#i havent rambled on here in forever

[apricustar]

there’s been a lot of talk about the kitchen scene—a lot of people calling eddie abusive, cruel, and emotionally volatile. but i think what that completely misses—what it refuses to see—is the truth about grief:

grief is not gentle or pretty. it is often an angry, twisting, acridic beast that refuses to leave you. it comes out in sharpness, in silence; in saying exactly the wrong thing to the person you love most because you don't know how else to make them hear you.

that is what we see in 8x17.

eddie wasn't being abusive; YOU are completely misunderstanding that scene—and eddie himself; buck, too.

buck is psychologically self-referential. not selfish, exactly—more self-centered, but not in the egotistical sense—in the trauma-informed sense. it's an adaptive behavior that helped him survive a childhood where love had terms and affection and prerequisites. he learned to monitor every mood shift, every silence, every closed door—because if something went wrong, it had to be his fault. and this was reinforced by his parents' behavior towards him!!!

so now? everything still feels like it's about him. because it had to be. because that was the only way to feel safe. buck internalizes everything. when something goes wrong, his first thoughts are: what did i do? what did i miss? that's not ego, that's fear.

but eddie deals with emotion like a live wire. he bottles it up, he locks it down. he was taught growing up that's what it takes to be a man—don't cry. don't ask for help, grit your teeth and keep moving. he waits. he stews. and when it finally breaks through? it comes out like it did last night—sharp, reactive, a ribbon of hurt tying everything together.

and this is not new! eddie does this when he feels powerless. when something big is shifting inside of him and he feels helpless—when he doesn't know how admit the true feelings inside of him. so instead we get things like the grocery store fight during the lawsuit, accusing buck of sabotaging the showings earlier this season, and the kitchen scene.

same structure. same rupture. same desperate attempt to push back because he doesn't know how to pull in.

when eddie says these things to buck—you're exhausting, you're making it all about you—he's poking where it hurts, on purpose. all of it—every jab, every flare of anger—comes from a place of not knowing how to properly articulate the truth underneath.

eddie expresses his needs rarely, if ever. he doesn't ask for closeness—he tests for it. more than anything, in that kitchen, i think he was trying to provoke buck into something—a reaction, a fight, anything.

because buck has been so shut down, largely unreachable, and imagine being eddie—watching the one person you always turn to drift out of orbit. being physically closer than you've been to him in months, and still, he feels further away than when you were in texas.

how do you ask for someone back when you don't know how to ask for anything at all?

this is all that people keep missing when they reduce eddie to 'abusive' or buck to 'selfish'. they see the surface of their words, but not the wounds they're coming from.

on a fundamental level, buck and eddie are incompatible in how they handle emotion, communicate, and cope, but they are unshakably bound in how they love. because underneath all the misfires and misunderstandings, they are two people shaped by trauma and silence—by never being taught how to ask for what they need.

and still—somehow—they keep trying. with each other.

so when buck apologizes for being sad bobby’s dead and eddie snaps—he isn't rejecting buck's grief. he's rejecting the idea that buck's pain is somehow exceptional; he's saying: why aren't you here you haven't talked to me you haven't asked me how its been for me you're right in front of me and i can't reach you i want to do this together—

the scene wasn't abuse—it was human; a very raw representation of the way grief twists its way into every corner of your love, your relationships, your voice. it was love—sharp-edged and realistic in its imperfection and messiness, ever fighting to be seen.

eddie's feeling invisible and alone inside his grief; he's seeking connection. he wants buck to react, to be present, to talk to him.

the beauty of all of this is that after everything, eddie brings christopher for buck. its not just an apology. it's a gesture of reclamation. because eddie knows buck has been feeling isolated—not just from him, but from the entire team. buck himself expresses that everyone's been walking on eggshells, treating him like something fragile, like grief made him untouchable.

so eddie does the one thing he knows how to do: he acts. he brings buck his (their) son. he brings pepa. he brings family.

regardless of how eddie responded in the kitchen, he walks it back in the way he always does: through action. and wordlessly, he's saying: you belong you're ours you are wanted.

and no one gets to make buck feel otherwise. no one gets to be mean to buck.

not the team, and certainly not eddie himself.

buck and eddie are able to hurt each other as acutely as they do because they know one another. that is the risk of love: you open yourself to the possibility of pain; to be loved is to be known, changed, and vulnerable in ways you can’t take back.

eddie is able to be mad and feel these emotions and express them in these ways because he knows he—in his entirety—is safe with buck. even the ugly stuff. take note of this fight vs. how gentle eddie was with taking chris back from his parents. he can feel and act without filtering it first with buck. he can just be.

both buck and eddie keep choosing one another in a variety of ways—keep showing up, keep staying. even when they’re being harsh, even when they’re being unfair—even when they’re at their worst. they keep going, keep trying. love is persistence, dedication, devotion; buddie is all that and more.

