#fun fact im using like one layer for everything

[jazzzzzzhands]

I'm just gonna ramble a bit cause I have art in the works but I don't want a long caption to go under it

But MAN does it feel good to be obsessed again. Just heart fitting to burst from LOVE for Welcome Home. (And YES for a certain primary colored man haha)

I can't stop thinking about this world, the characters and how clever the whole concept is. And Wally. His silly face brings me fucking JOY!!!

Anyways I'm drawing a BIG ART. I normally try to avoid taking too long on art because i only have so much time and energy due to my busy life.

But man I'm INSPIRED and full of love. I'm having so much fun with this piece. And it just feels so good. UwU

I can't wait to finish it and post it cause I'm already so proud of it SOBS

once again I'm just blathering here cause I like my captions on my art to be short ahaha

[santrrl]

Logan Howlett with Metalhead!reader, face piercings, tattoos, dark clothes - the whole get up.

i need grumpy x sunshine too, like reader actually being a cute little thing :')

L.H X METAL!HEAD READER

Author says; Thank you so much for your request!! I love doing them,l so this is gonna be the first of a few hopefully !<3 I LOVE this idea, and thus this is gonna be so fun to write !! HEHEHEHEH

The first and second part are split between bullet points, and then the actual story so i hope i got this right!! I'm so sorry if I didn't as i have only seen few x-men and dp+w, so i apologise if it's not good!!

BULLETS :

-Once he meets you at first he physically stops. Like, physically, shuts down for a moment.

-Bro was born in 1832, and somehow, this was his first time seeing so much piercings in so many...visible places. He was fine with ears, as long as it wasn't too bad, but more than three? He's gonna shake his head like a dad and shrug it off.

-At first he would probably think you're some emo, hormonal meanie, so when he finally takes a jab at you, he stops dead AGAIN. You? You wearing layer after layer of black n white are more energetic than he thought? What?

-at some point during your years of knowing each other, of course youre gonna be in his contacts. He never saw ':3' before, but..you learn something new every day.

-The first time he sees so many tats on one limb, he doesn't know whether to be amazed or turned on. So he opted for both.

-"Hey, you okay?" He'd smell the freshness of your new tats, and always find a way to let them be a excuse for him to talk to you.

-You look so....different, so mean, yet, you're so nice? He couldn't understand it. He loved being mean to the people that deserved it, why you felt bad and guilty? Over his head. But the pure fact you looked like a meanie, but weren't? God he wanted to destroy you.

FIC; (Kinda? Im so sorry if its bad, not correlating to the above)

"Welcome to Charles Xavier's school for gifted youngsters. I am Charles, by the way." The man in front of you would grin, opening the doors to the busy entrance. Some students were walking, others chatting and others were showing off their mutations.

"This is where you'll be spending, ah, the majority of your time." Charles grinned, snatching a paper plane out of the air. "Easy, Rodger." He smiled at the boy, who flushed red. As quickly as he turned red, he also turned as white as your eye shadow. And blush. And everything else that you had on that was white currently.

He quickly scurried off, whispering to his friends. "They'll get used to you in time. They think you're cool." Charles chuckled. As you made your way through the tour of the school, you eventually landed back to where you had started. "Any questions?" Charles asked innocently.

"I got one. The fuck Casper the ghost doin' here?" A gruff voice perked up, as I looked behind Charles. The man coming down the stairs practically had a halo on him with the way he had descended the staircase, white wife beater stained from God only knows what.

"Logan." Charles warned. "This is Logan, Logan, this is our newest addition." He introduced. "Keep this one away from magneto, all those piercings." He grimaced. "Oh, my god hi! I've seen so much of you! You're so cool my family adores you so much-"

Logan was confused. He didn't know what to be more confused about, the fact you looked so mean but were sweet, or the fact your rambling went on for eighteen minutes. He wasn't mad about it though. If anything it was...pleasant?

After a few days at the mansion, seeing what you could do, you ironically became quick friends with the rugged man. Even people who had never seen him smile were asking you what it was like. The press had deemed you two - 'Bumblebee team.' Mainly due to your black attire, and his majority yellow view.

And also because it sounded like grumble and hee, implying his grumpy nature and your happy outlook. The media seemed to love you more than hate you however, the nickname ghost, and vampire among others being thrown around, alongside your chosen name.

It only took a few months before the man found himself being more attached. Demanding he be with you on missions, protecting you at all cost, it only took so much in him to not flip you under him when he saw how truly tatted up you were, when after a fight majority of your costume had ripped.

He even went to such lengths as waiting for you every morning to walk you to breakfast, lunch, whatever. "Bub can't the makeup wait?'' He'd sigh, before turning around, already knowing he wasn't winning this fight as your music played in the background, drowning out the sound of a shoe hitting him.

Eventually, he got so fed up of waiting at one point, he just leaned over your desk, and wiped your lips with his thumb, before kissing you and walking away, obviously making you follow. "Just a way to make you hurry up." He'd laugh. LIES.

Those kisses eventually led to heated makeouts, and safe to say, you'd be fixing your makeup more than a few times a day.

IM SO SORRY IF ITS BAD LEMME KNOW AND ILL REWRITE <33

[honeydisiacc]

nerd talk: how i did the riso thingy

the riso effect is achieved through riso printing, printing by layer with CMYK. a lovechild of screen printing/photocopying. it starts with the lightest color to darkest, in this case; yellow (Y), magenta (M), cyan (C), and lastly black (K). the same principle even applies to markers and watercolors

somewhat fun fact from what I've learned so far: while CMYK is subtractive, replicating riso digitally works best with ADDITIVE blending modes (darken, multiply, color burn, linear burn, etc)

crazy (i was crazy once—), right :D ? obviously there's no "correct way" to do it, so i suggest experimenting to fit your preferences <3

here's the separate layers. i cheated a little since i wasn't sure what i was doing (or if it would even WORK), the lineart isn't layered but hey ! the coloring sure is 😅😅

here's the colors together without the lineart. riso prints tend to look "misaligned" so i did the same thing (kinda looks like chromatic aberration 😬😬😬 whatever !!!)

psst.... color palette is from this post!

opacity matters as well ! to get the desired color, i had to experiment and constantly adjust the opacity of each layer 💀💀 (i did say "the workflow is deffo slowing me down atm" thats because i intended to make a color chart FIRST AND FOREMOST !!! GRRR)

(an example of a color chart would be like this. i'd like to make one with my chosen color palette but noooo instead I eyeballed everything 💀💀 i was excited. sue me)

anyways ! sorry not sorry for infodumping. and im not an expert. however, riso is one of my recent favorite things to learn about. its a lengthy process to do it with illustrations imo. for my graphic design projects however? i might use this technique :D

[thisisdefinetlyaname]

I have a lot of head cannons for Rouxls but the one that I would defend in court would have to be glowy Roulxs (the idea the Rouxls has some sort of bioluminescent AKA he glows)

Because I think there’s some genuine evidence that could point to it (and it’s a fun idea)

Look at him

No really look at him more specifically his colour pallet he’s only 2 colours, blue and white the white also being his outline

When we look at the other characters none of them have white outlines or outlines lighter then the color they are outlining except for darker areas that need lighter outlines so they don’t dissaper completely against a black background (mostly on Ralsei)

This style of having a lighter color outline a darker color is used in other parts of the game though the best example I can find is this

A glowing neon sign

Another odd thing out his outline is the fact there kinda a double outline on some parts of him

Like here for instance, he has his regular white outline and then an extra layer of the blue slapped on the outside of it, from a doyalist perspective this is probably to make sure he doesn’t look weird on a white background but from a watsonian perspective

the pattern of a white line surrounded by a darker color reminds me of something glowing like in this image I found on google that conveniently mimicked Rouxls colours

And that’s just everything about his sprite!

The sparkles that appear around him in his shop sprite, sparkles that would be used to represent something shining or stunning

taken on its own this could just be Rouxls charm sparkles can be used on non glowing characters all the time but combined will all the other evidence I don’t think it can be ignored

Also the fact all his powers so far involve glowing beams of light and other glowy magic

THE GAG ABOUT HIM BEING A LAMP

THE EVIDENCE IS TOO GREAT TO BE IGNORED

Now Im not that attached to it being cannon I honestly feel like it could be proven or disproven in the future

The way the game handles lighting makes it difficult to prove this either way but I think it’s a fun theory and something I’m surprised no one else has talked about

If you have anything to add or any counter arguments feel free to mention it!

[d8tl55c]

y ' a l l . it took me multiple weeks to start working on a pony town skin <- real <- i made SIXTEEN other ones before the one i wanted

so now you're gonna look at them :D

behold! i bring you: disheveled TCO & rehabilitated TCO

it was a long journey to get here and every freaking detail has some personal lore about it- so if you want to see some progress shots ive chronicled them below X3

ok so 💕✨\o_🎉

the original plan was to: 0. go for a cho post-Showdown and pre-Box 1. use my existing spacescug colors (so i wouldn't get overwhelmed and stop) to create interesting gradients with the black, 2. dress them in.......... WHATEVER seemed cool at the time, and 3. have fun.

