#i didnt feel like colouring the line art so some of the detail is lost lmao but i might go back and render this ^-^

[artsy-book]

ok I had a silly idea/nf

so you know how xisuma is green and evil is red

XISUMA BUT TRANS

surprise surprise ^-^ I got carried awayyyy again ^-^

anyway both the trans boys chilling in some skirts ^-^

@transmcytshowdown

vote evil xisuma ^-^

[caeboa]

Notre Dame

So I just want to ramble here a second, sorry it’s not an art post guys, but I am just feeling relieved now that reports are talking about how the stained glass rose windows survived the fire in Notre Dame and am thinking back on some things. Just personal anecdotes about my thoughts on stained glass and my trip there in 2012 under the cut

So obviously the style I draw in is inspired by stained glass and tile mosaics and other abstractions, but for a long time I just called the stained glass style, which I’ve moved away from to use glass mosaic more now. But stained glass has always really interested me. The church I used to go to mass with my family in when I was little wasn’t a fancy cathedral or even anything with Gothic architecture, it was relatively new, white walls, carpeted floors, but it had stained glass windows. They weren’t much to write home about, very simple life-and-times-of-Jesus-Christ panels most of them, but I liked them, loved to sit in a pew near one where the light reflected through in colours on your lap, and there were two slightly different ones too.

There was one larger more elaborate one at the back of Mary in her flowing scarf and robes with a dove poised in the air above her. There were more shapes and lines to this one, and while mostly blue the blues varied. We didnt sit by it much as it was at the very back of the church in the overflow seating. The other I guess was what consistutes as a rose window in a church without the build for one. It was a round window across from the altar on the opposite wall, over the entrance, not the best visibility unless you were looking back at it. It was a lot more abstract, with an ocean, land, and sky and three maybe fish circling. It was more shapes and colours than a depiction, and nothing geometric or fancy, but I really liked that odd window.

Fast forward some years to going on trips with my mom and sister, and visiting more and more museums, historical buildings, old churchs, in different places. I always wanted to snap photos of the architecture and the windows, and they were all different! Sure a lot of them weren’t the best out there but it was neat to see regardless. I’d share some photos but my camera back then was out of focus garbage back them looking back hah. In 2012 we took a trip to Paris. We made sure to do all the stops, the museums, the tower, the arch, and of course Notre Dame. We went midday and all the sculpture on the outsides was lit bright. So many gargoyles, angels and faces. And then of course we went in, and seeing the bright sun filtering through the rose windows was lovely. I took lots of pictures, but none of them look quite the way they do. There was meticulous detail, lots of little lines and colours, figures, geometric patterns. They were worth seeing.

And this was even before my medieval art history class in uni showed me pictures of even more old churches.

Trips have been a great inspiration, the mosaics I saw in floor tiles and even more stained glass in Italy when I went for my class solidified it a few years later.

I don’t really imitate stained glass as a style anymore. I don’t outline my figures the same way, I don’t isolate shapes, rather I work with lines and tangents. However it’s definitely been an inspiration and I’m glad some sublime ones didn’t get lost to an accident in a renovation attempting to restore the building.

Hah I even watched Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame on the 1st this month since @immortanjill tweeted that it was a great thing to do for the ‘Feast of Fools’ and it’s just fresh in there.

I’m mourning the spire and the parts of the building lost, but with all the money pledged to rebuild and art works that have been confirmed saved from it, I’m glad the windows are among those that remain. Ok there’s my rambly piece about an old church hah, sorry.

[elvesofnoldor]

Last year, the uni LGBT+ pride board I’m part of tried to organize a series of screenings that feature LGBT films with poc protagonists, and only 2-3 people showed up to each of them. We advertised the screenings as much as we could, and for as long as I could, but people just didnt come to the screenings, even though all of the films are quite critically acclaimed and reasonably popular. Tonight, I just came back from a screening of “Moonlight” and I was pleasantly surprised that roughly 20 people came to the screening, and quite a few of them are people of colour. Someone (a fellow poc acquaintance) actually told me that there is a international students’ formal tonight and they worried that not a lot of people are going to turn up, so I prepared for the worst. We put up a facebook page for the screening for only two days, literally, and 20 might not sound like much but it was way more than i or any of my board members expected. 

Honestly a major reason behind the good turn out has to do with good timing. “Moonlight” just won the best picture it damn well deserved and a lot of people didn’t hear about it before its oscar win. Now that it did win, people actually wanna watch it, and the local theatre that used to show it only started to show the film again on next Monday. I watched “Moonlight” for the first time right before it was nominated for Oscar, mainly because a Chinese film critic said that watching the film made him feel like watching a Wong Kar Wai picture. At first I thought he was just imagining things, but turns out European and Asian art cinemas did in fact influence Barry Jenkins’s directing, and it’s just not that one critic that see Wong Kar Wai in “Moonlight”. That’s how i got interested, but that’s not exactly why I loved the film so much i’d say it’s my favourite LGBT film thus far. “Moonlight” bears reminiscences of Wong Kar Wai’s pictures, but it’s not a Wong Kar Wai picture and that’s a good thing. 

