#i haven't been liveblogging my comic-reading lately and i have no idea why

[ntshastark]

NUlts lb

I've been busy these past weeks so catching up with everything from mid-october to now

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USM #10

the jjj/uncle ben flirting in this is absurd, why is hickman so hooked on old man yaoi

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oh as soon as i saw u-65 i knew it was gonna have something to do with gwen (and completely forgot we actually already knew oscorp bought stane/stark, incredible work from my brain)

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NULTS GWEN IS SOOOOOO GOOD i missed gwen being a bitch so fucking much 😭 can't believe i've finally got my girl back

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gwenmj cheating arc when (i'm joking!!!)

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THE LITTLE GREEN GLINT THAT APPEARS ON HIS ALREADY-GREEN EYE WHEN SHIT'S ABOUT TO GET REAL OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THIS IS SO GOOD

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david messina kills it at conversation scenes, i don't know how he does it. the layout is so simple, and you can see a lot of the panels are recycled, but it still feels so dynamic????? how?????

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GIRL WHAT THE FUCK ok there's absolutely no way these two aren't fucking, i'm a clois girlie, i know article-proofreading-as-foreplay when i see it

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oh. oh no. now i want a hickman clone saga.....

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USM #11

remember how i just complimented how dynamic david messina's conversation scenes feel? yeah, his action scenes are just the opposite. so fucking stiff.

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queen.

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oh 👀 nults gayle???? (i hate how the shadows on her hair look)

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NULTS FLASH!!!!!!!!!!

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OH SHE'S SO REAL

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serving all that cunt in the cover only for this to be her only appearance in the actual comic, ugh

and i hope she eventually gets to update the suit bc this one is so whatever. and i hate the bare forearms.

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he doesn't seem like a guy ready to move on with someone else, so do we think jjj was their third

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OH UNCLE BEN KNOWWWSSSS

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UXM #8

ok, this is the first time i ever mention uxm here, so i should probably talk a bit about my feelings towards the series in general bc they're... complicated.

so, i don't think it's a bad comic at all, quite the opposite. but i'm definitely not the target audience, since i haven't been into anime ever since i was 9, and i never liked mangá (i'm physically unable to type it as "manga", sorry, that's a fruit). and it has nothing to do with the actual x-men characters or mythos, which is the reason i wanted to read it in the first place. i really wish they would've just made it about original characters who happen to be mutants and leave the door open for the x-men (and runaways!) characters to show up in other book(s). though, to be fair, fans of characters like armor, nico, and molly (who rarely ever get the spotlight) are probably happy to see them as prominent characters in a big book. but i, you see, am mentally ill about scott summers.

it might come off as a surprise, considering i almost never talk about him, but scott is probably the easiest character to make me tear up just by thinking of how much i love him. he's my special baby boy whom i've loved since i was a little kid refusing to miss a single episode of x-men evolution. but the thing is. x-comics are insane. so i end up not reading him much. and what upset me the most is that this was the perfect chance to change that. and my problem obviously isn't that they've turned him into a girl, i mean, *points at my own user*, but that natsu has almost nothing in common with scott, and if it wasn't for her powers i could read this entire comic and never wonder if she was anything other than an original character. so yeah, i was pretty upset i wasn't gonna get my baby. still am a bit, honestly. fucking wolverine gets a whole fucking solo run, as if he doesn't already has like 10 in the mainverse, and scott gets to be the only main x-character (so far + afaik) to be barely himself. offensive to me specifically.

but then!! but then. i almost cried over this little panel in issue #6

and i realised i am also capable of being mentally ill about natsu tsukishima. that's it, thanks for coming to my ted talk. now onto the actual issue

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guys i think kanon might be stupid.

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hmm really not sure how i feel about the tattooed numbers thing

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OH MY GOD I THOUGHT THIS WAS DROOL i was like wtf is wrong with her

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OHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO

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it's always morally correct to do this to influencers btw

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wait, the wiki says rogue showed up in this issue??? i've gone over it twice and haven't seen her

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OH WAIT this might be it

i thought these were bunny ears and it was mori, but i guess it's hair?

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UXM #9

this issue is feeling so rushed

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WAIT WHAT

OH MY GOD I THOUGHT IT WAS LOGAN

AND ALSO WTF, WHAT DID THEY DO TO HIM

AND ALSO tf you mean "the first homo superior"???

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dude what the actual fuck, look how they've massacred my boy

also... i know it's definitely on purpose in this specific case but... i'm actually not a fan of peach momoko's style......... it's very... loose? everything looks like a thumbnail, the characters sometimes look like they're melting, or as if someone randomly took a distortion tool to the page at random, and the watercolour colouring leaves a lot of blank spaces that bother me. like, i can see the merits, i can see why a lot of people enjoy it, but it's really not for me (which is basically how i feel about this comic in general)

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storm in the bg!!

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??????

this is less than 10 panels ago:

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see what i mean when i say characters sometimes look like they're melting??

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yeah, ok, the numbers tattoo thing definitely does bother me. i know it probably just doesn't have the same immediate connotation in japan (though they were axis so like... maybe that's a problem), but editors exist for a reason

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Ults #6

on reblog bc i've hit the fucking image limit on the second page

[clonerightsagenda]

HDM 3 & 4!

Episode 3:

me watching Mrs. Coulter ransack a university library while demanding "find me something heretical or illegal" wow haha it's just like being at work

"tired old men talking about tired old things" How much of breaking Jordan's scholastic sanctuary is revenge for the fact that they won't let women like her in? If you can't beat them, tear them down.