[sentientstump]

i have a (very evil) question to ask... who's your favorite miracle mask character? favorite to draw, favorite to think about, favorite in general? :)

i will let the images speak.....

thank you for the ask! (⁠~⁠‾⁠▿⁠‾⁠)⁠~

[crystallizsch]

these IDIOTS

[moomeecore]

i neeeed to post stuff that isn't mlp ... sigh

[foxyk7]

{COMMISSIONS}

[obstinaterixatrix]

also I told them that I think I can say I don’t like 50s pop from the usa, but as we kept going I was like ‘well, I guess I do like [specific 50s pop song]’ and we kept having to narrow it down & sister thinks, specifically, I don’t like slow white doo-wop from the 50s. she might be right

[volfoss]

Long time no faceup...

Under the cut cause my number 1 hobby with doll faceups is to talk 700 years about the process and well. I was talking a LOT this time around lol

I am so kind of notoriously bad at not finishing a doll. Like ridiculously so. In my defense with this doll- his face sculpt was SO ridiculously out of my comfort zone (I usually have more cartoonish dolls > realistic) and he was massive (and his body had a lot of mods that I in turn wanted to modify) (on top of my pain increasing a lot which caused me to not be able to work on projects often the last year or two). I would have kept his faceup if it wasn't scratched badly in certain places but, here's the before (blank, I am NOT showing how bad my previous faceup attempts are..it's bad) and then I'll get into processes and such!

[ID: A large ball jointed doll sitting up. His face is blank with no eyes or wig and his body has multiple sculpted blue sections on it. A cat is sniffing his shoulder. /End ID]

The mod work was easy (thankfully! Pin that says I ❤️ my dremel) but I am not done with that so I will be focusing on his face! I watched a lot of realistic faceup tutorials and came away with a few takeaways:

1. Watercolors and a skinny nail brush WILL be your best friend. Also water in general to fix the mistakes

2. Take your time <- you'd think this was obvious but I'm soooo bad at rushing a faceup ok. I'm so bad at slowing down

3. Pastel before watercolor makes it go on smoother (the vid recommended using white which worked well bc this boy is very pale lmao)

4. Be brave and get the worst bit done first so if you fuck it up it's no big deal

So, with that knowledge I began sealing the head (was doing him along w 2 other heads Ive been putting off) and that was when the trouble started. I use sponge on sealant (liquitex matte varnish. Works like a dream always and no respiratory gear or weather conditions needed) but it was applying glossy. I assumed it was too cold in my room and after a few layers of hoping that would fix it, it didn't! Thankfully it had happened to me before and I shook it up VERY aggressively (like 1-2 minutes of shaking) and it went on fine minus some exaggerated texture on the resin from the few bad layers. Now this is one of the issues w this method, the other is it can trap dust/hair or whatever in there (you can easily pick it out if you notice it before it dries tho). These are both pros for me, I like when the doll looks more textured skin wise (realistic) and if I'm getting a little too lost on what direction to take the head, the dust or hair can make moles, freckles, or even scars! Prefacing all of that with the sealant was kicking my ASS and I was fighting for my life, which wasn't giving me much hope when this was a faceup style greatly out of my comfort zone and skill set, so it was just really a bad start. Also important to note that I did like absolutely no mockups for this which I usually do. I did a very vague basic realistic faceup and that was it, which was not really setting myself up for success, one may say.

But, somehow, the first layer was ok! I put white pastel down under the eye, around the eyebrow placement and then after some mishaps with the watercolor on the brows, I went to my old tactic. Usually with brows, I lay a layer or two down of pastel (FAR lighter than I want the brows to be) to kind of carve a rough shape out because I'm so atrocious at getting them even (like to a comical level. The amount of times I've had to redo a full brow to match the other makes this be my default method bc I'm SO bad at them).

I did one layer of that, and then decided I would try again with the watercolor. I don't want him to have super obvious eyeliner or anything (statements I've never said before. I have dolls where the liner covers the entire eyelid, I love a big eyeliner) so I just did the top waterline in a dark brown watercolor on a skinny nail art brush. This went... Suspiciously well? To the point where I just decided hey, we're going in and doing the eyelashes on the same layer.

