#i just now realized how ungodly inaccessible it is

[rainbowdanganronpaa]

rainbowdanganronpaa is taking a hiatus!

hi! this AU is on hiatus. i shouldve called it that before because it’s technically been on hiatus for about a year or two now.

more info below the cut if u wanna hear me rambling + more detailed info.

i dont like danganronpa. i like the concept of the games but i hate the games, i hate how they represent minorities, and im not too fond of its fandom but thats more-so because fandoms will always have bad sides.

 it de-motivates me from wanting to work on it since the only motivation i have is to work on my HCs for the characters, and i really only like about 10 of them. i hate most of the characters. you can see why i would hate working on a lot of sprites/art for it then.

but it is about something i like, scemo and other alternative culture, and i would like to turn it into something more than sprite edits and occasional art thats not pumped out frequently at all. but im stuck. i dont know what to do with this.

i wish i had motivation to do more sprites or such for it but i dont, i dont know what to do with it, i dont know how to “revive” it i suppose? if anyone reading this who is a fan of this AU please, if you have any ideas let me know. i dont want it to just dissapear, yknow?

i thought about making animations but i do not have the physical strength (nor programming) to animate, especially with my detailed designs, but i did think about making a roblox game about it. --- seems funny but i like roblox and make things in it a lot and it could be used for both practicing and fun, reviving something dead, and giving me something more extensive to work on. writing that out, i will probably do that route eventually...

anyway. to anyone whos stuck around this long, thank you. even though i dont work on this AU as much as i used to, seeing its small community when it was thriving really made me happy. im glad i was/am able to make things people relate to and love.

[fuumiku]

Wip. I do want to finish this, i really enjoy doing even digital art of Metal, digital which is usually painstaking for me to do, and I’ve got sooo many angst art pieces of him in the works lol

But this is vent art. And I’m thinking it can be a nice opportunity to give an update on myself? And have a talk about flowergore, machines, sketches and disability, because I’m in that kinda mood

I didn’t want to put a read more split on this post but it became too long to comfortably fit on my blog, so alas... Life doesn’t often go as planned, yeah?

Cw for the next paragraph, just skip if these make you uncomfortable, or if you want to go straight to the flowergore & metal convo: discussion of chronic illness & disability, with references to disordered eating. I’ve been diagnosed a bit less than a month ago with a chronic autoimmune disease that has been severely impacting my life for a long time without my knowledge: coeliac disease. Basically, my intestines see gluten as something to defend the body against, and that not only causes painful indigestions but also damages the intestines over time, so much so that the body starts having trouble digesting other things and getting nutrients from food. This has caused chronic pain, a miriad of ungodly symptoms like hair loss and skin rash, but honestly, more impacting? Chronic fatigue. I cannot express just how much psychological and emotional damage it has done to me, to have that decline of energy come in waves, but also steadily going down over years right up to now, where I spend most my days laying in bed, where sitting up in bed and booting up my computer is a “good day”, where I’m either sleepy, exhausted, bored out of my mind or frustrated that I can’t just be making the creative content I want to do. The self-esteem utter destruction, having to work through with myself that it’s okay to be idle and abandon all ambitions, to prioritize physical survival and keeping the will to live even as you stop eating to protect yourself from pain, struggle to keep up with your daily schedule and even thinking takes so much energy. My ipad, my accessibility tool that allows me to do something even as I can’t do anything irl, has become super old and dysfunctional. It gets overwhelmed easily and works slowly, closes randomly, corrupts art files and loads apps uncorrectly. Doing anything with it is either incredibly frustrating, time-consuming and difficult, or straight up impossible or a risk to lose work. I have a Metal Sonic artwork I’ve lost and redone twice, I’m currently taking a break from redoing it a third time. It’s been rough. But tbh, in another way, I relate to it? Massive brainfog energy, lmao. When I have to remind myself that machines are faillible too, I end up humanizing it and validate its struggles, even tho it isn’t alive and it just malfunctions because it is what it is. It has taught me patience and the ability to build back up work that I have lost. But hey, there ain’t no reason to add another layer of inaccessibility to my pile, and I ordered a replacement for it just today! I’ll be so much more productive and happy with material that works smoothly and allows for more. But anyways, back to flowergore.

