#i want to get better at facial expression & give characters more distinct facial features | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

proudfreakmetarusonikku · 3 years ago

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@sajdd

Ok since one singular person asked for this the Big Explanation for Everything In My C!Tommy Design.

General:

c!Tommy, in general, I always try and find a balance between my really soft style and c!Tommy's rougher personality. I draw him with soft features but very sharp eyes, both to make his facial features distinct from cc!Tommy and a contrast to c!Tubbo who I draw with less rounded features but much softer eyes. I try and keep his usual expressions slightly smug and self-assured, to get across c!Tommy's bravado.

I generally draw him with tanned skin, as I imagine he’d spend a lot of time outdoors. This does vary on the arc I’m drawing him in, though, for example he’s much less tan in Pogtopia because he has less access to natural light whereas he’s more tan in exile due to not having much shelter from the sun. This is also done to make the pale scar on his nose bridge more noticeable- it’s one of the two scars I draw Tommy as having from the beginning, as I feel it shows c!Tommy's scrappy, determined personality very well. The other scar is a long jagged vivisection scar which is there to show my labinnit headcanon lol.

While I draw c!Tommy with varying hairstyles and lengths, I always draw him with curly textured hair that’s a very pale blond. I also draw his hair as leaning to one side and partially covering his eye, similar to how I draw c!Wilbur's hair, to show their closeness. I also draw c!Tommy with similar wings to c!Wilbur and c!Philza- specifically, I draw them with the same starry night sky pattern I do with c!Philza, but a lot smaller and atrophied.

I really like putting lots of fun design elements in characters eyes because drawing eyes is fun and c!Tommy is no exception! I draw his eyes a very bright electric blue, and I use a small brush and very light varied colours to make them look like they’re filled with little stars. I also give him red pupils to match his main colour association in either the shape of a full or broken heart depending on the arc. I went with a heart design to show his hidden kindness and loyalty.

There’s also a lot of design elements that are admittedly there primarily because I enjoy drawing them, and less for any specific reason. The fangs do have the most reason, to help show c!Tommy's rougher personality, but I also just like drawing fangs lol. (I also draw him with braces in every arc, since I imagine he couldn’t get them removed in exile and he didn’t have the time to care afterwards). I also draw him with bioluminescent, starlike freckles and a strange blood colour which is also used to help texture the skin (well, slightly, it’s not super noticeable but it’s pink instead of red) which are both just things I like to draw.

Also, this is a small detail, but I always draw c!Tommy with a Church Prime necklace (unless I forget it which I do sometimes lol). It’s a good way of showing his faith through a quick look.

Fun fact, what’s probably most noticeable about my c!Tommy design is that as soon as Tommy made the joke about his character being made in a lab I picked it up and ran with it, specifically the idea of him potentially being a clone of c!Philza. I draw them with identical facial features and hair colour/texture, though a lot of the more supernatural features of c!Philza are toned down on him. That’s specifically because due to my hc that c!Philza is an angel and angels as ageless it’d be impossible to clone them exactly so c!Tommy has some random human/hybrid dna thrown in haphazardly (which also makes him a mess of instincts from pretty much every animal ever lol)

Disc War:

I really like the headcanon that c!Tommy was nine during the L'Manburg war entirely because its really funny to imagine c!Wilbur looking at this literal nine year old and being “yes, my right hand man, responsible enough to help manage a nation in my stead,” so c!Tommy is roughly 9ish around this time in my design.

During the early Disc War is probably the only time I actually draw c!Tommy as close to his actual Minecraft skin lmao. It helps show that, despite the fact I don’t hc him as human he is mostly just a normal kid. I don’t draw c!Tommy in the traditional red and white t-shirt entirely just because I want to make sure he’s not mistakable for Dave Strider though. I have him in a white button-up shirt, a red and white hoodie, cargo pants, and trainers.

During this arc, I draw c!Tommy's hair as fairly short and very similar to how I draw c!Wilbur, as this was back when he idolised his brother and I think drawing their hair so similar shows that well.

L'Manburg:

This covers the time from the beginning of the L'Manburg war up to c!Tommy's second exile to Pogtopia, so this design covers a period of years from when I hc c!Tommy was nine up until about thirteen.

During the war, c!Tommy wears his uniform without modification, except for of course wearing his Prime necklace, but afterwards he and the rest of the residents of L'Manburg (except c!Wilbur) slightly modified their uniforms to better fit their own tastes. Specifically, he wears his trainers instead of combat boots, loose trousers instead of shorts, and a slightly shorter and short-sleeved revolutionary jacket, for easier mobility.

During the war, his two canon deaths left him permanent injuries and scars. His death in the final control room, where he broke his leg during his desperate attempt to escape, left that leg permanently weakened (along with being badly scarred) and requiring a leg brace to help him stand and walk properly. The arrow through his skull during his duel with c!Dream left him with a large scar on his temple, covering his brows in crack-like scars which also leave him with frequent migraines.

During the L'Manburg arc, c!Tommy's hair in my design still looks like c!Wilburs as they were still close during this arc.

Pogtopia:

Since Pogtopia apparently lasted two years (which is probably from Cursed Timeline Lore but I love cursed lore it’s hilarious,) c!Tommy would be around 13 to 15 here.

In Pogtopia, I draw c!Tommy as wearing similar clothes to during the Disc War arc, however, I also add on a loose belt holding knives, to show c!Tommy's increased need for self defence along with his fondness for knives lol. I actually don’t do the bandanna design with c!Tommy and c!Tubbo a lot of people do mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with c!Tommy's hoodie. They have an equivalent but it’s later on alas.

As c!Tommy and c!Wilbur get more distant, c!Tommy grows out his hair slightly, and wears it tied in the back in a short ponytail.

Exile:

Oh I have a lot of things to talk about here >:). As a quick note to my messed up timeline, c!Tommy would be 15 here.

During exile, c!Tommy wears the same clothes as he did in Pogtopia initially, though due to lack of care and supplies, they eventually of course fray and rip. He also wears c!Wilbur's old ragged longcoat, even though it barely keeps out the cold, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes weirdly comforting. Over time, he rips up his shirt for bandages to the point he’s not wearing anything under his hoodie. His leg brace breaks and he makes a new one out of branches and leaves. (He could ask c!Dream, but he doesn’t want to be fucking reliant on him, relying on pity handouts like a child, so he won’t.)

Eventually, since c!Dream doesn’t exactly want c!Tommy to get hypothermia and die anticlimactically, he gives c!Tommy one of his capes. This is one of my favourite character design decisions I’ve made lmao. I specifically draw it looking too-big, despite the fact that doesn’t make much sense because they’re the same height, so it looks almost like he’s getting enveloped in c!Dream's green shades, and it also hides c!Tommy's wings which helps reinforce the loss of freedom.

c!Tommy gains… a lot of scars over exile. I mean he was literally hit by an axe multiple times. Specifically they’re primarily around the shoulders or the torso. I also draw him with a Glasgow grin, specifically curved to resemble Dream's mask, along with smaller, self inflicted, scratch and bite marks covering his arms. In addition, due to him barely eating I draw c!Tommy from this point onwards looking very scrawny. This is also where c!Tommy's pupils change from hearts to broken hearts! They never turn back :)

During exile, Tommy's hair grows out a lot, down to just past his shoulders, in a matted mess. c!Dream used to braid it at the back, like how I draw c!Dream's own hair, but it very quickly grew too matted with saltwater, mud, and blood to style :) :) :)

Bedrock Bros:

c!Tommy turns sixteen here during my scuffed timeline.

c!Tommy patches up the rips and tears in his clothes. He can’t fully salvage his cargo trousers, so he turns them into shorts. He makes his own shoes out of leather to replace the ones he lost. There’s a gaping hole in his hoodie pocket that couldn’t be stitched up. He'll patch it up later. c!Techno gives him one of his capes to keep him warm, fur lined and arctic blue with silvery snowflakes embroidered on. c!Tommy has to be reminded, or he puts on the green cape, turned a dull viridian from the sun, that makes him feel both safe and so, so afraid.

Scars heal, but never fully fade. Still, his eyes brighten again, somewhat, even if the bags under his eyes less disappear and more just turn a strange gold. He finally has the time to clean out his hair, and c!Techno ties it into a short, loose braid at the back. With the cape, he almost looks like c!Techno like that. Obviously, the visual implication here is to show that even though it’s obviously not exile, c!Techno is still suppressing c!Tommy's identity, albeit unknowingly (and the gold is from his constant eating of golden apples).

Final Disc War:

By this point, c!Tommy's back to just wearing his old clothes, tattered and frail as they might be. He finds his old sneakers, and day by day he sees himself in the mirror a bit more than the gunpowder on a battered trenchcoat, blood on a smiley face mask, wither rot on the edges of an elaborate snowy cape. He patches the hole in his hoodie with a piece of the fabric from one of c!Tubbo's old shirts. He lends him one of his too-small hoodies so he can do the same.

He still braids his hair, but in his own way, in a tightly woven ratstail braid more for convenience than for aesthetics. Character design wise, it’s another way to show c!Tommy's openly rougher personality than say, c!Dream or c!Techno, and so’s the patchwork clothes and rough shorts and scars. Like I said, maintaining a mix of rough and soft is very important to me in how I draw c!Tommy, and I’m very satisfied with how I pull it off here and in the next entry.

Revival:

the story has handed me the opportunity to make my favourite boy undead. i will not pass up the opportunity to make my favourite boy undead.

After revival, c!Tommy stops aging, at least in appearance. His skin… less pale, more colourless and almost grey. One of his eyes glows a pure, empty white now, like ghosts do, and the white messy streak in his hair doesn’t glow but it’s white enough it might as well.

The injuries of his death bear apparent on his form. His limbs can bend at impossible angles, his entire body covered head to toe in bruises. Two black eyes cover his face like a raccoon mask, and the ugly mottled marks of strangulation on his throat stand out like a sore thumb. You cannot look at him anymore and not see that he hasn’t died. He avoids mirrors again.

There’s stranger things, too, like how he doesn’t bleed anymore, any cuts just revealing an impossibly dark void beneath his marble-cold skin. Sometimes he goes weeks without eating, the hunger only hitting once he realises. He feels so tired, so cold, in a way not even the touch of fire can stem at all. He doesn’t have a heartbeat, or breathe.

Initially, he was too tired, too out of it to even consider cutting off or dying the white streak. When he wasn’t, he’d soon learn any attempts were futile, dye fading in mere days, cut off hair half regrown in a week. It should bother him more, but he just feels numb.

#dream smp #dsmp #c!tommy #tw abuse #tw mutilation #tw scars #tw bruises #tw death #tw child death #tw murder #tw child murder

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katyatalks · 5 years ago

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Mob Psycho 100 - Kameda Yoshimichi’s Character Design Notes

With each blu-ray/DVD volume of MP100 Character Designer Kameda Yoshimichi gives some notes regarding his process designing each character. Here are all his notes for S1 in the order they are presented, regarding; Kageyama Shigeo, Reigen Arataka, Tsubomi, Dimple, Kurata Tome, Mezato Ichi, Hanazawa Teruki, Gouda Musashi, Kageyama Ritsu, Onigawara Tenga, Koyama, Awakening Lab Five, Terada, Matsuo, Sakurai, Ishiguro, Muraki.

KAGEYAMA SHIGEO

With Mob-kun, the first thing I had a bit of trouble with was - do I keep his design as it is in the manga!!??? Should I make him a little prettier!!!!!??? Should I make him taller!!!!??? Those were the kinds of things I thought about. During a meeting, we didn’t reach any conclusion, so I tried out a few things!!!! ONE-san’s recent designs for Mob Psycho 100 have been amazingly good, so I scooped up the taste of those illustrations and applied them to my anime designs. The atmosphere of the manga is lost if you make these characters too beautiful or make them taller, so I made the right choice!!

REIGEN ARATAKA

I feel I didn’t really struggle with Reigen’s anime design!!!! His suit is plain and there’s not many parts to his design, which was a little upsetting, but in terms of his character there’s no need to decorate him, so I thought that simple is fine. More than anything he pulls plenty of funny faces, so even if his design is simple he stands out as a character, so I think leaving his design as it is in the manga was the correct decision. In the manga, his tie is black, but here, to give a little extra to his design, his tie is pink - that’s a feature of the anime!!!!! Also, Something I particularly fussed over in the anime was the way he stands, with his hips cocked!!!! That’s the anime’s Reigen!!!!!

TSUBOMI

Fans of Mob Psycho 100 probably went, “Who the hell is this”, huh. (Laughs). A discussion was had in which I said I wanted to make her more heroine-like and sparkly - in the manga, she gives off the impression that she turns a lot of heads and puts on airs, but for the anime I thought it’d be good to make her into a more traditionally coded heroine!!!!!! From a directorial perspective I wanted to give her a country-girl-kinda look, so I gave her a hairpin. Regarding the colour of her hair and eyes, there was a lot of trial and error…... well, I think the way she is now is the most heroine-ish, isn’t it!!!!! She’s voiced by Satake-san, too, which is something symbolic!!!!!

DIMPLE

Dimple is a character that I had a good amount of trouble figuring out how to deal with design-wise - I’ll contrast him with Mob-kun, give him a flashy colour, then should I make him luminescent?? Have him slowly sway as he floats?? You could say Dimple’s facial expressions are the greatest in Mob Psycho 100, so I tried to draw as many variations in Dimple’s reference sheet as possible. Drawing expressions for this work was really fun! When I draw, I’m aware that I give distinct facial features!!! Well, not that distinct, but (laughs). Also, Ootsuka-san lending his nice, low voice to a character like Dimple gave the character depth, in a way that makes him quite profound. That’s the power of voice acting… but it made me a little worried, as I thought, I have to make sure the art lives up to his performance!!!!

KURATA TOME

Tome-san is a character that’s truly perfect as she is in the manga, so I tried to not ruin that! She has THE Mob Psycho face!!!! When I was choosing the colours for the school uniform, my decision was made based on how the colours suited her, Mezato and Tsubomi, but the bright blue in the uniform for some reason or another doesn’t suit Tome-san (laughs). The colour is lost a little on Tome-san. I thought Tome-san was quite a gloomy character, but her voice actress, Tanezaki-san, performs her in such a funny way that I ended up loving her! I think, out of all the characters, my view on her changed the most! “Tome Psycho 100” wouldn’t be a farfetched anime idea.

MEZATO ICHI

I drew Mezato with the intention of making her the heroine!!! When drawing character sheets I draw any particular trait the character may have and then pose them and see what I think - the moment I drew her standing with her camera, I fell in love!! (Laughs). The round head she has due to the silhouette of her short bob - I love that!!!! Her caramel coloured hair also stands out in her design!! She’s fresh!! And her eyes are big and round!! In terms of what makes up her design she’s not too different to Tome-san, but I really felt a girlishness in Mezato!!!! My heart is racing!!! But she never appears!!! Director, please include her more!!!!!!!! Let’s make “Mezato Psycho 100”!!!

HANAZAWA TERUKI

[Written in Osakan dialect that gets more intense as it goes on]

Teru-kun is a character whose appearance changes a lot - I designed 6 variations of his hair and clothes!!!!! That’s way too many!!!!! I don’t know if the number has significance but we see him in his 150% form the most, so I’ve gotten used to seeing him like that!!!! It makes me laugh so much! I wasn’t satisfied - I made his hair extend so far that you can’t even see the top of it usually! In the anime you could say his hair is at 200%!! I can’t decide between the version of him we first see, his bobbed hair version or his short hair version. How can I!!!!! Let’s bring back his 150% hair!!!!!!! Wow, I’ve gone full Osaka dialect here. The colour of his sweater was decided to my taste. Director’s sole judgement was that it’s cute and resembles pyjamas.

GOUDA MUSASHI

As you’d expect, I really fussed over President Gouda of the Body Improvement Club as he’s a popular character!! His characteristics are his caterpillar-like sideburns and eyebrows, his soft mohican hair, and his brawny body. He’s unexpectedly hard to draw (laughs), I suppose I had trouble with him. Above all else The Body Improvement Club’s existence gives a sense of security within Mob Psycho 100 - they’re strong and brave, but it was pretty difficult trying to make sure their facial expressions weren’t too intense!!!!! Kumagawa, Sagawa, Yamamura, Shimura… these are characters who I’d love to delve deeper into!!

