#i guess we know why lol

[dont-open-dead-inside-net]

oopsie!

[devilledminion]

#he wants that cookie so effin bad

[tropicalcontinental]

Human fear is the window to the soul or whatever ://

[clowningaroundmars]

some more hobie1610! :)

i luv this little bug just bc i love mj and i LOVE LOVE LOVE hobie! i simply couldn't resist 🩷

in the story, i tried mashing together a bunch of different references for his character, while still trying to stay true to the character of mary jane watson but also not sacrificing too much of hobie brown. i hope i… did a good enough job?

more under the cut :)

☆ hobie1610 is a supermodel-in-training inspired by mj watson's dreams of being a model and an actress. except in 1610, mj has these dreams forced onto him rather than aspiring to be them. he's living mj watson's dreams and hates it lol

☆ hobie1610 has a strained relationship with his family, true to mj watson's awful family dynamics in canon. it just... runs in every mj's blood i guess lmao

☆ hobie1610 wants so badly to be an investigative journalist! his plan after graduating from visions is to land an internship at the daily bugle :)

☆ he also gets up to mechanical shenanigans in his free time, fixing and building whatever he can get his hands on. he's very handy with machines and tech, true to the original characterization of hobie brown on earth-616, except on earth-1610 he usually has to hide his tools and gadgets

☆ his favorite subjects in school are english lit and physics!

☆ i gave hobie1610 uniform locs to look like mj's signature long hair but also to directly contrast hobie138's freeform locs

☆ if hobie1610 were to ever meet hobie138, he'd seethe and mald with jealousy. just like miles, mj's biggest wish is for his family to stop stacking so much pressure on his shoulders all the time. seeing another version of him living the free anarchist life would def have him feeling a type of way

hobie meeting mj: oh wow... nearly forgot what my face looks like without m' piercings lol :p

mj meeting hobie: I'M BRITISH IN THIS DIMENSION?!

☆ but he's a hobie alright! he rebels as often as he can in the typical ways teens with strict parents do. no one is putting this guy's flame out 🔥

☆ most of that rebellion consists of sneaking out when he knows he shouldn't. his mother is strict, but she's often very busy and that gives hobie1610 many chances to slip away unnoticed. his bravery is inspired by mj's character in the spiderman ps4 game, where she gets involved in dangerous missions with peter. those gameplay scenes with her in the museum inspired the 3rd chapter of my hobie1610 story

☆ hobie1610's sense of humor is more like zendaya's mj than anyone else

☆ the concept of hobie being miles' mj didn't entirely come out of nowhere! it wasn't just abt punkflower-- the possibility came up when i remembered that andrew garfield claimed he wanted his spiderman's mj to be a man. specifically played by michael b jordan ;)

☆ hobie1610's casual wardrobe outside of visions and his photoshoots consists of mostly greens and earth tones. most mj's across various diff portrayals have green or earth tones in their casual fits

references ↓

[sysig]

my 2nd request !! The skeleton brothers wearing matching pajamas :D

Day 13 - The Friendship Brothers

[vic-does-battlecats]

Calculating how to make a Moonpaw

[shithowdy]

realized a drawing i'm doing rn is almost identically posed to one i did 8.5 years ago of a different oc, except the old drawing was instantly tainted by one of the players featured messaging me asking if i could take it down because their abusive, possessive rp partner saw it and got jealous of them "roleplaying behind their back" and i said "nah" and it became a whole Thing that i should have walked away from at that exact moment but didn't and the 6 months that followed contained some of the most truly condensed batshit i have ever witnessed in an rp community already well-known for its batshittery.

... anyway i love my friends. so happy to accidentally redeem the pose.

[randomnameless]

Why do the FEH devs insist on ignoring Nabatean lore so much?

I recently had a surprisingly cordial discussion on redshit with someone about the "nabateans = colonisers" take, and one of the main points raised was that the game was purposedly foggy around Nabateans/Sothis/their story because it would obviously favor a certain narrative (and thus make another narrative look, uh, not that marketable anymore).

