#humans are my brand and go-to

[i-mybrunettelady]

You guys w/ norn comms are living out my other timeline where I was a norn main. I am now too deeply in human hell to go back and I ain't complaining but also norn are so good. Alas I am now human both in fiction and irl and it's just. Watching from the sidelines and cheering with my own norn ocs that aren't my main

[dont-do-rice-babes]

I know plenty of people have probably said this already, but I am so sick and tired of science being The Smart Thing and art being The Creative Thing

first off, there's a lot of dumb 'smart' people and a lot of uncreative artists

but more importantly, science and math and all that stuff takes an immense amount of creativity that really isn't appreciated enough, and art stuff takes an immense amount of intelligence that really isn't appreciated enough

[seefasters]

my take on the steeplechase trio (and montrose’s mask variants)

[mikuyuuss]

Mitsuri's weirdness is slept on me thinks. It's true that Mitsuri sorta represents normalcy in kny's bleak setting, despite being seen as unusual over something she can't control, but still, she's a weirdo <3 (affectionate) Maybe people forget that Mitsuri is weird because she doesn't have deceased parents (therefore isn't as unhinged as the other characters) and is girly(?) so surely, she must like normal girly things like makeup and shopping. I mean true! I'm sure she enjoys those, but I don’t think those are the only things she would like. (besides food ofc) Mitsuri is depicted as so stereotypically girly that it is unconventional in itself. She made the boys wear LEOTARDS in the hashira training arc. She's weird in a childish whimsey sort of way.

Mitsuri is a fangirl. She gushes over her colleagues at the most inappropriate times, but she compliments the things that are unconventional, like Sanemi's scars, Giyuu being quiet, or Obanai being snakey. (whatever that means)

Ya girl is also so obsessed with cats that her breathing style techniques are named after cats?? Complete with meowing sound effects too. Cat Love shower hello?!??.

Also I feel that aside from normal girly things, Mitsuri would LOVE magical girl things like sailor moon. There's so much magical girl motifs to her. She is like obsessed with cute things that her breathing in itself is super colorful and shiny, with bubbles and glitters. She also does a lot of unnecessary backflips, because she's just that. Extra.

She even has little hearts on her tsuka! Everyone else is regular looking or plain. I think she's the only one with that kind of design on her katana.

And I don't think these are a coincidence. Even in extra materials she literally has a ridiculous yet adorable OC named Big Hand Cat.

Look at her dragon even! Its so silly and whimsy I love it. It's like her cat oc in dragon form, complete with the big anime eyes. Again, Mitsuri would soooo love anime.

She even made a manga where the characters are based on FOOD

In short, Mitsuri is equivalent to THAT weird art kid. She's a weirdo let her be weird. 🩷

[baylardian-1]

thought it'd be fun to revisit my original threshold!janeway design

which played more into the evolved amphibian look, but lost its readability as being "janeway" and is why we ended up elsewhere. but its still a fun idea to mess around with and im feeling creative 2day :)

its funny to look back on my old threshold takes saying like, "wish the hyperevolved humans were more sexy" and like i get it but now the threshold lizards are beloved to me and i love their silly designs and features to this degree where im like you are perfect never change. anyway!!!!! obviously my old original design gave birth to the threshold!janeway we know now but yerrrr. AND I STILL LIKE THE OLD DESIGN not even bashing it ive just been drawing anthro anatomy lately and its got me in a mood lol.

[moeblob]

Shavuli !

She's just. Into rocks. It's fine. She likes to collect shiny rocks. (this is dice related and I am not apologizing for giving her this trait)

[recurring-polynya]

Good morning, happy Thursday, who wants to read a fun idea I had about giants in Soul Society?

So! I was reading this @littleeyesofpallas post about wuxing symbolism and was particularly struck by this passage in a section about the gate guardians:

There is no central guard but conspicuously Kirinji's name comes from Qilin, but apparently according to official height he's actually not nearly as tall as Kubo's drawings always made him seem. Not that he was on the same scale as the gate guardians even then...

No, I said to myself, of course not. He's powerful enough to control his size, because I was thinking of the part where Grand Fisher claims Isshin is too small to defeat him and Isshin responds with a lecture on soul reaper lore:

Now, bodies are not swords, but maybe the same mechanic applies! It certainly applies to Hollows. Earlier in this same scene, Kon mistakes Grand Fisher for a Menos Grande, and Grand Fisher is insulted by the comparison, but it's the same thing. Menos are huge and scary, but when they become Arrancar, they shrink down and become scarier. [Aside: I think this is why the Yammy-is-secretly-Espada-0 reveal doesn't quite manage to hit. It goes against the lore Kubo has been laying down for ages]

On a meta level, this is just a shounen storytelling tactic where X is an indicator of strength, but then later on, it's like "Reverse Uno! Not-X is the real indicator of strength!!" That's exactly how this zanpakutou-size thing is used when it's first introduced.

