just go out and take what he wants and other people can be subject to his whims for once.

In the sequence added in the Extended Cut, the collapsed and dehydrated Blondie looks at Tuco's boot right beside his face, swallows, tenses for a heave of effort -- and then grabs the boot, only for it to just be the empty boot, Tuco cheerfully bathing his feet a short distance away. (Blondie is definitely suffering from the "characters can't see anything out of frame" thing here, but I kind of enjoy the literal implication that his eyes can just barely even focus and the boot manages to be all he can make out in his field of vision, even if it stretches plausibility a bit.) I do quite like this bit, not least because this is the one time we actually properly see Blondie attempting resistance. He silently went along with the hanging and he silently goes along with the desert walk, too -- which makes sense, because he's being ordered to at gunpoint, and as I went into earlier, he doesn't have action hero armor that'd let him do much to fight back in these situations without just getting shot, and he's generally too careful to try under the circumstances. But it means that he feels very passive in these sequences, and seeing this moment where he finally does think he has a chance to strike back, and the hate in his eyes and how painstakingly he gathers all of the energy he can muster to grab it, helps a lot to contextualize the rest and make him more tangibly an active character who cares what's happening to him for this. With this bit, it's easy to extrapolate that he has been waiting for any chance to take him down this whole time, and this is the one time he (seemingly) finds one. Without it, his character just has no sense of agency at all the entire time he's being tortured, which would mute the whole thing a bit.

(Well, okay: a little before this, there is this wide shot, where we can see Tuco stationary on his horse and Blondie walking towards him -- then stopping, extending his foot a little further forward and sort of pathetically lunging for that last step, at which point Tuco's horse just moves further away, and Tuco laughs. This might be, and is on closer examination probably meant to be, Blondie making some form of stumbling attempt to sneak up on him. But it's a wide shot so you can barely see him, it goes by in seconds, and it's hard to tell what he's actually doing -- he could just be trying to catch up to Tuco, which is how I think I'd mostly been taking it before I started squinting at this -- which makes it not really serve the same purpose.)

(I gather the script had a bit, which was filmed and possibly in a version of the Italian release in 1966 but lost today apart from a small fragment, where Blondie slides down a hill into an animal skeleton lying there and grabs a bone that he could use as a weapon, but Tuco shoots it out of his hand and warns him not to try that again. That would have also provided that bit of agency, but given that was cut, the boot scene was all that was left, and I do maintain that cutting that too is bad for the movie.)

After he realizes it's just the boot, and of course Tuco's not letting him get close, and he has no hope of getting one over on Tuco at this point, Blondie sort of slumps in defeat for a moment, and then looks up, and then starts to crawl towards the water. It's pretty painful to watch; the utter helpless humiliation of being so thirsty and drained of defiance that he would drink the water Tuco just washed his feet in is its own grotesque flavor of torture, and then Tuco won't even let him have that.

After that, Blondie manages to push himself onto all fours, looks at Tuco for a moment -- probably realizing that even if he tried to rush him right now it would accomplish absolutely nothing other than entertaining Tuco more -- and then just crawls away, finally going somewhere of his own volition. He's not going to make it far at this point, and if it looked like he might Tuco would just shoot him, but maybe he can at least die somewhere a bit further away from him.

Tuco stands up and initially reaches for his gun as Blondie crawls off, but then he just laughs, seeing that there's absolutely no danger of Blondie making it very far or shaking him off -- he can just casually pack up his stuff and then follow him at a leisurely pace.

In the Italian/Extended Cut, Blondie rolling down the hill is continuing from this, whereas in the International Cut, Tuco had just gotten off his horse to approach him after he initially collapsed, suggesting that collapse wasn't quite as bad and that he was just sort of continuing but on all fours -- gives it a little bit of a different air.

I do appreciate just how pathetic Blondie's crawl/roll down the hill is. He sort of picks himself up again after the initial stumble but then just collapses on his back, admitting defeat. He's going to die here and he doesn't have the energy to do anything about it. Tuco lets that bottle roll down and come to a stop by his head and he doesn't even react.

Tuco spends a moment just looking at him down there before bringing out his gun to put him out of his misery. Probably less out of desire to actually put him out of his misery and more out of seeing he's not going to be able to make Blondie walk anywhere further right now, and he's not going to sit around waiting, and definitely not leaving him alive.