Flowergore is vividly poetic, but I only realized why it has always appealed to me as a comfort/vent and cathartic aesthetic while drawing this: There’s an innate stillness and loss of control to flowergore. Pretty, but tragic. Illness stops being an evil, and becomes a simple product of life that does its thing regardless of the will of the soil it grows in. You have to tend to the plants, whether you trim them to get them under control or must care after them to coexist.  No matter if you find the flowers pretty or not, it doesn’t change anything. The flowers aren’t an innate good nor a moral wrong, they don’t even have an opinion about growing on you. They don’t care, they can’t, they’re just flowers. And yet there’s something so comforting about it, something that can be sad but that can just be peaceful, too. It’s about living through the effects, and dealing with the weeds as they come and go. Resigning yourself, or the process of getting there. It’s about acceptance, and compromise. I think flowergore has innate ties with disability and illness that can’t be denied, nor broken honestly, when you think about it. I also think it can represent/relate with dysmorphia a lot, bodily or otherwise. In my case, I have various skin and sensory issues that give me dysmorphia, and an otherwise “I hate my body and my body hates me” feeling.  The stillness of flowergore often resonates as fatigue, sadness or anguish. It personifies the illness in a way that you can better reflect on your relationship with it, and your relationship with your body & yourself, in a way that allows you to better vent about them. It’s very healing.

These sort of things are the kind of thing that sometimes, you kind of have to personify to distance it from your identity and properly cope with them, you know? Or it’ll just consume you. Even way before I developed my disease, or was regularly fatigued, I loved flowergore, and I think it’s just... A really nice way to frame things weighing you down, that you just kinda have to deal with and process through. Even vague or “normal”/”light” things, like fatigue or negative thoughts, feelings or insecurities.

And don’t get me STARTED on the metaphors and feelings of plants sprouting from an inorganic machine. It’s the classic “sprout growing from a crack in concrete” dystopia trope, except with a negative punchline hah. I’ve always loved to humanize the dehumanized: robots, antagonists and otherwise. I love having characters that feel like they’re on a high pedestral of innate difference and superiority away from others, but that makes them unreachable by default, deeply lonely and misunderstood for it, wether they’re truly an exceptional being or not. I love characters thinking that they’re above physical or emotional weakness getting a slap in the face and having to acknowledge their vulnerability and neglected/suppressed needs head on. I love the delusional, emotionally repressed with anger issues robot having a moment of clarity where he allows himself to be honest to himself for a bit, and resigns himself to the pain of his past and future, before returning to their regular schedule or self-destruction, or not. Ignoring is often the only option you can manage to choose when you don’t have the strenght to make a change or admit to something you didn’t want to about yourself, but ignoring is a lot harder when the proof grows ever bigger and more out of control everywhere on your body. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t grow on you, impossible. But it does. So what are you going to do about it?

I think I finally get the appeal of hanahaki stuff too. I never understood before, but now I can see it in that same vein. Unreciprocated love causes flowers to sprout wildly, causing, at best, only body horror and/or wounds, when weeding them out or otherwise, and at worst proves to be fatal, most often by suffocating. Except that instead of illness or things like that, the thing you experience a lack of control over and feel some sort of detached destructive blame or resentment for is feelings. Feelings of love, like falling deeply in love, without your own consent, and the pain that being unloved brings. Your love, like a damaging parasitic disease.

Yeah, this isn’t gonna be my last flowergore content.

I didn’t end up talking about sketches, I don’t have the energy to and I don’t think it fits in with the rest anyway, but basically? It’s been an healing journey to allow simple, unclean sketches to be “enough”. To not be shameful, to represent progress and be pretty in their own right and a valid art format. And so, with all of this, I post my messiest sketch on social media to date. One of my very rare public wips. Freedom, baby. You get what you get, and that’s fine. Low standards art is part of my disability recovery arc ✨

[azumasoroshi]

i am in a storytelling mood and you all will now be forced to listen to it

So back in sophomore year, I had this final project for the end of the year. We had to make a book trailer with a partner, and our book was Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay. It's about this high schooler who goes to the Philippines to investigate why his cousin died.

Our school was not an art school; it was just a regular public high school, and so we were not expected to draw the whole thing. We were expected to find some videos, or film ourselves acting stuff out, or use Ken Burns effects on stock images in iMovie. My partner certainly thought that using stock images would be a good idea, and she legitimately saw no problem with the original "final product" of our iMovie low budget shitty production.

