#i stopped doing my homework for this

[tizzymcwizzy]

can you tell the brain rot is coming back

[habken]

wip :D

[wrenhavenriver]

I'll be your mirror. What do you want to know?

[gatoburr0]

Oh no he’s fuzzy

[beebox-illustrations]

A rather short comic today, but enjoy ! 🌻🐝

[giantenemyrobot]

Wip !?

There's more dialogue before this chunk that I want to add stuff to, but idk when I'll get to that

The audio is from the Bluecoats 2023 show Riffs and Revelations

Fav frames, I think I did really well on their sad sad wet cat faces

[frankensteinposm0]

Lil bro got stuck in my head and doesn't want to get out of there

[amelia-yap]

Thanks for the Fruit Bats Whiterose, I'm going to make it my entire personality

no problem! they go on tiny adventures trying different fruits together

[noritaro]

got a ton of TFA specific Bishoujo requests so alas

[amygdalae]

mashing the visual hallmarks of sublime romanticism and surrealism together like im making two very different types of toys kiss

[ihavesomejays]

quick shapey sunday thing i painted to procrastinate on my drawing assignment

detail shot under keep reading

[blackbatcass]

the thing about dickroy is it’s at this delicious little cross section where roy harper loves dick grayson so much his chest is going to explode one of these days AND ALSO is physically incapable of taking any of dick’s bullshit.

[meirimerens]

sprouted fully formed in my brain the idea of a fic exclusively centered on the pathologic Cathedral that would be structured like an artwork commentary with its introduction, plastic analysis, technical analysis, functional analysis, iconographic analysis, recontextualization, commentary & conclusion but it gets weirder as the text goes on.

[twinstxrs]

in light of recent canon academic conversations, riz adaine gorgug study sessions have never been more real to me. gorgug helps riz + adaine get out of their own heads when they’re overworking themselves, riz + adaine help gorgug with alternative studying methods because he learns best through visuals + experience. fabian’s there occasionally when he has a particularly difficult assignment/test but he makes them all swear never to speak of it in order to protect his “image.” kristen has shown up exactly twice: once for advice on a group project that was two months overdue & once to just lay on the floor and relax for an hour before leaving. fig didn’t know the study sessions were happening until sophomore year & now keeps getting monthly bans because every time she shows up she ends up accidentally distracting riz + adaine. also, sometimes after/in the middle of really long study sessions riz adaine & gorgug go to basrar’s together to unwind but fabian kristen & fig Are Not Invited (they do still text to ask if anyone wants something brought back from basrar’s. they’re not heartless, after all).

[atticollateral]

having adhd makes me want to scream because i am so full of ideas but they're ALL DIFFERENT IDEAS!!!! do you understand how hard it is being the adhd king that i am, the embodiment of jack of all trades master of none, do you understand-- I am suffering at the hands of this bastard known as mySELF. I fucking hate it here. If time could slow down a little and give me some breathing room? I'd be golden.

[the-grey-hunt]

last year i talked somewhat about jonathan harker in the role of the gothic heroine, which seemed to go over well! this year i've decided to challenge myself to delve a little deeper and keep my literary analysis skills sharp (trying to keep away from anything revealed later than today's entry, for the new readers)

for context in the literary background i'm examining here, the female gothic (a term coined I believe in the 70s) is a lens of analysis for gothic literature which examines the role of women as expression of contemporary anxieties around women and their roles in society, particularly as mothers and wives. like many kinds of horror, political and social anxieties are deployed as supernatural forces with which to terrify the "ordinary" citizens.

jonathan, our ordinary man, is certainly faced with horrors—but in what way? sent by an older man, Peter Hawkins, jonathan enters a foreign landscape where he enters into the power of another older man, at a particularly vulnerable time where a loved one (Mina) is waiting at home but jonathan does not appear to be married. the horrors that jonathan faces are the same trials set up against gothic heroines: threatening older men with power over you, poised at a huge point of transition in your life, etc, etc.

the main argument against jonathan as a heroine is, I think, his job. His transition point right now isn't an impending marriage or that he needs one, but that he's just established himself as a solicitor and is meeting with Dracula for business purposes. however, I think how these are deployed as tools in the story, such as Hawkins almost transferring guardianship of his young employee/ward to Dracula (temporarily), still very much mirror the ways in which high-class social norms are deployed against gothic women. even the work jonathan does in the castle (talking to dracula about real estate) isn't in service of bolstering his manly prowess, but serves as a tool for dracula to distract him, and keep him from realizing that he is trapped and serving dracula's own will.

rather than being tried in a manly fashion by his strength or his wits being challenged, jonathan's gothic experience is of his environment and even his body being manipulated by the man meant to be a helping hand in a foreign land. when I say body people might think it's a little early for that, but it's happening—dracula keeps jonathan up late so he sleeps in, forcing him to acclimate to dracula's own nocturnal existence. when he gets a glimpse of blood, he attempts to take it from jonathan. even today, a few hundred years after dracula's social anxieties about women's bodies being trespassed upon by men other than the ones entitled to them, women may see echoes of their own anxieties about bodily autonomy.

Dracula also isolates jonathan socially. He makes jonathan mistrust his own ability to percieve reality (gaslighting, anyone, a story about a woman being manipulated by her husband?) by pretending that servants are in charge of the cooking and so on, when really it's just dracula keeping up a masquerade.

this comes to a head in the mirror scene, where jonathan's shaving mirror—an item he uses to attend to his appearance—ends up being a helpful tool which exposes the supernatural reality of what jonathan's up against. however, because dracula is still the one in power, he immediately gets rid of it, calling it "vanity". I recall the quote by John Berger:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

the ways in which jonathan is treated by dracula, and the ways in which he attempts to bolster himself against the threat (spying to see what dracula's really doing, seeing the lack of reflection by chance) mirror the highly gendered dynamics of the Victorian era which this book was written in the tail end of. perhaps purposefully subverting jonathan's gender as a further expression of the horror of dracula, stoker's work takes jonathan as a man secure in his position at home in england to being a manipulated, isolated, and precariously positioned figure subject to the whims of an abusive man while friendless in a foreign country

(and the essay on how race, ethnicity, and foreign versus home plays into this is a whole other post! racism effects gender too! it's not a mistake that jonathan is securely male at home but his gender is subverted abroad!)