Blondie barely moves as Tuco points the gun at him, just closing his eyes again and swallowing and accepting that this is it. At the inn he had a chance but this time is a full-on definitely thought he was going to die here and was powerless to stop it, and this is also something that Blondie turns back on Tuco at the end.

(And yet Tuco keeps pointing his gun to kill him and taking a while to actually fire it, doesn't he. Part of this is just the movie doing dramatic timing but part of it is a genuine slight hesitation on his part, as shown more obviously at the inn.)

But then comes runaway carriage ex machina, just in time! Tuco not just shooting him first before checking on it is another notable moment of hesitation on his part. Once again, we actually need a deus ex machina, because Blondie needs to have been totally helpless here or it would completely change the implications for what's being set up.

This is another good scene that I enjoy a lot, particularly Blondie getting ready to grab the boot, although I'm also just a big fan of exhausted, dehydrated men stumbling around deserts. It's very merciless and ugly (gotta love the energy of getting Clint Eastwood at his handsomest for your movie and then absolutely fucking up his face with the gnarliest-looking sunburn makeup), really thoroughly parses as torture where the hanging scene was more quiet buildup, and Tuco's absolute cruelty here versus Blondie's exhausted helplessness is very important in viscerally setting up why Blondie does what he does at the end. But I also enjoy how strongly Tuco's actions here are still rooted in the specifics of how Blondie treated him. I just really love the twisted, fucked-up way the whole chain of revenge is built up between the two of them, and how interestingly their relationship then develops with all that hanging over it.

The carriage

I appreciate that we see Blondie juuust prop himself up to look as Tuco goes to intercept it -- he goes on to discreetly crawl all the way to it during the sequence that follows while we're focused on Tuco, and briefly seeing that he takes an interest and has mustered a tiny bit of energy again helps set that up.

More of Tuco's religiosity as he does the sign of the cross multiple times over the corpse of the soldier who initially falls out… and then immediately loots the corpse. Oh, Tuco.

I remembered the amputee informant's description of how Bill Carson was missing an eye, so as soon as we saw one of the apparently-dead soldiers in the carriage wearing an eyepatch I was like ohhhhh!! The storylines are connecting!! (And we're more than an hour into the Extended Cut when it happens. This movie very slow-paced compared to a modern film and yet so thoroughly enjoyable.)

You can juuust see Carson starting to blink a bit as Tuco searches him.

Tuco standing there glancing to the right out of the corner of his eye when he hears a noise from the wagon, while by the rules of the movie he can't actually see anything over there, is very funny. He even waits a bit before turning around to point his gun, as if knowing whoever is there can't see him either until he turns.

Tuco interrogating Carson about the $200,000 while the latter begs for water is another truly painful scene; Tuco's only invested in the dollars and anti-invested in saving Carson's life ("Don't die until later!"), straining to get him to talk first for as long as he possibly can, until he figures the guy is going to straight-up croak before talking, at which point of course he switches tack. Presumably he thinks if he actually gives him water Carson's liable to change his mind about telling him anything, so he has to get it out of him first if at all possible.

I also enjoy his annoyance with Carson telling him about his name and having been Jackson before but now Carson; the audience needs him to say his name, and it's probably also helpful to mention he used to be Jackson, but to Tuco it's just a waste of time. "Carson, Carson, yeah, yeah. Glad to meet you, Carson. I'm Lincoln's grandfather. What was that you said about the dollars?"

Tuco repeats the name of the cemetery near the very end of the exchange with Carson: "Sad Hill Cemetery, okay. In the grave, okay. But it must have a name or a number on it, huh? There must be a thousand, five thousand!" - which means that, since Blondie doesn't know the name of the cemetery (unless Blondie did know it the whole time and just pretended not to, which I guess we can't really rule out), he can't have been listening in by this point. Directly after this, Tuco tells Carson not to die and goes to get water. So Blondie pretty much can't have caught any of the stuff about the cash when Carson said it originally, and can't have known the full strategic significance of talking to him beforehand.