Exhibit A: Renji, a court jester, being impressed by the size of Ichigo's sword:

Exhibit B: A handful of issues later, Urahara, an intellectual (lol), sets us straight:

Genre convention or not, I think it lends itself some interesting world-building. Among low-powered people, size is impressive, but as you scale the ranks of power, it's kind of pathetic. Weirdly large people are like the petty bourgeoisie of Soul Society power dynamics.

But that's actually the perfect niche for a gatekeeper! In general, your typical Joe Shinigami is going to be able to take on just about any rando from the Rukongai, but maybe not a particularly strong ryouka. Ganju was able to take on Yumichika, after all. A single shinigami wouldn't be able to take on a planned rebellion, like in the Bount arc, and they've got to, like, sleep and stuff. The Gotei could, in theory, have an entire gatehouse and a gate patrol, etc, but that they are perpetually short-staffed as-is. Instead, how about one medium-powerful gatekeeper whose size makes them well-suited for fighting groups of people (or siege weapons), and who is going to be intimidating overall?

Furthermore, it's implied that Jidanbou isn't actually a shinigami. He wears a shihakushou, but his axes don't seem to be a zanpakutou (he doesn't release them and is distressed when they are destroyed). His neighbors offer this comment on him:

It's not quite right, though: after all, many shinigami are from Rukongai, including Gin, who is the reason Jidanbou is being healed at the very moment this panel takes place. I think what this guy means is that Jidanbou is of Rukongai, which is to say not of the Seireitei.

So what is he, then? Here's my big idea: I think that the gigantism in Soul Society might actually be a reiatsu-developmental disability! It's always been my impression that growth, especially for powerful people, happens in fits and spurts, rather than linearly, and that furthermore, big changes in growth tend to coincide with developments in reiryouku. Somewhere, either in childhood or adolescence, someone's spiritual pressure grows more quickly than their control over it, which results in their body growing uncontrollably. They become very powerful "physically", but their strength is all in their mass/reishi, which takes most of their spiritual pressure to control. This may end up limiting the upper end of power they are able to achieve and some cases means they get cut off entirely from the other forms of power used by shinigami (connecting to a zanpakutou, kidou). I think this might be especially common in children from the Rukongai, who lack access to education and training. I can also imagine it leading itself to cautionary tales in the outer Rukon that if you feed your hungry children too much, you'll end up with a giant on your hands.

This offers one explanation to why Jidanbou is a giant and his brother Jiroubou is large, but not remotely on the same scale (the Souls Data Book lists his height at 7'7" vs Jidanbou's 32'5"). There are a handful of other shinigami of larger-than-human height, which could be a milder form of this, or it could mean that some sort of special training or medical intervention helped keep their growth manageable. I think you can squeeze in a lot of interesting character insights into this headcanon, from Hachi (8'5"), who perhaps worked exceptionally hard in an effort to control his power and ended becoming incredibly skilled at kidou as a result (interesting that he, too, is not actually a shinigami). Or Oomaeda (6'11"), who gets by a lot on his family's wealth and clout, but is definitely on the weaker end of the lieutenant power scale. In his case, his large size kind of speaks to his entire "thinks he's classy, but is really just gaudy"/can't-even-tell-how-outclassed-he-is-by-his-peers deal.

Then, as a counterpoint, you've got Hitsugaya: immensely powerful from a young age, and one of the hallmarks of his character is how in-control of himself he is, down to having developed an actual visible power bar for his bankai. Whether this is some effect of his personality, or whether it's an intervention on Hyourinmaru's part, his growth has been choked off as a side effect. He's the direct opposite of Jidanbou, who additionally seems somewhat childlike in personality (crying over his axes, for example, or his attachment to his extremely dubious "rules of the city"). To me, it's very sweet that their friendship might have roots in opposite expressions of the same reiatsu-growth-fuckup.

Much in the way that the Shiba use some sort of magic that's distinctly different from shinigami-kidou, I guess I really like thinking about other ways power might manifest itself in Soul Society outside of the shinigami-industrial-complex. And also the way the Seireitei may or may not try to control those powers."Guard this gate!" they say. "We won't actually let you live in the city or give you city wages, but you can have a cool outfit and, uh...do it for the exposure?"