To be honest, we still ended up with a product that had a lead go "this race and its blood* is the reason why the world sucks" and yet that lead is still marketable enough to have raunchy cipher cards and 5 FEH alts, so I actually wonder if, while pissing on that lore had that purpose, it was ultimately pointless since Supreme Leader can still sell goodies despite her incarnation in FE16.

And not only Supreme Leader - but the entirety of WC where we basically have 70% of the cast crying/complaining about their "mixed blood" or lack of and basically adding their 10 cents to the "this race and its blood is the reason why the world sucks".

I mean, can you imagine Sylvain selling any goodies and alts if Flayn replied to his "wah wah people only are kind to me and want to fuck me because I have Nabatean blood :(" by some uncharacteristic "good for you, I have to hide my ears, had to dye my hair, have to lie about my family because if the truth is found out about my identity, I will be hunted and vivisected like an animal and harvested for parts by people who call my kin abominations - just like what happens in the game where the same people who call my kin "abominations" ally with a classmate who calls me a creature and pretends I am incapable of human feelings based on my race".

FE Fodlan's main selling point is its cast of students, for various reasons, but even if I tried to kid myself, Nopes and FEH made it clears : students are the main selling point.

If you spare more time and attention to the Nabatean plot/lore, the students either grow from "likeable" to "despicable" or worse, you won't gaf about them because yeah sure, Hilda might be upset because people expect things from her due to her crust, but it would feel like a "peanut" compared to Seteth's irrational (granted, it's not so irrational since GW exists) fear that Flayn's newest friends would dissect her if they learnt she was a Nabatean, and being conflicted by finally letting her have human friends and form bonds she crave, or protect her due to the trauma from the genocide of their species.

Don't get me wrong, I love peanuts, I mean, not everyone can have a tragik of loaded backstory!

And yet, given how this verse's DNA is "can you fight against the red emperor who uwus about you", they had to add copious amounts of Earl Grey to their games so there's no clear-cut factions :

The "Your alien blood and its influence on the world corrupted it, so I want to reform it under my command" vs "I don't want to die and you oppose me due to my race and side with the people who genocided my kin"

is turned to :

"Your alien blood Crests and its your church's influence on the world corrupted it, so I want to reform it under my command"

"I don't want to die and you oppose me due to my race and side with the people who genocided my kin"

Sprinkle with the cast's hammering here and there that the "reforms" might be needed - but never develop on what they are - and add a few baseless and groundless takes as a toping (basically everything Claude says about tolerance and the general "isolationism/foreign policy" stuff) and you get FE Fodlan where the Red Emperor's war isn't seen as the catastrophe it is in the other entries from the series!

Now, for FEH...

FWIW, the F!F!Billy's trailer had them try to explain that Sothis was a bit pissed about her slaughtered/massacred children when Nopes never gave any reason about why she was pissed - maybe on Billy's behalf bcs Jerry's dead, but come on, she would indeed deserve the medal of the worst parent in the franchise if that was the case, since Billy can murder her daughter without Sothis taking over ! - but given that they cannot write/go against the source game those characters are from.

They tried a bit, with B!Supreme Leader and Hegemongard's FB, but then it stopped (because she had no "new unit" released since then lol) and I can understand why : Hegemongard came out before the Supreme Emblem, and Hegemongard hates dragons who are seen/perceived as gods by some of their human followers. Come FE17, and now Supreme Emblem accepts Alear because they are "one of the good ones". We can come up with HCs and details and talk about what are emblems or if Hegemongard's views were only hers at the end of AM all day long... But imo, Doylist wise, it still feels it's a retcon because the devs from the main games tried to scrap and remove the most "controversial" traits she had.

For the other characters... Well, you see what Marianne is in FEH (but even in her base games), she's one of the few characters who reacts - in a way - to the partial history about relics and demonic beasts and all... only to give sad uwus to Maurice.

FE16 (and Nopes) refused to have any "student" character react to the Nabatean lore/reveal, about what are relics and all. There are no lines, Claude shared some knowledge in the explore section of VW's last chapter, but we don't have anyone muse or think or even talk about what are relics, what are crests, and what kind of fuckery their ancestors or the ancient humans of Fodlan did.

