#i guess i ought to tag this as

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Broke: Filoni sucks because Ahsoka

Woke: Filoni sucks because he can't remember basic plot points or world-building or characterization established in The Phantom Menace.

[buqbite]

it's kinda fascinating to me how welt has been "at the end of his life" for like. several decades by now. he goes on and on about how old and weary he is and how "his job is done" and his story is over but- oh wait i just realized i can phrase this in a very funny way- he's kind of sorta immortal now because he got the herrscher core back, so he's really just stuck in the epilogue for all eternity

[uncanny-tranny]

Also, in response to the "testosterone making people angrier" myth, I've found that, personally, testosterone has given me the self-respect to recognize and call out when my boundaries are being overstepped in ways that I wouldn't have had the courage (or, frankly even liking of myself) to have done before. This is in addition to me working on my trauma responses, but testosterone was the spark that gave me the will to do this in the first place. When I see people sae that as anger and thus is a "bad thing," I wonder how much of that is just people being uncomfortable with us... having boundaries or enforcing them, and that the response to that overstepping is labeled as aggressive anger.

Frankly, I now actually respect myself enough to care when I am being mistreated. It seems that people sometimes take that as a personal failure on my end because I don't think I deserve mistreatment.

Caveat: Anger is a fine emotion, and it is a worthy thing to recognize and honour. I find that the accusation of trans men* and trans masc* people "being angry" on testosterone is a moot point simply because it is often a false accusation which uses anger as a punishment. My issue isn't that we're "angry," but that our perceived anger is used, often, as a transphobic bludgeon to punish those who either want to transition with testosterone or who currently are, and everything in-between.

[lileiv]

My full illustration for Good Omens for Palestine fanzine! It was a delight to work on and lovely to go back to drawing these two.

[jin-zixun]

OK I need to just appreciate the boost in confidence my boy has post-timeskip like. The little smirk at the Lans while just straight up calling them out. Not even responding to WWX's inane shit talking here, just running interference like a very good boy.

Like I...

Just immediately spinning the situation against WWX, it's great. How much of this is planned? I don't know. He walks into frame like he's the hero of the day right after JGY's "et tu Er-Ge" moment on the stairs.

As he should! He is the hero of the day! And the hero of every day! If you're JGY I guess, from now on at least.

[outeremissary]

Probably the last round of Art Fight attacks for the month. I loved doing all of these so, so much- and I'm so excited to have been able to see another Kingmaker player out there too!!

(sorry to anyone getting tagged a second time, Tumblr did NOT like the first post for some reason)

Bastion and Azathoth - exmeowstic ( @exmeowstic )

Charlie - SpicyTofuRamen (Insta)

Callisto - bigmeandragonlady ( @bigmeandragonlady )

[six-improbable-things]

I will say, it's really funny how much got glossed over at the end of season two of Black Sails. Like, I 100% know what they were going for, and it was probably the right choice to not bog us all down with details after such intense moments, but I will never not find it funny how it's never discussed that Vane and Flint have to share a ship for weeks, or that the Walrus somehow was damaged to the point of no longer being seaworthy at the bay where the gold was. Idk, I just find it really amusing.

Again, I know that it was the right choice for pacing and ending a season on an interesting note, but there's so much room for weird and interesting stuff to have happened over that time... I'd LOVE to know what happened, yk? (Though I suppose for people who read fanfic, that's what fanfic's for. Filling in the gaps left by canon.)

(No spoilers past the end of season 2, please!! <3)

[supercantaloupe]

The Rent Post™

aka, a lengthy screed on how rent the musical goes about adapting la boheme, where it fails, and what can be done about it

so i’m admittedly a reformed Theater Kid™. and tbh i still very much am a Theater Person, even a Musical Theater Person, i’m just in my 20s now and my taste has shifted away from what’s mainstream on broadway right now and closer to the world of opera. but there absolutely was a time in my early teens when i was Really Into Rent, as many Theater Kids™ were…and there was also a time in my later teens when i thought about it and realized that rent was not only just not my thing, but that there were some significant Problems with it, as its own work and as an adaptation. now, having finally seen boheme for myself, i feel like i’m really in a place to piece together how the two works compare to one another, and why/how i think rent falls short of success (as a piece of theater anyway. obviously rent is not lacking in commercial and popular audience success, for better or worse).