Eyelashes are another point I'm so bad at, to the point where of all of my dolls I've painted, I've done bottom eyelashes 2x like ever. 3 at most. I remembered the tips from the video (not too much water but not too much paint, steady your hand, take it slow, and not doing just straight lines (hard to do that because I default to that often lol)) and just dove in.

The first eye went so well that I just went right into the second one and it was so much less bad than I thought it would be. It's crazy that practice and research helps? After that dried, I mixed pink and peach acrylic paints together to paint the lower waterline, and after THAT dried, I covered the bottom lashes with the same white pastel. It muted it a lot but the main thing I've learned working with this sealant method is that it WILL take stuff off. So in theory, I hoped that it would take the white pastel off and not fade my very painstakingly painted eyelashes.

Somehow it did work (thank you makeup knowledge or something) and the first layer was done. It felt SO wrong to have a first layer with NO blush???? Like absolutely makes no sense to my brain but it was so relieving to be done with the worst parts (minus the brows. I was not looking forward to those).

[ID: A three quarter view of the doll head shown above. Instead of being blank, it has very faint blonde eyebrows and dark brown lower eyelashes. /End ID]

This is the time in which I admit that I was wrong that it was so bad to do a realistic faceup (which could easily change when I do the blushing, you do not want to see the 80s blush situation I had on the first faceup attempt), as having the brow bones so prominent made the painting so much easier. I was very mad about this as this is my first proper* attempt at this sort of faceup and it was going so well (* proper meaning I actually attempted to adapt my style to the sculpt instead of putting my usual methods to use here on a head of a different style). Honestly I just kind of locked into the brows, and since my brush is a nail brush, there's a little ball stylus (I think that's what it's called? Dotting tool may also be what it's called) so when I messed up, I got that wet and very gently cleaned it up, dabbing the excess water/paint with my finger. This was SO much less painful than using acrylic paint on brows (that is MISERABLE to remove if you fuck up with black acrylic. That does not budge ever) or using watercolor pencils (like with doing my own eyeliner, I do much better with a brush than pencil).

Genuinely never will go back to using a different material for doing the brow strokes, this was such a breeze. Even getting it even wasn't too bad, I just cleaned the brows up with that same technique until I got it close enough. While I was waiting for that to dry, I used the same dark brown (I have a very small watercolor palette and no clue how to blend it lol, so I just used the same color this whole faceup so far) and same brush to add some paint to the eye crease to add some more dimension to the face. While that was drying, it started to bother me that all the dust was just not covered up, because my brain is used to when I break the paint out, I'm nearly done with the faceup, so it should be covered and cleaner by now. Which honestly I'm glad I did! It looks a lot better with most of it covered, although I do still.plan on doing a scar from the left eyebrow up to the forehead as well as others on the forehead but those are 3d sculpt projects and not flat paint projects (I use Elmer's glue to build it up and then blush/paint over top) so it is not my problem now lol.

[ID: A front facing picture of the head above. The head has dark brown curved eyebrows, moles dotted at random around the face, and the eye crease is filled in with dark brown. /End ID]

As if this project wasn't driving me crazy with stress enough, when I powdered the brows, one of them just didn't get as powdered as the other and so when I applied the sealant, about half the brow came away with it! Absolutely devastating but it is just the nature of water colors and liquid sealant! The next layer now had to include a patch job on the brow, as well as blushing (or if I was a little smarter, one layer for the brow repair, seal again, and a layer for the blushing so I didn't mess it up again!). It was such an incredibly frustrating set back especially with how long it took me to do the brows initially.

At THIS point, I was so relieved I had done a mockup digitally (even if not super accurate to what I ended up going with) because thinking of doing the blushing the next layer did make me want to cry a little bit for a couple reasons (on top of the already immense frustrations that sealing the brows on the start of day 2 brought).

As I said earlier, very different head type than what I usually do (usually can just slap some pink on the cheeks, brown elsewhere etc), but the bigger issue was how pale he is. I find it a billion times easier to paint a yellowed doll or a doll with darker resin (I am SO excited to get to my Dong next (his resin is so pretty (and has been really fun to work on while I was in white boy shading hell)) than a white unyellowed doll. If you know color theory or like any makeup at all, paler skin makes things show up so much brighter, which is a pain in the ass when you're trying to make a doll not look like they have clown makeup on with the blush alone. And with how sculpted his face is, I had to place the blush just right to get it to look ok, as well as somehow get the shading to look clean and decent.