With that in mind, FEH can't do much : either they write Marianne in a retcon-y way like what happened for Hegemongard (and they're not afraid to piss on characterisation, look at Lyon!), or they flanderise her "character" and develop her around 3 lines she had in the game in her paralogue, and continue to give sad uwus about Momo when he was at best a guy who slaughtered and murdered so much that he abused the Nabatean turned into a relic to the point where he turned in a demonic beast even if he had a matching crest, or at worst, had been part of Nemesis's piñata party in Zanado and was something of a genocider.

Tldr :

Why FE Fodlan never gaf about Nabateans : earl grey + the marketable cast has to stay marketable and you can't sell peanuts at the same price you'd sell swordfish

Why FEH dgaf about Nabatean lore : they can't afford to retcon characters + they have to sell peanut alts with the same seasoning they had in their base game.

For what it's worth though, I think FEH is more daring than the base game(s) given how they gave more lines and screentime to Rhea - through her different alts - than GW. And they even designed her Halloween!alt's lines to piss on some of Claude's assertions, while the various FB involving members of the church also - indirectly - reply to some accusations thrown their way in FE16 when, FE16, never gave them an opportunity or lines to explain that those takes were full of dung.

*"but random, maybe she doesn't know that the crests she often decries is "dragon blood"!"

It's highly debatable, especially given what she and Hubert throw to Billy in CF - but even if she doesn't, Doylist wise we still have a character who, knowingly or not, says "this race and its blood* is the reason why the world sucks" and who is never called out on her prejudice. That's more of an issue regarding the general writing though, she has to be a red emperor and took pages from Ashnard's book, and yet, the player must still feel bad and want to romance her, so her mindest/goal cannot be looked at too closely, because, I guess, even the devs thought it would be difficult to romance her (thus sell goodies!) if more light was shed on the "blood from this race corrupts our people" schtick -> which in turn would also make characters whose backstory and gimmick rely on "crying about crests" be way less likeable, thus marketable and able to sell goodies.

[bromcommie]

so I was digging through the Vast Legally Grey Junkyards of the Internet in search of better quality footage from AoU for my edits, specifically the scene with the CA FASCIST grafitti in Sokovia—which I unfortunately didn't find, but what I DID find was a bunch of deleted/expanded scenes that I didn't know/didn't care enough to pay attention to before. Which is fine. Most of it is techno babble and rushed plot setup. However. This stupid-ass ten second clip makes me literally insane. It makes me. Want to kill and maim and chew on the bars of my enclosure. And not in the sense that the contents make me oh-so-emotional, but because the potential of them could. Because what do you mean.

What do you mean those four and a half lines were cut for pacing/time when it's a ten second difference and the rest of the scene is in the film anyway. What do you mean you cut it because it didn't fit the narrative. It's literally couched in two minutes of plot it could've been so easy to slip it in there. A passing reference that would add at least a smidgen of depth to both the (already fucking incomprehensible) plot + politics of the antagonists, and to one of the main fucking characters. Like you were SO close what do you mean you cut every feeble attempt that was made to scratch the surface of Steve's character outside the whole nightmare scene we're supposed to feel so bad about what do you MEAN.

The fact that this minimal exchange—paired with that graffiti scene where Steve is confronted with the actual legacy of Captain America and what he's come to mean to people around the world and then quite physically discards the identity + him still circling back to the mantle at the end of the film anyway because he doesn't know how to do or be anything else, feels like he's too changed for this idea of a normal life that stems from before the war and the ice and doesn't know how to live without carrying that, without being useful in this one specific way—has more meat on its bones in the whole lead up to Civil War and ultimately Endgame than half of this movie's sledgehammer-over-the-head lines about home and family with Barton's kids laughing in the background or whatever like some fucked up C list hallmark movie is downright infuriating to me because like. You clearly thought about it. It passed through your head. You wrote some version of it into the scene. You shot it and edited it and watched it a few times and then you went "nah off it goes to the cutting room floor, we have enough of that. Add those seven and a half seconds to the 20-minute long, entirely CGI Hulk sequence, that we need more of. Surely that will fix the pacing issue".