[sesamenom]

browsing stormlight art on tumblr and ran into a post about how different dalinars life would have been with a somewhat healthier childhood and i think someone tagged it 'kaladin adopts young dalinar au' or something

anyways i propose a Make Everybody Worse au. teenage dalinar and gavilar get dropped directly into formenos and unofficially adopted by feanor a few years before the flight of the noldor. they both participate in the First Kinslaying/Oath/Losgar and then feanor dies. maedhros adopts them and then thangorodrim happens. maglor adopts them for a few years until mae gets rescued. they participate in the first few decades of the wars of beleriand, after which they get dropped back into the middle of alethkar.

on the noldorin side of things, m&m assume the random children they sort-of adopted (300some years before Secondborn were awakened) got killed somewhere in the battle. the kidnap fam situation now has the additional context of m&m having known even more pairs of children who died because of the Oath - one pair killed in the Second Kinslaying, one pair who presumably died in battle because they swore the Oath

on the alethi side of things, dalinar & gavilar are now Oathbound kinslayers who just lost five-to-ten parental figures and all their friends, and spent most of their lives being actively encouraged in war and military strategy. they also skipped the entirety of the navani-related conflict and are probably somewhat closer because of that. violence ensues.

[cranberrymoons]

.

[variousqueerthings]

I think it's also interesting to see how things change depending on the time in which they're being engaged with. so I see things about rose today that point out that she's written to be 19 when she meets the doctor and that's a big age difference (which... I understand the point is it's a big age difference because billie piper was 23 and eccleston was 40, and then dtennant was like 34/35 when he started which isn't so big of a shift but anyway the optics I get what people are getting at, but also I think it does oversimplify a lot of what's actually going on in the written dynamic, anyway-)

and also that the rtd run's Themes start coming together properly around s3 (although they are present from day one), and in some ways at this point, because nu!who has been running for... fuckn. actually quite a few years, which is wild to me as someone who started watching as a kid, and I wonder if classic!who fans felt the same way about their show and anyway -- she shifts from being Literally The First Companion You'd Seen For 17 Years (not counting the movie and fan things and the sketch) Who Was Defining A New Era For A New Generation to... a companion

comparable to other companions, comparable to the rest of the show

we sift through the writing to see what worked and what didn't (in our opinion), and we know how the ten-and-rose storyline Really ends, and how the ten storyline ends (sort, of because now that doctor and donna are Back), and we know what happens afterwards, and we talk about tenrose with a 2020s eye, and rose is "just" one of the people that travels with the doctor, one of several, and notably the one who gets most of the sunshiney doctor that buries a lot of the (wonderfully portrayed) angst of the latter half of the rtd show, and doesn't have as much lore as everything after that, so the story is "just" more simple overall

and to me she's kind of incapable of being just that. doctor who was still a risk that first season, it wasn't a done deal that it would have legs at all, never mind that it would continue for as long as it has. rose was created to be the Face of what nu!who was, moreso than nine/eccleston, because even with the extra angst and the eccleston gravitas, we know the doctor, the doctor is established, it's not actually the doctor that needs to sell what the new show is going to become and what the Feel of that new show is going to be (I mean, partly ofc, but-)

rose was doing so much heavy lifting and she succeeded! she was the face of who before dtennant or any other doctor or companion of his era and subsequent eras. she was created to appeal to a demographic of girls who wanted someone relatable in science fiction, because rtd wanted this to be for the girls, and billie piper came into it off the back of being a popstar and it changed her entire trajectory (for the better I think/hope -- there's a lot of bad shit in billie piper's past and I'm always sending her a fond thought)

nine/ten-and-rose were It! not calling it romantic or platonic or any secret third thing (haunting the narrative), but simply It! that's why it has so much staying power as a ship (which, my opinion on shipping has been somewhat *eh shrug* in later years, but in early-days when that was how you engaged with dynamics that got to you, of course it was going to be massive). it's so hard to properly describe how "for the time in which it was made" that this dynamic was written for, and how successful it was. it was rose that breathed doctor who -- and the doctor's character -- to life, as much as herself

she sets the stage for everything that comes next, both within and without the show proper

and I'm always so pleased that rtd at the time was thinking about what was needed to create this character and he opened with a shot from a girl on the estate with messy hair, clumpy eyeliner, and a minimum wage job, and went "that's the girl who's going to go on the adventure of a lifetime, that's the girl we're seeing the story through and relating to, because that's what girls (and uh... those who were girls at the time - and their parents and the boys) should be seeing."