I used a combination of a brush directly against the pastel and shavings and slowly built up some flush to the cheeks and shading around the nose.

[ID: The same doll head as above, but with a more peach color to the lips and cheeks, with slight definition around the sides of the nose bridge. /End ID]

I added the tiniest bit more blushing (my favorite hobby is procrastinating sealing. #1 thing ever) and then felt really unsure if I was somewhat close to being done or not, so decided to try it on his body with random eyes and wig to see what else needed to be there, which confirmed a couple things!

[ID: The same head as before, now shown on a seated large ball jointed doll body. He has a long lilac center part straight wig on and dark eyes. There is a doll to the left and right of him./End ID]

The first thing was somehow ALL of the messy forehead was covered by the wig, which was such a relief in of itself. The second thing was all of the blushing looked really good and natural which was such a big relief honestly.

He really just looked like some guy which was very funny as I really um don't have any dolls in my collection that have a normal faceup (guy addicted to getting too silly with it voice: Well surely getting MORE goofy won't hurt! I think the closest to a normal guy would be Theo? Cordelia perhaps too but she's also so pink lmao) and look like just a guy that you could find at a gas station. This will probably not last as I wanted to turn the forehead marks into silvery scars (I feel we could get a little silly with it and have it be magical or something like that, provides the scars look ok lmao. Future me's problem). I definitely need to add some more shading under his eyes (under eye bags are PERFECT when his eye bags are actually sculpted, I'm not used to that on a sculpt lol), accents to the lips (MAY do lip lines. May just add more color. No one ever knows what my go to is with lips because I hate doing them), add highlights (and maybe use some pearl x powder on the eyelid area... I kind of want him to look MOSTLY natural but I cannot lie, the lure of men with eyeshadow. It's a slippery slope) and mess with his eyes a bit as he looks really good with that purple wig, so I'd like to use colors that coordinate with that if possible (same with the eyes probably?). All in all, this was a lot of work for a low energy day and I feel I'm entering the home stretch a bit!

Day three, and despite how horrendous I was feeling like the entire day, I locked in and got a lot done!

[ID: The same head as above, with silver scarring on the forehead and nose and slightly more pigment on the lips. /end ID]

In pictures the scars look a LOT like leeches to me but it's ok or something. I wanted to do silver as I felt it would be fun to do a more magical twist with the characters and having some funky colored scars would work with that! I started with a layer of light grey paint and Elmer's glue mixed together, then added layers of a silver paint with the glue until it was more pronounced from the resin, how a scar would be, and then shaded with watercolors (before then adding the blushing to make it look like actual scars instead of weird metal globs). Honestly I really liked how the eyebrow and nose ones came out but the forehead ones were more of a cover up job rather than where I wanted to place them, so they may get adjusted later.

Other than that, I started work on his eyes (and most of the day was laying in bed in pain so I didn't get a ton done sadly)! It's not very visible in photos but I also used a glittery powder (pearl ex) on the eyelids to add some sparkle.

All that was left is a bit of scar work, figuring out if I'm going to do lines on the lips (my worst debate always tbh, I feel they rarely look good with my faceup style and are often a pain in my ass), finish the eyes (admittedly this is just because I'm very slow with it as I don't really like working with the resin a ton), and gloss the areas that need it. There is definitely a chance I remove the forehead scarring (the great part about it all being glue is well. It removes easily) and do something different there that's a bit bigger and less small blobs but that is tomorrow's problem. Honestly really excited about the eyes, they look REALLY good from when I've tried them in!

I then proceeded to procrastinate for about a week maybe (time is odd for me rn) because I was so unsure about the forehead scarring but when I picked it back up, I did the finishing touches I planned on here and then wrapped his eyes up and he's done! 2 heads to go (sadly. I'm so scared doing them to be honest cause it's so much work always) but very happy with him!

[ID: The head shown previously, but on his body. His lips and scars are now glossy, he has eyes with a dark blue sclera and bright purple glittery iris in, and is wearing a long straight lavender wig. His body is wearing a teal and purple camo shirt that is tight fitting. The doll is sitting between two other dolls on a shelf. /End ID]

[rainyraisin]

GUYS.... GUESS WHAT...