SO! i did. ~

(fun facts: the spacescug is one of the 16 skins i crafted while anxiety-ing over ava/m (sometimes ill use it to SNEAK AROUND and admire people (pls say hi lol <3 )))

features. i went with the fluffiest hair i could find, a starry mask for privacy, a comfy sweater, and my two pride and joys: firetail and transparency-skirt.

see look look it's supposed to be showing the legs on the other side of the fabric :D :D :D !!! and, if you look close, it's discreetly distracting from the big shackle i added to the left hind leg. (if you look REALLY close, you'll see i drew some grass in the "hole" of the head. this is why im so excited about this i went ALL IN ;v;;;;) (transparency-skirt ruled as a concept, but in the end it didn't make it any further through my TCOs)

okay so then i spot this character.

i instantly fell in love with the way they did their head (never before seen by me), and was inspired to refine my own work a little,,, so i would fit in more with them when we hung out.

i tore the sleeves off of the cozy sweater, added a Rocket-Brand™-lookin collar, and retired transparency-skirt.

i enjoyed this version so much i didn't change it until fall rolled around....

in which, while re-doing my whole catalog of fav skins to match the new ground color, i changed like 7 entire pixels of the design which i am not going to waste your scroll bar with. <3

now it's getting real.

one day, i needed a break from a thing and decided to dev some more accessories. i had an idea to strap down the wings with one of the feather outline colors and a Waist item, and that quickly spiraled into changing several many, many, more things.

speed round! extra features include:

firetail upgrade! ++shiny

+detail on right hind leg: scars? a tracking device maybe?

aforementioned wing restraint

right cozy sleeve ripped further to install the

Rocket™ wristband: that can't be good

hair accents match accessories and each other better

Back Mane changed for ++disheveled points

Ear accessory added for ++disheveled points

Ear type changed for more fluff back there

and as you can see i bit the bullet and tried to make an homage to my new friend's head style, and i found that these closed eyes (left) look like frowny cho-eyes. :3

AND THAT WAS AWESOME. i felt great. stylish, even. i sat there with an extra 10% deduction to needless social anxiety in my new threads.

and i thought, huh. i've made this little guy suffer, mentally and physically, for fifteen outfits now. what changes if they escape The Situation? and heal?

i pondered this for a while, but i didn't get the boost to act on it until i met this MVP.

they taught everyone on that day cool and funny pony-making tricks! and they're sweet.

from them i was inspired yet again ☝

and this time, i mixed in EVERYTHING. slowly untying the ropes, healing the scars, repairing the hair. the glasses trick that TDL taught me to get the more expressive eyes. the colors and patterning i learned from making a troodon skin (another of the 16) to re-dye the hair and add a new layer of striped pattern to the clothes. yellow with the red so it nods to TDL AND represents more fire. thE SLEEVES ripped ALL THE WAY OFF!!! YEAAAH SHUCK THAT ANGST I MADE THE MARKS BASED ON HOW YOUR CURSOR INVERTS IN WORD

WHAT IF INSTEAD OF RETURNING TO GREYS THEY START DRESSING IN LITTLE EXPLOSIONS OF COLOR •-|,=-||-•|-',=•-|"/, |'['-•-|_|<,['- [,-|'"/,/_',= '////////

and

that's it.

except for ofcourse the :V s :3333333

SO THAT'S THE STORY OF THIS

WOW, haha, thank you for coming on this journey with me. if you know more about pony town than me i am so taking suggestions- i am still learning and having a great time doing it!

TOODLES 💕

[ganondoodle]

i know i said i wouldnt be ranting about totk anymore, but i realized i didnt really count the sage dungeons as story (dont ask me why) so i thought im gonna write a better summarized version of my opinion about totk (i have around 60% of the game, all lightroots, not yet all shrines (missing like .. 20 or so, know the reward), not all krogs (dont know the reward), not all mayoi (half know the reward?) )

(in no particular order)

good stuff (in my opinion)

the. MUSIC! god the music is good, it was good in botw too but now with much more different bosses it really is probably one of my fav soundtracks of all time (most fav are all three phases of the end fight, the pre-fight to that, the build up one before all of those, Frosgeira (wind tempel boss) the glorious mASTER KOGA and more tbh)

the build up and end boss fight(s) are fantastic, i dont think im ever not gonna have my heart racing when approaching it (despite now skipping almost the entire way bc i set a teleport thing right before it) just bc the build up is so well made and the music(again) is such a banger and the fight(s) itself is so fun too, tbh i keep wanting to play it just bc its so fun

i LOVE how many themes play into the music (endfight alone had so many layers, fav probably is ganondorfs classic theme and calamity ganons both in the same piece among much more, and daruks theme in the fire temple)

(edit) YOU. CAN. TOUCH. DA. DRAGONS!!!!

ganondorf

ganondorfs design (x3)

ganondorfs weapon designs

ganondorfs voice (japanese)

everyone elses voice (japanese)

all voices (german)

thE YIGA!!! i love everythign about them and am so happy they got to be more than just some mini mission

(edit) also the fact that they get zonau tech to work without any special ghost powers is so ????

(edit) koga can summon and use zonau tech unlimited?? hes so cool

NO stealth mission!! (as far as im aware)

bosses are very different from each other

main dungeons are not too short and not too long and mostly fun (mostly bc i personally didnt like the gerudo one), i love that you can still somewhat cheese them and do them your way

sages felt like they got a bit more involved

(edit) you gotta do more stuff before getting to the actual dungeons and i really like that, feels less like a fetch quest but that you are actually helping

(edit) each sage is actually there in the dungeon and is required for it, which is great!

each settlement saw a much bigger danger/change (tho that has more impact if you have played botw) and its problems felt much more real

shrines are well varied tho i think overall a little easy (only got stuck on two so far and later solved them easily bc when i first started them i was tired and exhausted, no brain left lol)

NPCs felt less flat + more bigger sidequests that felt like they had more impact

cool new monsters + designs

the underground was pretty appropiately creepy

the sages abilities are neat

you can refight bosses!!

stable points system is a neat way to encourage you using them

weapon fusing is neat

(edit) the forest of the krogs being corrupted like that is both creepy and a neat nod to oot

(edit) the vai gerudo outfit being gone!! (one) evil has been defeated

(edit) the health bar going so far off the middle in ganondorfs second phase is honestly just funny hnjdfdjk unfortunate that you only need the master sword and with a few perfect dodges his health melts like butter in the summer

(edit) the music when dragondorf transforms sounds so sad .. its probably meant as a oh no world is actually ending sad but i like to think of it as a oh god what did he do to himself sad

the scene where rauru seals ganondorf kinda fruity

(graphic, animations and the overall world is still fantastic)

bad stuff (in my opinion)

everything zonau they feel forced into every bit of the world and its history (i know them being somewhat alien is intentional but not like that) it feels crammed into places they werent before and shouldnt be and it makes it all feel very artificial

the glyphs/dragon tears/memories really ruined alot for me, while it gave you insight as to what happened, it felt like it showed you too much and too little at the same time and i think it would have worked better if it was all in text for once if even at all, so the past stil stayed a mystery and youd be left wondering

timetravel .. really wasnt necessary and felt more like an excuse to get rid of zelda + make her the poor little sacrificial girl again + and to make her turning into a dragon as tragic as possible, like nothing but a stepping stone to the big reveal tm

shiekah tech being not just fully irrelevant but practically erased, wiped off the world (i know about the literally last guardian parts in hateno, it feels more like an oversight tbh, purah technically using it ... tho i dont think she ever calls it that, the purah pad is jsut the sheikah stone but worse), there being no good explanation, no remains, nothing as to why it would suddendly stop working and why even the titans and ESPEICALLY the shrine of life would be destroyed, if anything why wouldnt you enshrine it as a memento to history it was such a focus in botw and so well integrated into the world that it being fully gone, not even old overgrown, or visibly reused to build homes etc., or remains of how they built the og shrines in the underground feels like a HUGE missed opportunity (seriously it would have been so easy to make the ancient shiekah base their tech on old zonau tech, without stealign the gocus but buildign a connection)

all of the continuity problems, totk feels like botw didnt happen and the excuse of 'they didnt want to confuse new players' doesnt make a lick of sense in my eyes bc; its supposed to be a sequel, if you want it to be a standalone game then dont call it a sequel- if you start to play a game with the sequel instead of the first part its your own damn fault if you get confused; if anything, it would have been a good opportuntiy to make people interested in botw so theyd buy and play that one too

ganondorfs character is very flat, you basically get to know nothing about him (yuno even calls that out midgame but its never elaborated upon nhgfrdfhkk)

the zonau and their kingdom of hyrule is presented as this so perfectly good thing to such a degree it turns creepy, the end cutscene with mineru going poof was kinda uncomfy to watch tbh

the reward for all shrines being essentially a reveal as to who the hero in the tapestry was and it being, of course, some weird half zonau is the lamest answer to a mystery i didnt want an anwser too, it doesnt feel like it came naturally either (again my point of the zonau being forced into everything)

the shrines (zonau) feel so much more unnatural than the shiekah shrines, alien in a bad way and not in a good way + really are like a bad reskin of them, their sudden appearance and use is so much less logical

back in botw i was doubtful of if the shiekah tech wasnt going to far too modern tech and cause it all to feel like a bad mix of modern tech and medival fantasy, but they balanced it perfectly (tho the eponator zero was very much the limit imo) but the zonau tech .... oversteps that line i think, it really does feel, more than anything else, that it was just bc they wanted the stuff to be in there bc it might be fun to play around with, im not against that kind of stuff mind you im all for fun, but it feels a little like they thought of a box with endless stuff to play with first and a zelda game second (if you get what i mean)

quite a few quests or things in the game seem like they are more and then end in a dead end (the worst of all is impa saying she wants to go research what could help zelda turn back, and i was excited and convinced that shed give me a quest to find some mcguffin that would do that after i beat ganon but there wasnt anything you could actually do; less bad one but disappointing nonetheless the dongos were mentioned and treated like this big awesome thing from alot of NPCs all around the map and then when you find them they are bascially just gem vending maschines)

the way zelda turns back and link gets his arm back is incredibly unsatisfying, none of them even have something like a scar, or mark from it all, zelda spent thousands of years as a dragon (a transformation that was said to cost your soul but i guess that wasnt true) and link had his arm bascially eaten by miasma and he gets it back like it was never lost, zelda returns all intact as if nothing happened, getting blasted by some magic tm by two ghosts that were supposed to be long gone is the solution to all problems!!