KAGEYAMA RITSU

I tried to make Ritsu-kun have more of an adult-like aura than Mob. He barely smiles, so he has an intense look in his eyes. I kept in mind that his eyes are only allowed to become soft when he’s with Mob. His irises are bigger than Mob’s own, so there’s a bit of a difference there. Also, he gets a mid-anime gloom story, so I decided to make his hair a little bit on the longer side. His hair is flexible - I’d make his bangs/fringe longer or shorter depending on his expression. When he’s possessed by Dimple he’s magnificent, using his powers as a weapon. His eyes become even more intense, his hair gets all ruffled up and spiky, and he’s overflowing with confidence. ONE-sensei’s manga have all become like that, too, actually!!!!! Ahahahaha!!!!!!!!

ONIGAWARA TENGA

With Onigawara and his three lackeys, I gave them baggy pants to try and up their rural-delinquent-trashiness factor. Onigawara’s anime features are his baggy pants and the tape he has on his cheek. It gives off the impression that he’s some king of the punks who’s always getting injured… but truth is, it’s probably just there to cover up a pimple (laughs). He’s in a situation where he’s bettering himself after the recorder incident, so perhaps the next time we see him he’ll have given up on those baggy pants and will wear the same clothes as everyone else!!!!!! Switching topics, what’s up with those two wrinkles he has under each eye?? Please enlighten us, ONE-sensei!!!!!!

KOYAMA

You know, since Mob and Reigen use flip phones I thought that was the standard for the Mob Psycho 100 universe, but then we have Koyama with his smartphone. Sakurai uses a flip phone, too. So, only Koyama has a smart phone? What videos does he watch on it? Which apps does he have installed… it’s a mystery… a mystery!!!! Please enlighten us, ONE-sensei!!!! Switching topics, I’m pleased with the unique aura that his special move, Telekinetic Helix, has. Mob, Teru, Ritsu, Claw… everyone has their own particular colours!!

AWAKENING LAB

Hoshino-kun, Asahi-kun, Kurosaki-san, and the Shiratori brothers all have a sense of individuality, so I suppose it was easy to visualise what colours they might have!! For Hoshino-kun, the process was; Hoshino [star field] -> hoshi [star] -> star -> Nishikino Akira [A Japanese celebrity with a song titled ‘Passionate Star Disco’] -> white!! I thought, his clothes definitely have to be white (laughs). Kurosaki-san’s clothes are sporty but not particularly fashionable, Asahi-kun was designed with a ‘you’re almost there’ feeling, and the silent Shiratori brothers have plain clothes… it was with that that I decided the colours of these five, having them all be out of fashion. Episode 10 had Oda-san as its animation director - he drew a very good and cute Kurosaki-san!

TERADA

What stands out with Terada’s design is his T-shirt that droops below his left shoulder - is it a fashion statement, or is it simply worn out of shape? Who knows!! As something special to the anime, his middle fingers that present his special move, “air whip”, are adorned with jewelled rings! I’ll leave it up to you all to decide whether or not those rings have some hidden secret to them. Out of all the upper echelon members of Claw, Terada has the richest facial expressions - plus, he’s voiced by Tachiki-san - so even when he’s undergoing water torture, despite the cruelty of the situation, he still comes across as good and charming!!!!!

MATSUO

Matsuo is monotone-ish in the manga, but, “I could give him a magician-ish feel?”. So now he has a dark green shirt with yellow lines. The vase he carries has a bunch of colourful stickers on it, so I tried to make sure Matsuo himself wasn’t too flashy or he and his vase would clash!! Candy-chan and Cookie-chan were also fun to draw!!!! Their colours are also good!!!!

SAKURAI

This simple, undecorated design is rather like him. I tried to make sure it didn’t look like he was wearing mourning clothes. I included red in the handle of his katana. I intended for his hair colour to be a natural, slightly dark brown… but looking at him on TV, it ended up being more of an unexpectedly lighter brown… Not my intention, lol. His slicked back hair was pretty hard to draw!!! The atmosphere of his design changes depending on how much of a forehead he’s given, the silhouette of his slicked back hair, and the application of highlights. Ah, this is unrelated, but me and his voice actor, Hosoya-san, are from the same area! We’re also similar in age, so I kinda feel an affinity toward him!!!!! You didn’t need to know that.

ISHIGURO

First off, I already knew that in the manga there’s an old man beneath that mask, so I gave him a hunched back! Following a request by the Director I made his boots plump, round, and cute!!!! With that, the woman’s voice that comes out of him with the mask on suits him!! You can really feel how cornered Ishiguro is during the season 1 finale, thanks to the power of his voice actor and the lead animator!!!!! It’s just, he has so many scars on his face that I felt sorry for him, so I want to find out more about him!!! I look forward to seeing him in an active role again!!!! ...Will he appear again, I wonder.

MURAKI

Muraki looks more like he’s in cosplay in the anime than he does in the manga (laughs). Following an idea from the director, I gave him a cloak and a mark on his chest that’s connected to the mark on his forehead!!! He’s even wearing boots!!! His design is all put together with purple in a fashion-conscious way!!! Anyway, it seems the director’s favourite colour is purple. Muraki, purple, muraki, murasaki[purple], director, murasaki[purple], muraki, purple. Something I fussed over with his suit beneath the cloak was giving it a gleaming lustre much like latex would have… makes you unsure of whether or not it’s a high quality suit. All in all, it costs 9800 yen!! A bargain price of 9800 yen! Now then, you there, sitting in front of the TV - together with the director, Let’s Muraki!!!!

Twitter crosspost here.

Season 2 notes here.

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seasonsgreetingscreature · 4 years ago

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okay so here are my disorganized thoughts on drag race s 13: (and partially s 12 too tbh...)

- i feel like the show is making the finalists obvious really early on by only giving challenge wins to very few girls, at this point it feels kinda obvious that symone, gottmik and olivia are going to be finalists (no spoilers, just guessing) ... i might be misremembering things but back in earlier seasons they wouldn't let people win 2 challenges in a row,no matter how well they were doing. these queens deserved their wins for the most part but I'm kinda getting turned off by challenge wins being so predictable. remember when robbie turner won a challenge in s8? the show would never be that chaotic nowadays lol, only frontrunners are getting wins now

-the show is obviously wanting certain queens to go far, instead of just letting the competition run its course in a more "natural" way. obviously it's supposed to be a heavily produced show, and since ru is the only judge that matters her favorites are going to be prioritized, and that's fine. still, it feels a little unfair that some girls just can't get a win no matter how hard they try, just because ru would rather give her favorite queen a third win (jan was robbed lol)

- the lipsynch premiere with the winner queens and porkchop queens was messy... I love that we got denali and her iconic ice skating but it feels like the losing queens have been stuck being treated like losers for the whole season, considering that only 1 winning queen has gone home halfway through the season. it feels like the winners have had immunity from elimination so far (except for poor lala ri who was honestly my favorite of the winning girls, despite making the worst runway look of all time). if the porkchop queens got their revenge by winning challenges early on it would have worked way better but I guess we can't have that lol

- the editing for the disco challenge was fucked up... they showed gottmik for 2 seconds and then she was safe... she's probably the worst dancer/lipsynch performer of the season so she's being unfairly saved from the bottom just because there's no way she can win a lipsynch. she's obviously going to the final 4, which she probably deserves, but part of me wishes they would have let tamisha or kandy send her home lol. I know it sounds like i hate gottmik, which I don't, but she's just not my kind of queen. she's a look queen but her looks are not my thing at all if that makes sense. good job on snatch game though

-symone is a WINNER, like that's the only way to describe her. I can't believe she was just safe on snatch game when she had such a great week. I guess they had to downplay her a bit after letting her win the 3 first episodes lol. with that said, I find her lipsynchs really boring... I get that her facial expressions are iconic but I'm already getting tired of them. i don't need splits, high kicks and death drops to be entertained, but facial expressions and an amazing runway walk can't be enough to win a lipsynch... I feel like her charisma is in the way she talks and that obviously disappears in a lipsynch. but whatever, she's winning the season because she deserves to.

-the double shantay was just... why let these girls lipsynch when you know you're not sending anyone home? their performances didn't matter at all, they were saved because they're ru's favorites. with earlier double shantays we at least got some great performances.

-olivia is so ridiculously beautiful. that's it, that's all I'm going to say about her

- utica had one of the worst snatch games of all time. also, if she doesn't want to wear an afro then don't do a character who's most distinctive feature is their afro lol

- I'm constantly getting shocked by how great tina burner's runway walk is... like for some reason I think of her as a stiff old comedy queen who barely moves at all, but her walk is fantastic and she really did great in the disco challenge. too bad she keeps dressing like a slutty ronald mcdonald

- conspiracy theory: jan only made it halfway through her season, and her sister rose will make it much further than jan but she won't win. in season 14, i think their sister Laguna will win the whole season just to complete this huge 3-season story arc. it would be cute tbh

- I'm really in love with denali and i am not looking forward to her inevitable demise. no spoilers lol but I feel like she's obviously getting the jan edit. I really wish we got to see more of her snatch game. lipsynch assassin of the century (except for peppermint who remains the undefeated lipsynch world champion as far as I'm concerned)

so anyway this sounds really critical but this is still my favorite tv show of all time, so I want it to be perfect... whatever, at the end od the day it's just a tv show. remember that if you think your favorite queen is being mistreated by the show, show them some support outside of the show!

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margridarnauds · 4 years ago

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I'm very curious about Lady Bess and I would like to know which cast do you prefer or recommend ? I know they have their own particularities but I'm curious about Hirano Aya playing Lady Bess and what are the differences with Hanafusa Mari ?

VERY sorry it’s taken a while, the latest news over here + my frantic packing, have made the last couple of weeks absolute HELL.

Thank you for asking me this! I’m not sure if this is really public knowledge, but Lady Bess was my VERY FIRST Toho musical, I pre-ordered it as soon as the news was announced after pining after the 2014 cast for years and thinking we’d never get to see the full thing. As a result, it’s a bit of a personal baby for me. There’s nothing in the world that can really compare to opening up the package for the first time and...there it was, running to the TV to put it in, and then...there it was, beautiful and opulent and everything that I’d been wanting for ages. I couldn’t really believe I was SEEING it, in all honesty.

Anyway, nostalgia aside, personally...I have a difficult time, with this cast, more than any other, as far as solidly recommending one cast over another. (Honestly, MA is very unusual to me in the sense that I HAVE a clear favorite, most of the time, I end up going back and forth.)

Personally, I definitely do prefer Aya Hirano’s Elizabeth; in my opinion, she really gives her Bess a spine of steal, and you can understand how she can go from the girl at the beginning to Gloriana, and you can tell in Aya’s performance that she considered every aspect of Elizabeth’s character. Even at the beginning, where she’s a young woman, there’s still a polish and elegance to her that reminds me of the report about six year old Elizabeth that said that she had “'with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old'. Yes, she’s young, she makes some very stupid mistakes, but she’s still refined and clever. When Robin is annoying her in the beginning, she doesn’t show her annoyance, instead giving a small, frustrated smile.

Like. “Oh, you.”

She has a very smooth, rounded voice--while her initial training was in anime voice dubs and work as an idol, she moved to the musical world, taking four months to study abroad in New York City (more reasons that I have to have a personal fondness for her - She isn’t one of us, but she GETS us) and it shows in her voice. She has one of the voices that, even if she didn’t have a very distinctive face, with the beauty mark on the left side of her face being an easily distinguishable feature for my face-blind ass, I would be able to recognize it anywhere due to its power and full tone. Probably, overall, one of my favorite actresses in the industry. Absolutely love her and her take on Bess.

Hanafusa Mari’s Bess is less.....canny. During the same scene with Robin, we see her kind of showing her frustration VERY obviously.

She’s significantly less mature, more of a child as opposed to a young woman and, at the end, rather than an adult woman making the best choice for her and her country, I get more the feeling that she’s an instrument of fate, being tugged along like a sailboat caught in a bad breeze.

“Guess I’m queen now, idk.”

Aya Hirano’s Bess, meanwhile, is looking out towards the future. Yes, she regrets, to a certain extent, that she wasn’t able to have a life with Robin, but she’s also looking forward to the future, to the England she’s going to build. She loved Robin, but it was a love that never could have really been anything else. It was kind of that first, high school love that, yeah, was what she needed at the time, when she was alone and (almost) friendless, but they both wanted different things in life and became different people. There would never really have been a future for them with marriage and babies, even without the class difference, and Aya Hirano’s Bess knows it.

I think, looking at them, you can TELL that they both had fundamentally different ideas about the ending of the musical: Hanafusa very clearly saw it as a tragedy; Aya Hirano saw it as, at worst, a bittersweet triumph, and her Bess accepts her destiny with full agency, meeting her future head-on.

I will say, also, that the dynamic with Robin is....slightly....uncomfortable with Hanafusa’s Bess, not the least because Yamazaki has a baby face. It makes them seem very unbalanced when, in fact, they’re supposed to be the same age. I’m all for older women dominating the stage (I’ve never complained about, say, Kazutaka Ishii or Oka Kojiro getting a role that’s generally cast younger, and by God, I’m going to be consistent on this one), and Hanafusa’s to be congratulated on her long career and experience, but I do believe, strongly, that it would have been better for Kato Kazuki to have been her Robin.

Now, onto the Robins.

This is, perhaps, a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I do actually prefer Ikusaburo Yamazaki’s take on the role.

I LIKE Kato Kazuki (I own two Proshots of various things he’s been in and I’m still STRONGLY considering Frankenstein simply so that I can see him fulfill his life’s ambition, I definitely don’t personally hate the man, though he’s one of them that’s never been my ULTIMATE FAVORITE in any role he’s been in. Sorry, Kazuki). He has a good voice, probably one of the steadiest male voices in the industry, and he is currently one of Toho’s most bankable stars, to the point where he’s on my shortlist of actors for calculating the chance of a musical getting a proshot (Furukawa Yuta + Kato Kazuki + Aya Hirano in a replay of a musical? Yeah. This one was getting proshot.)

But. But. He tends to not be particularly on the expressive side, I found that his reactions tend to be a little on the dull side, and I feel like, with a character like Robin, who REALLY needs to sell the romance angle, you really need someone who’s more of a livewire, someone charismatic, someone who can offset Bess’ gravity. And, unfortunately........Yamazaki did that better, in my opinion. I just did not get a really great sense of chemistry from Kazuki, and I feel like he did that Thing he’s been known to do where he just plays The Hero instead of really tailoring his performance to the individual role.

Using pretty much exactly the same facial expression for when his father’s died in front of him (in 1789) VS when he embarrassed himself in front of the pretty girl he just met (Lady Bess.) But his cheekbones are 10/10.

Puppy dog eyes 10/10

“Toss a coin to your Robin, oh valley of plenty”

Mary I

Both Marys did SO WELL in the role, it’s hard for me to really pick a favorite and, after all these years, I’ve still not properly sat down to parse each one’s performance. The role of Mary is vocally and emotionally demanding, as she has to be threatening and villainous, belting out an INTENSE rock-inspired number in a HEAVY velvet gown, while also showing Mary’s loneliness and trauma. Not easy for any actress to pull off, and BOTH of them did a phenomenal job with the role.

Looking over their respective scenes at the end, I feel like Rie Yoshizawa’s Mary had a slight vocal edge, pulling off the final BRILLIANTLY in “Don’t Dance With the Devil” and never making a shift from her chest voice to her head voice, whereas in her co-star’s case, it’s quite audible, though still VERY strong and solid. Which ISN’T her fault, necessarily, given the range required for the song, but it’s definitely something that I did pick up on. Rie Yoshizawa, though, handles it almost effortlessly, even adding a bit of a growl to it. I feel like, of the two of them, she’s more of a trained belter (which makes sense, given that she’s more of a career Toho actress, whereas Yuki Mirai is a trained Zuka actress. AGAIN, it’s nothing against one or the other, but I think that it means that one of them is more likely to go for a belt, the other is more likely to go for head voice.) (Also please keep in mind that my knowledge of the terminology here comes from osmosis + what my aunt, who IS trained has told me when she was trying to critique my car-ride performances of “Evita” + my grade school music teacher. As a result, I am NOT an expert.)

At the end, Yuki Mirai’s Mary seemed to really, really hope that Bess would genuinely change the religion of England back to Catholicism, her face hopeful as she clutches onto Bess’ arms only to fall when Bess only says that she’ll follow her own heart in the matter, whereas in Rie Yoshizawa’s case, there’s a certain resignation to it. She’d HOPED that her sister would respect her wishes, but when she doesn’t, while she’s disappointed, she puts her mask carefully back on, somewhat brusquely asking Bess to bow for her one last time before nearly collapsing when Bess leaves, as that queenly facade crumbles. I do think, that being said, that Yuki Mirai resembles the historical Mary a little more, and I do still like her portrayal. I think that, when I think of Lady Bess’ Mary, I do tend to think of her, though I do think that, when it came down to it, I do slightly prefer Rie Yoshizawa’s take. (Though, again, both of them did a WONDERFUL job with the role and my opinion might change over lunch. I’ve gone back and forth on this one for well over 2-3 years, I’m not likely to come to any solid conclusions any time soon.)

