#i should draw older nimona too

[walrus150915]

HEY HEY HEY

Do you guys remember this post? With the Goldenheart fankid?

Remember how I talked about Bal and Ambrosius as parents??

Well, here's basically what I think they'd look like in their deep 40s, early 50s even. Kid, no kid: doesn't matter - that's old men yaoi for ya!!!

Should I... Like... Elaborate on the design choices?😭😭

Let's start off with Bal, shall we?

- I made him as hot as I could

- GLASSES BC he's an aging man let him live guys...

- beard bc I think he's grow one out eventually

- a golden earring to pay respects to Blackheart

- some cool tools to accentuate his job

- I feel like Bal is a type of guy to have a lot of body hair for some reason so uhhh I couldn't resist okay😁

- little scars on his fingers bc his job has a lot to do with creating mechanical stuff

- grey long shirt inspired by the city fashion of townsfolk in Nimona

Now, to Ambrosius

- he's kinda younger-looking since I think he still dyes his hair (doesn't bleach - dyes) his natural color and uses make-up to cover wrinkles bc he's kinda afraid of aging

(he doesn't mind Ballister aging like fine wine tho👀)

- my man's growing out his hair!!

- lavender on the ends since I think he's be a type of an adult (dad too in that sense???) who tries to understand youth's culture and stuff. Also bc lavender is the gayest color and it'd suit him so well

- a silly moustache bc I wanted to make him more dad-ish if it makes sense

- an ugly white polo shirt since HE HAS NO FASHION SENSE I'M SORRY😭😭 HAVE YOU SEEN HIS HOODIE???? BOY-

- yeah his and Bal's rings match bc silver for Bal&golden for Ambrosius except they're switched to show that they belong to each other blah-blah-blah all that romantic stuff

Them as dads would be such a chaotic duo tbh😭😭 neither of these mfs had permanent good parental figures who didn't die (in Bal's case) or weren't using them (in Ambrosius's case) and they have NO IDEA what they're doing

I know for the fact that Aquila's classmates would be head-over-heels for Ballister. HAVE YOU SEEN HIM. GOD. DAYHM

Ambrosius oh so agrees

Some memes ig- I refuse to elaborate on them

Gn!! Lemme know what you think of these designs jzjsjsjsjsja-

[mc-tummy-blur]

Wait wait wait Nimona was trying to build a connection with Gloreth after being rejected by animals and Gloreth was accepting of her despite being a shape-shifter but Nimona was seen as a monster by the village which then made Gloreth switch her opinions because her parents and the village told her that Nimona was a monster and tried to kill her then 1000 years later Ballister ended up building a connection with Ambrosius a descendant of Golreth and after being rejected by the knights throughout his whole life basically since training started young Ambrosius was accepting of him despite being a commoner but then he was seen as a murderer by the town which had made Ambrosius changed his opinion on him because of what he had seen and what the knights/Director were telling him but unlike Gloreth who while was reluctant at first to treat Nimona as a monster but then gave into hating her and wanting her to die like the people around her did Ambrosius had been reluctant throughout the whole ordeal but in the end stayed committed to Ballister because he loved him despite what everyone else was saying about him and its like the movie was already drawing parallels to how Ballister and Nimona were the same and viewed as outcasts/monsters/murderers but there's notable parallels to Gloreth and Ambrosius in how they were people close to Nimona and Ballister and it came to a point where they had to go against them but the key difference in what happened was the side they chose and the aftermath when they were being forced to chose a side and it really showcases how their generations were different thus their mindsets were different in handling the situation and its just exactly like in real life when it comes to queer people like people especially children can be conditioned to hate queer people with enough fear mongering/hate speech and that's exactly what happened with Gloreth in how she ended up treating Nimona and it was going to happen with Ambrosius but a saving grace was that he was much older so it was harder to change his opinions on Ballister that and he is in a different time period than Gloreth showing how things had drastically changed and advanced in many areas and i feel that the whole point with the parallel between Gloreth and Ambrosius is that times have changed and how even though our past generations have treated queer people like they are monsters and that we should hate them when in reality its not too late for our generation to treat them like equals and that we should love them like holy shit this movie is so insanely and unapologetically queer in so many ways that I did not imagine was humanly possible

[pea-green]

August’s books! Prime Suspect by Lynda La Plante, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg, Nimona by Noelle Stevenson and How to be Both by Ali Smith. 

I borrowed Prime Suspect from a friend I was staying with after I ran out of books, and I never saw the ITV version, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was written in 1991 and I still think of the 90′s as being a couple of years ago but holy shit we’ve come a long way - it feels like The Fall (specifically Stella Gibson’s refusal to ‘divide the girls into virgins and vamps, angels or whores’) was written as an antidote to the attitudes that everyone including the protagonist Jane Tennyson has towards the female victims. The plot’s more of a procedural than a whodunnit, and the story’s interesting enough even though all the characters but Jane (and sometimes including Jane) are utterly unbearable. It’s not gay at all except that a) Helen Mirren, when asked recently about what she thinks Jane’s doing these days, said she’d have gone gay and would be living with a very attractive partner, and b) I read this on the train and for a few stops around Doncaster I sat opposite a girl who was also reading it and we had a ~moment (your NHS nametag said Sophie and you were cute).

The Passion is set (mostly) in Venice, a treat because Winterson’s writing is beautiful, and her descriptions of what her character calls the city of mazes and madmen were so perfect I took half a dozen pictures of my favourite passages:

It rains too, mournfully and quietly, and the boatmen sit under sodden rags and stare helplessly into the canals. On an afternoon when the Casino didn’t want me and I didn’t want myself, I went to Florian’s to drink and gaze at the square. It’s a fulfilling pastime.