i knew years ago that rent is a direct adaptation of la boheme, but wow, only after seeing the opera did i come to realize just how closely rent follows boheme: in plot beats, in character names, even borrowing a couple of lyrics and musical motifs here and there. 

but it also changes things from the original opera -- namely, it adds things -- and i think this is the first place where rent runs into trouble. now i am by no means such a purist that i think no work should ever be adapted unchanged (more on this later...what’s the point of adaptation if not to change things to make the work resonate with a new audience anyway?). however, any and every change made to an existing work in adaptation should be thoughtfully made and motivated, because every single change has an effect on the whole product in some way, and many small changes can add up to create a rather different final product than a creator might realize. 

(and this goes both ways, i think -- both in a work where a more flawed source material is adapted into something new and better, and when a superior original work is adapted into a worse new creation.)

definitely some of the changes made in rent while adapting la boheme are due to the change in medium. opera and musicals are both theater, sure, and more similar in many ways to each other than either is to straight play or film perhaps, but it’s still like a spanish speaker and an italian speaker trying to have a conversation with one another. the languages are similar and there might even be a bit of crossover in mutual intelligibility but they are still ultimately two different languages with different grammars and vocabulary. opera in general tends to have slower pacing than book musicals, fewer plot threads of equal importance. that rent is specifically a musical adaptation of la boheme, rather than a true rock opera, demonstrates this well. the mimi/rodolfo relationship is still front and center (americanized of course as mimi and roger), with marcello and musetta close behind (though expanded in rent as more of a love triangle among mark, maureen, and joanne, the latter being an invented character for the musical who i think embodies the original marcello as much as mark does). but rent adds a lot of stage time and focus to a new couple, collins and angel, who are directly lifted from colline and schaunard, who are essentially secondary comic relief characters, whereas collins/angel are arguably as important plot wise to mimi/roger and mark/maureen/joanne. 

(and i’m not gonna get into the level of #problematic there is to the depiction of maureen as an overly promiscuous bisexual or discuss why colline and schaunard can’t have been a gay couple the whole time or whatever because. wow i do not care. there are more important things to complain about here c’mon)

first big addition to rent that wasn’t original to boheme is that increased stage presence/focus for collins and angel. it's not inherently a bad addition, and for its time the open depiction of multiple queer romances onstage was still kind of groundbreaking. and yes, rent having a longer runtime than boheme should give it the opportunity to flesh this relationship out more as well as the other two to make sure they all have an equal chance to develop and end in a satisfying way. hell, they don’t even all have to be equal in stage presence/focus/importance to be a positive addition to the show (and how can it be when angel dies halfway through act ii? then again, the character dying doesn’t exactly mean the relationship loses its importance in the plot…) but despite the extra runtime and faster storytelling pace, rent doesn’t actually develop angel and collins all that much, especially not before angel dies. this isn’t an issue with colline and schaunard, of course, cause it’s obvious they’re not important characters in boheme. but collins and angel are arguably more important in rent than even mark/maureen/joanne. and angel dies halfway through act ii…meanwhile, mimi survives the end of rent, when she very pointedly does not in boheme.

and…oh, mimi. she is probably the biggest and most problematic adaptational change in rent as compared to la boheme. on the surface she (and roger/rodolfo) seems the least changed of all the opera’s characters, her name not even undergoing the same americanization treatment as the others. but there are just so many small details that add up and up until she’s a fundamentally different character in rent. i don’t even begrudge the change in occupation: her becoming a stripper/exotic dancer/possible sex worker(?) rather than a seamstress does bring with it some cultural baggage, but i am not personally interested in reading any morality into her choice of occupation, and i choose not to read her line of work as having any implications for her “innocence” or moral value as a character. nor will i read her addiction or disease as being moral qualities either. however: there is a big difference between tuberculosis in the 1840s and both AIDS and drug addiction in the 1980s. neither boheme’s mimi nor rent’s are morally responsible for their illnesses. but there is absolutely nothing mimi could do about her tuberculosis in boheme except die, because it was france in the 1840s and nobody knew what an antibiotic was. in new york in 1989, there were rehab clinics and there were medications for HIV. these things were expensive and hard to access, yes, but rent really goes out of its way to show us that mimi had the resources to access these things -- she is able to afford AZT in act i on her own (and the fact that she’s on AZT is used as shorthand for her HIV+ status, as opposed to other characters about whom we are told outright)...