Philip II

............I like both of them, for various reasons, and I think that who you go with depends entirely on what you’re looking for in the role. I fell in LOVE with Genki Hirakata’s strutting, flamboyant prince, and it was really, really obvious that he was having the time of his life in the role. Hirakata played up Philip’s (nonhistorical, going to emphasize that lest I get slammed) bisexuality, which...honestly, I do kind of like, but also does play into the long, long list of examples in Japanese theatre in particular of using LGBT+ characters as either humor, fanservice (LOOKING AT YOU, ZUKA), or as a way to emphasize a character’s villainy or hedonism (Artois 1789).

But also. I totally shipped it. #BessWho.

He’s FUN to watch, he does really make Philip a very memorable character, and of course I was drawn to him at first, because it’s very hard NOT to be. I thought that Furukawa’s Philip, at least at first, was rather colorless and dry in comparison.

But! But! As time went on, I warmed up to him a lot. Furukawa’s Philip is much more of a schemer. Genki Hirakata’s Philip was still a schemer, yes, but he didn’t really emphasize it, and he kind of pulls it out every once in a while only to put it back where it came from (during Gardiner’s downfall, he’s very flippant the entire time, not quite breaking character as the party prince even as he knows, fully well, what the glass of poison contains, while Furukawa smiles, but each smile contains a dagger in it), and, for the most part, is here for a good time, not a long time. When Bess rejects him, it’s a mild annoyance, the same you’d expect (in a best case scenario) from a frat boy who made a bet with his mates that he’d get the girl in the back and she turned him down. He’s frustrated for HIS sake, but it isn’t a personal loss, not really. With Furukawa’s, there’s real FRUSTRATION in there, as he realizes that he’s going to lose England. Furukawa’s Philip might be flamboyant on the surface, but it’s hiding a mind of absolute steel, and he has his own ambitions and plans for the future. I can see how his Philip, very easily, can grow into the Philip II that will set the Armada on England.

I feel like...if you’re interested in Philip as comic relief/ship bait, you’ll like Genki Hirakata’s. If you’re here for Philip as more of a serious villain, Furukawa nailed it.

Overall...I like BOTH casts, for various reasons, though I do think that Star Cast is the best, simply because, in a musical like this.....you HAVE to get the best Bess you can, and I feel like that’s Aya Hirano. The musical revolves around her and what she wants, and she truly OWNS the role. This was the musical that really, really made me appreciate her as an actress and that made me look out for anything she’s been in since, and I can tell that she put a LOT of herself in it.

#long post #lady bess #Elizabeth I #Mary I #since I know there are some people in the tag who are curious about Lady Bess and I don't talk about it all that often #scarletfantasia #aku no hana

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mayiotome · 4 years ago

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XOXO Droplets [Free to Play/ ext. ver:$19.99]

My Rating: 💗💗💗💗 ▪️

itch.io game page

Producer: GBPatch

Release Date: Aug 31, 2017 (Updated: Mar 20, 2020)

Languages: English

Genre(s): Stat Management, Romance, Slice of Life,

Download size: 279 MB (W/L) 261 MB (M)

Content Warnings: Swearing but it’s censored anyways.

Advertised length: not listed in hours but the completed game is 320,00 words while the free version is 130,00+

My Play Length: a few (3-4) hours to complete all routes (using cheats after the first one and skipping all seen lines).

Steam Key: YES

Achievements: YES

Demo Available: Technically there’s a free version that’s about half the game.

(There is also a horror version of this game I’ll be reviewing in the future.)

Description/Features from game page:

“The story begins when our nameable protagonist finally transfers into the boarding school of her dreams at the start of her junior year in high school. It would be perfect if it wasn't for that little catch attached to her enrollment: her parents will only let her keep attending the school for her remaining two years if she doesn't make everyone there hate her by shunning them, like she always does.

Do your best to show just enough interest in the other losers around to appease the folks while still having time to chase after all the attractive guys in the MC's afterschool group, which just so happens to be a group for chronically unfriendable people.

★★★★★★★

No, seriously folks. When we say the protagonist and main love interests are a big ol' jerk squad it's not a mistake and it's not an understatement.”

Default Game

3 distinct jerky main boyfriend options: Everett Gray, Nate Lawson, and Shiloh Fields

6 side characters who'll be your buddies and 6 minor clique boyfriend options, each with a bonus effect that makes the game easier

Partial Voice acting for every significant character by a talented cast

The option to break up with your bf and start dating someone else, if you feel like it

A variety of methods to manage your Reputation with the unimportant students

Part-time jobs, stores to visit, useful items, optional mini-games, an in-game phone to call a guy up and arrange a date at one of several different locations

Over 130,00 words. Hundreds of different events, including a collage-style ending system where you get events for every goal you achieved during the game

Cheat codes for those who don't give a f*ck about gameplay and just wanna see the events

Paid Extended Addition

3 more main jerk boyfriend options: Bae Pyoun, Jeremy King, and Pran Taylor

2 sweet but not-terribly-bright side boyfriend options: Kam Sung and Adrian Wulu

Yet 1 more boyfriend option in the flirtations party boy Lucas Kaiser (New Addition!)

4 Extra Date Events for Everett, Nate, and Shiloh

The ability to unlock all 4 CGs and 12 outfits for Everett, Nate, and Shiloh, rather than just 3 and 10

50 more Random Events, 45 more Text Chats, 24 more Part-Time Work Events

320,000 words in total

An accessory system that lets you decorate the main character with a variety of pieces, plus small events where characters comment on the accessories you wear

The option to change the background of your cellphone to one of 12 different options

Even better cheat codes

My Review:

This game is half stat manager, you have to “work” to get money, choose where you sit at lunch to raise your popularity with different cliques, etc.

The story isn’t all that long if you use cheats but if you do use cheats you can’t get certain achievements.

The free version only lets you date 3 out of the main 6 guys (The paid extra version gives you those 3 + 3 others that are more side characters but they have their own scenes too, though not many).

It’s not too long or that story rich compared to other games I’ve played. The gameplay isn’t too hard or difficult to figure out.

You can pick the first and last name of the protag but not her looks.

Story/Writing

The story isn’t that long or complex, you have an ultimate end date. Extra scenes take place at the jobs you do every few times you do them. Each job is connected to a character (and school clique) with a few scenes. There are 1-3 date scenes per date location per guy. On certain (calendar) dates certain events happen, depending on who you’re dating certain dialogue will change but it’s not too big of a change (maybe like 3-5 extra or changed lines).

Most of the game is just slight dialogue changes depending on who you want to romance/who you’re dating and a few original scenes per character.

Characters

So yeah, they’re not lying when they say that the characters are jerks. Kinda loveable jerks after a while but yeah, none of the guys actually want to date the protag but she kinda just says “Hey we’re dating now” or “Hey we’re going on a date tomorrow” and they just go with it albeit reluctantly but she grows on them for the most part.

There are 3 side characters you can date too, for achievements and I think 6 others for smaller perks for the game but no actual game-play involving them and it takes a long time to be able to actually date them as you need to meet certain requirements.

The 3 side characters are only with the paid version but they don’t go to the school the protag goes to so there’s less scenes of them really.

Visuals

The style of the stat raising menu/Weekend Planner is cute, the CGs are drawn in a cute drawing style and the rest are classic looking backgrounds that match the character styles.

The protag has a little portrait in the bottom corner where her facial expression change. With the paid version you can buy her accessories and they show up on her in game (some also trigger random events for each guy, 2 per guy as there are 2 versions for each of those items).

Sound

It is semi-voiced meaning there’s sigh sounds, growls of annoyance, a few lines here and there are voiced, they each have a set of “catchphrases” like the protag will go “Boo” when she is unhappy or a little laugh sound, Nate saying “this is absurd” when he’s annoyed or “You can’t be serious!” Sometimes they say the first or first few words of a sentence.

Stat Raising (Gameplay)

It’s not too hard to keep the stats (clique popularity) even/balanced so you don’t fail the game. It’s easy to earn money via the jobs, if you have a set guy you want then keep doing the job associated with him (where he also works) to raise his stat with you, get scenes at that location and earn more money the more you progress that job. (There’s no mini game for the jobs just occasional scenes.)

Using cheats the stat gameplay goes by fairly quickly and with no possibility of failing. You can get through each route quicker this way but there’s no way to skip the actual weekend planner part (which is good because you can go on dates or the store still.)

My strategy is to use a cheat to raise clique levels to the max, to get money, and buy a bunch of taffy (which skips the weekday choice pages and lets you quickly get to new story events.) that way I can just skip over the mostly tedious parts of the gameplay.

Worth the Price?: In my opinion, yes. You get a lot more content, unlock the other 3 guys, outfits, cheats more, date options, etc. (See above) and clearly time and effort went into this game. There’s no bugs, the VA is decent however limited. I’m sure some people might thing it’s a bit expensive but you have to remember you’re supporting a creator and not some big game cooperation.

Conclusion aka TL;DR

It’s not your traditional guys quickly fall for the protag story as none of the guys actually want to date her when they start dating. All the characters are jerks (So much so that they’re all in a club cause no one else wants them in theirs) but they do grow on you after a while. There’s no way to really skip the stat raising part of the game but it’s also not that hard to keep everything balanced and there’s always cheat codes.

I ended up getting the extra version (meaning paying for the rest of the game) because I wanted to romance Jeremy and Pran (Green and white haired ones).

My Rating:

Story: 7/10 (would score higher if the routes were more different.)

Characters: 9/10 (They’re jerks but they’re meant to be. This isn’t really a game where the characters will compliment yours and make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside but they’re well done.

Visuals: 10/10

Sound: 10/10

Gameplay: 9/10 (sometimes you just wanna skip all the stat stuff and just read the story. there are cheats in that case but you still need to actually click through the weekend stuff and keep skipping days until you get to the next event day). You can’t simply roll back on the mouse wheel to change a choice or rehear a line, it’ll bring up the log page where you can click any line that has sound to hear it or read what was said.)

Overall - 💗💗💗💗 ▪️

#otome review #otome game #xoxo droplets #gbpatch

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overlourdes · 4 years ago

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𝑪𝑯𝑨𝑹𝑨𝑪𝑻𝑬𝑹 𝑺𝑯𝑬𝑬𝑻.

repost, don’t reblog

basics !

FULL NAME. don Lourdes Soledad Romano Sierra NICKNAME. lola GENDER. Male HEIGHT. 5′4″ AGE. 61 ZODIAC. scorpio SPOKEN LANGUAGES. spanish, english, some louissiana creole, italian, and french

physical characteristics !

HAIR COLOR. black, but there’s a little gray creeping into his sideburns. if he ever grew out his facial hair (which he won’t), it would be almost entirely gray EYE COLOR. brown SKIN TONE. brownish BODY TYPE. he’s always been small, but he’s put on weight the last 15 or 20 years or so. he was never “skinny” but always fit until his 40s ACCENT. a strange and unique blend of cuban, northern american, and something else most can’t place (it’s mid atlantic; he adopted it some on purpose) VOICE. a deep baritone. a bit rough sounding from smoking for 45 years. he speaks softly, but not in a meek or timid way. his voice carries regardless. DOMINANT HAND. right POSTURE. he stands very straight, but he does have a lot of issues with his back, mostly due to mild scoliosis SCARS. several that are easy to miss around his hands, wrists, feet, and ankles, from surgeries. a faded and stretched but still distinct gnarling on his left calf from being attacked by a dog as a child. TATTOOS. none MOST NOTICEABLE FEATURE(S). very sharp widow’s peak hairline. he’s also just very pretty and young looking for his age.

childhood !

PLACE OF BIRTH. a [fictional] village in the ciénaga de zapata region of cuba HOMETOWN. trinidad, cuba. at least, that’s what he says. FIRST WORDS. there’s no telling SIBLINGS. none that he knows of PARENTS. perlita azul romano sierra, and an unnamed father who he came to understand was his mother’s uncle PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. he never met his father, and his mother avoided him for the 8 years that she was around before abandoning him.

adult life !

OCCUPATION. crime lord, associated with the cartels. to most, he just owns several large and lucrative businesses, such as casinos, hotels, bars, and restaurants. CURRENT RESIDENCE. southampton, NY CLOSE FRIENDS. @themercifulmother RELATIONSHIP STATUS. single, in most verses FINANCIAL STATUS. obscenely rich DRIVER’S LICENSE. no. he stopped renewing it a long time ago, and doesn’t know how to do it online. CRIMINAL RECORD. none VICES. pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath

sex and romance !

SEXUAL ORIENTATION. homosexual ROMANTIC ORIENTATION. homoromantic PREFERRED EMOTIONAL ROLE. submissive | dominant | switch PREFERRED SEXUAL ROLE. Submissive | dominant | switch LIBIDO. higher than anyone expects TURN ONS. rough, scary men, especially ones who are willing and able to commit unspeakable acts. that’s all i’ll admit TURN OFFS. poor hygiene, being disrespectful, talking about turtles LOVE LANGUAGE. quality time, words of affirmation, and somewhat gift giving, though that’s more how he expresses it than wants to receive it RELATIONSHIP TENDENCIES. he’s typically had a hard time reining in his emotions, often getting carried away and overly attached in a relationship that was too new to call for it. jealousy and self sabotaging have been issues, too. obsession, sometimes coming off as clinginess, also has come into play a lot.

on the more positive side, he’s very attentive, and shows a lot of affection (in his own way: usually through sex and giving gifts. he also very much enjoys listening to his partner, getting to know them, their past, and their interests.)

miscellaneous !

CHARACTER’S THEME SONG. man idk HOBBIES TO PASS TIME. reading, learning languages, the occasional movie, shopping (particularly for clothes), MENTAL ILLNESSES. (all undiagnosed- he doesn’t want to talk to a doctor) some form of anxiety, c PTSD, possibly bipolar disorder PHYSICAL ILLNESSES. CMT LEFT OR RIGHT BRAINED. u think i know FEARS. small, enclosed spaces. dogs. SELF CONFIDENCE LEVEL. this is a complicated concept, even with most people. lola has confidence in what he does, generally. most things he just knows he’s making the right decisions and is generally very sure of himself. on a more personal level is where most of his insecurities lie. he��s had a difficult time with his romantic relationships over the years, most of them have been negative, and none of them have lasted very long, which ties into a really deep rooted fear and insecurity reaching back into his childhood. so, it really depends on the context. VULNERABILITIES. his children. if anyone knows he’s never been able to hang onto a romantic partner for more than 5 years/he’s been alone for even longer, that’s something he’s insecure about. but to actually really get to him, his daughters are the way to go. but that’s dangerous because he’s a very vengeful and ruthless person.

tagged by: @hammurabicomplex ! tagging: @beenpole, @grandzealot, @forgedwild, @hellbentwidow, @soypeor, @armsdealing, and anyone else who wants to better steal it

#about. ( lola )#i dont have the patience to do this for all of them atm

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cartoon-children · 5 years ago

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My Experience of Maladaptive Daydreaming

(This is from a paper I was writing for my class. I wanted to post it online because it might help others understand maly-d better, and let you know you are not alone in dealing with this.)

I’ve never really written about this. I’m a little scared. It's called Maladaptive Daydreaming. And I’m 95% percent sure I’ve got it. It has affected my life, for a very, very long time. Before I go on, let me explain briefly what it is. “ Common symptoms include: extremely vivid daydreams with their own characters, settings, plots, and other detailed, story-like features, an overwhelming desire to continue daydreaming, making facial expressions while daydreaming, whispering and talking while daydreaming, daydreaming for lengthy periods (many minutes to hours).”

They started in fifth grade. (I’m going through my three most important daydreams) The first was Zenobia, a story about a hero (Me) going to a magical land called Zenobia, to defeat an evil witch, also called Zenobia. Daydreaming about yourself becoming a hero is common in maladaptive daydreaming. In that world you are important, probably because in real life you don’t feel that way. I was a hero (so was Grace and Daniel) and we defeated the Evil witch. The twist in the end is that I was actually the one who created everything, even Zenobia, and that I landed there without remembering that. And that I created Zenobia because I was lonely.