Instead, Blondie probably quietly crawled after Tuco with the aim of maybe being able to get the jump on him while he's distracted with whatever this is, and he only got close enough just at the end to see Tuco talking to Carson and telling him to not die. Then, as Tuco ran off for the water, Blondie obviously could not follow him back there, but instead crawled the rest of the way to the back of the wagon to see who Tuco's so desperate to keep alive, where Carson managed to gasp out something about a grave marked 'Unknown', next to Arch Stanton, and that it had money in it (Blondie does definitely learn there's money, since he then knows to use that as leverage). This is supported by how Blondie just refers very nonspecifically to having been told a name on a grave. He's really pulling a bit of a bluff here since he doesn't (presumably) know what cemetery this grave is in, so if Tuco hadn't happened to have learned that bit (which Blondie can't know), this information would not actually be that useful to either of them. But so long as he can make it sound like he can lead Tuco to riches right now, he has an actual shot at surviving.

I enjoy the way Blondie manages the tiniest wisp of a victorious smile to Tuco's "What name?!" just before passing out. The moment he sees Tuco's furious desperation to learn the name he's talking about, he knows he's won and that Tuco's going to do whatever he can to ensure his survival. He can pass out in peace.

Tuco's shifty eyes and expressions as he has to reevaluate everything are great. Eli Wallach really, really just makes this movie with his performance. I love Blondie and all, and Clint Eastwood in his thirties is very attractive, but I think it's criminal that I had heard about this movie and about Clint Eastwood being in it but had never heard Eli Wallach's name. He's so good and singlehandedly makes Tuco the best thing about it. I love him.

And there comes the Tuco tack-switch! He's not just invested in keeping Blondie alive for the money; he's his friend! As if this is somehow going to be persuasive to the man he's just spent hours torturing and toying with.

I love this absolutely bonkers goddamn character dynamic. First Blondie saves Tuco from the bounty hunters, then he apparently turns him in for the bounty, then you learn actually they're running a scam together, then Blondie screws over Tuco in a way that makes you kind of root for Tuco to get back at him, then Tuco painstakingly, cruelly labors to punish him for it in the most specific twisted ways until you're anxious for how Blondie's going to get out of this, then this happens… and because Tuco is the character he is, of course it works. He is already the guy who switches tack on a dime when it seems to serve him in the moment. We've just spent this whole carriage scene building up how singlemindedly fixated he is on this money once he hears about it. There are already so many striking layers going on in the interplay between these two guys and it makes it delicious to realize we've just added yet another layer and the rest of the movie is going to involve them having to work together after all this. And because it's the cash box from the Angel Eyes storyline, we're following up on that too in the process, with the also-delicious implicit promise that that's how they're going to bump into him. This is just such a gleefully fun and satisfying moment where everything comes together and I love it.

(Continued in part two! Thanks for reading if you got this far.)

[ofdarkestdesires]

Alright! So, now that we have the full line-up of the Level 10 Bell’s Hells artwork, I think it’s about time I sat down and gave my personal opinions that nobody asked for about everyone’s styles.

Chetney Pock'o'pea

While I appreciate the more active pose and visible armor as opposed to his more unassuming original design, I am very off-put that he completely abandoned his original color scheme and all shreds of his original aesthetic. I also think the tracksuit is a bit much—listen, I’m a fan of toeing the line of what fashion belongs in a fantasy setting, but I’m pretty sure this fully vaulted over the it and did a full backflip and three-point landing into ridiculous. 3/10

And unfortunately, the same must be said for his Lycan form. This artwork feels like a serious downgrade from the original Chetwolf, which honestly filled me with a shock of horror each time he popped up. The only reason it is higher than base-Chet is that Chetwolf is still a werewolf, and werewolves are badass. 4/10

Laudna

Laudna, on the otherhand, is a total glow-up from her original design. Everything about her design ties together and brings in perfectly her aesthetic and backstory, from the haunting tree embroidery on her dress (akin to the Sun Tree she was hung from) to the little Pate birdhouse backpack (an homage to the Baba Yaga forest witch imagery she picked up), all the while looking so much like the elegant and imposing Delilah Briarwood. Easy 10/10 for me.

Fresh Cut Grass (F.C.G.)