(edit) link losing an arm wouldnt just be super intersting but also lend itself well to lead up into the next game where his prothesis is the focus and source of abilities

(edit) zelda got done so dirty, instead of her actual interests and character to shine she just gets shoved into yet another crisis surrounded by strangers in a world that looks like hers but isnt, and all she does is beg the ancient sages to swear to help link and sacrifice herself again (can you call that fridging? bc she sure feels like she got fridged) i like zelda and i dont like how much i didnt care about her and tbh im angry at the game for that

(edit) both link and zelda not even slightly changing in the years btween botw and totk kinda boring, like a haircut can only do so much

(edit) sonia really is the wife that dies to make husband sad thing isnt she? i get that gan had to get his hands on an enigma stone but i feel like there had been better ways to do that, the fact that she dies that easily is almost funny honestly, why does ganondorf even have weapons when he can just one punch people to death (tho i find it funny to imagine he can literally just kill people in one punch but hes too prideful to do it most of the time so he always uses weapons to look more cool)

(edit) so many new characters that you barely get to see or interact with, i really ... couldnt get myself to care much

(edit) zonau tech being so irrelevant to the games story while its also the focus is .. weird, its really just play doh for the players and nothing else honestly

(edit) monsters mining sonanium feels strange bc ... they dont do anything with it? the best thing i can think of is that they were told to do that so link cant .. upgrade his battery thignies? but then again you could just destroy the mines and remaining constructs to stop it .... also you really dont need anything zonau tech related to beat gan?

(edit) ganondorf beign so utterly uninterested in their tech is weird considering how he dealt with shiekah tech (and we KNOW it can get corrupted) he should be a tech nerd tbh

my twitch VoD of the first time beating the game getting muted at the credits despite me talking over it

nitpicks (in my opninion)

(edit) ganondorf should have a bit more of a boar inspired design, as treat, i think

(edit) the enigma stone wandering back to ganondorfs forehead even after transforming is? weird? i guess an excuse for da epic last stabby but still? (how cool would it have been to have to plunge into his mouth and break it there or something)

(edit) the underground gets a lil old after a while, the fact that its pretty much the same everywhere aside from some .. very strange flowing magma is a lil boring

(edit) ganondorf could have gone way more crazy with abilities and all that, imagine hed spwan multiple miasma arms on himself when you get him to a certain level of health

(edit) i miss unique weapons, there arent even normal axes around anymore, everything is about fusing really, i miss the cool shiekah tech weapons

(edit) the forest of the krogs being largely irrelevant is kinda weird

(edit) mineru being the sage of spirit still is kinda meh, the robot is neat but i thought tauro or purah would be the surprise sage tbh

(edit) the bosses were a little easy (i did boldo gohma rather early and did it without even getting hit)

you cant talk to koga normally :(

you cant find koga again after the last fight :(

you cant refight him (to my knowledge) :(

i find it very strange that yuno seemingly lost daruk shield, despite him having inhereted it in botw

the sage powers are not .. very great integrated, while its fun to haven them run around and help you fight, to actually use their powers you have to chase after them, something that in the heat of a battle is very annoying to do, constantly activating the wrong on or them losing their charge up when they get knocked over is like trying to herd a wild pack of geese while a three headed dragon is shotting laserbeams at you

some widlife just disappearing all of the sudden is very strange (like the rhino in hebra)

some new houses or settlements would have been cool, that the material things at the sides of roads are really only for you to play around with and not to build anything that lasts

you cant fight ganondorf (non dragon, even the dragon is locked to that evening sky) in the sunlight, night or rain, i would have loved to fight him at various times of day

their refusal to show any kind of blood is honestly turnign serious scenes into very awkward ones, sonia just getting punched and she dies with not even like, losing some spit from the force or something, or the fact when you defeat ganondorfs second phase he acts mortally wounded but doesnt even look scratched is just :/

amiibo stuff while neat being included its really mostly just bloating your inventory, if i wanted 5 vaguely different link outfits then i would have gotten the amiibo for it

why hide the -now-totally-not-phantom-ganon-armor- behind such a long questline and then .. have that NOT be upgradable

they put in a house building thingy and then not let you have a roof or a tree or something :(

at some point stable points jsut get you more and more of those free staying over night tickets that i maybe used .. once at the very start and now its just accumulating in my inventory

only one new horse coat pattern :(

satori now only being a thingy that shows you caves is kinda boring, i loved the mystery around it in botw (additionally, that it shows you caves you have completed already kinda sucks)

the end of the shrines isnt that cool anymore, speaking to a mummified monk that gives you essentially his last remains of life energy is so much cooler than a statue of the oh so awesome god king and his wife

the many references and reuse of old names is neat but together with timetravel etc. it easily leads to confusing and fighting among fans for who is more 'right' and its just .. tiring

(edit) considering how much of the advertising was about the sky islands i wished there were more and bigger ones, the underground (that was a little one sided after a while, it all looking the same rly) could have been alot smaller if the sky was bigger instead

(edit) i wished there was more of a sense of .. lost life in the ruins you find, from all races, the ancient ruins are jsut some bridged and ceremonial stuff and i wished there were more like .. houses, like people actually lived there and it not being all around beign a platform for you

(edit) the fact that the half zonau hero exists mean either rauru and sonia had kids but those were clearly not important enough to ever show nor mention, or there were other mixing of them before they all mysteriously died out the fact that the ancient hero was half zonau means their genes survided till then but somehow it never came up? the tapestry still exists and impa and purah say like its a well known fact that the hero looked like that (not at all close to any modern species) when you talk to them while wearing it (the fact that the hero armor thingy is very reminiscemt of ganondorf is like some backtreading bc we were theorizing about the hero having been ganondorf once and they wanted to stop that .. but the more funny thing is the HC of its a descdendet of rauru and ganondorf nhjdfknhdgkfnhkfd) (edit to add to the HC; the game being a big battle about child support is funnier than it should be idk if nintendo knew what they were doing adding details like that)

all in all it just feels like missed opportunities, lost potential, and more a game build around some game mechanics they really wanted to get into than telling a neat story, espeically so bc they called it a sequel, most of my complaints wouldnt be there if it was some alternate thing instead

i probably forgot stuff but if i think of more i will add them later with a little note that it was added in an edit (sidenote, i find it funny how much more nuance that whole conflict would get if rauru and ganondorf were bitter exes bfdrjfbdfndk)

[neonfretra]

making hockey edits as a total newbie

having completed my first poetry edit its both easier and harder than i thought! which is pretty exciting considering the fact i have a poem in the back pocket that reminded me of the sharks. its WAY longer and i probably dont REALLY want to actualize it. but. fun process! talking about my process below the cut :)

concept

the inspiration was wanting to make a pickles edit and his number is 44 (and there are SO many sharks players that couldnt take 44 because of him. i mean it so seriously i hope they retire his number solely to inconvenience everyone for the rest of this franchises lifespan)

i dont think hes super widely known because:

the sharks are bad

marc edouard vlasic is bad

so i doubt the narrative of the edit makes much sense LOL

long story short, he used to be REALLY good. never got acknowledged for it in the broader scope. fell off with age . makes him super unpopular because hes signed 8x7m (shout out to past gm doug wilson) and hes bad. hes played with the sharks for the second most amount of games (second to patrick marleau who is like. THE shark of all time. hes so shark they call him mr shark. so if you grade on a curve...?) .

i love our shriveled husk!

the first image (the title card) came way before everything else actually, sort of my proof of concept and proof that i could actually make anything its very young pickles! that image is like. 7 years old

collecting images

all images (not including text overlays) were pulled directly from getty images

i got around the watermark kind of stupidly! most of the time, you can get around it by just pulling it from newsites that did pay for the rights to the image (reverse image search is a pal) or by checking social medias for reposts by the photographer or team (harder for me because i dont use any social media, use instagram only when necessary because it CRUNCHES)

i used mspaint.

it shows.

(brian babineau)

yeah it was by literally pasting the thumbnail (upsized by about 334% i believe?) on top of the image which is why its such a mess of pixels . the nice thing about the human eye is that it kind of smooths over the image if you dont look too closely . other times the texture of the image is so crunchy already that it doesnt actually make a difference.

(i DID edit the right image i just. cant see it?????)