Side note: this is me not even getting into the fact that, at this point in the franchise, this would have been one of the few lines we'd get of Maria actually saying something or interacting with anyone in a way that is even marginally removed (which this barely is) from simply delivering plot information. This is the only time we kinda get her view on something or even an inkling that she used to be a goddamn intelligence agent. And how that history informs her view of the situation and how it could possibly clash with Steve's own. And that woman is in every fucking movie. (Not to mention the fact that the two of them were just in a movie together, for Christ's sake, and going through something together you could pretty fairly characterize as traumatic and bond-inspiring to boot—and in AoU we can barely tell they even know each other. I mean the bar is so low and they still managed to limbo right under it.)

[icewindandboringhorror]

indeed my exact process once every 8 months or so

[genericpuff]

Hey so I have a question-

Is Rachel even contributing to LO's art anymore? Like, at all?

CAUTION: MILD FASTPASS SPOILERS AHEAD !!!

I've talked at length about the 'tells' of each assistant and artist, and while it doesn't guarantee that I can tell exactly who drew each panel, there's one thing there's been a lot less of in the most recent episodes that have caught my attention - things that I know Rachel would typically contribute.

And most of it comes down to her lineart.

The shading was always her, no doubt about that, you could tell with how consistently awful it is, how she would take actual decent flats from her assistants and proceed to butcher them with muddied shading.

AmyKim89's flats vs. after Rachel's gotten her hands on them:

(seriously Rachel why tf did you darken Persephone's legs here, it looked so much better before ??)

But there was also her lineart which, at first, I didn't realize who was drawing it. It didn't show up super often in LO but it was always very noticeable when it did so I knew it had to be someone on the team doing it:

The thickness of the lines and the extra little strokes added in along the knuckles and bends, that wasn't something that was really common in LO at this point... at least it hasn't been since S1:

And when comparing it to the lineart she used to do in The Doctor Pepper/Foxglove Show:

(look at the mouth in The Doctor Foxglove Show vs. Hera in the pilot version of LO, they're literally the same)

So yeah, it was certainly the revelation to discover that that one instance of "weirdly detailed lineart" wasn't one of her assistants having a little extra fun, it was Rachel herself. It was already so uncommon for her to contribute all the way back in S2 that her contributions seemed to be more of the exception rather than the norm.

And since seeing the art that's been in the newest FP episodes following the return of the series... is Rachel even drawing at all anymore? Because lately the lineart has felt very thin, in a way that I can't tell if it's her assistants just doing all the lineart now or if she's trying to emulate S1 LO more by using less lineart. But S1 didn't have thin lineart, it had very thick lineart, BUT only being used where necessary to emphasis shadows and depth.

Now the lineart feels very... dinky? Especially when you look at the eyelashes.

That said, there are moments from S1 that had similarly 'dinky' lineart, so take this with grains of salt. It still didn't feel as dinky though as it does today where the lines are practically non-existent in how thin they are.

There are also times when you can tell they're really trying to emulate that S1 look, the pieces are there but they aren't being put together very well:

So yeah at this point I wouldn't even be shocked if all Rachel's doing at this point is scripting and roughs. And considering there are definitely times where she'll just draw without knowing what to write, the 'scripting' is also practically non-existent. It's just her leaving her roughs off to the last second for her assistants to whip out with very little time to pay attention to what's being submitted.

Once again it's Rachel fundamentally missing the point of the criticism that's being made of her work. She's trying to forcefully emulate something that she didn't even have a process behind. I can attest as someone who's been trying to do studies of her past work to recreate it as faithfully as possible through Rekindled, it's very difficult to achieve the 'old LO' look because 'old LO' was literally just Rachel slapping down brush strokes until they looked good, there was no specific process or guidelines that she followed, she just made things look textured and colorful. Everything else was basically up to her figuring out what actually looked good, with panels often having their own vibes separate from others in isolation of one another.

Now she's trying to replicate that look while missing the point entirely that it's not something she can really replicate anymore. Though we do get the odd panel that's way closer to the point, those panels have one thing that she's clearly not putting into the comic as a whole anymore - love and effort.