F.C.G.'s new art...isn't bad, but I'm not as wowed by it as some others on this list. Something has clearly changed here in the choice to include his new blue jacket, and I approve! I'm also a fan of the wires having more definition and appearing more purposefully stylized, as if he's taking better care of himself...but the pose and the style just feel a bit lacking to me. 5/10

Fearne Calloway

Honestly, my only gripe with this outfit is the upper-half of her bustier. It feels very cluttered and like there is a lot of fine detail that just ends up being all meshed together. That would be my other only other gripe, too—there's a lot of small, fine details here that makes her feel cluttered. Which, honestly, fits her as the sneaky little hoarder that she is! But yeah, I would've done something else, something cleaner, with the upper half of her bodice. Also, while I know she is a Druid, I don't think she needs the plant growth on her legs... 8/10

Imogen Temult

I would just like to point out that this outfit was unveiled to us as Imogen's choice for winter-wear while traveling through the Crystal Sands Tundra. Is it sexy? Definitely. Is it my personal taste? Mm, not really, but I can see the appeal. Am I upset that even after the semi-canonization of her needing glasses, this bitch is still not a sexy glasses-wearing nerd? Absolutely—but the biggest sin this outfit does is fail to be climate-accurate. -1/10 for improper environment protection, and 7/10 for the outfit itself.

Orym, Savior Blade of the Tempest

I am incredibly torn here. Because, when it comes down to the armor itself, this is a clear winner. Orym's new uniform is a perfect upgrade from his original more humble and simple apparel, becoming much more about function and protection, while still retaining his svelte and limber appearance. The noted upgrade to Seedling is also nice, though I wish it was a bit more pronounced. What pulls me back from really loving this design, though, is his proportions—I feel like his head is way too big, or his limbs are way too skinny. Over all, I have to give this an 8/10.

Ashton Greymoore

Remember at the start how I said I'm all for toeing the line of what fashion belongs in fantasy settings? Yeah, this fucks! From the first episode, we knew that Ashton was a punk, and this just picks that up and runs with it in such a cool, fun way. I legitimately want this entire outfit—fuck cosplay, I'd just wear this irl! It leans enough on his old design to be recognizable, but pops out as truly his own. And the hammer looks wild—I can't wait to see that thing really pop off like crazy in the next fight. Definitely a 10/10 from me!

[oinkinpigprince]

OOOO Charlie Dompler x lovey dovey fashion designer reader? 😏😏 maybe dressing Charlie up and loving to hug and cuddle him? Asking for a friend 😁😁 I love your works smmmmm

I love you calling what I do ‘works’, I literally write this in bed after coming home from school, I’m sprawled on my bed like a sloth fallen out of a tree

Charlie x Fashion designer reader

You love dressing Charlie up, he’s like your personal mannequin. He’ll let you dress him up in any style you’d want. If you even asked him hard enough he’ll let you put in him dresses

It’s fun, although he may get tired and bored rather easy if you just stick him there for too long. I’d say you got 30 minutes of fun til he wants to bail and play COD

You two are such opposites, you’re bombastic and loud and he’s, kinda there. It’s nice, you two bring each other in and out.

He prefers function over fashion and you teach him he CAN have both. If he just tried a little bit harder

It’s so funny watching you two walk down the street together, you’re a glamorous god(ess) who has clothing so stylish and he’s worn the same hoodie for a week

You two could be the most fashionable couple around, if he didn’t mind being uncomfy. He just cannot fathom fashion over function, once in a while he’ll let you dress him up, but not often

You lay on his chest a lot, koala cuddling. Making kissy faces at him, he’ll shove your face playfully and say ‘cringe’. It’s a sweet dynamic

Charlie may call you ‘cringe’ or a ‘weirdo’ but he’s just being bashful. Pepper his face with kisses and he’ll roll his eyes as if he’s not melting

He actually likes getting opinions on his outfits, likes being dressed by you. He’s never really thought about what he’s wearing so he’s happy you do it for him

[manda-kat]

Precious baby Jenna! I think this is the most intentional character design I've ever made. So let me ramble a bit about her.

Jenna is Micah's twin and the two of them are both new dragon riders hailing from a proud family of dragon slayers. While Micah despises the idea of teaming up with a dragon, Jenna actually loves dragons and wants to disown the idea of dragon slaying entirely.

So for Jenna's design, I focused on the following:

Each character has their own signature element, related to the element of their dragon partner. Jenna's element is sky, so she has a lot of blue, she has long flowing hair, round edges, archery as a fighting style, ribbons, and- something I noticed while drawing and decided to emphasize a bit later- a flight-attendant-esque outfit. Like wind, sky, storms and rain, Jenna is a free spirit, but her preppy style implies that she's putting on appearances and not fully embracing that personality.

She is woefully underprepared for this new lifestyle. Jenna has no armor, is wearing a skirt, has little buckle-on shoes with no socks, her hair is down, her bows are in the way. Every utility-based item she has is in the same dark gray featured in Micah's belts.