(left: kavin mistry, rightt: noah graham)

for simpler shapes i did try to use an airbrush to fix it but its not super noticeable so.

the important thing was not using photos where theres a watermark over the main focus because im not making it look good enough to pass .

are there easier ways? oh god yeah. for sure. am i using them? well if you scroll back up

human centipeding images together

hardest part was the photos that mashed images together:

(man just check the original post for credits)

these were NIGHTMARES (now text free!) i have all the things i edited as separate layers if anyone ever wants quinn hughes disembodied hand or two pickles

making image two

the concept of this one was the second, but i had the final image ready to go second and finished it last. i finished this one second after fighting for my life to compile the images for it

the ideas straightforward enough: pickles on ice with the puck, other prominent defensemen going through the motions of a shot edited in. this is when pickles is like. capital g Good

compiling the pictures were easy enough? the hardest one was actually finding one of pickles HAHAHAHA

fun fact is that i chose a bunch of right shooters by coincidence. actually a miracle that i didnt notice until comparing pickles to them in editing. which i did extremely haphazardly (seriously i was guessing when resizing them

i did all this in an art program that didnt have the ability to select the subject so i hand erased the background. i keep mentioning it but if i had to work around erik karlssons hair i get to complain about it.

first time using the soft eraser if that means anything. the green background was to help me tell what i had and hadnt erased yet

this one took me the longest by far and had me questioning the decisions that lead up to this point the most.

making image three

PAINFUL. there are five different peoples hands on this thing and i spent most of it trying to choose hands that were interesting poses+decorations and in different places. didnt bother removing the watermark on any of the hands because why do i want to make more work for myself. erik karlssons second hand did not make the cut (watermarked)

the nice thing IS that there is a sort of photoshoot they have with consistent angles and lighting. i proceeded to spend way too much time aligning five different photos on top of this to make sure the hands are in the right place and about the right size.

an interesting bit of the editing is that the colors on the trophy photo were actually an afterthought! because it looks kind of nothing.

it looks nice next to the second image because of the cymk coloring but the problem was that the first three images had colorful elements to them and the fourth is just text on the image

adding text

alt title: OH GOD IMAGE FOUR IS SO NOTHING.

image 3 uses my favorite quote about pickles believe it or not ^_^

If you are new to hockey or are newer to the San Jose Sharks fanbase, you will see the withered shell Vlasic is of his former self and think that any conversation about immortalization in Toronto is beyond the bounds of possibility.

insane someone wrote this about another person. quite chuffed that you can read that phrase in the final image!

image four babe im so sorry you are so underbaked. the article on THAT one is literally just about the 1000th game celebration. but also its hella ironic

“I’m still the same guy I was when I came in, just 14 years older,” Vlasic said. “Plays the same way, does the same things, plays against the same players. Just 14 years older.”

whole lotta people want this man GONE because hes flopping so hard. everyone and they momma taking bets on when hes getting bought out. its BAD LMAO i hope they sign him another 8 years

in reflection

edits are way easier than i thought they were to make with zero knowledge of the medium! i had no idea what i was doing but i made something i feel extremely proud of, take a shot at it sometime ^_^

something i kind of struggled with was making something that felt interesting and unique but unified as a whole piece? i dont approach things with a visual "theming" in mind and i more or less tripped up on the colors LOL

give it a shot! a spin, even! oickles.

[lukesaprince]

Honestly i could write a lot more but it would probably become unbearable haha

“Then I want to strip you naked and watch you bounce on my cock. Forwards… backwards.” (I fucking love it when you use italics)

You nodded eagerly, loving the sound of all of it. “Uhuh. All of it…” you inhaled a sharp breath, loving the feeling of his hands moving to knead at your inner thighs, “There is one thing though. Something I want.”(inlove when they tell each other the things they want before doing it)

Then he did something unexpected. With a shit-eating grin on his face he pulled up the chair he kicked away earlier and sat on it, shuffling close to the table like he was getting ready to eat a three-course meal. You were going to make fun of him for it, but you didn’t really get a chance when he slung your legs over his shoulder and nuzzled his nose right into the crotch of your underwear. (Speechless.id love to see more banter between them)

“Hey. Look at me.” He nudged, not happy with your lack of response.(okay daddy! Although maybe they dobt have a dom sub daddy dynamic maybe once she lets it slip and they play it out for once to experiment and jtd be hot as an experiment cuz shes calling smn younger than her daddy yk?)-(obviosly im not trying to tell you how to write your story clearly i love it just the way you’re writing it its just that im getting carried away haha its too good so im sorry for that!)

“Y/n, I’d worship you and this pretty pussy”-(oh yeah.i like the concept of respecting and worshipping going on in this story.it is what is drawing me to the story most.)

“Oh, you’re such a good little slut letting me spank you like this. Right over your little clit too, hm? Who knew such a pretty girl would like such dirty things.”(sorry he has the best of the best dirty talk game)

This chemistry with you… it was otherworldly. Supernatural almost. A compelling pull like his cells were trying to fuse with yours. (Insane writing babe you’re on a roll)

Harry didn’t quite realise when you said you liked dirty talk that you liked it both ways, but he rather enjoyed the filth spilling from your mouth. He found it cute that you could barely string words together when he was pleasuring you, but like this? It was the biggest fucking turn-on.(two sided dirty talk is thee best)

Sorry some of the details in the smut i just want to point that had me fainting but its going to get too awkward for me and you that way honestly ik you will think im exaggerating but this is some of the best smut (top 3 id say )ive ever read in both the fanfic and romance book world and trust me ive read a lot of that.

“Say it, baby. Tell me how I’m doing, hm?”(oh the guts on this man to be this hot)

You were slightly shaky in his arms, sensitive as he placed you gently on the floor in front of his bed. He broke the kiss to look at you for a moment, panting heavily while brushing his nose against yours. There was something about the look in his eyes that had you crumbling inside. They were soft and almost loving; so full of yearning and desire that you were almost scared to look back. It was overwhelming.(this bit made me cry. We all deserve dirty gentle loving looks and want and longing and romance and sex)

Honestly i could comment on every single sentence of this piece of smut cuz it has so many layers to it but ill spare you haha

“You’re a vision.”

“So are you.” (We all deserve love and romance that loves us back as much if not more)

Because it wasn’t just the pleasure. It was the chemistry. The eye contact. The fact you two had a laugh about him thrusting against your ass cheek instead of inside of you because his table couldn’t handle the pressure. The way you could have that laugh just minutes ago and be back to this. The firey eye contact and his trembling thighs underneath your palms. (Cant tell you how much i love imperfect sex.and even more to read about it)

Coming down was all open-mouthed kisses and laboured breaths and this distinct feeling that everything had changed. You two could never go back to casual and you most certainly couldn't look at yourself or your husband the same way ever again.(just wow writing.just wow.)

Honestly you not olny outdid yourself but you outdid alot of writing standards with this.like wow.stunning piece.The type of shit id read and swoon over if it was a romance book and harry wasnt even a character in it.

And you wrote such an endearing romance.the respect,the love already blooming,so gentle,so considerate,so much passion.we all deserve it.thank you for this piece.this masterpiece.truly.thank you.

(Pls excuse all my mistakes I was rushing to get my thoughts out as soon as I read a paragraph )

1. I LOVE ITALICS!!! IM AN ITALICS LOVER ILL ALWAYS USE THEM!! I feel like it conveys tone so much better and you can read each paragraph better knowing what's been emphasised.

2. I'll def include some more banter between them because I love them and the way they interact so much!!!

3. (okay daddy! Although maybe they dobt have a dom sub daddy dynamic maybe once she lets it slip and they play it out for once to experiment and jtd be hot as an experiment cuz shes calling smn younger than her daddy yk?) REAL!! He definitely takes a natural dominant position in the dynamic because it's what they both like! I'm sure a daddy kink will come up at some point you know I'm a sucker for it and he for sure will give her a little bit of teasing because he's younger. Like just imagine the dirty talk 🤭

4. you're so right about everyone deserving soft loving looks during sex because I think it's so important! imperfect sex is fun to write too because it does happen and more often than not something will happen. Sex isn't choreographed so I'm so happy you liked those bits of the smut! (and the dirty talk hehe it's my fav to write)

[this is some of the best smut (top 3 id say )ive ever read in both the fanfic and romance book world and trust me ive read a lot of that.

Honestly you not olny outdid yourself but you outdid alot of writing standards with this.like wow.stunning piece.

And you wrote such an endearing romance.the respect,the love already blooming,so gentle,so considerate,so much passion.we all deserve it.] - these comments honestly have me screaming like genuinely thank you so much idk what else to say 😭 I have so much self-doubt when writing it's crazy so hearing such nice compliments and such extensive feedback means the world I'm so appreciative 🙏

thank you so much for reading my work and writing this and I you enjoy what I post next 😭 ❤️

[magic-is-something-we-create]

HI I AM COMING TO BEG U FOR HELP HOW DO YOU MAP OH MASTER OF ART

HELLO HI I AM HERE TO AID U MY BROTHER IN ARMS!!!

this got very long and i tried to cover things that helped me when first getting into hand drawing maps, but if there's any other places where you're struggling let me know!!!! ive got a lot in my brain im just going from broad to narrow here :)

BIG SCALE:

great ways to make continents that look like continents include

- peeling an orange or equivalent citrus messily and laying out the pieces of peel, and copying those shapes pros: realistic coastlines that would fit together like in real life, if you get into the nitty gritty these can also serve as tectonic plate templates. cons: messy. might not have oranges on hand. can be hard to scale up and transfer to digital - getting some paper and pouring a bunch of doodads of some kind on it, then clumping them in vaguely the shapes you want and tracing the coastlines. things i have used in the past include dry macaroni, beans, dice, and paper stars. pros: potentially less messy than oranges, more control over the shapes, scales up easily cons: coastlines will be less realistic tectonically if that's a concern (for both of those i usually then take a picture of what i get and start editing in my drawing program of choice from there)

other strats to try: taking a grungy brush in your drawing program of choice, making it Huge, and scribbling a few clumps, then on another layer going in and tracing around the edges to make the coastlines. using a map from real life and cutting chunks out and rearranging/copying/warping them to make a collage you can trace for coastlines. etc