The second was somewhere around seventh or eighth grade. World of Color. This world didn’t include me as the hero. I based my character off Colors. Orange, Blue, Yellow, Cyan, Green, and Pink. (In order of creation.) The story goes something like this: Orange is a shy girl who meets the other girls, the other girls become her friends and teach her how to ice skate. I think I based my story more in Anime than real life. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to remove myself from that world. But anyway, I fantasized about that all the time, seeing the different friendships play out, each two characters would have their own dynamics. But I think the meaning is simply that I wanted friends to encourage me, be there for me. To pick me up when I fell down.

My current fantasy started somewhere around my junior year. I listened to Wombats (my favorite band.) religiously. One of the biggest triggers for maladaptive daydreaming is music. So, Quartet was born. The characters are distinct, all very different from one another. The story goes something like this: A rag-tag group of young adults decide to form a garage band and live in the same house together for a year. (Their names are Neptune, Lavender, Magenta and Gray.) The meaning of this one is that people are everything. People define and shape your life. And to find and create your own family.

I create because I am lonely. Because I want to be accepted and loved. Because I want someone to talk to, to be there for me and understand my every gesture. I want the freedom to express myself, to be heard. I want to yell and scream. I want to run and sing. I want to not give a fuck and say whatever I want, dump out all my dirty secrets, be as stupid weird and wild as I want to. (Did I just cuss in paper??? Oh god, I probably shouldn’t do that.)

“Behind every daydream, there is a feeling. It drives your plot, it molds your characters. It’s the mastermind behind it all. Every character, every single story is an embodiment of it. The entire narrative content of your specific daydream is driven by an emotion that you failed and continuously fail to express in real life- and as long as this particular emotion remains unexpressed in your real life, by your real self, the respective daydream which is driven by it will not stop.”

I create because I am lonely. I dream because I don’t want to bottle up my emotions, which in turn, bottles up my emotions. It’s very dissociative, this disorder. You lose sight of who you really are, you forget which pieces you hid in what characters, and you struggle to get them out. But the goal is not to get rid of these characters. You are them. They are you. You vent your emotions into them. But you need to vent those emotions through you. To let yourself feel the pain, the hurt, the love and the happiness.

#maladaptive daydreaming #maly-d #madd #actually madd #mental health #parascom #paras #madd help #personal

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megaboy335 · 5 years ago

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Mega’s 2019 Top Anime List

Another year of anime has come and gone. This year I ended up watching a lot less due to the over saturation of Isekai and light novel anime, but there was still plenty to enjoy. As usual I consider any show that ended this year as a contender to be on my list. This is simply my opinion and there will be spoilers below.

1) Pokemon Sun & Moon

Starting this list with a show I watched for 3 years, Pokemon Sun and Moon was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with the Pokemon anime. It took the best aspects of XY and added loose animation to the mix. Ash and friends have never had so much personality as each episode brought the characters to life in new ways with funny facial expressions. As an adaptation of the game, Pokemon SM did better in some areas compared to others. The trials were simplified or restructured to account for Ash’s classmates being trial captains in the game. While the Kahuna battles were spaced out very far apart in the anime. I always thought it was strange that in-between major story battles, Ash barely ever thought about the challenges.

The two major story highlights of the anime are Lusamine’s arc and the Pokemon League. Lusamine’s story was the main plot of SM and it played out almost exactly like the game. Her downfall to her Ultra Beasts obsession and then Lillie knocking some sense back into her mom is still an emotional highlight of the series. In any Pokemon anime, the Pokemon League is what brings meaning to Ash’s entire journey through the region. SM’s league is similar to the game where it’s the first league of the region. The rival pairings and matches were completely predictable, but it ended with two big surprises. First, Ash was actually allowed to win for once (matching your character becoming the first champion in the game), and secondly he had a full 6 v 6 match with Kukui. It spanned 3.5 episodes with Ash’s Litten completing its character arc by reaching its final form during the battle. It was a rare match where both parties are battling it out for fun and it ended with a flashy finale of two hype Z-moves. Pokemon SM will be remembered for its simplicity, yet ambitious approach in always showing something new week after week.

2) Mob Psycho 100 Season 2

Mob-Psycho continues where it left off in season 1. The main protagonists have come away from a battle with Claw and now daily life resumes. This season featured a love story, Reigen’s arc, deeper exploration into psychic powers, and the return of Claw. Just like in season 1, Mob continues to excel in two major areas. First is of course the animation. An average episode of Mob is literally that one stand-out episode of a one cour anime. Psychic power usage is often a reflection of emotions and they are animated in different ways depending on the characters thoughts in a particular scene. There were so many highlights this season that it would be impossible to list them all.

Mob’s second strength is the character writing. In season 1 Mob was a boy struggling to create his own identity. This season Mob actively tries to break out of his shell and become his own unique person. We see this through his efforts with the fitness club, again when he separates from Regien, and again as he shows everyone that having psychic powers is no substitute for personal growth or status. Mob is no longer a timid boy like he was at the start of the series. He can now stand on his own two feet and help others who are struggling to get up. Considering there is still a little more manga left to cover, I can only hope it gets one last season to finish out the story.

3) Kaguya-Sama: Love is War

In order to understand the appeal of Kaguya-Sama, just for a second imagine if Death Note was a romantic comedy. Both of the protagonists are locked into a battle of wits to outsmart the other in the events of daily life. The mere act of choosing a vacation spot, going somewhere, or giving an item to each other suddenly becomes a high stakes duel. Kaguya-sama follows Kaguya herself and Shirogane as they try to avoid being the first to admit their love for each other. The side characters only help to add wildcards to each battle such as Chika being able to change the tide of battle with a single phrase.

I enjoyed seeing how absurd each battle would become week after week. The presentation is simple, yet very effective in this anime. Resources were definitely allocated for use in certain places for maximum impact. The voice acting also helped a ton in selling just how important each battle was in the minds of the characters. Overall, the series knows how to play with your expectations. Some battles turn out as expected, some with a twist, and others end on some kind of middle ground. However, each battle brings them a little closer together. I can’t wait for the next season in April.

4) Run with the Wind

Almost all sports anime revolve around high school students trying to become as good as possible and win nationals before the 3rd years graduate. However, Run with the Wind takes a different approach to this formula. It focuses on a group of college students who, at the start at least, would rather do anything else than run. It takes about half of the show before our group of characters even get on the same page about running. I enjoyed how this anime put us into the heads of each character. Some have personal reasons for not wanting to run, while for others it was something trivial. However, by committing themselves to the team they each gained a new outlook on themselves and those around them. It was quite literally an uphill for the team to reach the level of success they got at the end. The final run brilliantly showed how each character learned from the experience and how the time they spent on the team was a positive life changing moment. Run with the Wind shows that it's never too late to try something new.

5) JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5: Golden Wind

Jojo is back on the list after an extended break between parts 4 and 5. Compared to previous stories, Part 5 is most similar to part 3. There is a quest to clear and it involves the main group traveling across the land and defeating enemy stand users each step of the way. The differences between part 5 and its previous stories becoming apparent right away. First off, the protagonist is not a traditional Joestar. He is the son of Dio born from when he had Jonathan’s body. Secondly, the group of main characters are not exactly good guys. As mafia members they display a sense of unity, but lack the high integrity of previous Jojo characters. A connection they all share is being looked down upon in society, but placing a place in the world through Bucciarati’s squad.

The aspect that makes or breaks a JoJo story for me is usually the villain. I consider Diavolo to be the weakest of any villain across the various JoJo stories. During the early arcs of the story, Diavolo comes off as an interesting character. He has a mysterious personality and will clearly stop at nothing to keep his identity hidden, including killing his own daughter. The series then adds layer of complexity when we meet his alter ego Doppio. The two personalities are clearly distinctive, but the line between which one is charge can be murky. However, his character intrigue quickly comes crashing down as the final arc fully brings Diavolo into the limelight. The story comes down to who can control the stand arrow, which is a sharp contrast to previous villains who drove the final arc on the back of their eccentric personalities. While JoJo part 5 is still a good anime, it will always come near the bottom of my favorite JoJo parts.

The Year of High Profile Weekly Shonen Jump Anime Adaptations

As the 2016-17 hits from Weekly Shonen Jump have aged up, all of their anime dropped in succession this year. I am a huge fan of the magazine, so here’s a section with some quick thoughts of their anime.

The Promise Neverland - The anime changed the escape arc from a mental battle to a horror series. While animation is definitely better suited to playing with the idea of show don’t tell, the result ended up being telling the story through a different lens. While I appreciated the idea, I feel it came up short. The loss of Posuka Demizu’s art was another major blow to the mood they were trying to create.

Kimetsu no Yaiba - When the manga first began, I never imagined it would become a 1+ Million seller. Ufotable brought their top class digital effects to a manga that at a quick glance would make anyone think it would be the last series to get such treatment. The anime brought a lot to the table and greatly helped to bring the manga to life. It was a great experience from start to finish (episode 19 is a major highlight of the year). I’m looking forward to the upcoming film.

Dr. Stone - Compared to the other Jump anime this year, Dr. Stone’s animation and presentation stuck very close to the manga (if not even inferior to Boichi’s creative spreads at times). The aspect that sold this anime best was the voice cast. They brought so much life into the characters and conveyed the passion each one has for science and learning. I enjoyed seeing Senku create his inventions in animated form.

Bokuben - This might not exactly be considered “high-profile”, but I can’t help but find myself impressed by the anime week after week. It adds a few touches here and there to better tell a cohesive story and occasionally adds a scene or two. I appreciated the heart the anime brought to the series through the seiyuu. Introducing a new seiyuu unit from the cast was also a nice bonus as well.

Best OP/EDs of the year:

1) One Piece Opening 22 - The One Piece anime has changed dramatically under Tatsuya Nagamine. This opening is fast paced and filled with future story teases. It changes the format by cutting the op run time down to 2 minutes and includes clips of the episode. The final sequence of Luffy vs. Kaido always gets me hyped each to watch the episode each week.

2) Mob Psycho II Opening - This opening feels like a natural continuation of the first season opening. It once again showcases how the show is full of creative animation and unusual characters.

3) Mix Opening 1- Mitsuru Adachi is known for his nuanced writing of giving characters the space to convey their thoughts. This opening fully shows these traits through its sequence of character shots that feel like a natural usage of his writing style.

4) Kaguya-Sama Chika Ending - Cute song and amazing choreography. There’s a clear reason why this swept across the internet last winter

5) JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5 Opening 2 - Not only is Traitor’s Requiem a very cool name for a song for this part of the story, but the plot teases are perfectly timed in the song. The opening animation also kept on giving with the villain version and Giorno later recapturing the opening.

This brings 2019 to a close and another decade comes to an end. As my way of recapping the decade, here is a list of my top shows in each post I have made since I started posting them in 2014:

Space Brothers

Hunter x Hunter

Kill la Kill

Nisekoi

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 3

Sore ga Seiyuu

Death Parade

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 3 (Second Half)

Hibike Euphonium

One Punch Man Season 1

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 4

Mob Psycho 100 Season 1

Yuri on Ice

Konosuba Season 1

Sakamoto Desu Ga?

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Tsuki Ga Kirei

Re:Creators

Ero-manga Sensei

Owarimonogatari (the Monogatari series in general)

Hugtto Precure

A Place Further than the Universe

Yuru Camp

Dragonball Super

S.S.S.S. Gridman

#Mega's Words

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elven-ariaera · 5 years ago

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Welcome all!

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re familiar with my work as either an artist, cosplayer, writer or any of the other creative things I do. Recently, I had been asked about some of the work that I do, and I thought a fun way to just that was to fill out a few questionnaires. Here I talk about some of the high and low points of doing what I do, what inspires me, and my process of creativity.

For those who are only interested in certain segments, I’ve broken the article into the following sections for you to easily maneuver your way throughout the piece: Art, cosplay, writing, and questions asked by you.

I know I’m no professional and compared to a lot of others I don’t have as outstanding an amount of followers, but if this article can help inspire at least one artist to try something new or learn something they didn’t know, well, that’s good enough for me! I hope you enjoy!

Art

When did you get into art?

I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember, but I do recall middle school in particular being the time that I really started pursuing art. I had to choose between volleyball and art club after school, and guess which one I picked. It wasn’t just academics either. My notebooks were full of fan art of mostly Link and Zelda, but you could find some Kirby, Pokémon, and Naruto scattered in there as well.

Show us your oldest piece of art you have on hand.

Yeah. It’s… Something.

What defines your artistic style?

I think the faces of the characters I draw distinguish my art. I always have a certain way of drawing the eyes, ears, and other features. I always give my females more prominent eyelashes than males as well. Certain clothing as well — The way I draw capes and hoods are distinct. Not to mention when designing my own clothes, I tend to use similar patterns.

Do you practice other styles/have you tried other styles in the past?

I occasionally dabble outside my comfort zone. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the “Cal-Arts” style, but I’ve tried it every now and then, especially when creating fan art for shows like Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Amphibia. I don’t really do it too often, but I’ve made a piece for my portfolio mimicking several art styles from a variety of different shows just to demonstrate that I can do it if I’d like to.

What levels of artistic education have you had?

Honestly, just high school. I thought I was going to college for digital illustrations but it turned out communication/graphic design was totally different. I actually got into that because I could draw when not many other people in that field could. Of course, I’m always interested in learning outside of school. I learn through watching other artists on social media, seeing how they create their work. Just watching a speed draw can help so much! The way I learn the most, however, is just by doing. Practice, practice, practice!

Show us at least one picture you drew or sketched recently that you did not put on a public site.

I’ve been doing a lot of Fire Emblem doodles for my new sticker line, so here’s Setsuna. Honestly, I just like drawing bust portraits like this.

What is your favorite piece that you have done?

I can’t just pick one! I’ve drawn over 900 things since I first joined DeviantArt (and I’ve been drawing even before then), you want me to pick just one? Haha, I’ll narrow it down to three of my favorites (in no particular order):

I love this one because it was like the first cute drawing of Ivysaur I’ve ever done. Ivysaur was always a tricky pokémon for me to draw, but this was the first time I feel like I nailed it. Ivysaur also happens to be one of my absolute favorites, so that’s a plus.

This is Minerva, a Guardian from my fantasy stories. Every time I drew her prior, I could never quite get the look I wanted. This was the one that I really liked and so I colored it and am very happy with how it turned out.

I don’t know why I just love this drawing I did of Dimitri from Three Houses. I think its the eyes and hair. And the color contrast — especially in the original ink sketch (that I hung up over my craft table.) I just love it.

What is your least favorite piece that you have done?

Again, you want just one? Haha, too many failures. I’ll be fair, though, and post three of those as well.

Here’s one from my early days. I was trying so hard to get the hair all detailed like and instead it came out looking like gross looking veins. Not to mention how atrocious the proportions were. Oh man, I’m sorry past me, I know you tried.

Here’s one I was so proud of: I copied the official art for Twilight Princess and thought it came out amazing. So amazing I titled the piece “Awesomeful Link.” Yeah. Um. Nope.

Here’s a more recent one that I’m not too pleased with. I was so excited about the latest batch of Steven Universe episodes (which I would later learn were a big bunch of filler episodes and that didn’t make anything better) I drew Pearl reciting her ‘big line’ of the trailer. I tried to mix styles and I tried something different with the eyes and all in all it just came out… Meh.

What do you like most about your art?

I like the faces that I draw. They’re always the most fun and I think they come out the best. I especially love the eyes, I go into so much detail on them (even though they’re usually so small when I print them.) I’ve had issues in the past where I made all of my characters look like they had the same face, but I feel I’ve been doing a lot better at individualizing the face of each character and that makes it all the more fun as well.

What do you like least about your art?

The hands. Sometimes I draw them well, but I still struggle hard and sometimes it really shows. For chibi drawings, I don’t really care as much, but on my more “serious” art, I get a little bummed when I’ve got a wonky hand hanging off their wrists. Feet also sometimes give me a bit of trouble, but usually only when I do poses that involve more movement, which is why I sometimes make my art stiffer and I don’t like doing that either.

Have you ever considered taking commissions?

I do take commissions. In fact, I’d love to take more if it were possible.

Are you looking to pursue a career in art?

I do it part-time right now. I’m satisfied doing commissions and artist tables at local conventions. I think I’d like to pursue writing more than art, but I do love art just as well, so part-time is perfect for me.

What do you like drawing the most?

As I mentioned before, faces. I love drawing facial expressions, I feel like it’s the very core of a character. It’s the first thing I notice when I look at anyone’s art, so I always go all out on my own. I also like drawing hair and wrinkles in clothing. I used to be really obsessed with wrinkles and it would always look like my characters didn’t iron their laundry, but I’ve definitely toned it down since then, haha.