… and her relationship with benny (the much-expanded counterpart to boheme’s benoit the landlord character) in act ii, who verbally offers to pay for her admittance to a rehab program.

yet the next time we see or hear anything of her, her loving mother is calling to ask where she is as she’s presumably gone missing…

…and then discover she has been living on the street, dying from exposure/disease/addiction. 

did she do this willingly? did benny refuse to continue supporting her? we don’t really get an answer to any of this; rent isn’t really concerned with why mimi is in the position she’s in, but is rather entirely preoccupied with staying true to boheme -- up until mimi’s death, anyway. because mimi doesn’t die in rent, she is saved, and says that angel told her to keep on living (as though it were a choice). why? we can only speculate. really, if any character embodies the same “dying tragically in a world too cruel for them to survive” theme as mimi in boheme does, it’s angel. and her death is honestly used as a tool throughout the rest of the show: a purpose for kindness, community, life.

is this a bad “bury your gays” kind of thing? i don’t really know, i’m inclined to believe not. but i do think angel’s death is more thematically akin to mimi’s death in boheme than the actual (near-)death of mimi in rent. 

and this is the biggest difference between rent and boheme: boheme is not about hope. boheme is a tragic romance about how important relationships are among people in disadvantaged communities/situations, but it does not say that love will transcend or materially improve those conditions. rent, by contrast, does. rent suggests that the love of partners and community (even if filled with complications and tensions) is lifesaving. 

(and i know rent’s stated thesis is “no day but today,” i.e. live and enjoy every day as though it could be your last, but i think thematically all the characters and their interactions overall suggest a theme of community just as if not more strongly, whereas “no day but today” is more limited to the HIV+ characters and has little to do with the mark/maureen/joanne subplot. mimi's outlook on "no day but today" changes when she chooses to stay alive on the urging of angel from the other side.) 

now i don’t think this is altogether a bad moral to have in your theater piece. especially in one of the first major pieces of theater centered on marginalized queer characters. i will not deny how important and cathartic it can be, both now and especially thirty years ago when rent premiered, to end on a hopeful note rather than a tragic one. but i have a couple of issues with how rent goes about making this its central theme. for one thing, mimi has frankly too many Things affecting her health in the end for her survival to be realistic, and absolutely nothing up to this point in the show has suggested a setting of magical realism or pseudofantasy; everything has been as grounded in real life as possible, until finale b, when mimi suddenly and near-inexplicably survives. it feels like it comes out of nowhere tonally and thus isn’t very satisfying an ending when put to scrutiny. for another, angel has already died, and angel is, compared to mimi, a much more beloved and uncomplicatedly positive force in their community and relationships. angel’s entire stage presence (while she’s alive and when her character is invoked or referenced after her death) is a positive one: caring for collins when he’s injured, providing food and funds to the group, placating arguments, etc.

and the fact that angel has no concerned parents leaving her voicemails, unlike mark, roger, and mimi, underscores that she has no one else to lean on for support except her community of bohemians. and we’re not given a reason to believe one way or the other about her home life or financial stability outside of today 4 u when she got a sudden windfall for killing a dog (whatever; schaunard did the same thing to the parrot in boheme). in contrast to mimi, roger, and especially mark, who are clearly shown to have family who care about them and want to support them, yet they choose to live in romanticized poverty anyway. mark even gets a good job in filming and still finds a way to complain about it.