SLIGHTLY SMALLER SCALE:

country borders were, until quite recently, determined mainly by geographical obstacles like mountain ranges, rivers, canyons, oceans, etc that are very hard to cross. also borders will be highly disputed when it comes to warring states or eras without, like, satellites and bureaucracy and such!! making them fuzzy or jagged or having areas where both colors mix or stretches of land where no one knows where either country ends is in fact very fun and cool and sexy

mountains usually are chains, and so are islands. i like to make big curves across the world map where i think it would be cool to put mountains, and when those curves extend into oceans i like to put island chains on those as well. if you choose to do whole ass tectonics with your orange then do those on plate borders

biomes can get really specific in their placement if you want to be hyper-realistic, or you can put them wherever you like. personally i like a little realism a little "fantasy world can have whatever you want in it". deserts are usually on one side of mountains, and on the other is really lush. the higher the mountains the larger the areas and more extreme the difference between the two. outside of that case, youll usually get forest > grassland > desert in a gradient. also remember there are multiple kinds of everything

HOW TO DRAW THESE THINGS

good ways to draw rivers include: tracing blood vessels from photos where you can see someone's veins through the skin, dead trees or lightning, or cracks in stone. theyre all fractals and how detailed you want to get is up to you. BUT they always flow downhill and eventually meet the ocean (the ultimate downhill), usually starting in the mountains. also those fractals all go kinda reverse of what you might think; the ends feed into the main river, not the other way around. i used to mess that up a lot

PROTIP: canyons and the like are almost always old riverbeds. use the same method as you do making rivers, just widen the brush, maybe draw a border around the shape instead of just a line

mountains: personally i prefer using premade brushes for mountains just because the one (1) time i did them by hand it took me like four hours for one mountain chain. this video has some tips on different mountain styles if any of those look good to you, otherwise there are about a bajillion videos like that out there!!

biomes in general: just a little texture is usually plenty! doing some bushy edges on deciduous forests, pointy bush edges on pine forests, a few little grass lines and sand dunes, etc etc is usually plenty to get the point across :)

SMALLER SCALE

roads are personally the bane of my existence. i try to treat them like rivers just a little straighter, depending on what time period you're emulating you might go curvier. also they dont care about maintaining width or what direction the fractal goes in humans just put those shits wherever they walk a lot. in contrast railroads are usually pretty straight, simply because trains are built different than cars or wagons or people

cities are almost always on a source of freshwater and a valuable resource that draws people for work in the early days. also they'll have like 10-20x the landmass of the city itself in farms around them, less if theyre on the coast and have access to lots of seafood, more if theyre more landlocked. those farms can be farther away if theyre more industrialized and can transport the food en masse easily. you also dont have to draw the farms just kinda mention them in the story if relevant

towns can be on smaller rivers, lakes, or even just by natural springs. you wont find permanent settlements in places where water isnt accessible (unless you have magic to fix that which is always a cool detail)

EVEN SMALLER SCALE

city maps i have 0 advice on other than roads get thinner the fewer people travel on them, industry will be on a very different side of town than the rich people for smell and noise reasons, and especially when emulating pre-car times, think about how far you would feasibly walk in a day. if you want characters to be able to know pretty much the whole city that they live in, it's gotta be reasonable for them to walk to the farthest edge of their knowledge and back home (or to an inn) in a reasonable timeframe, if they have a home. also big cities tend to have colleges, trade schools, and a bajillion and one jobs that need doing. magic cities might need mages to maintain infrastructure, non-magical cities need people who light the streetlamps when it gets dark, waste disposal is Hugely Important, etc etc etc

it can sound boring at first but coming up with the odd maintenance jobs people have to do in cities can be a really fun creative exercise, and it might inform how the city is laid out, too!!

IN CONCLUSION

think of the world in layers. landmasses + oceans -> biomes and geographical landmarks -> countries and borders -> settlements -> districts. i literally have those on different layers in clip studio so i can futz with them more easily.

also realism is not the be-all-end-all of this. there's lots of room for symbolism and environmental storytelling in maps, as ive ranted about in the past, and stuff doesn't have to make absolute sense in the real world to work well for your world. breaking the rules is like, art 201 and it applies to ever part of the art in question <3

i hope this helped!!!! again pls let me know if you have any more questions i love helping out :D

[thebirdarts]

My 2023 Year in Art

Because of my sporadic drawing, I just picked 12 pieces of mine, spread out across this year, that i felt had an impact or shows an one on my overall artistic style, from the first time I've experimented with something, and when i solidified it.

i nerd out over my own drawing under the cut!

In chronological order, starting with my portrait of my first WOTR commander, Alaun.

Original Post!

Not only is this is representation of me getting into WOTR, its one of the first times i did smoother and softer shading, something i haven't really done since. Additional, i can easily see the line between the metals i rendered here and Cecio & Celia's more stylized metallic elements. I miss Alaun, he was ahead of his time as a good kc of mine. its a fairly big full piece, and one I'm still proud and fond of today!

Original Post!

Estinian! god i miss ffxiv... Here is the root of my bright idea to use pencil brushes for colored shading, to get a textured gradient, and i used it in the metallic golds. its also my biggest art post on this blog! it is a big & detailed piece, and seemed daunting at the time, but i just put in the time, and was rewarded for trying to make sense of the armor [i used my own dragoon as a model for how thing actually interacted & what was what] Im still stupidly proud of it. it was my second piece of FFXIV fanart, and the beginning of many more!

MURA! original post

Given this is about drawings that have impacted me, i think this one is an easy contender for the one that's done so the most. Drawing Mura reminded me how much i loved fashion & clothing, and drawing it! I've always has a tremendous amount of fun with her drawings, and it all started here!! Mura also was the first time i repeatedly used a colour pallet for a character, with her pinks and purples now ingrained into my mind!

Original Post

Out of all my drawings, Estinian and Mura are tied for how much ive drawn them, which Estinian has an advantage due to my large bank of FFXIV screenshots & my redraws thereof. This was great fun, not only for understanding the armor better, but having fun experimenting in colour pallets! something i can see has carried on into my non-literaly coloured Celia & Cecio drawings!

Mura<33 original post [has link to its original art]

My first head only drawing in a long time, and somewhere where i experimented with coloring, as well as the introduction of Muras netted and braided hairstyle! in fact, you can see the visible brush strokes as what would eventually be the stylized shading used in my more recent portraits! The shattered stained glass. looks cool as hell. and was my first time majorly experimenting with layer options, something that would become very common for me.

Mura again<3 original post

Look narrowing it down to three was hard, i drew her so much, she really re-inspired me to draw. Lighting<33 you can really see here the style i would use on Cecio, just using a pencil brush rather than a roller one. its a piece Im very proud of, and one day i will light everything as consistently as this

Miss Star-Sailer<33 original

Expanding the working with a limited color pallet from Mura, and once again rendering metals, this piece of my wol has a special place in my heart. just... her<33 She<33 her muted and dark colour pallet, her expression... i love this one<33

GEORGIE!!! original

my baby boy<33 Im finally drawing curls... and the brightly coloured iris & tiny white pupil may have become a thing of mine.

Celia<33 original

the limited colour pallet, the non literal colours, the sketch peeking through, the shading on both clothing and skin, the hair? this is like the payoff to all theses previous drawings. i used a different pencil brush, and goodbye 6b and hellooo procto pencil!!!!

Cecio<3 original

If the previous drawing was the payoff, this is one of the stages of refinement, taking the new stylized skin shading and applying it to a portrait where the face is the focus, and damn!! Cecio<3

original

A compositional outlier, this piece earned its place for me revising what has to be one of the most drawn compositions of mine - the eye. In many ways its the closing loop of a full circle, the brushstrokes exactly how i would shade with my pencil on paper, the lines and movements coming naturally to me, in an entirely different medium. the main difference is colour, while my pencil drawings were firmly grayscale and i resisted all attempts to get me to use colour, this is practically a sunset, using my knowledge of not just colour but layer filters to create bright and overly saturated variations. full circle, just add colour.

Original

And the final piece! a portrait of Cecio, showing off all i have developed, from the metallics, to the stylized shading, colour pallets, the use of filters for alternate versions, the hair, the face, the new brush!!! its not my last drawing of 2023, but its a fitting end.

- end note.

if you will permit me to get sappy, 2023 has been hell of a year, but damn if it hasn't been pointing upwards. in 2023 i came to understand i was disabled, and my whole life changed course. My art became not just a hobby or skill of mine, but will be my main source of income once i graduate. my existing friendships have strengthened, and so have my online ones, ive met so many new and awesome people. seeing everyone's tags, comments and reactions to my art has been amazing, and thank you all for that. i have seen so many amazing artists and writers who inspired me to better myself, and also to focus on what makes me unique.

2023 has been a hell of a year, but thanks in no small part to some of the most amazing people i've had the privilege of knowing, it been a damn good one.

its been tough, coming to realize your physically disabled and having to rewrite your life plan was hard. its been overall up, but there have been some spikes down. im aware, that every year i say i cant get happier, and then i do, i break though another barrier, reach another high.

im not saying that this year, because i know next year will be better, and the year after that, as i have the opportunity to steer my own life, it will improve in ways i cant even think of now.

Thank you, all.

[twobruhsinahottub]

Shout out to my fellow singlets with "innerworlds/headspaces" (quotation marks as im not sure this is the correct term for a singlet to use!).

A long description of my inner world and the way my brain works is found below....