All in all, I like drawing human characters the best — or humanoid. Elves, fairies, merfolk; I love them the most. I like drawing animals too, but not as much as people.

What do you like drawing the least?

Once again my answer is hands. They are still as difficult to draw as the day I started.

Backgrounds are also not enjoyable for me to draw. It’s an important part of a piece, but I get so bored drawing anything that’s not a character — which is why you’ll probably notice in a lot of my art that I do a lot of very minimal backgrounds. I’ve been trying very hard not to just take stock photos anymore (with the exception of my Mythical Month art as they’re meant to be stickers,) and I’ve been using games like Skyrim and Breath of the Wild as inspiration with their gorgeous scenery.

Do you draw more fanart or original art? If fanart, what fandom do you draw the most of?

I post a lot more fan art than original — at least I used to, but I also think I have expanded in sharing my original art more and more with my Mythical Months/Mondays. I guess maybe I’d say about half and half.

What medium/program do you use the most in your art?

Digitally I always use Photoshop. Always. As for traditional art, I’ve been using Copic knock-offs (I’m still learning, so I’d rather not waste the money) and the Sakura Micron pens for my ink sketches. I’ve really been enjoying them, actually, it’s very therapeutic. However, no matter digitally or traditionally, I always, ALWAYS start with a pencil. I like mechanical pencils, I don’t like traditional #2 pencils anymore. The thin lead helps me keep control better.

How would you rank your art? (poor, mediocre, good, etc.)

I always say I think my art is “above average.” I know it’s not bad, but I think it could always use improvement. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a place where I think my art is phenomenal, but I’m content with it, it makes me happy, and that’s all that matters.

List at least one of your “artspirations.”

My art style was greatly inspired by Naruto, Fire Emblem, and Zelda. I always liked more proper body proportions with that hint of anime inspiration. I like bigger eyes on my characters because they help convey emotion so much better, but I also don’t like the oversized baby eyes outside of the occasional chibi style. Avatar: The Last Airbender was also a great influence since the creators did exactly what I like to do and execute it wonderfully.

What do you think you could stand to improve on?

I feel like I can always improve on everything that I do in my art. There are things I’m good at, but I don’t feel like I’ve mastered anything in particular. Then there’s hands and feet again which I definitely need to work on. Lastly, motion. I want to be able to draw more fluid character motions. I’ve been working on it with my original art that I don’t post online, but hopefully I’ll start incorporating it into all my work.

Do you have a shameful art past? (recolor sprite comics, tracing art, etc.?)

Ugh, yes, YES! I admit I was so bad at first, but I also think that’s just how we learn. I used to do a lot of tracing. I started first just full-on tracing images off my computer — That’s right, I’d put the paper up to the computer and trace it like that. Then I started using bases, which was better because at least I had to draw all the details like hair and clothing by myself. Then I finally worked up the courage to stop using them completely. I’d use references, but I would force myself to figure it out by eye rather than copy it straight from the source. I’m happy to say I haven’t been tracing since my late middle school- early high school years.

Cosplay

How many years have you cosplayed?

My first cosplay was when I was fourteen, and I’m twenty-five at the time of writing this article, so eleven years now. Wow.

How did you get into cosplaying?

I honestly don’t know. I was invited to a convention where I heard people dressed up and was like “hey, I want to try that!” I guess it was because I didn’t really do Halloween as a kid and I was so deathly terrified of costumed characters as a toddler that I never took an interest until high school.

How many cosplays have you done?

That’s funny, you want me to remember how many cosplays I’ve ever done. A lot. According to my photo collection, I’ve done about 60 different cosplays (59 exactly if I’m counting correctly.)

What was your first cosplay and why did you choose it?

My first cosplay was Osaka from Azumanga Daioh in her blue summer uniform. Azumanga Daioh was my second ever manga series and my cousin and I were so obsessed with it. She even went as Yukari with me to the convention (though only, like, two people knew who we were.) Tomo is probably my favorite character, but I related personally more to Osaka, being the air-head that I am. I also didn’t have to really style my hair (because that was an era before I used wigs.)

What is your favorite cosplay you’ve done so far?

It’s a tie between my Trainee Link (Hyrule Warriors) costume and my Royal Guard Link (Zelda: Breath of the Wild) costume. Both are alternative costumes for one of my all-time favorite characters that I hand made all the really detailed pieces all from scratch. Link has always been a special character for me to cosplay, but these two are my favorites.

What is your least favorite you’ve cosplayed?

Rapunzel (Tangled). I was obsessed with her at the time which is why I wanted to cosplay her originally, but my dress was not the best and I didn’t look good as her. At least I think so. It was the only costume that made me feel insecure.

What cosplay is the most uncomfortable or troublesome?

Okay, I love this costume and character to pieces, but my gosh the struggles I go through for Pearl (Steven Universe). Blue Diamond (Steven Universe) is the worst in terms of how long it takes me to put my makeup on, but Pearl is right behind her at about 2 hours being my best time. However, the thing that makes Pearl more troublesome to wear is one thing and one thing alone: armsocks.

They look great and prevent you from having to dab makeup all over your body, but I literally couldn’t even hit the home button on my cellphone and it’s not like I could just take them off like gloves. They’re attached at your middle and putting them on is a hassle on its own. Getting your fingers into each tiny socket is so time-consuming. Now imagine this while also being coated in body paint. Plus, having white be the color of the stockings, you have to be conscious of everything you touch because it will stain and show. Because of all this, I refuse to use the restroom dressed as Pearl, and while that is “in character,” it is not healthy and totally NOT recommended you do that.

What is your most comfortable cosplay?

During the winter, Ravio (Zelda: A Link Between Worlds) for sure. It’s like wearing a giant snuggie. However, in summer, it does get hot very quickly (which is why I literally only wear biker shorts and a tank underneath if I ever do take it out on a hot day), so I only wear it in summer if I know there will be AC. Heatstroke is a real thing. Miss Frizzle (Magic School Bus) is probably the best all-year cosplay in terms of comfort. It’s just a dress, stockings, and a wig really.

But in all honesty, most of my cosplays are relatively comfortable. There’s really nothing that I’ve been so uncomfortable that it’s made my physically ill or scarred me physically. My health is important to me, and should safety should always come first.

How do you research the cosplay before you make it?

I look up lots of reference images. I need an image of the front and back, though if it’s not available, I just improvise based on the images I do have on hand. After that, I kind of just wing it.

Do you sew your cosplays yourself?

A good majority of them, yes. There are a few exceptions to this, though: My Disney princesses are all bought since I use them in performances and want them to be durable if children come and tug on the outfit. Pearl, also being a performance cosplay, I did buy as well. For her second reformation outfit (the sleeveless with the ribbon) I got specially commissioned to look and fit me just right whereas her movie/future appearance (jacket and mom-jeans) I literally found at a thrift store. I also love to find costume pieces at thrift stores. Whether I use them as is or make alterations, they make life so much easier when you make a good find for a cheap price. Leni Loud (Loud House) is probably my favorite thrift/sew hybrid. I found a base dress, altered the top and added strap sleeves, put lace around the edges, found a blingy pair of sunglasses, bought earrings and painted them, and made bows for sandals I already had. The most expensive part of that cosplay was the wig I bought from Arda (and it’s always worth it to buy from them in my opinion.)

When I make a costume completely from scratch (like Ravio, Thranduil, any of my Link cosplays) are when I really love the costume and character and want to take on a challenge and bring it to life myself. They also tend to have pieces that can’t be altered from your everyday clothing, but that just makes me work harder and learn more!

How did you learn to sew?

My grandmother taught me how. Osaka was my first cosplay, but my mom altered it from a tee shirt we found at a thrift store and a lucky skirt find. Kabuto Yakushi (Naruto) was the first cosplay I made from scratch (and I won best novice at the convention I wore it to — even with my terrible wig, haha.) She showed me how to use patterns when we made that and my Ayame Sohma cosplay, but after that, I scrapped using patterns and I basically just eyeball everything now. It’s totally not recommended, but I’m a little weirdo and just prefer to do things the way I do. Still, I wouldn’t be able to use a sewing machine if it weren’t for her. Thanks, Nanny!

Do you make your own props?

Most of them. I don’t really use props too often as I find them cumbersome to lug around a convention (which is how I thought of the Fire Emblem, Gravity Falls, and Skyrim book boxes to store your stuff and add some extra flair to a costume.) The few props I have made include Link’s sword, his trainee shield, his original shield from Zelda 1, and Soren’s Wind Tome (which I used for Laurent (Fire Emblem: Awakening) because I didn’t finish Soren (Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance) yet…) Then there’s my prized cosplay prop; Victreebel for James (Pokémon). That was all thanks to my fleece hat business in high school that taught me the skills to build that thing.

I actually think the only prop I store-bought was my Hylian Shield because it was so lightweight and easy to carry, plus I was dreading doing all those details at the time. Maybe one day I’ll make it from scratch, but for now, I’m content with my store-bought.

Do you style your own wigs?

Yes. I have been improving my styling skills a lot more since I first started. It was always a more difficult task for me, but I’ve been practicing more and more. The first one that I attempted on my own was my short-haired Rapunzel. That was basically just giving it a haircut, though. My first real styling challenge was Breath of the Wild Link. It took a long time, but I actually had fun figuring out his hair.

For most of my costumes, it’s really just the bangs that need that extra pop, to which I use Got2B gel and spray. Does the trick every time and keeps everything in place. For those who are wondering, though: No, I did not style Pearl’s wig. I am not ready for that kind of gravity-defying styling. That was all E-Bay.

What skill has been most useful for making your cosplay?

Well, sewing mostly, but other skills that have come in handy for me personally have been painting, crafting, makeup, styling, and overall decorating. Probably other stuff too, just nothing more I can think of off the top of my head.

What is the hardest thing when making a cosplay?

Probably figuring out how things connect. This is the main reason I’m timid when it comes to armor. I’ve been getting better, but I’m still having trouble figuring out how everything attaches and how to put on these kinds of costumes, which is why my Skyrim Elven Armor has been put on hold.

What was the biggest screw up you’ve had making a cosplay?

I’m not sure if I had any major crisis’ when it comes to making cosplays, but I’ve certainly had my fair share of irritating mishaps and mistakes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally sewn the sleeves on a costume inside out about 4 times before I finally got it right.

I’ve cut holes in my clothing, I’ve sewn sleeves on too tight, and I’ve even completed a hat that took hours just for it to wind up being too small when I put a wig on. I guess most of the major issues I’ve had with sewing are measurement issues, so my advice to you is to always measure and try on your costume as you go. Don’t wait until the day of the con to try out your new cosplay.

How often do you injure yourself while making a cosplay?

Not too often, I occasionally prick my finger with my sewing needles, but I haven’t had too many serious injuries. I think the worst was when I slashed my thumb with the exacto-knife when making my first shield for Link. Needless to say, there was a lot of blood.

Do you try to stay cheap or do you splurge on materials?

I am a frugal soul; if I can save, I will. That’s why I thrift so much. However, on a costume I’m really passionate about, I will spend more to ensure the quality. For example, I spent a little more going to a more shimmery material for Royal Guard Link. It cost about $50 for the blue and red material, which to me, is a lot (and that was with coupons). However, the results were 100% worth it. PS, Michaels and Joann’s ALWAYS have coupons. I totally recommend downloading both apps.

I also stand by that with wigs and contacts. I love Arda, their quality is great, but they are more expensive than Amazon. Contacts I don’t mind spending more for as well since the quality is VERY important in this case; they are going on your eyes, after all.

However, as I said, I am absolutely not opposed to going cheap. If you can make it work, make it work. My Nyo!Austria (Hetalia) cosplay came out very cute and it was literally made from bedsheets. From using mostly thrifted and recycled materials, a lot of my cosplays came to around an overall price of around $30. Some of these costumes include Mega Gardevoir (Pokemon), Tomoyo Sakagami (Clannad), Spyro (Spyro the Dragon), and Luan Loud (Loud House.)

Cosplay can be totally affordable, you just have to be creative and think a little outside the box sometimes to make it work.

Have you ever cosplayed with a partner or group?

Yes, a few times. I’d love to do more group cosplays, but we all have to think of something we all like. Luckily, two of my very good friends decided they would dress up as Steven Universe and Amethyst to go with my Pearl this year for Comic-Con and it was such a great experience! I’m trying to convince them to do others as well, such as The Loud House and The Magic School Bus with me as well, haha.

Do you try to act in character?

Always: but I don’t always succeed. It really depends on the character. Pearl I could roleplay for days. It’s probably because I connect so much with her and performing as her doesn’t hurt either. Dee Dee Magno Hall says her favorite lines to say are peoples names, and after giving it a shot myself, I totally see why. I even practiced Garnets “Stronger than you” monologue in Pearl’s voice and tone (in case no one volunteered to sing during our karaoke event) and it always makes my friends laugh.

The characters that stump me a little more are the more serious characters I choose to portray; Link, Laurent, Thranduil (the Hobbit), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), just to name a few. I’m kind of a goofball/airhead so those characters clash with my personality a little bit, but I am getting better. Blue Diamond is surprisingly the easiest of these types to stay in character for.

That being said, I love being the outgoing, oddball characters. Like I said, Pearl is second nature to me, as well as Anna from Frozen. Back in my Hetalia days, Austria and America were my go-to guys. I could act as them forever, and my friends and I literally lived as them for a while with how much we role-played. Most of the Disney Princesses it’s pretty easy for me to stay in character, especially (like I said before) Anna, Sofia the First, and Merida.

How do you react to cosplayers dressed as a character from the same anime/game/etc?

If there are some good character opportunities, I will role-play on the spot, but more often than not I will ask if we could all get a picture together. There were so many fun interactions with other Steven Universe cosplayers when my friends and I did our little group, but one of my favorite interactions was probably when I was dressed as Laurent and I stumbled across a Miriel cosplayer and I just shouted out “MOM! I FINALLY FOUND YOU!”

Do you try to duplicate your character’s expressions, walk, movements, etc?

I can talk the talk (mostly), but I have more trouble walking the walk. I’ve been trying to replicate movements better, but facial expressions I have trouble with (ironic as it’s my favorite part of drawing.) I’m not as photogenic as I’d like to be, as you could probably tell by most of my pictures being the same face, but I definitely am striving to improve on that.

What was your funniest experience of acting in character?

Okay, there’s a lot that I could share, and eventually, I want to do an article solely on cosplay “in-character” experiences, but the one I HAVE to share right now is a recent experience when I was dressed as Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

I was performing at the family day event my church helps out at my pastor’s air force base as Ariel, and after my sing-a-long, my makeup was a little smudged. I asked a volunteer where the restroom was so I could touch up before I headed back out to the crowds. I thought he’d take me to a private restroom, but he brought me to the public one where there were families waiting outside. They noticed and the dad joked “See? Even princesses have to go.” to which I laughed and gave my best Ariel shrug to play along. I went inside, fixed my makeup, and went back outside.

It wasn’t long, so the family was still outside the men’s room. As I walked by, the man’s son shouted out “Ariel, congratulations on going pee-pee!” to which I bursted out laughing. Everyone was. I mean, if you gotta congratulate a princess on using the bathroom, you picked the right one! After that, I did explain that I was just putting on makeup but I appreciated his enthusiasm and thanked him for it.

Do you compete in cosplay contests?

All the time. I love them. Whether I win or lose, I always get something out of it. I learn tips from other cosplayers, get to meet so many interesting people, and those times I do win I get prizes which is always nice as well. Most importantly, though, the memories that are made there are the very best part.

Have you won anything?

I have won quite a few. I have three trophies, a medal, a few certificates, and have won a cash prize as well. My first win was my second convention as Kabuto where I won the best novice trophy. My most recent win was for Ravio in August of 2019 with best in show. It’s amazing, I never thought I would get this far, but I’m so grateful for everything I’ve been a part of.

Again, it’s totally not about winning, but I’ll admit that it does feel really nice to have my hard work appreciated. Just as drawing, I still feel like I have a lot of room for improvement in my cosplay, so winning a few contests here and there definitely helps my low self-esteem.

Do you prefer skits or walk-ons?

I’ve only ever done walk-ons. I’ve never had anyone to do a skit with and I don’t think I could pull one off on my own. I’d love to do one eventually, but for now, our panels are good enough.

How many friends have you made because of cosplay?

Quite a lot. My Instagram is full of cosplayers I’ve met at conventions and I love seeing their cosplays and drawings, it’s all so inspiring!

Do you attend photoshoots and meet-ups outside of conventions?