Tony's mumbled excuses about how he found Lyra are so on point for 'kid who does not want his mom finding out about his vigilante justice escapades'

Loving the running gag of Boreal going to our world and finding his car ticketed/booted. He doesn't even know what the boot is

Oh wow, we're getting our first look at Will now? As well as backstory on why his family is getting harassed, and we dropped the bomb of John Parry = Grumman already, even though that's a late book 2 reveal. Interesting choice. My guess would be that they want to spend less time in season 2 on stringing that mystery along and more on developing Will and Lyra's dynamic, since they shift into bffsies mode pretty abruptly.

Mrs. Coulter thinking about falling off high places again... I don't recall the implication of this self-destructive impulse in the books (haven't reread the third yet) but this is certainly setting up her death, huh? Whose idea was it, I don't remember....

Also, her calling Benjamin "boy" multiple times even though he's clearly a grown man - does that have the same racist implications in the UK as it does in America? It certainly shocked me. We hadn't really seen a racial undertone in how she's dealt with Boreal, the Master, or the reporter...

Episode 4

Of course they added Lee singing a song lol. If you paid all the money for LMM...

They took away Farder Coram's disability? He's older, sure, but seems perfectly hale and hearty. I'd make a joke about Lyra just thinking someone is tragically disabled due to being 60+ but the books say his health got wrecked after getting hit by a poison arrow. There is that other gyptian with the limb differences, I suppose.

Iorek is pronounced Yorick??? Oh wow I've been doing Eye-or-eck (like neck) for years.

I can't identify the accent Iorek has, but I'd be curious as to what accent the showrunners decided bears should have. I'd assume something Northern European since we're in Fantasy Scandinavia.

Mrs. Coulter has been violent toward her daemon a few times, which I also don't recall from the books, although it comes up with that one guy in the prequels. It emphasizes her internal conflict that they're setting up super hard.

Lee's far more comic relief in the show, and they've padded out the Iorek armor quest quite a bit. Guess they decided they needed to get their money's worth out of having Lin Manuel Miranda around before he dies and gets eaten.

They didn't make Serafina's daemon a goose??? Slander!!!

Lord Boreal homophobia moment... These have been the Bigotry Episodes

So I get why they have Lyra speak up to convince the gyptians in the previous episode and take the initiative re: Lee and Iorek - it makes the MC a more active rather than reactive protagonist, etc. - but I said while liveblogging the books that I appreciated the gyptians clearly have their own plans and aren't just convenient brown people who exist to ferry the protag on her journey, and this undercuts it a little bit. Also being a kid getting helplessly buffeted around by the machinations of adults is part of what Lyra has to deal with.

I'm still reading it as Eye-or-eck in my head as I type this. Sorry. It's too late for me.

[gamesception]

Done with Utena for now, but I had fun trying to post something near daily and would like to try to keep that up. Given my track record I'll likely not get very far, but I didn't think I'd finish the rgu read, so who knows. I've got a few ideas, but I also have to take like a week to get out from under the minis-painting commission, so in the mean time why not a poll to see which idea I should go with? explanations under the cut:

Cass Cain project: Cassandra Cain was my favorite comic book superhero, and DC bungling her character back in the day was what got me out of comics altogether. She has since been revived as a new character after a reboot or two, but while I tried I was never quite able to get back into the later version of her, and around the time of the Birds of Prey movie I started a project looking back at her comic appearances more or less in order to try and put into words what I liked about the character back in the day and why later reinterpretations of the character didn't quite hit that same note, for me at least. I put it on intermission at some point and promised to come back with a look at the 'Shadow of the Batgirl' graphic novel, but that book was too long for the too little I had to say about it, so I never did finish that post and the project stalled out. I have thought on and off about dusting the project off and starting it up again. Now might be a good time to do so.

Dark Souls: I've played Dark Souls before. I had a lot of fun with it, and for a while watched a lot of lore & cut content videos. One of the bits of cut content that really stood out to me was Oscar, Knight of Astora. In game he's the nameless knight that drops the key to you at the start of the Undead Asylum, and later gives you the estus flask before dying, but until relatively late in development he was supposed to survive the asylum and appear repeatedly in the main game, following a sort of parallel path to yours. Ever since hearing about this cut npc quest line, I've kind of wanted to recreate it by naming a new character after Oscar, collecting all his gear early, and then using co-op and pvp features to play out Oscar's narrative in the games of random players online, helping early on before becoming a rival and invader later.

Morrowind: I never did beat Morrowind - just played it until I had completely broken the game by accident (through bartering if you'd believe it) and sort of lost interest after that. The game's a classic that deserves a better run than that.

Fallout: New Vegas: Another project I started but failed to finish, multiple times over. But maybe third time's the charm for Bethany? I had a lot of fun with New Vegas but the liveblog got bogged down because I ended up playing too far ahead. If I just post thoughts or updates to where I am currently instead of trying to create a continuous narrative of the entire run that shouldn't happen.

Hollow Knight: I've done all the Hollow Knight Achievements on both Switch and Playstation, but on PC my record's sitting at a shameful 83%. Gotta fix that, plus I kind of want to replay it again before the release of the sequel, which I'm still thinking will be later this year.

Cyberpunk/Nier/Sekiro/Disco: Nothing much to say about these, just some games I heard were good and bought on steam that I haven't gotten around to playing yet. At least, not more than just the intro/tutorials.