I know rose isn't the first working class companion including classic!who, but she set the tone for nu!who and her family and background are important to why she is who she is, and is explored

"I've got no A-levels, no job, no future-" said the girl about to see the universe

she was very much for teenagers, and so she reads differently when you're an adult watching it back (much like those "teenager saves the world," novels you loved as a kid), but that's why she's 19 at the beginning. that's why she's billie piper (who does a perfect job). she was there to bring a new generation into this story, and it was perfect. and then she grows up. and we grew up. and she had adventures and it was brilliant and she survived and she made a life for herself. that's her story

[theshadowrealmitself]

Person who gets yarn from different planets and tests them out by knitting animals, so they have a really cool collection, with some of the plushies being impressively knitted alien animals and others being made from highly valuable yarn

But strangely, it seems like the prized one in their collection is a plain earth animal made from the most attainable yarn, cause it’s the one they’re most protective over

Turns out it’s because they once promised their younger sibling they’d knit them that animal, but they didn’t make it till after it was too late, so now they just protectively take it everywhere, not letting anyone else touch it

They know it’s not rational but a part of them feels like they’re just…waiting to give it to their sibling

[solradguy]

come on grandpa its fine. let your inner dadguy out

Maybe I should........

[yournewfriendshouse]

honestly as someone who is really isolated post-covid, I have to reiterate just how much impact kind retail workers have on someone’s life.

like it just fucking…I haven’t been out of the house in weeks, you know??? and today I was met with kindness several times, and it just makes such a difference in a scary world when the contact you have with humainty is workers who get treated so shittily and still have patience for disabled people who take a long time to find their scripts or their card like…it just really has an impact.

please know that 💛💛

[lavenoon]

Can I ask for a preference for the DCA boys? Sun/Moon/ Eclipse. And if there is a specific AU version you fancy?

Oh, sure!

For the preferences I'm uh. Between Sun/Moon I refuse to choose? I see them as a set, Do Not Separate, and it feels unfair to choose between them. I'm very enthusiastic about healthy sleep, and own unholy amounts of glitter glue and other craft supplies, so it really just works out for a match. I love Eclipse too! Though I see him as separate*, not as intrinsically linked into the set, and given that Sun and Moon are the "originals" they win out over Eclipse**!

*Depends on the interpretation, of course, but if left to my own devices

**This, too, depends on the interpretation, as I've been known to simp for the Police Chief and perhaps a teeny tiny bit the Bounty Hunter in @naffeclipse's Syzygy in Dedication/ Sleuth Jesters

In regards to AU preferences that's already one point then, though uh. I've kind of made half a brand out of being entirely insane over also Naff's Cryptid Sightings Sun/Moon/Eclipse - all three just one being in this one, and big dangerous cryptid soft for one human is simply too much of a weakness.

Them being caretakers is always a plus, because I love the trope of caretaker confronted with being taken care of, does not compute (literally, in their case) and also just. Animatronic existence and the conflict it creates (not necessarily fighting, but the surrounding circumstances in the world, misunderstandings, getting to know each other and growing closer while exploring and appreciating differences as well as similarities, and how these intertwine) is my favorite, though as long as it's human and non human interaction I'm going to be fascinated tbh. As a queer neurodiverse person accepting and cherishing differences, and taking the time to truly understand the other is simply my bread and butter

I suppose I should also say I like my own AU boys too? I mean, obviously, I created them! Though honestly, there are so many versions and interpretations of the boys and I'll eat them all up, I'm really bad at choosing, so I suppose the bottom line of all this is...

[fiendishartist2]

art youtubers are either the funniest ppl alive or theyre so horrifically annoying its a wonder they have anyone watching their videos at all. idk if maybe im just too picky about the videos i watch, but i hate those "i learned x skill in JUST 24 HOURS!!!!!!!" videos bc its like. so you tried it for the first time ???? you didnt learn that skill, you made a first attempt at it. i hate it bc it like sets a standard that ppl should be able to master a skill in a day or a week when actually you can keep trying a hobby for years and still learn new shit all the time. ive been sewing since i was like 13 and i STILL learn how to do new techniques and i still fuck up majorly!!!! bc you cant master smth in a few tries. thats not mastering, thats an attempt that looks good to the untrained eye

[moeblob]

What Deacon thinks: what did that mean? did he want me to wear a collar too? why else would he mention my neck? i mean, if he /asked/ me i would wear one but he didn't so would wearing one be weird?

What Ymber meant: It's nice to be near someone who isn't tethered to this world to serve it with a physical reminder for all to see.