I am a maladaptive daydreamer and autistic and i have a very detailed inner world / worlds / universes that i interact with very often. I call mine my inside brain. I visualize it as a world in the center of my brain (if all brain functions were on the outer shell, this world is inside like a bubble). It is infinite. It has layers and depth and it can be zoomed in and out to different parts of it. It can also be "swiped" to a different world (i have two main ones) as well as there being many alternate versions of each world. They grow and change with me and what i need most at that time. I only interact with one main one these days but i keep the old one there, in ruins, to remind me of where ive been and how that part of me is now gone and i have a new inner world now. I also have the mind palace (inspired by bbc sherlock) which is on the edge of my "brain" and "inside brain" where i store all important things such as memories and facts in filing cabinet rooms, and there i can project the memories onto the "inside brain" to watch them the same way i watch the characters in the inside brain!!!! Its great fun honestly and has pretty much saved my life as it gives me a safe space no matter where i am. All i have to do is dissociate and go in there and im safe from harm :3 it also helps with academics because the mind palace has a black board room and a few visualizing rooms that i can do math on and picture any words ive read in respectively.

Its very hard to explain how i interact with this "inner world" because i am a singlet and its just me (and my characters who are like dolls, i control everything they do and say and how they look and act etc etc) in there. Its not like a hallucination, its entirely in my head and i watch from different angles like from the perspective of a movie camera. And i can still see the world around me when im in there. Id describe it like dreaming while awake but i am in full control, so its a daydream really, but in the same space every time and its a very detailed world.

My inner conscious is also in there. His name is Harri. His appearance and personality is who i want to be and how i want to look and his voice is how i want to sound, but he does have a different life to me such as he is Australian American and is adopted, and he has hEDS, which I do not have (but many of my family members do). Idk if its weird that he has a disability i dont have but he just does, thats not something i chose, he just started appearing with braces and a crutch and i was like oop- okay then 🤣 yeah anyway Harri is a cool dude idk, hes 38 and hes like my best friend. He replaced the guy from my old inner world who was called Bill (he was technically just Bill Weasley but i changed him so much he was really an OC) but then things got bad with Bill and i had to start a nuclear war in that headspace to get rid of everything a start a new world.....my brain is weird.

Anyway I love my brain, I have to be careful to make sure I dont have a repeat of the Bill situation, but I avoid it by using only OCs and changing the story often so i dont get too sucked in to anything specific and start becoming delusional and dysphoric about not being a 50 something year old ginger wizard from Ireland- yeah.....that happened. I also started having memories of things that happened to him (which was not good because he had a very violent life) and becoming triggered when watching HP movies because I would remember being abused by certain characters 😬

Nowadays i know how to control my mind better so it stays safe most of the time! But yes that is my brain and my innerworld lmao, feel free to share your own experiences (both singlets and systems!!)!

Also bonus fact: my innerworld was actually my special interest for about 3 years? It was hard to explain so i said my spin was harry potter but it was actually my inner world that was based off of harry potter lol

[wackpedion]

📚

From this askgame

How many layers do you typically use?: OHHH this is a big question. Well I most often do colorless sketchy doodles, in which its like 1-5 (depending on if i put diff doodles on diff layers or keep them together on one , or if im putting some colored details over the top of them)

For like full rendered pieces its ALOOOOTTT . id guess 10-30, depending on the piece. Its because 1) My shading style involves lots and lots layering over top of eachother, to make some shadows darker than others and other stuff, and 2) I put in like, alotta detail in my fully rendered pieces, whether its like putting lil shines in glasses and metallic details or how I render hair. and I prefer to keep them on separate layers incase I choose to get rid of it, so I dont have to spend time meticulously erasing it amongst everything else. Or if I wanna flick a specific detail off and on to compare and see if the piece looks better or worse with it and what I prefer. Fun fact: my zine piece has 50 layers ! Considering that and its size, it lagged my program a Tad Bit. Worth it tho <3

[reversedumbrella]

hello and happy birthday!! I wanted to thank you for your art, your comics always make me smile anytime I see them and I really love how expressive the faces you draw are! Your demon OC's are also very cool looking... would you like to tell something about them? do you make these for some story or just for fun? 👀

Hope you have a good day.. or night!

thank you!!

my demon oc's are just for fun! they belong to a series of stories "demonicismos" which i don't plan on ever writting. sometimes i don't even remember their stories! i always find myself revising these characters and changing stuff about them and how their world works. i haven't got the opportunity to infodump about these uys in years (actually counting for how long some of them have been around is making me sick)

im going to talk a lot about them. like. A LOT

checking the demonicismos tag on my blog led me to discover i have never really posted much about them, despite the fact that i made charater charts in 2020 or something (unavailable to me atm. most drawings of these characters are away from me rn)

nowadays i don't really care much about them. i've thought about doing a digital card game with them like south park: phone destroyer (yes i used to be into south park. im not ashamed of it. im using this example bc i really liked how a kid could only ever be in the battle field one side at the time. if your opponent played character A and you also had that one, you had to wait until they opponent's died. i also thought about playing around with character dinamics. if a character saw someone they hated join their team, they'd join the enemy team and vice-versa. i got distracted so i never started programming it)

currently im mostly trying to redesign the characters as an exercise for myself. these were the original concepts for egil (pink), marcel (orange/red) and antonio (yellow), versus more recently (i am unhappy in regards to marcel and antonio)

Design Rules

my ideas have changed over time and with them how characters should look. first there weren't any rules, i just drew whatever. then i choose that every demon should have horns and a tail even in human form - it would be a reminder of what they lost. they'd never be human again. then i went back and forth on how much demons could change their shape. it ended with all demons having a human form and a demon form, with some having specific shapeshifting habilities but always with horns and a tail (egil can stretch his limbs but mostly does so in order to be the tallest guy in the room) my last rule, added for this exercise, is that all demons always have their human face. the idea came from that undertale quote - "despite everything its still you" no matter what you do its still you. the good. the bad. you. demons can blame their behaviour on the "corruptive nature of hell" but its them

Basic Lore

i debated myself over wheter or not i'd talk indept about worldbuilding lore, which would triple this post's size. let's go through the basics. people die and become demons in hell. hell is divided into numbered layers and where someone goes after they die is judged according to the motto "nobody deserves to suffer". people that actively stopped others from suffering go to layer 1 and people that found joy in other's suffering go to 9. a demon belongs to a layer but can go to the ones below it, but not above (demons from 5 can go to 6,7,8,9 but not 4,3,2,1). demons are souls, and their physical bodies are made of mud transformed by that soul. i was inspired by some papers i read on witchcraft. demons couldn't manifets physical bodies so they'd trick people with smoke, gases and dust in the air a demon can only have one body at a time. if their arm is cut off 1) they reattach it or 2) a new one grows at the same pace the other turns back into mud. if the entire body is destroyed they reform from the mud in ground demons dont need to eat or sleep but feel hunger and sleepyness. hell is a punishement for their behaviour so layer 1 is ok, layer 9 is... not. money is also a thing. because this is hell

demons have powers based on personality and character flaws

a demon's size is based on their strength - how big their soul is - but their human form is the size of their human alive self. there are 3 ways for a soul to grow. 1) feel strong emotions, then rest and absorve those emotions. its important to rest. 2) cannibalism. eating other demons body part will give that part's strength 3) deals. a demon can share their power. deals are fast but demand consent. cannibalism is slow but nobody can stop it

Finally talking about the Characters

i don't remember very well the first story i made. it was about a boy that had another boy living in his head. and the boy in his head was really angry because he couldn't do anything and when he got extra angry things started to burn and melt around them

miguel (or michael or any other version of this name)... actually i just remembered i wanted to do this guy's story

Egil. his original design was based off angel dust from the hazbin hotel pilot and i don't think he has changed that much.

those blue branches on his head are the guy who killed him. there are ways to permanetly end a demon and after egil did that, the dude fused into his head. the pink arms and legs are rubber gloves/boots. he's a biologist, specialized in genetics. his house/layer is full of vats filled with unnatural stuff growing in there. he doesn't have friends, he's prone to anger and always has to be the smartest person in a room - this goes with his tendency to always be the tallest person in a room. his shapeshifting powers come from his unhappines with himself and inferiority complex. he used to love biology but now tries to gain knowledge just so he can know more than the people around him. he gets angry easily so he's an unpleasant person to be around so he doesn't have any friends so he convinces himself he doesn't need anyone and i hope im making sense here

antonio and marcel. father and son. marcel my baby. you deserve a redesign more than anything

back when the stories where set in an alternative earth with history similar to ours, antonio was an italian american. now i don't know. he went around killing fascists and made immortality magic so strong one of those "get rid of you permanetly" things just sent him to hell and is now lodge in his heart. he can remove the sword and use it as a weapon but his beating human heart is there and removing it will kill him permanently (unless you put the sword through another heart) in hell he had time to think and understood that he was only killing fascists to saciate his bloodthirst on people he deemed deserving of death. the true way of ending fascism is with good infrastructure and school system. killing fascists became an hobby

marcel... my sweet son marcel that deserves better colors. rules don't apply to him he can do whatever he wants and i'd let him. technically a cannibal

quick sketch of the sisters. i don't rememeber their names. i dont even remember if they had names. based on a bird and on a pupper/spider. cannibal vs deals

they're both very manipulative. the bird one, the older sister, always got the upper hand at home so the spider one let out her frustrations by manipulating and controlling people. the bird one can turn people to birds and control them if they hear her play her harp. this counts as cannibalism (slow and no consent needed). the spider one manipulates weaker demons into bellonging to her by deals. in their story they end up fighting each other as they scream their frustrations, coming to the conclusion that everything is their mother's fault (wrong)

barbara and barbara, one is based off a carnivorous plant and the other a bear

i had never thought of them as friends until i started the redesigns but now i kinda like the idea. they're both cannibals with my favourite being the plant one. in this drawing she's missing teeth on those big green jaws. she closes them with some guy inside and digests him

i have so many more characters but i've also been writting this the whole afternoon

[ban-joey]

ok im posting this. uh this is like, a pretty unhinged barely organized essay/stream of consciousness. I compiled a lot of this during a trip to my grandparent’s with a glass of good whiskey and brand new headphones, just after the release of the andor finale. I finished it when the rest of the soundtrack was released. I have a google doc of my notes, where I basically just gave every single track my undivided attention and made various connections here and there. this is specifically about cellos in the soundtrack.