(fr this panel is so gorgeous but I feel like at this point it was more sheer luck because of how rare it is to see panels like these nowadays, this feels like an accident LOL)

Case in point, this honorable mention towards Persephone's outfit which is literally just a color-swapped version of the sketch that Rachel posted to Blue Sky that got meme'd to death in the ULO sub:

Did you catch that though? The weird dark patch over her boob and the gap in the lineart of her cleavage?

That's because they copy pasted the first panel and then erased out the hands, but missed the part of the hand shading that was overlapping the breast and the gap in the lineart.

I shit you not, Rachel coming up with memes on Blue Sky that she's scraped out of shows she watched 20 years ago is basically the full extent of her writing at this point.

Haha take a thing and make it bigger! So funnyyyy!

(seriously Rachel's 'humor' feels like it's stuck in 2010)

Yep, you're really earning that #1 NYT Bestseller label that you haven't even gotten since Volume 3, Rachel. Put your hand down, there are no high fives for you here.

[robbyykeene]

Potentially unpopular opinion, but I love that Miguel was an asshole again in the second part of this season! It’s a reminder that he’s a character and not just Johnny’s main support. I mean Robby didn’t deserve it at all, but it makes sense that Miguel couldn’t help taking his anger out on him. And I love that Johnny was on the receiving end of it, because it feels like the tension between them just went away for no reason.

Sorry if I’m bothering you!

You’re never bothering me, and I completely agree! They so rarely give Miguel any narrative agency these days, and like Johnny all it does is reduce him as a character. Miguel is a whole, complicated, messy teenager. He isn’t a saint. He isn’t perfect. He makes mistakes and has ugly unfair feelings sometimes, like every single teenager does. And I love when this show actually lets him be like this, lets him be wrong, lets him be a little bit of a dick to the people he cares about who don’t deserve it. Lets him be a real person with actual human feelings. And then also lets him take accountability for what he does wrong, apologize, show how much he’s grown, that he is a good person and a good friend. I love it truly, and it feels like it’s something that in a lot of ways hasn’t really been granted to Miguel since he fell off that balcony.

[vodkaslyme]

Friday Nights are so uncomfortable

[waspgrave]

now there was no reason for lucanis to be given purple johnny silverhand as a plot point and then never have the purple johnny silverhand utilized except for maybe 3 or 4 times in the game (if you saved Treviso, otherwise it's twice) and dialogue. Dialogue where he pretty much just says weird and funny things and occasionally gets scolded like a dog which is entertaining sure but there is Literally A Demon In One Of The Companions Why Is This Not A Bigger Deal

[himbohimhoe]

Holding out hope that the writing in veilguard will get more bearable but rook saying to lucanis that it's "not nice that Spite hurt him" and he "shouldn't accept that it’s fine bc it wouldn't be ok if a person did that" like. That is a demon. Built off a single emotion called SPITE. Rook I am finding it really hard to believe that u have lived in thedas for more than 30 seconds.

[padfootastic]

hohoho i am writing a remus & sirius confrontation that is ending up a little too mean and it’s verging on the edge of not fitting into FoD but by god, is it satisfying 😈😈😈

“Oh, stop pretending, Remus.” There’s a part of Sirius, not insignificant, that tells him to shut the fuck up. To bite back the words as he’d always done. They don’t expect it of him but he is perfectly capable of maintaining a civil tongue when needed. He just doesn’t want to, today. “You’ve always resented us, haven’t you?”

“Padfoot, do you even hear yourself—?” Remus’ amber eyes are bright, almost feverish, and Sirius knew that all he had to do was push.

So he did.

- brought to u by ‘i’ve been thinking about remus and i also recently read a fic that blindsided me w commentary on james’ and sirius’ social positions intimidating remus into compliance as an excuse for his cowardice and general temperament and got incredibly annoyed at how he is, yet again, victimised so i shall now endeavour to turn that idea around on its head using the ‘ol ‘u cannot help someone who does not want to be helped’ adage so help me god’