Occasionally. I’ve never done a professional photoshoot (though one day I’d like to,) but I have attended a few meetups. I’ve done one for Steven Universe, Once Upon a Time, Disney, and I actually accidentally walked into a Fire Emblem: Awakening one dressed as Laurent, so that worked out.

What is the funniest reaction you’ve gotten cosplaying from people outside of the community?

The best one was when I was dressed as Link and my friend and I were on the subway. There was a mom and her kid sitting across from us and she pointed to me and said to her child, “Look, an elf! You see? Santa’s got his helpers out all year round, so you have to be good!”

I also had another wonderful experience outside of a con dressed as Link, though it’s not as funny but more just a sweet memory. It’s quite a bit, but luckily I’ve already written about it for Zelda Universe so I’ll just link it here for anyone who’s interested.

Name a few cosplays you’re planning to do next:

I’ve got to get Soren (Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance) done soon. I’ve been wanting to do this cosplay forever and I did start it, but I need to finally finish it. Dimitri (Fire Emblem: Three Houses) is also on my list to do next. Not sure about who else I want to do for sure, but some ideas that have floated around in my head have been Tilly Green (Big City Greens), Anna with her Frozen 2 look, Princess Peach (Super Mario), and a Thalmor Mage (Skyrim.)

What is your dream cosplay?

Princess Zelda from Twilight Princess. I’m still too scared to try to cosplay her. I bought a cheap starter costume that I was going to build off of and it wasn’t turning out the way I wanted, so I put it off again. One day I’ll feel confident enough to make her costume, but until then I’m totally satisfied with my Link cosplays.

What do you take into consideration when picking a character to cosplay?

Honestly, I just have to love them as a character and the costume itself has to seem do-able. I mean, I’m totally not opposed to buying cosplays if I really want to be a particular character, but like I said, making it means all the more to me. It’s my display of affection towards that character, the creators behind them, and the series as a whole.

Is cosplay serious business for you?

Yes and no. No because I don’t do it for money, likes, or internet fame. I do it because it’s fun and what I like to do. Yes because I go all out when I cosplay. I do everything I can to get the look the way I want it and I put my blood, sweat, and tears into it when I make them by hand.

What is your favorite thing about cosplay?

Everything: Dressing up as a character I love, roleplaying them, taking photos, just everything! I would do it more often if I could!

How do you want to grow as a cosplayer?

I want to learn how to make more. I want to build armor, I want to learn new makeup and hairstyling techniques, and so much more. I’m happy where I am, but I know I can be better. I will watch others and learn from them and push myself to try new things!

Are you willing to answer questions and help other cosplayers?

Absolutely! I may not be a top dog of cosplaying, but if I can help someone with something I’ve learned along the way, I’m more than happy to help!

Writing

When did you start writing?

I started in middle school as well, I used to write a Nintendo fan fiction called “The Kirby Show,” where Kirby and his friends would get into wacky sitcom scenarios. They were really just knock-offs of the television shows I used to watch back in the day, but hey, everyone’s gotta start somewhere.

As for my original writing, I started that more in high school. I still wrote a lot of fan fiction at that point, but I was starting to develop my own characters as well. I thought it about time to think of my own creations, and I did. I remember I was in my Godmother’s car when I thought of the main three characters and since then the cast has expanded so much, their stories are much better developed, and the lore is much more solid.

When you were a beginning writer, what did you write primarily? What do you write now, primarily? (i.e. romance, fan-fiction, poetry)

As mentioned before, I started out writing stories about characters that were not my own. Now I do all original writing — well, aside from my work at Zelda Universe. There I get to write about all the unique aspects of one of my favorite game series of all time, so there’s that as well. Writing there has helped me start writing little fandom topical posts for my own blog, such as top 10’s, reviews, and other things along those lines.

How often do you write?

I make it a habit to try and write at least a half-hour a day. If I’m really on a roll, I could write up to a few hours a day before I get burnt out. Even though I’m not always writing, I’m always developing the stories in my head.

When is your favorite time of the day to write?

I always write a half hour before I go to bed. The later it is, the more ideas keep rolling in. With my early hours for work now it’s harder to stay up late, but that doesn’t stop the ideas. I just gotta push myself a little harder to start earlier to have more time before I need to go to bed.

Do you have a writing muse? If so, who/what?

Not in particular. I always just write about what I like and incorporate different aspects of my life into it. I guess I’m my own muse in that sense? I don’t know. I just write what I do know.

What is your most popular lit piece?

Out of all my public pieces, I’d say either my “Animal Crossing Diaries” series or my “Endless Ocean” screenplay. “Vagabond” gets some decent attention as well, which is nice, but honestly, I’d be happy if there was just one person enjoying my work, so I really can’t complain.

What is the piece you are currently writing?

Out of my public blog works, “Vagabond,” from my Zelda Universe collection I’m working on a character piece on Colin from Twilight Princess.

What is the piece you most recently finished?

On my blog that would be my “Top 10 Favorite Fire Emblem Characters” list. For Zelda Universe, it’s actually a piece about Fire Emblem as well — It was DS week, I could write about whatever DS game I wanted to, of course I have to sneak in some Fire Emblem.

What piece are you most proud of?

While “Vagabond” definitely needs some more work, out of all the pieces I’ve posted publicly, that one is the one I am the proudest of. If anything just for Kurt and Maerwynn. They are two of my favorite characters to play around with and I’m so happy that somehow I was allowed to think these two up.

In my more private works, my fantasy story is my pride and joy. I feel so blessed to have been able to come up with these characters, and I do hope that someday I will be able to share them, whether on a television screen as I’ve always dreamed of in a novel of some sort. One day, maybe.

What piece are you most disappointed in?

It’s not so much disappointment, but rather I’ve grown so much in my work, it’s very hard for me to look back at my first romance story. It’s a little cheesy and the dialogue is a bit clunky, some of the actions that my characters had performed totally go against what their characters have become now after spending a lot more time with them. It’s something I would love to revisit and maybe even go public with, but it’s going to take a lot of work.

From all of your stories, who is/are your favorite character(s) and why? (try to limit it to 3)

Since I only published “Vagabond” online, I’ll stick to characters from this story in particular.

Maerwynn is definitely a favorite because she’s got a lot of qualities that I wish I was bold enough to enact myself. She speaks her mind without a care of what anyone else will think, even if it’s blatantly rude. She goes for her goals, even if they may seem ridiculous, and she pursues them with great passion and ferocity. Even with this rough and tough exterior, she’s still got a softer side that she’s just discovering in her new life at the palace. Now, I wouldn’t ever recommend being like Maerwynn ALL the time, but there’s definitely is a time and place where we could all be a little bit more like her, I think. Her confidence is the thing I admire most about her.

Kurt I connect with as well. Again, he says all the things that we all wish we could get away with at one point or another, but he knows he can because he’s royalty. However, he’s got so much going on underneath the surface as well with the complications of his past. He’s learning to open up, connect with others, and understand his feelings. Despite feeling restricted by the laws of his kingdom and the traditions of the royal family, he finds his own way to feel free and be himself.

What is the best compliment you ever got on your writing?

My best friend who I’ve been sharing these stories with for as long as we’ve known each other told me the nicest thing not to long ago. I always laugh at myself for going so crazy in-depth with the lore and characters of my fantasy world, but she told me how she’s admired that and the love and care I put into each little thing was what made it so great. It really meant the world to me to hear that and I can’t thank her enough for all the love and support throughout the years!

What is your main goal in writing?

I don’t know if there’s one main goal in particular, but I suppose if I had to pick just one, it would be to show good through the works of my characters and hope and pray that it inspires others to be like them. Kindness is growing scarce in the world, and if I can just inspire a little bit of it in someone, I suppose that’s all I can ask for.

Have you ever been published?

No, but I am aiming for it. Once I complete Vagabond, give it another revise myself, and hopefully find an editor to give it another look over, I’d love to find someone to publish my book or even self publish on a platform like Amazon. Just something to get my work out there.

Questions asked by you

Who is an artist that you look up to? There are a few artists online that I follow who I just adore their work. Three that come to mind in particular are Bianca Roman-Stumpff, Bellhenge, and TheStarfishFace. Their art is so different from mine, but I think that’s probably why I love it so much (if that makes sense?) They each have such a unique style and great subject material, I highly recommend giving them a look!

What did you think of “Frozen 2”?

I loved it. No secret that I’m a huge Frozen fan, so I was bound to like it. I was actually really nervous about how it was going to end, but I can say (without spoilers) that I am 100% satisfied with how it concluded. Also, Kristoff finally gets the spotlight that he deserves, thank you, Disney.

However, as much as I did love it, I do totally admit I do see flaws in it that could have been improved on. That being said, there was that in the first movie too and I stilled loved it. The characters have enough charm to keep the film entertaining throughout and I just adore them!

What does your family think of your art?

My parents have always encouraged me about my art and I know my grandmother loves it; I gave her a sweater with the art she liked of mine last Christmas and my mom says she wears it all the time. The rest of my family knows and supports my art as well, I never really had any issue with my small art business and the family.

Any memorable cosplay experiences at a con?

So many. I’ve shared a few before, but I think I’d like to make a whole article on the great cosplay experiences I’ve had! There are so many to talk about and stories to share.

Is there a type of art that you would like to get into? I’ve seen a lot of people doing wood carving and burning, but that looks insanely difficult.

I’ve actually been considering wood burning, haha! It does look difficult, that’s why I’ve been hesitant, but maybe in the future I’d give it a shot. I think they’d make my Skyrim wood pieces look legit.

I’m really up for trying anything. If money wasn’t a thing, I’d have tried a lot more by now. In the future, I’d love to try needlepoint as well!

Recently, I had been asked about some of the work that I do, and I thought a fun way to just that was to fill out a few questionnaires. Here I talk about some of the high and low points of doing what I do, what inspires me, and my process of creativity. Welcome all! If you're reading this, I'm assuming you're familiar with my work as either an artist, cosplayer, writer or any of the other creative things I do.

#art #artist #ask #author #cosplay #cosplayer #Q&A #writing

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mrslittletall · 6 years ago

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Title: Keeping it together (Chapter 23) Fandom: Dark Souls Characters: Dragon Slayer Ornstein, Silver Knights, Lord's Blade Ciaran, Hawkeye Gough, Great Grey Wolf Sif Word Count: 6.718 AO3-Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16328084/chapters/43960237 Previous chapter: https://mrslittletall.tumblr.com/post/184296200789/title-keeping-it-together-chapter-22

Summary: Ornstein is working on feeling better.

(Author's note: Last chapter ahead and it is a pretty long one. Please enjoy and thanks for staying with me during this ride.)

After around a week had passed, Gwyndolin finally allowed Ornstein to leave the Dark Moon Tomb. Ornstein had needed that break as much as he hated to admit it. His nausea had subdued and the constant ache in his stomach had greatly tuned down. It now was apparent to him that his sickness had stemmed from him trying to keep it together.

For his injuries, he couldn't do anything about the broken fingers, but that shouldn't hinder him much, at least it was only on the left hand. His bruised leg still hurt a bit, but was on a good way to heal completely, with him able to walk on it quite normally.

Now that Gwyndolin had allowed Ornstein to leave, he was very eager to get back into his armour. In fact, he felt a bit uncomfortable having to walk the distance to the cathedral without it. It was a good thing that the streets were pretty unoccupied. Granted, that might have also been because Ornstein had decided to walk back once the night had fallen. His gaze was on the bright full moon as he walked. Ever since Gwyndolin had taken up the mantle to rule over Anor Londo the moon had been full every single night. Ornstein had never questioned it, they were a god under the protection of the moon overall. It didn't occur to Ornstein how cold the nights in Anor Londo had become.

As Ornstein approached the cathedral, the silver knights standing guard there greeted him.

“Captain, it is good to see that you feel better.”

“Don't worry about the cathedral, we took good care of it in your absence.”

Ornstein thanked them with a smile and made his way to his room, hoping that his armour had been brought there. To his relief, it was there along with his spear. After not being able to wearing it for so long and because Ornstein wasn't tired at all yet, he put it on, only with a little trouble because of the restricted movement of his left hand. After he was done, he picked up his spear and looked at himself in the mirror.

Seeing the fierce expression of the lion helmet instead of his face brimming with his insecurities and anxiety, made him feel a lot better about himself. Gwyndolin was saying that he should be more true to himself, but Ornstein didn't felt anything wrong about using his armour to keep up his composure. He still was the captain of the knights and while he had allowed himself a moment of weakness, it had to be over now.

He adjusted his armour until it fit perfectly and left his room, wandering through the cathedral, greeting any silver knight or servant he saw and eventually stopped in front of the so called silver knight ask box. It looked like there actually were some messages in it. Well, he hadn't checked it for a while now. Ornstein gathered the box and headed for the conference room with it.

When he opened the door to the conference room he first deeply sighed at the sight of the paperwork and then froze because he saw Sira sitting there. Without her helmet for once, working on the paperwork.

“Sira, what...?”, he started and she jerked up, frantically fishing for her helmet and got it on before answering him.

“Oh, Captain Ornstein, are you feeling better?”, she asked. “I was handling the paperwork. I have made stacks for stuff that you still need to sign and stuff that I can't do on my own, but everything else is pretty much done, I wanted to turn it in once I finished the last few bits.”

“Have you done this the whole week?”, Ornstein was astounded as he gazed along the paperwork, messy lumps now neatly organized. It even intimidated him how big the stacks had become. He thoroughly hoped the biggest one wasn't the “to sign” stack.

“Yes, but I liked doing it. To be honest, I only joined the silver knight because my parents wanted me to. I never felt much for fighting, organizing stuff is a lot easier for me.”

“I am impressed. This helps so much. That you managed to do all this work in such a short time. I should assign you to do the paperwork exclusively.”

“Actually, I would rather cherish that.”

Ornstein stared at Sira, then at the paperwork, then at Sira again. He was half during the process to formulate a sentence in his head that she didn't need to and that it was his duty to do the paperwork and he just needed to stop procrastinating it, but then he asked himself. Why shouldn't he lot Sira do the paperwork? She had told him that she liked it more than doing the usual duties of a silver knight.

“Well then, Sira, I assign you to be in charge of the paperwork.”, Ornstein said.

“I will fulfill this task to the best of my belief.”, Sira answered and bowed to him. She took a bunch of papers with her, to Ornstein's relief from the biggest stack, pointed the one out he still needed to sign and left the room. Only when she had left Ornstein noticed that she hadn't stuttered once talking to him this time.

With Sira gone, Ornstein put the ask box down on the table and his gaze laid on the stack to sign for a moment. He should probably sign it, better sooner as later, but for now, he wanted to open the ask box first. He removed the lid and fished the first message out.

The silver knight ask box had been established a long time ago, back when all four knights of Gwyn still had been around, when the dragon war still had been raging on, when Lord Gwyn and even the Firstborn had still been around. Ornstein had bought the little box because he had become sick and tired of having to answer the same question to every silver knight individually, so he put the box down, instructed the silver knights to put any questions in it and at the end of the day he and the other knights of Gwyn would go through them and tell the silver knights their answers at the next roll call.

Ornstein was expecting to see a few requests in the box, so when he unfolded the message and looked at it, he got surprised to see the words: “Captain, are you feeling alright lately? It doesn't seem like it. May I suggest you get some rest?”

He unfolded the next message only to be greeted with a similar sounding message: “Captain, don't worry too much about taking a break, we can handle it until you feel better.”

Ornstein fished a third message out of the box, which read: “Captain, if I don't see you take a break soon, then me and Terrick will drag you to the infirmary.” It was signed by Amira, of course.

The rest of the messages were all like this. Concerns, the knights telling Ornstein not to worry about it, them begging him to take a break and even a few that must have been tossed in only recently, because they asked him if he felt better.

“You guys.”, Ornstein murmured to himself. “Why did I think I had to shoulder it all alone? I should have trusted my knights a little bit more...” He laid his head down on the table, overwhelmed by the kindness of his silver knights and his gaze fell onto the papers that still needed to be signed.

Ah well, he could get to them now. He felt that he at least owed Sira this. And if he only had to sign the papers it wouldn't take long. He fetched a quill and an ink pot and got started. ___

Later that day Ornstein was going through the stuff he had brought back from Oolacile. It wasn't much of course, he hadn't been there for sightseeing and he already had unpacked all the clothes he had brought with him and gave them to the laundry team.

What he hadn't unpacked yet, where the sketches he had made back then. Gough, Ciaran, the Sanctuary Guardian and some flowers from Dusk's garden. He remembered that he once had also drawn Dusk's maiden, but he had given the picture to them. Ornstein stared at the sketches. Didn't he thought about giving them some colour once he returned? He wasn't too sure though when he had used the easel the last time. He should check if the colours there were still moist and hadn't dried up yet.