(If you like music theory and loved the Andor soundtrack, I really recommend listening to Kirk Hamilton’s episode about it on his podcast Strong Songs. He also guested in an episode of A More Civilized Age which is a podcast that’s totally taken over my listening time and utterly Star Wars pilled me as soon as it started. Kirk does a really wonderful job taking you through music step-by-step and pulling out specific things you might not notice on your own, and really enjoys doing it. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot listening to him.)

anyway.

STAR WARS: ANDOR and The Cello as a Character Device (and just a good instrument)

I just put my earbuds in. My phone is still on the track “My Name is Kino Loy,” just at the very end, when I turned my car off after getting home and sitting in it for a bit to finish out the song. It’s one of my favorites on the soundtrack, utterly spellbinding from beginning to end. It’s killer. The sheer amount of emotion in it even without the context of the scene it’s in is just phenomenal. 

The entirety of the released Andor score is about 2 hours and 40 minutes of some of the most engaging and interesting soundtrack I’ve had the pleasure of listening to way too often.

Andor (Main Title Theme) - Episode 1. The engine guns, the cellos are flying this ship. Everyone’s talked about how good this theme is. The fact that Britell composed so many versions of it, resulting in a core identifier of the show. A changing introduction every episode, setting the tone of what’s to come.

When I started watching this show, I was pretty instantly blown away by everything, but music is always the thing that reels me in for the long haul. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard cellos as the main focus in a score. I can’t think of a TV show or movie that uses them so prominently. In things that I’ve listened to and watched, cellos are used for solos in moments that are meant to invoke some strong emotion. They’re an instrument you feel in your chest, not meant to be the main feature throughout.

As I watched, I just couldn’t get this out of my head, that Cassian Andor and the cello are entwined in some way. I started to think about how he moves, how he speaks, the pitch of his voice, and then started really paying attention to when the cello shows up. As soon as I started listening to the soundtrack on the regular as it was released, I figured out what was going on.

“Rix Road” is firmly on my list of top tracks. It starts up right after the Time Grappler in the show, blending with the final few blows on that gigantic metal slab. The camera follows Cassian through Ferrix. We get a shot of his back as the cello comes in, and he seamlessly merges into the crowd while the cello is nearly entirely absorbed into the layers of this beautiful piece of music. The cello plays what we will soon recognize as a theme central to the community of Ferrix. 

(if you are my friend and you haven’t watched past the Aldhani arc don’t read the rest of this kthx) 

The musical identity of this place is delivered to us along with these extraordinary sets, costumes, details of a bustling community united in its work and each other. The music ties it all together in such a profound way—this specific melody, a funeral dirge, is played while Cassian walks down Rix Road. Where the Empire hung his father. God damn.

I unpacked my viola after having it stored away for months and learned how to play that solo shortly after hearing it, because how could I not? It’s gorgeous. At the time, I had no idea what it would grow into.

After I watched that scene, I decided the cello is Cassian. Diego Luna’s voice makes it work, frequently hitting that same register. More specifically, though, I noticed cellos really bring out moments of quiet for Cassian, bringing pieces of his internal identity to the fore in really interesting ways. Cellos only get a feature when Cassian is present in a scene.

Like, “The Night Before.” We get this gorgeous cello (I’m so biased, it’s always gorgeous, I love this instrument beyond words), this tremulous, high-pitched back-and-forth across the strings. Cassian sits alone in Maarva and Clem’s old ship, holding his father’s gun and spending the night awake. Waiting it out. Again, we only get the cello when he’s on screen. 

The cellos in the soundtrack are never confined to just one melody, they’re dynamic as all hell. They play counter to each other frequently, as in the theme for the second episode—which, to me, sounds like three or four different melodies struggling to unite in some larger identity, and almost reaching it, but they’re cut off too soon to resolve. Knowing what we do about Cassian, there’s definitely something there. How well does he know himself? How much is he afraid to confront about what makes him who he is, his past, his emotions, his pain, everything unresolved about Kenari? Is having so many separate pieces of self-identity part of what makes him so good at playing a role? It’s just the song having a few different cellos doing different stuff, it’s probably not intentional on the part of the composer, but the point is that it made me think and it’s just the intro music. It’s about 50 seconds long, but it made me think about the character in a new way, and I just think that’s really cool.

My number one track is the one that’s better as it is unmixed in the show. Pilgrim. I have pointed out a bazillion times that this track comes in after the line “If you can’t find it here, it’s not worth finding” because I am insane about this. Instantly, the cello, attacking the strings in a steady, hacking beat, absolutely sawing, taking us into the full orchestra, absorbed as we go. The camera pans down to Ferrix and the drums start in, to find Cassian walking through the scrap yard, fitting in to the world around him as the cello merges into the strings and we get that absolute banger of a drum solo. He walks in time with the beat. The cellos reemerge, soaring high in the theme and shifting even higher in a wail as the screen goes to black. It’s insane. It makes me foam at the mouth. Garage drums in Star Wars. It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.

And again—that idea of Cassian blending into his environment, enhanced by the cello doing the same thing. Love it. 

“Past/Present Suite” is another on the list of all-timers. The ticking clock of the beginning, this slow build. The cellos begin as a quiet drone beneath violins and violas, and then the solos shine through with the main theme and counter-melody. The other strings are there, pushing everything forward, the percussion is there, there’s this driving bass that’s really good, the synth blends everything together in such a fantastic way, but the cellos are the stars of the show in the end. At first, they’re just repeating the same phrase. The brass comes in, taking over for the cellos, and the cellos take back command of the melody, driving forward in what I view as Ferrix’s theme. That funeral dirge.

And then, by the end, this culmination of astonishing emotion. The cello keens above everything else as the strings and brass and percussion fall away, Ferrix dropping away beneath the Fondor, taking an unwilling Cassian away from home. The interplay of his kidnapping from Kenari is striking, and that high tone of the cello is just heartbreaking. How painful must it be, to watch your life repeat itself in this way? The cellos pull that out, giving you an insight into Cassian’s emotional state that is driven and pinpointed by Diego Luna’s performance. 

After the first three episodes, we get way less cello. They’re still present in the intros, but not so much in the rest. Makes sense—the following arcs are less about Cassian as a person and more specifically about the world we’re in and how our cast responds to it, the roles they play, the institutions they serve. Cellos are of course still there, at least whenever the soundtrack falls back into a traditional orchestra. You can’t cut cellos out of that, they’re the best instrument. But, they’re not the main feature for a while.

So, like, obviously as soon as the cellos hit at the end of “My Name is Kino Loy” hand-in-hand with the brass I was knocked off my ass. That one’s on my top whatever list. An incredible blend to finish out (I THOUGHT) an episode that ripped my fucking guts out. And then we descend into the depths of Coruscant. Bye bye cello. Hello oh my god where are we and WHAT is Luthen wearing and oh holy shit

Anyway then the cellos show up again in “Heroes” because, duh, Cassian is back. The cellos are up front here, plus these absolutely bonkers horns and CRAZY triumphant drum hits, and finally it’s the end of the episode and it was a WILD fucking ride and this song does not dim the adrenaline rush that was that entire 40 minutes of top-tier television as we close out episode 10.

Also, worth mentioning, the cellos are barely in the intro for episode 11. It’s very sexy considering the musical end of the episode. When I say sexy I mean it makes me cry a lot. 

And, yeah, that musical end is “Your Mother Is Dead,” which is the entire reason I started typing this out. Nine cellos. NINE CELLOS. The barest hint of other strings behind them, but it’s all cellos. And it’s just Cassian, by the end. All alone. At the water’s edge. White-knuckled grip on his bag. It’s just grief. That’s the entirety of this song. It’s unending, profound, overlapping, waves of grief that just keep crashing down. It’s so painful. You get one look at his face in this scene and it’s so clear what he’s feeling, he can just barely lie, say that everything’s fine, but he chokes on it. (Diego Luna I am shaking your hand)

Episode 12 is all brass. I don’t need to say more about that. Y’all already know. Funnily enough, it’s actually violas that show up when we see Cassian on Ferrix again, which I love. It’s almost like the cellos were fully spent after the last episode, all of that emotion so overwhelming. But “Clem’s Stone” is just as cutting a piece as “Your Mother Is Dead”. On top of the grief, it’s achingly hopeful. It’s on my list as well. It’s only 2 minutes long, and remarkably effective.

The last place we hear the cello is in “Cassian Will Find Us”, for obvious reasons. It feels like a goodbye. I hope we see these characters again, but I don’t know. It’s blending in, not the focus at all, with all these other instruments and melodies that have been featured throughout the show—some of them not for a while! The percussion unique to the Aldhani arc comes back, tying a neat little bow on everything that’s happened to this character this season. Combining it all in droves, in a relatively unassuming piece of music, completing Cassian’s arc in this season, uniting him with everything he’s gone through and learned and lost.