really, except for angel (and arguably collins, too), it’s difficult to totally sympathize with the characters in rent and care fully about their plight because they’re just…not depicted as particularly likable people. maureen is an unfaithful and kind of manipulative partner, and her approach to “protest” is really just bad self-absorbed performance art. roger just kind of sucks at songwriting (how is your eyes the song that he’s spent the whole show writing? it’s the worst number in the musical lol), and he’s quick to anger…his decision to leave mimi makes even less sense here than rodolfo’s decision to leave her in boheme, where at least he did so out of genuine concern for her health (also why does he leave mark? rodolfo embraces marcello as a friend still after mimi leaves in boheme...act iii of boheme is the least closely adapted in rent by far.). wheras in rent roger seems to be both genuinely jealous of mimi interacting with other men and upset by her continued drug use. although this last one i don’t begrudge him for, since it’s made clear he’s a recovering addict himself…although it does make mimi’s relationship with him all the worse, considering that mimi’s take on the whole “no day but today” theme is to throw caution to the wind with her actions and not worry about the future at all, and her interacting with roger is directly tempting him back into addiction which he clearly does not want. (and roger’s rejection of her in another day is framed as him being in the wrong with mimi being backed up by the life support chorus…)

while mimi as we’ve seen is reckless and throws her life away even when people try to help her (very very different from boheme’s mimi, who makes no particularly reckless choices, and accepts help when it's offered). and mark is entitled and uses his film as an excuse to disengage with the real world, even exploit it (see: the way he films the life support meeting without permission, or the homeless woman, which is never really confronted elsewhere in the show…)

the inclusion of a homelessness subplot in rent is particularly strange to me. it shows up a lot, especially in act i: the threat of homelessness for the main characters should they not pay their rent or come to some kind of agreement with their landlord; the vague future threat of benny’s “cyberarts studio” getting built which is implied would evict those living in tents on the lot; mimi being found living on the street in the finale; and the chorus/ensemble who show up periodically, as above. homelessness is an ever present element of set dressing/conflict in rent but it’s never really addressed, no points are ever made about it, which is in my opinion kind of wild and very unsatisfying. the above scene especially, considering how direct of a callout it is towards the show’s own characters and writing, yet it is never addressed afterwards, and this conflict is never really resolved. 

one could take similar issue with the choice to swap tuberculosis in boheme with AIDS in rent. though in my opinion i think addiction is as much as if not more rent’s analogue to boheme’s TB, since that is a much more acutely seen disease for mimi and only mimi while there are multiple characters (main and chorus) living with HIV…then again, angel is the character who gets the real tragic death analogous to mimi’s in boheme, and angel dies of complications from AIDS, so i suppose it’s open to debate. regardless, there’s a significant contextual difference between TB in the 1840s and HIV and addiction in the 1980s: there was no system, political, social, or medical, that could truly heal someone of tuberculosis in boheme’s setting. but there very much was a medical and social system in place to help people with HIV and addiction in the 1980s; systems which were aggressively denied to those who were suffering by the political system. and for as much as the characters in rent like to sing about revolution, protest, and activism, not a single one actually challenges the powers that be or call out by name those responsible for the systematic denial of healthcare to the marginalized. activism and artistic revolution is hollow and meaningless in rent, they never name a real enemy, just a vague sense of “the man.” but it’s a story set in a real and still recent historical time period, the effects of which we still deal with today (and i’m sure even more acutely so back in 1996); it just feels disrespectful to me to use those crises as such important set dressing for your musical which positions itself as a “fuck the man” revolutionary kind of piece of theater and yet do or say absolutely nothing about the real world issues it is appropriating. for more information i highly recommend checking out lindsay ellis’ video on the topic. 

so is all this to say i think rent is an irredeemable, fundamentally broken work? actually, no; i think it has a decent foundation and some solid music. i understand the reasoning behind and appeal of updating an old work to a new time period/setting for a new audience, and i think trading 1840s paris for 1980s nyc is an interesting and workable substitution. but when i look at rent as it is now, i just do not see a finished product. 