However, before Ornstein wanted to visit the painting room, he picked up the sketch of Ciaran in front of the makeshift grave. Back then, Ciaran had shooed him away and he didn't had a chance to finish it yet. He let his gaze wander over the sketch. Ciaran's general posture had already been sketched out, how she had kneeled in front of the grave, hands folded into a prayer stance. Ornstein grabbed for a pencil, an item he usually would carry around with him and set the tip on the paper, it made a scratching sound once he drew the lines of Ciaran's helmet, the distinct shape, resembling a hornet.

He couldn't look at her for reference right now, but he didn't need to. He had seen her almost every single day for a few centuries, she was vividly in front of his inner eye. He continued the sketch with adding her distinct ponytail, unlike his, it had been added to her helmet, but Ornstein knew it had once been her actual hair, hair that she had cut short when she became an assassin. Ornstein drew the last few lines of the braid before adding her armour, the light leather set, which was worn by all of the lord's blades, but Ciaran still managed to distinct herself from them. Her mask looked different and she herself had chosen it. Ornstein drew the narrow eyes and the thin mouth on it, the only facial feature on the mask. Once he was done, he laid his pencil down and looked at his work.

A perfect sketch of Ciaran in her grieving, which she had done right away, instead like him, who had hid his feelings for far too long. Ciaran had decided back there and then, that her feelings were more important than her duties and stayed at Artorias grave. It hadn't even occurred to Ornstein to visit her. It must have been awful for her, maybe even more than for himself. He had a churning feeling in his chest, thinking about it. His gaze fell onto the drawing of Gough, the gentle giant, who would always carve and whittle away on some wood on this tower. They both had been worried about him, had told him several times to take care and what had he done?

Ornstein determined that he would visit both of them as soon as he had a free day. And his leg wouldn't hurt anymore.

Now that Ornstein had finished the sketch of Ciaran, technically he felt he could venture to the painting room and look for colours, but he wasn't in the mood for it. Instead, he picked up a fresh piece of paper and his pencil.

The first thing he roughly sketched out were a few trees. They didn't need to be very detailed, he just needed the general idea of a forest clearing on this piece. He adumbrated some grass and then the scratching of his pencil worked on the main part of this sketch, a figure leaning against a tree, legs spread out, relaxed posture. Nobody viewed Ornstein draw, but when he would have a spectator, they would have realized that he was working on Artorias the moment the lines formed his cape and hood. Ornstein added the details of Artorias armour on the drawing, the leggings that mostly resembled those of a silver knight as well as the chest piece, which was party covered by the cape though. Then the next line formed the tassel on Artorias hood, going straight down, resting on his chest. And even though most of the time, Artorias face was darkened inside that hood, Ornstein decided to add it. The gentle gaze, the charming smile, the vertical scar just above his nose, the beard shadow that grew back even after Artorias had fully shaved that morning.

Yes, this was Artorias like he remembered him. An Artorias who was at ease with himself and the world. Ornstein hoped, that wherever Artorias mind was now, that he could find this peace, that he didn't had to wander in endless nightmares.

Ornstein gazed at the sketch again. Actually, this wasn't complete yet. What truly made Artorias, was still missing. He added the figure of a wolf pup next to Artorias with a few strokes, curled in on itself.

Another glance, still didn't felt finished. Ornstein didn't need to think twice about what to add. A few lines later, Artorias had his sword laid lazily over his legs, the massive size of it still making the tip bury slightly into the ground and his shield was laid protectively over Sif, as if he wanted to shield her from any harm. Ornstein laid down the drawing and felt satisfied. That was how he wanted to remember Artorias. Not like the one he had seen in his dreams... he wanted to try and remember his friend as the relaxed man chilling in the woods.

It had gotten quite late while he had worked on the drawings. Now he had Gough, Ciaran and Artorias. Three of the four knights of Gwyn. Only one missing.

Ornstein stared at his armour that he had stacked into a corner of the room. He stood up and walked over to it in slow, but steady steps. He studied the armour thoroughly, tried to etch every single detail into his mind. He had been wearing it pretty much every day now since he had become the first knight of Gwyn. It felt like it had become a part of his personality.

“I wonder if this is a good thing?”, Ornstein asked himself, when he picked up the helmet and took it back with him to the table, placing it in plain sight, turned around, so that he would look at the backside. Then he straightened a new piece of paper.

Ciaran he had drawn praying in front of the makeshift grave, Gough he had drawn carving, Artorias he had drawn relaxing in the woods. And the last knight of Gwyn?

Ornstein sketched out the cathedral, the part that was most visible for anyone who would come from Sen's fortress, the big gates, the stairs, the windows, the spires, before he sketched the figure of the dragon slayer in front of it.

Spear firmly gripped in his right hand, his back turned to the watcher, the gaze of his lion helmet on the cathedral, his ponytail falling down his back, posture strong and assertive, showing that this place was under his protection. He truly felt like the last protector of Anor Londo.

Ornstein dropped his pencil, after drawing that much his fingers had cramped and the broken fingers in his left hand throbbed too, although he mostly had used this hand to hold the paper down.

Ornstein looked out of the window. He hadn't even noticed that the sun had already set. That explained why his room suddenly felt so dark. He lighted a candle and put it on his night stand. Ornstein wondered if he should go to bed straight away, but he wasn't feeling tired yet. It wouldn't hurt walking the short distance to the painting room and check for colours. He could buy any missing ones the next day on his patrol, so he grabbed the candle and left his room.

As Ornstein was wandering through the hallways, he could hear a voice casually speaking: “...and then we all wanted to know who the mysterious piano player was and were eavesdropping at the door, but we were too greedy and then the door busted and it turned out to be... Oh, Captain Ornstein!”, Herman greeted Ornstein as he crossed the path of him and Jervis. “Is anything the matter? Do you want to check if we do our job right?”, he chuckled.

“No, I am not here for that.”, Ornstein replied, he couldn't help but feel amused. “I just wanted to check something in the painting room.”

“Alright, captain, call us if anything happens.”, Herman said and both knights passed Ornstein. After a few more steps, Ornstein could hear how they continued their conversation.

“So who has been the mysterious piano player?”, Jervis asked.

“That's it, it was indeed Captain Ornstein. He was furious about us eavesdropping, especially at Artorias, but he still agreed to play for us.”, Herman answered.

That brought Ornstein back. One day he had discovered a piano in one of the guest rooms and he used to learn it as a kid. He hadn't played for a good while this particular day, so his playing was far off and sounded awful, so he came to practice every single day and got the interest of the silver knights. Playing the piano... he hadn't done it in a while yet. Ornstein thought it could be fun to do it once again, but then he remembered the broken fingers on his left hand and looked at them.

“Won't be able to hit all keys with two of them restrained liked this.”, he murmured to himself and entered the painting room he had arrived at in the meantime.

He closed the door behind him, put the candle into his left hand (carefully to not drop it, being able to only hold it with three fingers) and headed straight for the cupboard where they kept their colours. He opened it, carefully placed the candle on the floor and checked if he had everything he would need.

Let's see, he needed gold, red, blue, silver, white, brown, black and green mostly. Most colours were still there, but he noticed a shortage of blue and gold. Ornstein closed the cupboard, picked up the candle and went back to his room.

The next day on his patrol Ornstein strolled over the market place and got the missing colours, a new brush when he was already on it and some treats that he intended to give to the group of cats.

It felt a bit like Artorias ghost had possessed him when he bought the treats. Ornstein had never cared much about cats, they were far too hostile against him, but for some reason, this group had started to grow on him. While Ornstein was tossing the treats to them, he thought about that Artorias often had brought dogs or cats with him into the cathedral before he had gotten Sif, hastily hiding them in cupboard drawers until Ornstein had forced him to get them out of the cathedral.

An uneasy thought crossed Ornstein's mind. What if he still had cats and dogs hidden in his room? And nobody had entered this place for a good while now...

Orstein shook off the thought as quickly as possible, there was no way Artorias would have left some animals to starve while he was gone. Even if there had been animals in his room, he would have made sure that someone took care of them. And when he had asked Ciaran, she also would have made sure that they were taken care off.

While Ornstein had been lost in thoughts, he hadn't noticed that the little white cat had laid down beside him, purring and he absentmindedly had started to pet it, even though his hand was covered into a cold metal gauntlet. Snowy didn't seem to mind though. Hm, strange, maybe he could get behind cats after all.

Ornstein kept some of the treats for himself (a guilty pleasure only a few people knew about) and finished his patrol. There wasn't much going on. His silver knights did outstanding work and managed to deal with thieves, bandits and even Undead flawlessly. Ornstein had to admit, it probably helped that Seath would house the Undead until they were able to escort them to the asylum. Even though Ornstein felt like they always got less Undead back than they had brought in.

After Ornstein arrived back at the cathedral, he met up with Sira to take care of the paperwork she couldn't do on her own. After that was done, he cleaned out the silver knight ask box while eating the left over dried fish treats and saw even more supportive messages, which brought a smile on his face. One of them was from Amira and Terrick inviting him to a game of cards. Ornstein considered it, he really should try to go out more, spending time with his knights could be just what he needed. Even though he enjoyed some solitude, he had to admit that he had felt quite lonely lately, with Artorias, Ciaran and Gough gone, the three people he had spent so much time with over the course of several centuries.

After his duties were done for the day and the silver knights were assigned to new tasks (even though Amira and Terrick had suggested they could do it, Ornstein still wanted to do this task on his own), he fetched the colours and the brush he had bought earlier as well as the sketches from his room, unsheathed from his armour and walked to the painting room.

Ornstein prepared an easel, put the sketch on it and poured the colours on a pallet. He wanted to start with Ciaran so he mostly needed blue and some white. Soon it was only him and the strokes of his brush on the painting as Ciaran started to get some colour, first the basics, then the details. Ornstein took great care into adding lighter spots at where the sun had shone on her, he remembered the picture of her praying in front of this grave so well and that it kind of had looked beautiful how the light had reflected on her armour.

As soon as he was finished with giving the grave some colour, Ornstein stepped back and inspected his work. He found it to be a fine piece. He would have loved to show it to Ciaran, but...

Ornstein's stomach growled and he realized how much time he already had spent in the painting room. He could finish the other paintings over the course of the next few days. As he was cleaning up and on his way to leave the room, Ornstein noticed another easel which was covered with a cloth. Curious on who had painted lately and what, he removed it and stared at a painting of himself and Artorias.

Oh, that explained why blue and gold had been out.

Ornstein nearly felt like crying when he looked at the painting. It wasn't a masterpiece, far from it, it was pretty crude and bristled with beginner mistakes, but he instantly knew that Artorias had painted it. Ornstein wondered if Artorias had planned to gift it to him? Had it been his birthday? Ornstein was awfully bad at remembering it, but Artorias hadn't forgotten it any single year. Every year Ornstein had received a cake from him, often along another present, often handmade.

And now, Ornstein would never eat Artorias cake again.

Ornstein put the cloth back over the painting, wiped away the tears that had formed in his eyes and left the painting room.

After dinner, Ornstein decided to accept the invitation to the silver knight card game and thus it was far too late to continue his paintings once they finished and he excused himself to go to bed while the silver knights still seemed to want to stay awake a bit. After Ornstein did had so much sleeping trouble though, he decided to work on a consistent sleep schedule and go to bed at a reasonable hour each day.

The next few days continued in this matter. Ornstein would attend to his duties, then paint until dinner and then usually spent some time with the silver knights. Over the days, the drawings became more and more coloured.

On the first day Gough and his carvings turned into the brown and black shades the giant appeared in. On this day the silver knights wanted to play some chess and all got destroyed by Ornstein, who jokingly said they had to get Seath when they wanted a chance and ended in several silver knights trying to hold back the newbies when they actually wanted to venture into the archives.

On the second day, Ornstein's brush strokes gave colour to Artorias and Sif, which soon appeared in their usual silver-blue as well as grey. Ornstein took so much care of tiny details, that he had to postpone painting the background, because he barely managed to finish Artorias sword once it was time for dinner. This evening, the silver knights indulged in a game of truth or dare. Ornstein didn't join, but watched from the sidelines, thinking about the times he had played it with the others. This evening when Ornstein left he felt a lump in his throat.

The third day was spent with painting the forest around Artorias and Sif, before Ornstein managed to give colour to his self portrait. This day he didn't felt like hanging out with the silver knights and instead used the extra time after dinner to finish the drawing, added some details and painted the cathedral around himself. After he was done, he took a step back and admired his work. It had been some time since he last had painted, but this felt like some of his finest works. Now he had to find a place where he could hang them, but first, they needed to dry.

Ornstein decided to take a bath, he had managed to splash himself with colour quite a bit. It was a bit troublesome with the splinted fingers, but at least Gwyndolin had took off the bandage around his leg in the meantime and the bruise had almost healed, so that Ornstein didn't need to limp at all anymore. Ornstein also had arranged to visit Gwyndolin on a regular basis for some tea and them talking to each other, as friends not as knight and lord and Ornstein felt like this greatly improved his mood, he had started to look forward to visiting them ever since he had left the Dark Moon Tomb. He felt like both of them needed this visits, it made them feel less lonely.

Even though Ornstein enjoyed spending time with his silver knights, they never had the same chemistry with him than Artorias, Ciaran and Gough had. Sure, they were friendly and made him feel cherished, but ultimately, Ornstein knew they still saw him as their captain and so a certain closeness was missing. Ornstein wondered if that was what Artorias had felt about him? That Ornstein involuntary had pushed him away, because he was his captain and not because Ornstein had feared that his secret got lifted? Sadly now he would never know the answer. Artorias literally had taken it to the grave with him.

This night Ornstein had a mental breakdown again.

The next day, Ornstein had organized some picture frames, mostly from unused rooms with paintings so old that the colour already chipped off, still storing them neatly in the painting room.

Ornstein had decided where to hang his paintings and so he was in the silver knight quarters, scanning the walls, searching for the best position to hang the paintings. Once he had found a particular long wall with enough empty space, Ornstein picked up the hammer he had brought and proceeded to knock a nail in the wall, carefully taking care to not hit his hurt fingers. It was troublesome enough already with only three fingers to hold the nail and every hit on it made the injury throb, so Ornstein was pretty glad, when some help arrived in the form of Herman.

“Captain, let me help you with this.”, he shouted out. “It must be difficult for you to hold the nail with your injuries.”

“Thank you, Herman.”, Ornstein said and instructed the knight to where he wanted the nails. While he was at work, Jervis popped in, curious what Herman was doing. These two knights really had become inseparable lately. Ornstein felt like they had some father-son-dynamic going on. Which also reminded him, that he never did had a father figure in his life. The closest was probably Gough, they often jokingly had said that Gough is something like the team dad of the knights of Gwyn. And Gough had just chuckled in his low voice and said that he didn't mind having three children like them now.

Once again, reminiscing in this good old times made Ornstein feel uneasy.

“Alright, Captain, I am done.”, Herman's voice snapped Ornstein out of this thoughts.

“Thank you.”, Ornstein said and stood up, walking over to the paintings he already had framed. He picked the first one, that of Ciaran and hung it on the first nail on the wall.

“Oh, we are blessed with some original Ornstein's today.”, Herman casually said.

“What?”, Jervis asked, clearly confused.

“You see, Captain Ornstein sometimes paints and then finds a place in the cathedral to hang the paintings. This appears to be a painting from Lady Ciaran, who sadly has left us. What is the painting called?”

“Grief.”, Ornstein answered, after checking if the painting was hanging straight.

He picked up the next painting, the one of Gough carving.

“It has been so many years since I last saw Sir Gough! How is he doing?”

“Fine.”, Ornstein answered. “He carves the whole day, so much, that his body is littered with chips.”

“The title of this one?”

“Calm.”

The next painting was that of Artorias. Ornstein mulled over it for a bit before he started to hang it. This time, Herman didn't say anything.

“I called it peace.”, Ornstein explained after hanging the painting. “It is what he deserved. It is what I hope he has.” Ornstein didn't knew yet that he never would stop wondering if Artorias had actually be able to move on.

Only one painting left. He picked it up without taking a second glance.

“So know we have all of the four knights of Gwn watching over us.”, Herman mused. “And what is the title of this one, captain?”

Ornstein finished hanging the painting, looked at it, looked at the floor, blinked and stared at it again.

“The last protector.”, he finally said. ___

“How nice to see that you bless us with our presence.”