It makes sense that the cello would be the main instrument to follow Cassian through a scene, considering it’s the lead in the main theme, and he’s, y’know, that’s his name. But, I’m so used to Star Wars soundtrack maintaining character themes only, to the point of overuse post-og trilogy. Having a specific instrument for a specific character, an instrument that is in itself so versatile and malleable, just like the character? Fucking rules. Having that instrument specifically single out his identity within and outside of groups of people and planets as well as his deeply internalized struggles and barely outwardly expressed emotion that’s boiling over? I go crazy for Nicholas Britell.

Anyway. I love this show dearly. It’s been really fun to watch and listen to, and I can’t wait to see what kind of musical lines they draw in the second season. I’ve feasted and I’m satisfied with this, but I am so eager for more.

[freshlybakedspiderbread]

I am sending you Aya Shameimaru. she is here in your ask box now. chirping

..no im kidding, i would never want to repel our pure and honest reporter despite her everything

General opinion/How much I care about them: so theres a strong bias due to the fact that my very first exposure to touhou as a whole was hearing pofv's Wind God Girl back in 2009, and by extension Aya herself was the very first character from the series I came to know. I dont think i immediately came to obsess over her or anything and probably only came to like her for real much later... That said i feel like ive known her my whole life and she's top contender for my single Favourite character. It used to be that she only competed with Seiga for that title but i guess there's a lot of characters i could go just as if not more nuts about given the right time of day...

her schtick as an earnest but kinda shady reporter of the ''''truth''' has never gotten old and im pretty sure she's only gotten even more despicable in her methods over the years, but i love all that about her. the tengu has a whole in gensokyo have gotten a whole lot of expansion but i still consider aya to be our main focal point of that group and its always fun to think about how role as an exceptionally long-lived youkai and her perspective on both tengu society and gensokyo as a whole.

Also how lucky was I that i chose Aya, an actual important recurring character who will reliably keep showing up in canon, as one of my favs? I'd be living so differently if i had latched onto like, Medicine or Yuuka instead 😛 (then again i did mention Seiga above and I kinda dont expect her to ever be relevant again so its a matter of context 😝)

A ship I love: There are a bunch of Aya ships I know of and even like, and the ones I most often think about are probably Hatate and Reimu.

But i'm gonna vary it up and talk instead about Aya/Nemuno, something I wish we got even a little more scrap of back in th16. I mean every other player character got some with their matching season character! I choose to believe that even after that one meeting, Aya still makes regular visits to that cave, having designated Nemuno as her go-to yamamba contact despite Nemuno gripping about their supposed non-interference treaty. But Nemuno doesn't mind that much (since she usually doesnt chase Aya away with a cleaver) and comes to begrudgingly kinda like her, which i guess is the reaction to Aya in every ship of hers?

(I also think she's got complicated layered history with megumu which i talked about a little in an older post!)

A non-romantic relationship that I love: actually maybe i should have talked about reimu or hatate above and then saved nemuno for here. i actually want to say ahead of time for this part of the asks that even if i might not immediately default to romantic in a relationship, it uh... wouldnt take a lot for me to see it that way if needed.

That said, i like the thought that both Marisa and Sanae are regularish visitors to whatever hidden tengu infrastructure is in the mountain. Sanae because shes a neighbour with a pass and Marisa because she goes wherever she pleases. Aya being the tengu closest to humans is typically the one tasked to handle their needs or deal with them, with which Sanae she probably gets along with fine, though with Marisa theres probably more hidden ire going on there with how she's typically intruding (the hypocrisy of how aya's always hanging around the human village is always brought up by marisa in response)

The NOTP: gonna say this regarding this part of all these asks, outside of questoinable stuff like incest or so on, there usually aren't ships that i am Against. At worst, i may just not personally see the appeal or much prefer a different dynamic of the relationship.

so um.... ive never really managed to get excited over Aya/Momiji? Like I think they have a very funny potential back-and-forth, but begrudging tolerance is the usual best i see from Momiji's side and i actually much prefer the angles you cold go with Momiji/Hatate. (aya/hatate/momiji love triangle...? 🤔)

My biggest headcanon about them:

she's Old. 👵 Like, thats not just headcanon to me but is actually vital to her character that she is not just long-lived by youkai standards, but shes one of the few tengu around who lived through their developing history, watched their society and gensokyo changed in real time, and adapted in turn with it all. This goes hand in hand with how she simultaneously has great pride as a tengu yet also holds bitterness towards some of the ways they have changed (or havent changed).

Also after messing enough with kappa-made cameras over the decade, she now also fiddles with custom models with her own self-made modifications 📷

An idea for a fanfiction I would like to write/read about them: Talking about ideas is kinda embarrassing for me because i mean... what if i never actually do any of em? 😅 well whatever gonna try not to let that bother me...

for a story about her specifically, there's probably a neat tale to be had like a few decades prior to her being assigned the odd role of 'reporter' and bitterly taking to it, but then gradually coming to make it into her own passion more than any other crow tengu... Imagine the first time she looked at a particularly nice photo she took and imagined the story it told, and her heart fluttering in a way it had never done so before.

Something that makes me thing of them: every journalist archetype in fiction i've seen since and even before 2009 😄 No but if i say i think of her every time i see like, a camera or newspaper, how insane am i going to sound? girls who only thinks about aya going "getting a lot of aya vibes from this"

[youve-doomed-us-all-jerk]

and finished it ,got dat true ending yes def had a great time on the game 8/10 (but yeah performance def docked some points as well as some writing threads that felt kinda dropped, but am trying to in good faith piece it together in me mind so just gonna ramble spoilers under the cut:

when people said this is what they wanted the original DD to be i can see that but like i feel like the lead up to the game kept hearing people who know more about the originals history talk about how "40-60% of the original vision was cut down" from dd1 and i feel like my brain unfortunately interpreted that as "oh cool so were gonna have 100 new vocations like the monk and 100 monsters and the parallel worlds(technically true☝🏽🤓) and the moon stuff, neat" thats on me lmao but yeah removing those expectations and seeing it for what it is, its def the spirit of the the first game but its systems deeper and more fleshed out not good at all the techny terms but im not very into or good at action games but this one made me want to be cuz the combat was fun haha hmm writing wise there was a point where i felt like everything just suddenly got dropped once the godbane stuff started happening and youre suddenly barreling to the ending while everything else just wasnt important anymore lmao, but trying to interpret the story as a story the pathfinder is weaving, i think its meant to feel like that cuz we see the pathfinder essentially write us out of problems, give us a griffin to escape slavery, gives us a clue to where were supposed to go and the big one he like straight up changes ambrosius mind about giving us the godsbane when it wouldnt make sense for him too, the old man by harve even alludes to this by saying the real world is much messier when hes telling you about how fake everything is, like the watcher said everyone there is there to play a part in a tale hes laid out and i think he wanted to get to the ending faster. It's definitely another layer they added from the first games cycle, but do wish if that is what theyre going for(and if im not delusional lmao) that they did more like the ambrosius thing just watching as he ass pulls us out of dead ends making us feel what rothais felt when he realized all his feats and hardships didnt matter, also just would have liked more sidequests with fun characters lmao.

Also did enjoy the endings of the 3 major peoples in the unmoored world and felt like their side quests really fleshed them out and led them there to their endings well,mostly, very cool idea to bring it all together like that. elves wanted to stay isolated but they needed outside influence to break tradition, to save their tree and how it all built to them agreeing to seek refuge with the other races rather than die with their way of life. Ironic that disa was half right about sven needing to inherit the throne but ofc she was also half wrong cuz she a tyrant and wants him to have it mainly cuz of blood, but he deserves it cuz his sidequests were about him getting to know the common folk and becoming self assured lmao battahl tbh full disclosure i messed up the queen nadias sidequest to the rose chateau, tried to scare the dick head shopkeeper into giving me the medicine for the beastren and got arrested so idk how that one ends(will find out in NG+ lmao) but based on the ones i did do, it seems like the nations whole thing was about always being in conflict with each other and how the unmoored quests there are about making people put there differences aside and band together, including the arisen teaming with phaesus. Also like the irony of their view on pawns being right at first but by the end of the game they end up being wrong. but yeah do feel like they didnt get into that more, along with what the lambent flame is? (googled that there was lore texts you can find that explain how an earlier emperor is deceiving the people about it and what it really does) they also dont go into the fact vermund was a nation of beastren, started by a beastren and then history was wiped?? and how theres vermundians fear of beastren and human children always look like beastren and yet wilhelmina is a direct contradiction of this?? that seemed like a really juicy plot point but they didnt really do anything with it. and lastly idek where to start with the pawn and arisen ending, found out theres slight differences in the affinity ending (got the high affinity one cuz reds my my gurl i always revive run straight to her to revive her🤗) but watching them talk about how happy they are to have their own will while saying theyd still do anything for you filled me with something, dont even know what but was crazy.

oh also before i forget another way its in the spirit of the first game for me is just like in the original i also forgot to talk to the person i was romancing and giving them flowers before the endings and got diff people appearing there just like my first playthru of the dd1 lmfao( got manela with grigori and sara in the true ending, was going for ulrika this playthru lmfao) def gonna NG+, maybe do a magic archer and get the stuff i missed and try and get the other endings. Also hoping for another expansion/dlc like they did with dd1 down the line with more vocations and monsters.