Watching "Moonlight” with 20 something people in a campus lecture hall tonight was the 2nd time viewing the film for me. Interestingly enough, I reacted to this film similar to who I reacted to Wong Kar Wai’s films that feature Leslie Cheung. The first time I watched them, I usually thought, “it was a good film. I liked it. I think?”. The second time I watched them--that’s the time when all the details came together and the emotions hit me, raw and hard. I couldn’t stop crying the 2nd time I watched “Moonlight”, and it was weird that the movie emotionally impacted me this hard since the subject matter really isn’t something I can relate to as a non black person. Whatever the reasons are, I know that they were different reasons why I cried watching some of the Wong Kar Wai pictures the second time. 

The poetic and lyrical style Wong had does not give moviegoers the kind of instant gratifications they are usually looking for, and I could see a bit of disappointment in some of the audience members because of it (they did smile politely and said they liked the film though). Before I was a film student, I was just a regular moviegoer too, and I looked for that kind of fast food instant gratification as well when I went to watch a movie. So, really, I don’t have some sort of moral high ground when it comes to appreciating art films, in fact, I haven’t watched some French new wave artists’ films till this year. 

The first time I watched “Happy Together”, a pretty iconic gay film (I actually screened the film last year, but really, I should have done that this year because of “Moonlight”), I almost didn’t make it through because how much I hated the dysfunctional and fucked up relationship between Leslie Cheung’s character Ho Po Wing and Tony Leung’s character Lai Yiu Fai. I didn’t really like “Days of Being Wild” because how much I could not get past my dislike for the volatile and self-destructive dandy Leslie Cheung plays in the movie. But the 2nd time I heard his character’s theme music from “Days of Being Wild” in “2046″, I couldn’t stop crying. Watching Leslie Cheung and hearing Leslie Cheung in these two movies, feel like watching and hearing his ghost on screen. And let me tell you, feeling a dead person’s emotions can really fuck you up. I can see his ghost, hear his ghost and feel his ghost--forever preserved in films. The emotions that’s inaccessible to me in the first screening and the sense of lost and despair that I couldn’t feel all suddenly hit me during the 2nd viewing. It’s been almost 14 years since he jumped down from a hotel’s balcony, it had only been 12 years when I watched Wong Kar Wai’s movies for the first times. I only started to miss him over a year ago, but I know that I will continue to miss him years into the future.  

Obviously I dug Wong Kar Wai’s overall style, but the feeling and emotions in his films only made such an impact in me because they were the emotions and feelings of a family member that never existed. Not to get mushy here (well, I already am pretty mushy and emo am i), but the memories Leslie Cheung left on and off screen makes him seem like a family member to me. He was queer, he was bisexual (maybe gay tbh), and he was Chinese. I grew up to love woman as a woman, and before I was that, I was Chinese--I am Chinese and I will always be Chinese. I really could have used someone like him to look up to. However, Leslie wasn’t just a family member, he was a unreachable and untouchable family member. You don’t romanticize family members, but you do that if you never get to know them or see them. Wong’s films can be deeply personal to me, but his films’ subject matters are never socially or culturally or politically radical (although they can be interpreted to something of that effect). Oftentimes Wong Kar Wai’s films felt devoid of substance because of that. On the other hand, Barry’s “Moonlight” doesn’t have that problem. In fact, the substance enriched the film and made the film oscar worthy. 

I didn’t talk about this before, since I was searching in moonlight tag for a post that says similar things. If any of you saw a black folk talked about similar thing, I’d like to reblog that post because It’s better that commentaries about “Moonlight” comes from black folks, more importantly, black gay folks. After all, the movie was about them and made for them. I see a lot of people talking about how beautiful the “you are the only man who ever touched me” line is, but I don’t see people talking about just how important the line that say something like “black boys look blue under moonlight” is, or how important the imagery of a young chiron standing at the beach and under the moon is. That line combined with that important imagery, almost...romanticize black skin and dark skins. Now, art cinemas don’t do that shit. Art cinemas feature white people and light skin people, and it always romanticize whiter and paler skins. Art cinemas is blond hair white woman with blue veins in Godard’s films, art cinemas is Maggie Cheung’s paper white skin in Wong Kar Wai’s “Ashes of Time”, art cinemas is women that look like porcelain dolls in “Neon Demon”. Art cinemas is never for and about black people, black men or dark skin people, and it sure as hell never portrayed dark skin as beautiful the way it portrayed white skins. White skin is beautiful and humanized, while dark skin is consumable at best, dirty and sinful at worst. But with that line, with the movie’s beautiful cinematography that features dark skin colours, “Moonlight” subverts that harmful norm of portraying skin colours in films. And it’s so SO important. I talked about how important that it features black gay sexuality, black identity and black subjectivity before, but I didn’t talk about this before. 