This basically spells it out that Jenna didn't actually pack that stuff herself and Micah is the one adjusting her gear so she doesn't die. Since she'll be riding a dragon, she is now wearing thick, protective leggings that don't really match the rest of her outfit. She didn't want to bring her weapon at all, but Micah insisted. The bow is dark and has little to link it to her character. It represents the violence that Jenna despises, but like it or not, she must carry and learn to use for the protection of others. The quiver is just thrown around her waist with the only added detail being a bow she added after the fact just to keep it from being depressing.

There is a lot of room to grow. Jenna's final design at the end of her story would be more put-together, confident and prepared for action. Right now she's a teenaged girl trying to live her dream without really knowing the details of that lifestyle and I really think it shows! I hope I design more characters like her.

Bonus for her twin brother's design:

Micah's element is fire, but at this point he won't be flaunting that the way Jenna already is. His hair and cape give a bit of fire imagery, but that's mostly it. Fire is the most dragon-like element and he doesn't want anything to do with it. Red is still his color, connecting him more to that violence that Jenna is running from. For Micah, being able to fight and protect is the most important trait for a person to have and if he fails in that regard, he's nothing. The red is smothering him. It's something he carries for someone else rather than something he owns and wears proudly.

Just like Jenna, he is unprepared. While she forgot essential supplies and dressed for fashion rather than function, Micah remembered his armor and gear. However, the gear isn't suited to him specifically. Everything he is wearing is a hand-me-down from his father and grandfather. Key parts of the golden armor are missing, which implies he couldn't find a way to fit into the whole set and had to just settle for the pieces he could adjust. The sword is nearly as tall as he is and is way too big for him. Instead of finding a more reasonable weapon, he stubbornly sticks to the family relic, insisting that if it worked for the previous generations, it'll work for him.

Micah's round chin and freckles just make him look so young. He's way too much of a kid to realize the severity of being a dragon slayer.

I think Jenna's design has more thought behind it, but I love the twins together. Their eyes match, but their hair and skin helps keep them separate. Jenna is slightly darker, implying a tan. Like she actually goes outside and does things on her own, while Micah hides indoors and avoids actually living. Micah's blond hair matches his mother, but Jenna's hair has red in it, which neither of their parents have, which marks her as an outcast in the family. She's also taller and comes across as more mature than her brother, despite them being twins.

[leohtttbriar]

just curious, have you read binti by nnedi okorafor? i’m a bit reminded of her worldbuilding style when i read your star trek fics, if that makes sense

when i saw this i had not read binti by nnedi okorafor but now i have!! and it was beautiful and i really found the world-building fascinating as well as the rest of the story. and i have to thank you so much for bringing these stories to my attention!

i'm not going to claim that my star trek fics are like this bc that is so deeply flattering that i can only shy away from it (how is someone supposed to react to a part of their writing being compared to a quality of an award winning novella--i can't accept that fully but oh wow thank you so much), but i will say that there are details in okorafor's story that appeal to me and drag my interest and inspire me to want to write more. and i think if wanted to try to boil down what these details are it'd come out to something like: physical reality is more creative than the general narrative of physics supposes.

(apologies for how long this got--i am incapable of stopping once i start)

obviously the word "creative" invokes something like a designer, someone who put it all together. and i definitely don't believe in god but i also think that "god" serves as a interpretive interlocutor between how people expect physical reality to be and how it's beyond us--at least to people who aren't consistently enmeshed in theoretical physics or any other field/area of science that engages more with abstraction than materiality. and i love how okorafor takes the aesthetics of spirituality and extends that to tech. how she collapses the space between tech and art:

[...]

okorafor even invokes "god" multiple times, all in relation to the himba people that binti is a part of. and the way she reworks the theme of "innovation" is the expression of "god" in tech--creativity in material realities:

even just the suggestion that innovation and technology can be "small, private" and for "traveling inward" to explore the universe is fascinating enough--then she adds on this idea of "treeing"--of meditating so deeply on mathematics that physical parts of the world can "harmonize" with other parts through that power of mind and noticing and "inward" travel. it's wonderful.

she then has mathematics and harmonizing language with this conceit of "information" being found in certain material and how that material can be the medium of communication:

[...]

and that's not even getting to the way the red clay functions in the story and as a part of the world. the clay has information, data, and healing purpose, but the first time binti is asked to explain it to one of the meduse she says:

so all of this adds up to binti being in the right place and the right time in order to return what was stolen and save lives--when she says she's a master harmonizer, it's a layered claim in the story: she can create astrolabes, she can communicate with her edan--very old tech, she can physically communicate from her people to the meduse with the otjize she kept with her as she traveled outward in the universe, and she can use language.