and i think this is the most frustrating and disappointing thing about rent to me: rent is, quite literally, an unfinished show. its composer and librettist, jonathan larson, died suddenly the day of its first preview performance. and for so many developing (off-)broadway shows, previews are when the actual finished product is crafted, as the show is revised based on audience reactions. of course audience and critical reception to rent from the very beginning was positive, but i can’t help but speculate how much of that is influenced by the mere fact of its creator’s untimely death. and i wonder what changes larson would have made to his show if he had lived, and been able to hear the audience’s reactions, and revise the show accordingly. i wonder if he would have thought it worked. i wonder if he would have seen the same cracks that i see in it. i don’t think rent is inherently unsalvageable, but it is so far unsalvaged. 

and frankly i don’t know that it ever will be salvaged; not for many years, at least. not until copyright and licensing in musical theater changes, and not until broadway audiences get more comfortable with the idea of altering beloved and familiar classics (the 2019 revival of oklahoma! was, in my opinion, a work of genius, but i’m well aware my opinion is not universal, and especially during its national tour the show’s entire concept has been extremely controversial). do to rent what bartlett sher and aaron sorkin are doing to camelot right now: keep the heart and soul of the piece intact, but rewrite what doesn’t work. or do something even more drastic, cut subplots and change character traits, i don’t know. maybe mimi should die; maybe it really is important that she survive! maybe rent shouldn’t have been based on boheme at all; hell, what would rent look like if it was based on la traviata instead? (well the answer to this one is “a different show entirely,” most likely, but if you want to write a poignant and tragic love story based on a romantic opera and set in 1980s nyc featuring queer and/or HIV+ characters, well…it could work and i’ll leave it there.) maybe that’s going too far, i don’t know, but the point is, i want to see directors and writers have the freedom to try that stuff out. because i don’t think rent is unsalvageable; i think it’s unfinished. 

but rent is far too popular and beloved for anyone to dare touch its libretto with new ink. the memory of jonathan larson is held far too preciously for anyone to allow such debasement of his work. when searching online for libretti to reference when writing this essay, i found one transcribed script with this at its heading:

and i think that about sums it up for me. “may he be friggen worshiped!” him and all his creations, holy and untouchable.  it’d be tantamount to theater sacrilege at this point to try and change it. how dare you sully larson’s good name by thinking you could “fix” his masterpiece…the masterpiece no one wants to admit he never got to actually finish. well, i don’t know, maybe it’s me being jewish and sentimental here, but if i have enough respect for a piece of work i want to be able to engage with it and question it and interpret it as i think it best ought to be. (jonathan larson was also jewish. would he agree with me? i don’t know. but i think he’d want to see the best of his work, just like i do.) live theater is inherently participatory and dialectical. and it ought to be alive, not carved into stone. neither immovable nor under threat of utter annihilation should someone come too close with a chisel. rent has potential. la boheme is still as affecting today as it was a hundred thirty years ago (did you know rent premiered almost exactly a hundred years after la boheme?). rent could be the same. and it does have emotionality behind it as it is now, credit where credit’s due. but it could be more than just that. if we could just let someone finish the thing already, even if larson himself couldn’t.

[winter-doggo]

Clay Gengar and GSC shiny palette Dragonair :] all painted! I've been having a blast doing this stuff, painted dragons hopefully soon to follow

Dragonair's shiny in GSC is more purple than the pink shiny of later gens, and I really like it:

[plasticfangtastic]

Thats a lot to unpack i guess.

Altho i dont think is doxxing if amazon finds out the person leaking sensitive ass info and posting not just spoilers but images of unrelease footage prior to airing...

For somebody who dont work with amazon they sire seem to know a lot about BTS drama...

[midnapanda]

Thanks for telling us about your Agents! Do you have designs for any of them?

WELL since you asked so nicely AND I got Fizz's jacket today, I took some pictures :3

Captain 3 (Typha/Cherry) and Agent 4 (Fizz/Windcrusher)

Agent 8 (Ebb/Plum), and New Agent 3 (Neriti/Acerola)

Forgive me for the multitude of names-- I've called them by their gear-based names for forever, and I'm trying to be more creative and get more used to their oceanic-based names.