I still can’t really explain why “Moonlight” impacted me so much. I mean, I could pull some shenanigans about how universal the pain and loss Chiron felt are, but I hate the word “universal” and how problematic it is. When it’s applied to films that features white subjects, labelling white subjects’ feelings and emotions as “universal” only perpetuate the harmful notion that white experiences are the default and are supposed to be ALWAYS relatable to everyone. However, when you label a black subject’s feelings and emotions as universal--especially when a lot of these emotions stemmed from experiences and struggles unique to black people--you eradicate the blackness that’s inherent to the subjects the films feature. Chiron is black before he was introduced to have a gay/queer sexuality. To me, Chiron’s father figure Juan’s speech about how black folks are everywhere and the first ones on earth as well as his recounting about how a black woman says black boys look blue under moonlight are establishing Chiron’s identity as a black person. Mind you, that process happened before we even suspected he was a young gay boy trying to figure out his sexuality. 

I guess what i could say is that I could better appreciate what Barry was trying to do the 2nd time watching his film. He was humanizing his subjects, making them sympathetic and relatable in an art cinema language, and that effort finally made the full impact on me when I watched “Moonlight” the 2nd time. I don’t think it made the same kind of impact on the 20 people i watched the movie with today. it will take time, and hopefully they get to watch the film 2nd time, 3rd time or even 4th time, and then maybe they will truly understand what Barry Jenkins was trying to accomplished. 

[raitrolling]

charon is my favorite, can we get some deets about him?

omg im glad but i also gotta question ur taste in taste in trolls cuz charon is legitimately the worse lmao

but anYWAY if ur just looking for simple facts, check out his toyhou.se profile, but otherwise cuz i didnt know what to write deets-wise i ended up getting carried away textwalling the entire history of charon’s character so enjoy?? i guess????

charon was my first troll who i made way back in late 2010, sometime after i caught up with the comic (which iirc was the make her pay flash). at first i was like ‘lol fantrolls are a dumb idea why would you make characters if alternia no longer exists in the comic’, but then i discovered the trollslum board on mspaf and the types of really creative trolls people had come up with and now 6 years later im still stuck in fantroll hell LMAO. but charon didnt rly have much of a concept back then apart from doing the thing im sure a good 70% of people making their first fantroll did and choosing the lime green colour thats supposed to be in between sollux and nepeta, as well as wanting him to be some creepy dude who loves blood and fighting because i was still in my edgy phase back then rifp

this pic here was the oldest one i could find of him, i lost a lot of my 2010 arts when my old external harddrive corrupted, and the oekaki i used to draw him on no longer exists so i cant grab anything from there either. i cry looking at the horrid anatomy omg

so then i started rping him on mspaf (which was the first time i rly rped, apart from randomly jumping into other peoples rps on other forums when i was 10 cuz i didnt know wtf it was but i wanted to be cool and write characters too lmao) and he just kinda developed from there i guess?? since he came from a friendless background he ended up getting really attached and protective of the friends and quads he ended up making, which ended up being taken up to 11 and turning into his obsessive tendencies he has now (though i ended up retconning all his past relationships because at the state hes at now, he would never be able to move on from losing so many people and id be stuck with Yet Another Ball Of Angst OC)

the story about his lusus has been changed a couple times too, originally kitedad was just some big angry bird who was attacked by another troll so charon was seeking revenge, but then retcons happened. somewhere down the line i was like ‘yknow charon’s p full on when it comes to trying to help his friends to the point where hed definitely try to hurt them so he could keep them safe, that mustve come from somewhere’ and now we have the awful abusive/codependent mess that exists today

i think a lot of his development came from the way i kept reinterpreting his behaviour too. ive mentioned on this blog a couple times That Weird Black Butler Cosplayer I Almost Dated Back In High School, who, while im sure he meant well, said and did some real creepy shit like turning up to my house unannounced as he found out where i lived cuz we took the same bus home and had memorised the route, as well as turning up uninvited to parties (dressed as fuckign sebastian. i wish i was joking. even my 2011 ultra weeb ass thought that was embarrassing) i was going to because there was gonna be alcohol there and he thought i needed ‘protection’, and also texting me this incredibly detailed dream he had of saving me from bullies and whatnot and that just made me go HOLD ON THIS BEING PROTECTIVE OF SOMEONE THING IS ACTUALLY REALLY WEIRD so i wanted to channel that kind of creepiness into charon. also his guilt trippy tendencies and making everyone’s problems about him is the same shit people have pulled on me before so lmao.

tho that being said, ive never really intended for charon to be 100% irredeemable?? he’s really only ever been intentionally malicious to those who have hurt him or his friends, so he’s more... incredibly misguided to the most extreme degree. he knows what behaviours get what he wants, but doesn’t understand that those behaviours are harmful to others, and he’s hopelessly loyal and protective, but these traits are coloured by the fact he’s got a poor sense of boundaries and doesn’t recognise when he’s going too far. he’s an interesting character for me to write, but finding that exact balance has always been difficult and i still dont know if ive got him pinned down properly yet. i always get happy when i post something related to him and i get messages from people who are just ‘holy shit charon’, it makes me feel like ive done a good job at capturing his character lmao

he kinda came full circle in a sense, from horrible edgy disgusting creep to somewhat of a nice guy with the occasional weirdness to legitimate disgusting creep who happens to also be a nice guy?? idk unlike a lot of my trolls who have gone through a lot of development charon is one of the few who still has a lot of his core concepts, just refined greatly