[...]

i tend to be more interested in language as a physical gesture. as a thing that is wholly reliant on the body. i've always been more drawn to phonetics than semantics, and all the potentially significant ways a body can express itself. i just like meter and sound and gesture etc. obviously that's a part of how okorafor engages with "language" in this story but largely "language" arrives through mathematics--through something as abstract and rational and creative as mathematics--through a practice with "getting closer to 'god.'" and that's so beautiful in terms of the idea of "harmonizing," implying a peace and understanding between conscious beings that always exists so long as someone can tap into it.

binti's role in the story reminded me a little of the narrative/cultural role of the "peaceweaver" in early medieval poetry/culture. the sort of diplomatic conceit behind marriages of daughters to neighboring kings, but instilled in the actual person of the daughter/new wife, the woman who is now "weaving" peace through her ties to both kingdoms. binti of course isn't acting as diplomat through this cultural custom (the politics of medieval power structures are not really there to cause this role to exist to begin with) but the word "peaceweaver" is a word that suggests a creative engagement in material reality. she is weaving material together, she is weaving people together; the word poetically collapses the space between her abilities in a feminine craft and her abilities in her political role. and there's something like that happening with binti's "harmonizing"--her role as "harmonizer."

[...]

so despite the fact that the conceit of "language" is depicted as something that is an abstract truth that can be accessed, okorafor is still arguing that "communication" is a product of the person. so long as the person is not barrier-ed or diminished. so long as that person has always been able to communicate their self to the world around them, in such a way that the person does not keep that self apart from the world. "treeing"--engaging with fractals, self-similar mathematical patterns in perpetuity--being both the accessing of material truth and "god"--allowing for treating with other people. between people. with a result of cultural harmony.

with binti's edan i was reminded also of the golden compass in his dark materials. pullman depicts the compass as a piece of tech more than a piece of magic, even if magic definitely exists in-universe. and the way lyra has a special relationship to this tech, then looses it, then decided to figure the relationship out the hard way: binti's relationship with the edan is very like this but also okorafor writes it so that binti has already done the hard work of figuring out the tech, with her studies and meditation throughout her life (practices of her people), and by the end of the story she just needs to understand her understanding. and there's something about the fact that she is using "god" instead of fully rejecting it, as the story demands lyra does, because the relationship one can have to an object, a piece of tech, can be personal--and the personal is necessarily spiritual (the emergent property of self-consciousness, implementing an abstract meaning on that which might not inherently contain it--the "to be" rather than "not to be").

and the way binti's body is warped at the end of the story, changing her relationship to everything around her, mirrors the way she has carried her people's clay with her as communicative tool and personal expression and cultural honoring of her land and family and loved ones. she is still looking inward for the universe, it's just now the universe has become a part of her body.

anyway i was deeply interested in this story because i the speculative/sci-fi question that has most attracted me is the question of how biology and culture interact and how that interaction can produce something like technology or progress. it's an eco-critical question at the core because it's a question of how to be in the world and of the world while still not limiting the creativity that is as natural to our mind as any other part of the human body. it's how i read something like this novella as well as something like sir gawain and the green knight. it's like: when you're studying any aspect of biology, there's a tendency to see the description of, say, cellular respiration, and think, even unspoken, "who the hell came up with this. this is so impossibly complex. how does it even work??"

and the answer is "it works because that's how matter works. it works because that is how matter is. it works because it was inevitable for matter to behave this way in the conditions created because matter behaves this way and that is what is and that is it."

and so the "creativity" in that reality is not so much authored as it is the ongoing process of everything. trying to interpret and apply a culture that respects that is like...the project of climate activism, i guess. but maybe i'm getting to far into the umbrella Issue here. i just wanted to say that i loved this novella and i'm so so flattered by what you said and i find world-building details like the one's okorafor wrote to be fascinating and inspirational! <3333

[satoshi-mochida]

Action Game Maker announced for PC - Gematsu

RPG Maker series developer Gotcha Gotcha Games has announced Action Game Maker for PC (Steam). It will launch in 2025.