I may change some things later, like I had a hard time thinking of what Neriti should wear. Plus, all of these weapons are weapons I've played in the past, and as a result they're all either mid-range or backline lol.

[umarthiels]

surprise surprise, les mis letters has got me Thinking about Catholicism again!

[uncanny-tranny]

One conversation I remember people having about people who have endured abuse or trauma is the use of survivor versus victim language, and I think a lot of people have misconceptions about the "right" language to use.

I think a lot of people have this idea that using victim language (e.g., "I was/am a victim of abuse") can send the message that you're perpetually a victim, and that because of that, it is "bad language." However, I think it's more accurate to conceptualize it more so as putting responsibility onto the people who harmed them. Framing yourself as a survivor can feel final and permanent, and some of us aren't ready for that level of definitiveness.

I think we need more acceptance of peoples conception of their experiences. It's okay to say that you were/are a victim, just as it's okay to say you are a survivor. The idea of being a "good" victim/survivor is damaging, and it's harmful to us. It puts the onus on us to think about everybody else's comfort but our own about our own damn trauma

[seconddoubt]

ho there guys <3 what should i read next?

you can either vote willy-nilly or click read more to get context :)

if you saw my last poll like this you know i have a french author streak going (dumas-maupassant-sagan-camus-hugo), if i were to keep that up w books i own and haven't read next would be either The Second Sex by Beauvoir, or Swann's Way by Proust, thing is i just got back to reading daily and those feel a bit intimidating while I'm still working up my reading stamina.

another thing i wanted this year was to reread old favourites to see if they can still hold that title, as i read most of them ages 16-18, top of that list would be Catch-22.

but then glancing at my bookcase i see Assassin's Apprentice by Hobb which has been sitting unread for probably a decade and i haven't read a fantasy in a long time and that feels like it should be a light read so i could be pursuaded to read that if it gets majority votes.

[natalieironside]

I'll go days and days barely writing a damn thing and then I'll just sit down and randomly shit out Fallout: New Vegas fanfiction. Merry Christmas I guess.

[koyoba]

Happy OC Valentine's! 💖

Several days ago I was prompted to doodle all of my OC couples, so I went ahead and did so! And why not share 'em today :D Though I'm still missing a couple shared OC pairs 😭 Featuring both the clean version and the special commentary version.

Couples from top to bottom, left to right:

Matas & Sae [M/M] childhood friends from the same village on an adventure together

Slice & L.P. [M/M] a vampire punk rock singer and his DJ boyfriend

Nils & Ori [M/M] a young and curious civil servant and the grouchy old potter who lives up in the mountains

Dagim & Etefu [M/M] an aloof temple acolyte and the wandering bard who won't seem to leave him alone

Azucar & Shio [NB/M] mad scientist double special; the self-experimenting geneticist and the pathologist who loathes them; "If I die, please don't let anyone else dissect me."

Helori & Darsian [NB/M] half-elf priest and their human husband, the village baker; extremely married; a lifelong love...but as long as whose life?

Marisol & Aibel [F/F] the pirate captain of a large armada and the sweet young scullery maid she rescued from a life of tragedy

Mogwa & Cipa [F/NB] a cruel goddess and the shapeshifter who challenged her so doggedly they ascended to godhood as well

Verin & Luna [F/F] a potionsmaster and a conjurer both working as instructors at a magical academy; they share a dark past they don't speak about

Path & Elmyra [F/F] a fiery tiefling cleric and a taciturn yuan-ti monk both serving the same once-dead and now recently-revived serpent goddess; relationship status: It's Complicated

And the few I didn't get a chance to include:

Xoazul & Noakl [M/NB] a GW2 salad couple! a Priory researcher elementalist and his warrior dearheart he duped into joining the organization as well

Zeiunn & Klilim [M/M] another GW2 pair; just a couple of Vigil science rats, the brave-hearted warrior and absent-minded engineer

Marjani & Fiam [F/F] a demon blacksmith and her horn carver gf

And there's plenty of other minor ones, aha~ The three above as well as Azu & Shio are all shared ships with my partner, and Elmyra is an NPC in my friend's game o/