#get bent lmao

[nat1nonsense]

And if I said that the most unrealistic thing about Percy and Vex’s scene is that Percy was wearing his glasses the whole time? And if I said that??

I’m right, by the way

[no-where-new-hero]

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

[n1ni]

republicans when they see pronouns in someone’s bio

[bonefall]

OMG intersex Moonpaw with a cleft lip???

I just used it as an example because cleft lips and palates are a really good example of the quirks of bilateral symmetry, BUT I do actually have a cleft lip in BB LMAO

It's Lizardstripe because she got a glow up in BB, is one of the smartest and most competent background characters in the rewrite, and has an expanded friendship with both Bluestar and Yellowfang. I gave her a cleft lip because unironically it is such a cool feature and it deserves a million examples of positivity.

Her son Deerfoot also got it, he also got a glowup as a TigerClan rebel.

I should give it to more cats honestly... and more lip features in general. I love you people whose lips naturally curl above the teeth. I love you people with cleft lips, both severe and minor. I love you people who have had mouth surgery and have visible scars.

[ratatatastic]

youve ever seen an angel walk amongst mortals on this earth

Panthers Championship Parade | 6.30.24

[drtanner]

👀

Gee! If the practical effects folks are unionised and the VFX folks are unionised, where will Disney and Marvel have left to turn to churn out their cheap, soulless garbage? What ever will they do??

[akkivee]

like that was so unnecessary lmao

[milky-rose]

precure Reddit mod go outside challenge (impossible)

[screamingay]

just woke up to my nose being elbowed at the same time that my girlfriend woke up to her elbow stretch being interrupted by a small pointy bit of cartilage lmao

[dykepaldi]

got 12clara on the brain do we all agree the cloisters confession involved them having some sort of time lord psychic exchange

idk if this is something other people have thought about, obviously they said they love each other normal style as well but i feel like there arent gonna be any words that could scratch the surface of the Everything

itd be the most emotionally intense thing either of them had ever experienced like 1000 acid trips at once but all that remains of it in the doctor’s mind is a beautiful song. clara, on the other hand, gets 4.5 billion years worth of suffering beamed into her mind in a matter of seconds and goes absolutely batshit insane (moreso than she already was)

[wirefive]

days without crying over them counter: 0

[crusheswhimsandfancies]

Bra-tastic!

Credit to Ermintrude73 on flickr

[cryptidowl]

Going back through, fiddling with my characters and giving them actually thought out names is fun because now they can have ironic names.

[lokh]

me after falling Once (1): im wearing safety gear for ever and ever.

[themousebehindthecurtain]

now, for some actual drawing rules lol

the mice needed to be pretty simple shapes so i knew i would be able to replicate them over and over. all the mice are going to have the same basic head shape (circle+triangle), eye shape, and tail style with variations in the body shape and hair. bc they don't really have mouths or large eyes most of their emotive energy comes from the tails and eyebrows.

while i reserve the right to change the way i draw the mice at any moment (more on that later) i decided pretty early on that i didn't want to erase the pencil sketches after i inked. i think it gives them a cool "in process vibe" that reminds readers of the fact that they are in a literal created state via spell

i also decided there wouldn't be a lot of redraws allowed. part of the deal with me taking on some of the drawing would be i could tap out and have annie help me at the sketching phase if a pose was coming out a little TOO whack but for the most, first drawing is what sticks.

now that the mice are finally in the comic some keen eyed readers might have noticed there are some differences between the first promotional cover we posted and the first page they appeared in and the first page the mice appear in as characters. that's because (trade secret) they were drawn at least a year apart from one another! all that is to say is that there isn't really a way for the mice to ever get too "off-model" if a part of the experiment of this comic is to watch the way i draw evolve.

for a more detailed breakdown, here are the two pages im talking about below:

a big difference can be seen in how i drew the mice's ears and how the clothes became more complex.

first appearance from the mice in story = all white ears with flat black and white colors

promotional poster = hatching give the ears a slightly more 3D/curved look and the clothes have more going on then just being white or black lol

with this close up on the couch from the promotional poster, you can also see some of the "roger rabbit" production approach we have going on. first, me and annie discuss general composition. then, she paints the background in watercolor. then i draw the mice and we throw them in. this gets more difficult when they actually have to interact with the environment! with the two mice on the couch, i drew the mice and couch all together based on measurements of the couch that annie had already painted so they would approximately align when we had to edit them together. here, you can see i left the pencil lines of my sketched couch in the final scanned mice so you can kind of make out its rough outline:

[cosmiccanid]

I really hope in Volume 10 Team CFVY isn't like Suddenly chill with Emerald. It still drives me nuts how fast everyone just accepted her, and having people who actually have beef with her is waaaaaaay more interesting for a redemption arc.