Here is an overview of the tool, via its Steam page:

About

The latest in the long-running Maker series of game development toolkits, Action Game Maker brings 2D action game development to those of all skill levels! Built using Godot Engine, Action Game Maker provides access to professional level functions without any programming required! A collection of samples and assets are included to provide the foundation needed to make your game a reality! Unchain your imagination!

Fully No Coding Visual Scripting

Action Game Maker builds on the node-based visual scripting system created for Pixel Game Maker MV with many improvements. No knowledge of programming is needed. Simply connect up Actions (similar to RPG Maker‘s Event Commands) and see the unique logic for your game come together!

Advanced Engine Technology With Godot Engine

Take advantage of the excellent 2D functionality provided by Godot Engine, the popular open source engine powering Action Game Maker!

User interface design based on the existing Godot user interface.

Support for GDScript is provided for those who want to move beyond visual scripting.

A complete 2D pipeline.

Tile Map Editor with auto-tile function.

Supports both sprite and 2D bone animation systems.

Access to Godot’s rich particle and shader systems as well as support for dynamic lighting and shadows, enabling a full suite of graphics features!

Sample Assets Included

Everything you need to build your first game is included, from character art to tiles, music, and sound effects! Free yourself from worrying about assets and just get started! The provided samples are intentionally simple and pixel-style so that it’s easy to open them up and make modifications or extensions to begin creating your own original look! Of course, if you already have your own assets it’s easy to import them—and high resolutions are supported!

Watch the announcement teaser trailer below.

Announce Teaser Trailer

English

Japanese

[blackrevell]

// WIP WHENEVER AND FOREVER

Been tagged by @ouroboros-hideout, @olath124 and @wanderingaldecaldo recently, thank you!

2D | 3D | Writing | VP

The last several days over here were quite turbulent and I suppose I gulped a bit too much of negativity, as nothing I did so far felt right or decent. That's why this journal will re-cap everything that's piled up in my project files since the previous WIP Whenever post: (x)

// Digital Art Still thinking of So Mi x Myers painting, the sneak peek of which you saw the last time. I think of it daily, I promise. Some day I will finish it.

Beyond that one, there's also a Myers' study that I'd want to complete. Been a while, but who knows.

// 3D

Modelling felt much more dynamic lately. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Blender is awesome, and I've had a blast working in it again.

For starters, I embarked on an endless highway of finally fleshing out my OC. The progress on the character herself is slow (well, at least there's no deadline and no rush). In terms of looks, she is a connoisseur of sunglasses and gathered quite a wide collection over the years. Here is one design out of the 4 planned:

Planning is not my natural forte, though, which often produces unexpected results. Had a night when I went too hard on caffeine and couldn't sleep, decided to spend the extra brain-overdrive time modelling a dress I saw on Pinterest. It's not even within my character's usual clothing style, but who's gonna stop me? Me? :pain:

What you see above is a low-poly preview, there's still lots of work to be done even in terms of mesh, much less texturing and weight painting (which is going to be a total horror).

Last, but not least — one of my frens on Discord was looking for sock garters to port for a character, so I thought I could help out a bit. Currently testing it for mesh clipping; texturing here is a "demo" solely for preview purposes.

// Writing

My friends and co-brainrotters somehow pulled me into writing, even though I've been notoriously bad with it my entire life.

At the moment, there's one ficlet in progress focused on character exploration for my OTP Nightwing (OC x Kurt). It is a wild mix of text with bits being deleted, and changed, and added, so I'll keep it under wraps for now.

The sad sack days did lure me into writing out small shards of feelings, which I have no idea how to classify. Vesna and I have a terminal disease called "Rosalind Myers and Kurt Hansen are bitter exes", and their tragic relationship just doesn't let me go:

Lies, lies, lies, how have I been blind to The knives cutting my sanity That you brought with you And I thought would only undo The enemies we could Conquer together and Share their bones and Share our hearts Too bad the taste of my blood Was your favorite hue In the palette of what I could Ever bring you

There's been a couple of other small writings that I won't dare to post (cause extra cringe)

// Virtual Photography Not much to report here, just want to say that it's been a pleasure to finally try my hand at proper VP with Kurt and his peachbutt (x).

I hope I'm capable of learning better and better, because photography has been a tempting idea for me since I was a kid, and I have already got concepts for several photo sets to do in Cyberpunk.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Not tagging anyone in particular, my brain is not functioning today. Just wishing everyone a nice day and evening. <3