Movie Sonic!!! He exists!!! Isnt that neat!!! The silliest guy ever is real he is right there and he has three whole movies worth of content to go insane over (and like a little bit of a TV show episode icl the first episode was VERY close to being my favorite ep of Knuckles purely bc Sonic is in it I'm not even joking- Episode 4 ate so hard tho)

Anyway be prepared to hear about this guy for like the next few weeks still probably especially because my band have agreed to do the Sonic movies for our college music festival so now being insane over this hedgehog is technically college work let's go chat (i also have to make Escape From The City into a ballad for one of my units so this hedgehog has invaded my college work multiple times its so funny)

[theallegedbird]

one of my friends started playing hollow knight and we've been talking about it a lot.. i want to play it again and draw shit so bad

[lazaruspiss]

not sure how i manage to be bad at making a self insert lmao, i always end up developing them into an entire OC in the end

[bramblepaws]

i am finally trying to catch up with warrior cats because i miss knowing what's going on in all of the amvs/pmvs (that i watch no matter where in the series they're from because they're always SO GOOD). also i love fanart of kittycats. wish me luck.

[goddslayerr]

thinking about.... various scars that ashton has received over the years

little sketch + various little notes

[kenziecrystai]

I know the world is severely fucked up rn because I'm getting far more interactions from porn bots on Instagram than here

[sedanley-uris]

was just talking to my partner yesterday about how i haven't touched this blog in AGES and i completely fell off of that steddie fic i was writing...i don't have much love at all for stranger things left at this point, but i'm also rired of never finishing fan projects, so i'm kind of tempted to try and finish i'm glad it's you. i know it's been literally a year and a half at minimum since i updated it last, but i had the entire story outlined so i might as well at least give it another go and see if i can finish it after all...?

[fy0lin]

irls that im not really comfortable being super vulnerable abt have my main, so i might start reblogging some stuff here

[felix-lupin]

there's something about writing recovery. recovery in real life never concludes. it's sedate and day-to-day. there are milestones but mostly you don't realize you've gotten much better. i think. so writing it is strange. writing the slow gradual change of soul feeling like he's a person rather than a thing would be strange. like wouldn't you need tens of thousands of words of slice of life? or you cut it off. or you decide a point in which you'll be done, soul is recovered now. and you know that isn't really true but it has to stop somewhere. that kind of scale is just impossible to have in fiction, right? i don't know. i don't know how i would do it, it's a pretty insurmountable task, or it seems so. portraying the creeping feeling of things getting better. of taking longer and longer to relapse each time. or you could do it to love sound again style and just have a moment, a moment in which he realizes - yes, i can live like this.

these were the reasons that i decided to have the fic just be like. soul gathering a will to live. cause that is so much easier. idk thoughts

^^^

I agree that it's difficult to write recovery. It's certainly nice to have a character have a neat, linear recovery where they're perfectly healed by the end of it and manage to fix all of their problems and issues. It's nice to have a character face all of their challenges and trials, and triumph over them, and then get to say and then they all lived happily ever after.

But in real life that's just. Not how things work. Recovery is not linear. It has ups and downs. Things get better, certainly, they do. Things get less hard. But it's like that one post like— grief never goes away, and it doesn't get smaller; you just grow around it. Things get better, but perfection, some state of complete healed-ness where you can point at them and say "see, they're perfectly healed now!" is just. not attainable.

I mean yeah, the nature of stories is that you need to end it somewhere, which is one of the reasons it's so hard to write recovery in a way that feels fully realistic and true. Because recovery is never truly, fully done. Even at one's best, there would still be times where reminders of things that happened would come up, and it would still sometimes hurt, even just a little bit. It would take a lot of dedicated time to be able to portray something close to the reality of it.

But like. You can patch wounds up and treat them, but that doesn't make them fully go away, it's not just something you can forget about. But you can get patched up and treated and let the wounds heal. And scars are a lot better than just letting yourself bleed.

An ending that feels true would differ from person to person, I think, because everyone's relationship and journey with recovery is different. I don't personally know how I would write it, but that's a mixture of I've never written anything that's super long + writing is a journey and if I actually got the ideas and motivation to sit down and write a long recovery piece, my answer to that question would probably change by the time I was done.

Obviously with recovery one would need to portray, like, backslides, times where things get worse, or relapses, and how that affects their view on their own recovery and how they get past those things, but that's mostly just a given.

It would be a lot of moments strung together to tell the wider story, as recovery often is irl. You would need a lot of slice of life stuff. Especially because that can often be where some of the most important realizations happen with recovery.

But yeah. Writing recovery is difficult, but it's not impossible. Just like recovering oneself is difficult but not impossible. It can be daunting and it would take a lot of effort, just like writing any longform story would be.