The book is split into 4 sections which initially seem unrelated, but the characters and events converge, and the two protagonists are sympathetic and well-developed. Although Villanelle is bisexual and has a relationship with her married neighbour, same-sex romance is a theme rather than the subject of the novel. Also despite the beautiful writing, some of the subject matter is truly awful, and some passages could have been taken straight from Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is part art history, part family biography. The author comes into possession of a collection of Japanese netsuke and goes on a journey to find as much of their history as he can. My friend lent me this because I loved the nesuke on display at the British Museum but I’m a huge philistine who knows nothing at all about art (I literally liked them because they were cuuute) and have enough of a chip on my shoulder to resent everyone upper-middle-class or above by default. It took a few chapters to overcome my distaste for de Waal’s ability to to just decide to spend a few months travelling the world investigating his family history for funsies, but by the time I hit the segment where it’s WWII and his family is ripped apart by Nazi Germany I took it all back. The times and places jump around a little, but the book took me from knowing actually nothing about art, to knowing one or two things, so I’ll be presenting thinkpieces on BBC4 in no time.

The back of my copy of Pages for You describes the novel as “the story of the beginning, blossoming and falling apart of [a] delirious love affair”, so when I talk about how they break up in the end you can’t shout at me that it’s a spoiler because it’s right there on the cover. Nominally a student/teacher romance, but less creepy because it’s a university student/her TA so everyone’s an adult, Pages for You was first published in 2001, but has been rereleased this year to accompany the publication of its sequel, Pages for Her. I was put off reading this before because I’d been warned about the purple prose, and while it wasn’t as bad as expected, it is pretty florid in parts. Unusually for a YA book (especially one written 16 years ago), there’s little hand-wringing from protagonist Flannery about her same-sex escapades, but although the term lesbian is thrown around to describe their relationship, the word bisexual is conspicuously absent, especially since (having read the synopsis for the sequel) it’s actually the label that applies to both women. The beginning of the book is sweet; Flannery’s hopeless crush on a beautiful older woman gradually becoming less hopeless is gratuitous wish fulfillment and I Love It, but the relationship breakdown at the end was by far the best part.

Nimona is a comic based on the webcomic of the same name by Noelle Stevenson, co-author of Lumberjanes (ps. you should read Lumberjanes). I can’t find the tweet, but I’m 90% sure Stevenson tweeted before that people should “assume all my characters are gay unless otherwise stated” which is a great starting point for any story. Nimona is the co-protagonist, a twenty-something shapeshifter who announces herself to be the new sidekick to supervillian Lord Blackheart as they try and take down the oppressive and mysterious Institution. Stevenson’s art style is adorable and draws you into the tale of dragons and knights and good vs evil before turning the story on its head and making you realise that you care about the characters much more than you’d expected to.

How to Be Both won a ton of awards when it was published, and I’ve never read anything by Ali Smith before, so I figured it’d be a good one to start with (also the title sounded promisingly bisexual). I lent it to my mum who couldn’t get into it because it was ‘too postmodern’ which is a good description; it flicks suddenly between a time before and after the death of the protagonist’s mother, speech marks are eschewed entirely, and the final third of the book is (as far as I could tell) an entirely different story. There’s three full pages at the start of my copy of undiluted praise for the bold creative choices and innovation, so I think the problem is probably my traditional sensibilities (/me being kind of dumb??), but while I enjoyed the story of adolescent love and loss, the weird stuff didn’t really add anything for me. But there is both an incredibly sweet and real romantic friendship between the protagonist and her female best friend, and a strange relationship between the protagonist’s mother and another woman so there is actual wlw content! If anyone has recs for other Ali Smith books please let me know :)

[northwestquest]

The Secret Loves of Geek Girls

Hop on.

The alluring title refers to an excellent anthology by editor Hope Nicholson as well as describing our own daily lives. (Maybe it should be the “Not So Secret Loves…..”) Like the contributors to this 2016 Dark Horse release, Debbie and I love games, comics, SciFi shows like The Expanse and Star Trek, novels with swords, sorcery, and spaceships, and 20-sided dice.

(Guilty as charged.)

We’re proud to have been one of the 3,640 Kickstarter backers to this anthology. The book covers heartbreak, secret crushes, obsessions, and the ways that the world of geekdom can comfort us in dark times. The book has a good balance of text stories and comics and a nice range of voices: older women, women of color, LGBTQIA, and several emerging writers and illustrators.

The book offers a stunning breadth of work from the likes of Margaret Atwood, Sam Maggs, Roberta Gregory, Soraya Roberts, and Meags Fitzgerald (plus an additional dozen or so magnificent contributors) all in one slick volume.

The stories that resonated with me were the ones about growing up geeky. Like Cherelle Higgins, I first read Lord of the Rings in middle school, but I was lucky enough to keep my copy of the book intact. I also felt right at home in Laura Neubert’s comic about Jane Eyre. But there are many more pieces to the collection, covering a range of topics, including game criticism, essays on romance programming in games like Mass Effect, and one about finding mentors by Soraya Roberts that is all too familiar to too many women.

Collections like this one help to break the stereotype that women don’t play games, devour fantasy and science fiction novels, and read/write/draw/celebrate the wonderful, wild world of geekdom. We have always been out there - out here - playing Gears of War and D&D and Arkham Horror. Reading and writing GameLit, FanFiction, Steampunk, and SciFi. Creating comics like The Underfoot and Nimona. Making albums, podcasts, zines, art installations, ARGs, and interactive fiction that all say “Geek girls unite!” -Beth

Image courtesy: Nerd Alert. Credit: Pixabay User: succo.