However, my dumbass was excited, because I liked animating and the plot of the book allowed for some very interesting imagery. I had ideas, oh so many ideas.

I was a fool.

Because the one fatal thing my dumbass forgot to take into consideration was that I was, and still am, a serial procrastinator.

(the trailer is below the cut)

So, after getting pretty much nothing done, midnight arrived on the due date. And I was terrified, but in that "eh it doesn't really matter" kind of terrified way because I was an emotionless husk and couldn't feel any emotions other than “welp”.

I had maybe 10 seconds done of what was roughly supposed to be a 1 minute and 30 second long video.

My English class started at 10:05.

“Well you had 10 hours, Soro-“ NO I DIDNT

because i had to LEAVE for school at 6:30 and i had chemistry, java, and health between 7:30 and 10:00 so i couldn’t do any of my work during those periods.

So I had about 6 hours to make an entire book trailer. Whoop.

I started off well enough with the Gising Na Ph! posts. Except I didn’t start off well at all and I spent at least two of my six hours trying to figure out how hands worked before finally letting go of any honor I had left in my being and just tracing stock images.

Now, my partner had gotten a few good images on her version of the movie, which she’d graciously sent to me so that I could scrap most of it. And I wasn’t intending to use any of them in the slightest, but by this point it was about 2 am, and I figured I should hustle a little bit. I was planning to import her iMovie into my iMovie and take the photos from there. Easy enough, right?

NO

The file got corrupted somehow and I had to reverse image search every single image that I wanted to use by screenshotting them from the movie rather than having the photos themselves. And for some inexplicable reason, I wanted to try to resemble my partner’s movie as closely as possible, which meant using the same photos. Could I have just found different stock photos? Yes. Was I in my right mind at the time? No. Did I even consider trying to find different photos? Not until 5 am.

Now, along with the movie being corrupted, that also meant that my partner’s recorded voice lines were inaccessible to me. That meant I had to record my own. At 5 am.

I have several friends who are very talented voice actors. They live in Britain, so it wasn’t too early for them. They’d already expressed that they were willing to help two weeks prior, back when I thought I wasn’t going to procrastinate. Should I have asked them? Hell fucking yes. Did I? Well, I just so happened to ask the only one of them that wasn’t awake at the time. Luck and reason are on my side, clearly.

5:30 am, I realized that my friend probably wasn’t going to answer on time. And it just so happened that one of my irl friends had woken up, for some ungodly reason like sleeping on time or something. I quite literally begged him to record two voice lines for me, and lo and behold, he actually did it. He sounded deader on the inside than me, but his character just so happened to require being dead inside, so that ended up working out. He recorded the voice lines on Notability. That was pretty funny.

(around 6 am my british friend saw my message and he was like oh shit whoops ill do it now and i had to awkwardly explain to him that i found a replacement. that wasnt a fun conversation to have at 6 am)

6:30 am I was in the car. The movie was almost done; I just needed one final image of Jun and Jay together, and I wasn’t going to find that on Google Images. I drew it during health class. My teacher definitely noticed and was probably pissed.

10:00 am. I actually went into the bathroom stalls during the 5 minute transition period between classes, pulled out my headphones, and listened to the whole thing just to check it over. (I’m overly paranoid about how loud my voice is in recordings due to a certain incident that won’t be explained in this post) It sounded fine. Everything was fine. It was all good.

10:05 am, English started. A few other groups went before me. I was ready to present. I had the movie open on my iPad, and I was resigned to my fate. I tried my hardest, somehow. That was enough. My partner hadn’t gotten to check over my movie at all, so she had no idea what was about to happen. That was fine.

11:00 am. Class...ended?

waiit shit that isn’t right. i spent all night working on that movie trailer and i didnt get to present it???

WELL, as it turns out, my AirPlay wasn’t working or something and the method of sharing to Google Drive was apparently too time-consuming, so I had to present the next day. A whole nother 24 hours, just handed to me like that. I could do anything I wanted with the movie in that period of time.

What the fuck.

“So you definitely removed the stock photos and made your movie even better in that time, right, Soro?” oh FUCK no dude i got home at 3, yelled to my friends for an hour about how mad I was, and then fell asleep at 4 pm and didn’t wake up until 6:00 am.

I presented this movie the next day.

I got an A+.