#i hope these tags cover it up??

[artificialdogs]

Kalos fans are finally winning after 10 long years im gonna cry

[phanfuckingtasmal]

im sorry but i cannot stop thinking about isha's pastel memories that play during her sacrifice scene.

look at how full of colour this beautiful fuckin shot is:

it's been well established in episodes 4-6 how grim and dark the undercity has become under cait and ambessa's new rule. but look at how isha sees/remembers it - because of jinx.

jinx, who went through a severe childhood trauma that has carried over into her present self - she covers extremely destructive weapons and grenades in bright pinks and blues, neons, childlike doodles, graffiti. (joy and destruction, powder and jinx, a contrast so striking it becomes like a signature for her).

and then we see the world through isha's eyes. when we meet her in episode 2, she's running through sewers, from goons dressed in black; it's grimy and grim. and then all of her recent memories are done in these childlike pastel, almost crayon-y sketches. because what isha saw was jinx covering a dark and grim world in colours.

and so isha covered her world in colour, too.

because jinx made her world bright.

isha looked at jinx and saw the child in her. she saw powder and she saw jinx. she saw joy and destruction. and that's why jinx gave isha so much hope. isha knew the world was grim and dark - but then she watched jinx, and she learned that you can paint over all that grim darkness with neon blue spray paint.

that's why isha believed in hope. that's why in her final moments - in a scene that is lit dimly and dramatically - she sees nothing but a bright world coloured in pastels.

never underestimate the hope of a child.

[chaoscohort]

Still needs to be ironed and the edges finished but here's my laika patch inspired by this post by @manywinged !

[ferncloud]

the part that makes you evil

[vien05]

I said to the community aun no beats reminds me of chosen and dark so

[maractean]

My entry for the Monster Mayhem competition, hosted by @catmask and @frogcroaks! This is my entry for the Desert Oasis theme, a horrible little critter I've called The Haven Crawler! I decided to take a more bestiary/encyclopedia type approach to this, and I'm actually quite happy with how it came out :D

Color ref and explanation of my inspo for this guy below!!

The Haven Crawler was actually inspired by a story I was told ages ago about Cone Snails. I had a friend from Hawaii who once told me about how tourists would hold the shells up to their ears thinking they were empty to snap a cute photo, and then just end up dead on the beach. "Dead before you even hit the ground" was the exact wording they used, and while I'm not sure if it's accurate to how venomous cone snails actually are, the story stuck with me so much that I had to use it as inspo here. Absolutely horrifying stuff.

Anyways here's the palette for this little nightmare!! I had a blast designing this little guy, and no matter what happens I'm honestly really happy I decided to participate. I learned so much designing it! I hope you enjoy C:

[myokk]

💘

[somegrumpynerd]

Alright, colouring book test!

These should both be transparent so you can either print them out or save and open them in your art program of choice, put a layer underneath and colour away! :D

Since the poll was pretty close, I have one with the eye and nose sockets pre-coloured and one with them still blank so you can have your choice. It wasn't that hard to do both so if I make more I'll probably do one of each for variety. Let me know if you come across any problems with them and I'll try and find a way to fix it!

Also I printed it earlier to test and tried colouring it in so I'll put that under the cut lol

[ahollowgrave]

don't worry @idalenn, she brought options!

[commandertartarsmoocher]

This is not an AC/DC reference

Two versions because I think both are neat!

[skullsandcorals]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @apiratefellinlovewithastar 🤭💜💜💜 !!!!

I hope you like it ;)

(click for better quality if you're on the mobile app. do not repost.)

[avirtualdrive]

Lower one's eyes (x)

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[sunshine-and-her-ikevil-stuff]

I fear that Alfons's route will be just as emotionally taxing as Elbert's and I'll miss using my tickets in time just like I did in Elbert's route because my brain's had enough emotions and miss finishing the mission board again

[forgetfulmachineart]

Hi! Could I request an autumn themed Megumi? Thank you :)

Hiiii!!!! Yes you can!!!

[ID: A digital drawing of Megumi Fushiguro in an oversized sweater. They have an unimpressed expression and a coffee in a clear plastic cup. In big boxy text behind his head is his name in hiragana and in front is "Jujutsu Fashion" in blue slanted text. Behind, there is an orange leaf texture that gets lighter going upwards. /End ID]

[shokupanko]

It’s Fukase Friday! ⊂((・▽・))⊃