Ciaran's word stung like a hornet. Ornstein knew she didn't mean it like that, she usually was that sarcastic. He took it as a good sign. Her spraying some poison meant that she was feeling better.

“I had a lot of stuff to do and then...”, Ornstein started but didn't continue the sentence, absentmindedly petting over Sif's head instead, removing his left gauntlet to better feel the soft fur of the animal.

“What happened to your fingers?”, Ciaran asked, suddenly standing next to him, startling Ornstein so much that he jumped.

“Oh that...”, Ornstein said, staring at his fingers. “I fell.”

“Fell how? Down the stairs? Or did you trip over a cat?” Ornstein could clearly hear the irony in her voice over the last line.

“Fine, you got me, I collapsed from lack of sleep.”, Ornstein blurted out. “And then I was sick for a while and couldn't leave.”

“You insisted all this time that you were fine, but I still knew it would happen.”, Ciaran scolded him. “You should have taken care of yourself right away.”

“To be honest, Ciaran, you put on quite a burden on me when you told me that you wouldn't return to the cathedral.”, Ornstein snapped back at her.

“That is true. I am sorry for this, but I simply knew that I wouldn't be able to continue my duties.”, Ciaran casually explained.

“You want to watch over his grave.”, Ornstein said, it was a statement, not an ask. “Together with Sif.”

Ciaran simply nodded and sat back down behind the grave. After a few moments, Ornstein followed her. As he passed the grave, he took a moment to pray in front of it, sending his best wishes to Artorias. The sword of the wolf knight had been slammed into the ground. Sif was still too small to use it. And it would probably take her another 100 or 200 years to grow to her full size, great grey wolfs were a long living species but also one that grew exceptionally slow.

“So, how have you been?”, Ciaran asked once Ornstein had sat down beside her.

“Well, you know...”, Ornstein started and then he told her almost everything what had happened until he arrived back at Anor Londo. About how he drowned himself in work, how the mission with the dark wraiths went and how he was locked up by Gwyndolin in the Dark Moon Tomb for a good weak, but he didn't tell her about the mental breakdowns he had, how much he actually had vomited or that he had hung a painting of her grieving in front of Artorias makeshift grave into the silver knights quarters.

Eventually Ornstein had to leave. The way to Oolacile wasn't the shortest and he had used his free day for the visit, although this time he hadn't travelled on foot alone but actually paid some money for a carrier ride which greatly shortened the time. The first time around he mostly had decided to walk, because he had dreaded the arrival. And while this time he still had an empty feeling in his chest, Ornstein knew it was because he missed his friend, that was all. He probably would never stop to miss him, he only could get used to it.

However, Ornstein didn't want to leave back to Anor Londo right away, he had another friend to visit. As soon as he had climbed the ladder and set both feet on the ground of the tower, Gough greeted him.

“It's good to see that you are feeling better, Ornstein.”

“Yes, I am glad about this too... wait, what?”

Gough chuckled, that low chuckle that made Ornstein feel so much at ease.

“It is the way you walk, the clanks of your steps are sounding totally different depending on your mood.”, Gough explained. “So, how have you been doing lately? You took your sweet time to come for a visit.”

So Ornstein told his story a second time, pretty much the same like for Ciaran, only letting out things like his mental breakdowns, although to Gough he did tell that he had hung paintings of all four knights into the silver knight quarters.

“And when I was painting, I was discovering this other painting, it was of Artorias and me... and even though it wasn't signed I knew instantly that Artorias had painted it. Had he told you something about it?”

Gough stopped his carving and pondered for a bit, but then shook his head: “No, Artorias hasn't said anything about having done a painting. I guess he wanted it to be a surprise. Why don't you consider it as his last gift?”

“I was thinking about it anyway. Thanks for your advice, old friend.”

They both stayed like that and chatted a bit more until Ornstein really had to leave, or he would miss the carrier departing towards Anor Londo and he was supposed to pick his duties back up tomorrow. From the base of tower, Ornstein could see how Gough waved to him and Ornstein waved back.

Even though his knights weren't with him anymore, he could still visit them. And that made Ornstein feel a bit less lonely. ___

Ornstein was in his room, searching for a place to hang the painting of Artorias he had discovered in the painting room. It took him a long while to find a a place, trying out quite a few, being unsatisfied and searching for another place until he finally settled at the door. Then, he could look at it every time he left his room. And Ornstein felt like Artorias deserved this, even if he didn't knew if the painting had been intended as a gift, the dragon slayer had known the wolf knight for so long, that he pretty much didn't had any doubt about it. He would cherish this last gift Artorias had ever made him. He wanted to be able to look at it every day without even forgetting once. So the door was the perfect place for it. After he was done, Ornstein took a few steps back and just admired the painting.

Not everything was fine yet. Sometimes Ornstein still awoke in cold sweat because of a nightmare. Sometimes Ornstein still had mental breakdowns. Sometimes he had to just leave the hangout time with the silver knights because his feelings overwhelmed him and he needed to calm down. But at the same time, Ornstein had started to talk more to Gwyndolin about everything that troubled him (but he still left out he had mental breakdowns, he didn't want to burden them with this knowledge) and he regularly visited Ciaran, Gough, Sif and Artorias in Oolacile.

But Ornstein felt like he had to do one last thing to get full closure, to finally being able to accept Artorias death.

He was staying in front of Artorias room and took a few deep breathes, pacing back and forth until ten minutes had passed. “This is ridiculous, just enter.”, Ornstein scolded himself but knocked at the door first, exclaiming “Artorias, it's me, Ornstein, I am coming in.”, even though he knew Artorias couldn't be in there.

It still felt right to do it. They always had announced when they intended to enter the other's room. When Ornstein opened the door and entered, what he was seeing was a nice, tidy and cozy room.

That was so very much Artorias, he loved to keep his stuff neat and clean, just like his handwriting. The bed was neatly made, some blue sheets with a wolf pattern was on it, which made Ornstein smile, that was so fitting. The table in the room had a tea service ready to use on it. There were some books stacked on the night table, Artorias probably had intended to read them after he returned. There was a cupboard and when Ornstein opened it, Artorias clothes were hung in place, a few missing, the ones he had taken with him to Oolacile.

Ornstein also opened the drawers and sighed in relief when he didn't see any cats or dogs in them, especially because after so much time had passed they already had starved. But Ornstein also knew that Artorias would have never let that happen, he loved animals for too much for this.

Ornstein sat down on the bed. It was soft and yielded under his weight. He took the first book on the night stand and opened it.

It was Artorias cookie recipe book. Ornstein stared at his beautifully handwritten recipes and at the drawings he had added of the cookies. He stared at the notes Artorias had made. Notes about which cookie which of the knight liked the most and even notes how to make more unliked cookies better so that everyone of them could enjoy them.

Ornstein put the book aside. He felt tears streaming down his face. But, this time, he just let them be. He allowed himself this moment of grief. Yes, Ornstein would need to keep it together for a little while longer.

But he hadn't to keep it together right now. (Author's note: And we have reached the end. Thanks for everyone who supported this story. I would love to hear your opinions. Even though I halfway wanted to give up on this story, I am glad that I could get my muse back and write out this last chapter, with a scene I wanted to use to end it with over a year ago, when I first thought about writing it. I hope you enjoyed my take on how Ornstein would take Artorias death and maybe we'll see each other again on another work of mine.)

#dark souls #fanfiction #dragon slayer ornstein #lord's blade ciaran #hawkeye gough #great grey wolf sif #silver knights #I am actually very satisfied with this last chapter #sorry that my upload schedule got so messed up #littlewritesstuff

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him-e · 6 years ago

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Hey! I love your analysis’ of Reylo. They’re my favorite. I have a loaded question (hopefully you’ve never been asked) — when do you think both Rey and Kylo became PHYSICALLY attracted to each other? And when do you think Rey became ROMANTICALLY attracted to Kylo, because I think we can all agree after killing Han Solo and their fight on Starkiller Base, she was, and rightly so, hostile and angry. Sorry if it’s a stupid question but you just seem to go really in depth with details. :)

ok so I noticed a very similar ask is already making the rounds on here, but since I started writing this post before I saw it, you’re getting mine too, yay.

First: physical vs romantic can be a false binary. Some people don’t experience a difference in physical attraction vs romantic attraction. On a literary level, and especially in the context of a space opera/fairytale geared towards a young audience, the distinction might be entirely redundant: the two spheres coincide, as the sexual element is never explicit in fairytales, and the romantic interest is often a stand-in for both. You don’t get a point where the characters are “only” physically attracted to each other in this kind of stories.

Second: going from hating someone to falling in love with said someone is a pretty standard romantic trope. It’s juicy, it’s sexy, and it’s all about CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. In enemies to lovers stories, the initial hatred is not an obstacle but part of the romantic build-up.Usually there isn’t “one” turning point where the relationship dramatically changes, but many. It’s a gradual evolution.

With that said… I believe a degree of attraction was always there on both sides (Kylo’s side being a bit more self-evident than Rey’s, though Rey’s part is interesting as well, more on that later). The romantic feelings, on the other hand, are still a work in progress. They still haven’t acknowledged them.

Let’s start with Kylo because it’s easier.

1) Kylo is VERY attracted to Rey since the beginning.

Our boy is very transparent when it comes to Rey.He instinctively recognizes that there’s something special to this girl, and he’s drawn to her like a moth to a flame.

^ He looks her up and down. Adam emphasizes this gesture with a blatant head motion because he’s wearing a mask and he can’t be subtle about it. Which means he was probably asked to be unsubtle.

^ He gets in her personal space immediately after that. There’s really no need to be this close if he wanted to simply mind probe her.

This is especially interesting because the way this scene is edited we don’t see how he got so close that he’s practically…what, sniffing her neck? Whispering in her ear? So I guess the final cut was rather toned down compared to the raw footage of this scene, and it’s for the better, since Rey is immobilized and terrified and in no position to give consent to this closeness. (tbh, I suspect he was originally meant to touch her or cup her face in this scene, and they cut it because they wanted to make sure that Kylo never touches her—aside from bridal carrying her into his ship. See also how he touches her during the interrogation in the tfa novelization but not in the movie. This is an excellent decision in my opinion. It’s crucial that Kylo doesn’t cross that boundary without Rey’s consent, so it makes it all the more poignant when he touches Rey’s outstretched hand in TLJ. Yeah, don’t tell me this wasn’t all planned.)

This attraction isn’t conscious on Kylo’s part—he seems to be completely clueless about it. Both Rey and Kylo are coded as very immature for their ages, both because they’re supposed to have a coming of age arc (which in true sw fashion overlaps with a hero’s journey), and because they’re emotionally stunted as neither had a “normal” adolescence (for different reasons).

^ more unnecessary closeness and he’s also blatantly looking at her lips and neck here. I won’t go in deep into the interrogation scene because there’s too much to dissect, but yeah, the whole thing is Kylo being ridiculously fascinated by Rey and not knowing what to do with it.

But this is also where he starts going deeper into her… ahem, poor choice of words, sorry. I mean he looks inside her mind and he’s enraptured. He sees her loneliness, her fear to leave the place where she’s bound in a forced state of childhood, he sees the island of her dreams—and her affection for Han, which immediately triggers a cascade of unpleasant feelings for him. In short, this is where he connects with her emotionally (although forcibly) and where it stops being just curiosity and attraction and becomes something more, on a deeper level than just the physical, for him.

(casual reminder that this is a space opera so yes, Kylo can see a kaleidoscope of Rey’s inner world and HOPELESSLY FALL IN LOVE WITH IT in the span of 2 minutes of mind probe. This isn’t to be taken literally.)

As she slips out of his grip just when he’s starting to know her, Kylo LOSES HIS SHIT. He gives in to a childish temper tantrum at the sight of her empty interrogation chair, and when she shows up again at Finn’s side, he sees red. This is very possessive/jealous coded behavior.

THEN REY SUMMONS THE LEGACY SABER AND HE’S LIKE:

^ Heart eyes, motherfucker. I think at this point our boy’s fallen HARD. He still doesn’t know, of course. But it’s clear that this moment—the whole duel with her—left a huge impression on him. Later in TLJ, he tells Rey that she has “that look in her eyes, from the forest”, which, wow, someone’s been thinking about Rey’s eyes A LOT and memorizing that particular expression and romanticizing the shit of of it.

Verdict: Kylo immediately finds Rey attractive but has probably no idea why he feels that way, and starts making a lot of irrational decisions in order to take her with him and make her stay. By the end of TFA, he’s already caught a variety of Feelings. They will only intensify in TLJ, but the foundation, both in physical and emotional terms, is already there.

2) Rey. Rey is more complicated because she’s our protagonist/main pov, she’s female—female attraction is depicted differently than male attraction—and most importantly she’s in a situation of disadvantage for most of TFA. Due to her limited agency she is forced to react rather than act, and she’s constantly in a fight or flight mode.

This, of course, makes her (subtle) attraction hard to notice and problematic to discuss, but we’ll get there.

^ Her first reaction to a full masked Kylo Ren is blind terror (with reason: Kylo chases, immobilizes, and then threatens her with his lightsaber). But remember: per the novelization, “she has seen this man before. In a nightmare, in a dream”. This already introduces an element of ambiguity: why this distinction? Was the dream pleasant? Kylo is, at this stage, the physical manifestation of a shadow that seems to be haunting her (in her subconscious, but also in the force vision she had minutes before). It isn’t as much repulsive as it is scary.

Soon enough, she starts conversing with the shadow. Once the initial terror fades, she regains composure and starts demanding answers, even as tied up to a chair as she is.

The unmasking is a crucial moment.

^ This is when Rey sees Ben’s face for the first time—the prince underneath the beast—and it confuses her. It’s where she loses her combative attitude and has to regroup for a minute. She blinks, she breathes in, her eyes wander across his figure.The novelization states that it’s because he looks so average (LOL, sure) and not monstrous at all, but beyond the surface reading, this already tells us that Rey took time to register Kylo’s facial features and find them strangely unthreatening–even familiar. She definitely doesn’t find him repulsive or odd-looking.

From this moment on, she has trouble looking at him. She’s constantly avoiding his eyes or stealing short glances at him—he turned from creature into man, and she’s suddenly hyperaware of his closeness and her restraints. (this is where most people feel uncomfortable with that scene, because it’s dripping with ambiguous tension). Then she finds Kylo in her mind, she fights back and locks eyes with him again, this time unafraid. She chooses to look into the monster and while she turns the tables on him, invading his mind, she finds herself “inexorably drawn to”… something. His fears? The novelization leaves this unsaid, but the choice of words is interesting. She’s not merely pushing him out, or defending herself anymore. She finds something that intrigues her in there. That draws her in.

This scene is where they truly reveal themselves to the other—Kylo’s humanity and weaknesses, and Rey’s powers and strength. It leaves them both shaking and bewildered. It’s a sort of initiation—for both. To each other’s force powers, but also to the attractive power each has on the other.

Then comes another turning point—Han’s murder, which Rey witnesses from a privileged perspective.

^ There’s a sort of softness, but also enrapture, in her expression here. She’s completely sucked into this scene, all but forgetting she could shoot Kylo from where she is and end this at any moment. No, what she’s seeing is another side of Han, but also another side of Kylo Ren.

It goes back to when she was first introduced to the story of Ben Solo.

See? Raptured. Camera zooming in on her face. Light spheres floating around her as Han tells her about the boy who destroyed it all. This is a magical moment, the cinematography is telling us.

On some level, even before meeting him in person, she’s drawn to him. Remember, this is a fairytale.

By the forest scene Rey is horrified, angry, exhausted, grieving. In the span of two days she was forced to grow past childhood, cut her umbilical cord to Jakku, and enter a scary phase of transition into adulthood, which Kylo is, like it or not, a big part of. Now she’s seen him murder his own father—he is a monster with a human face, something that seems to enrage her even more. The following duel is more of a discovery of her own powers (and potential darkness) than it is about Kylo (whereas for Kylo it’s definitely about Rey), but in the end she can’t bring herself to kill him. Again, this tells us more about who Rey is and what is her inner conflict than it does about her relationship with Kylo but… it’s something. I think on an instinctual level, even at this early stage, she recognizes something in him that resonates with her. His loneliness, his anger, his misery perhaps.

Verdict: at the end of TFA, Rey is mostly angry and scared of Kylo. All her actions revolve around getting the hell out of dodge, keeping Kylo out of her mind, and punishing him for Han’s death. Understandably.

But she’s also curious. This man confuses her. He shows up in her subconscious, and he’s inextricably linked to her understanding of the Force, and her first experiences with it. It’s a sort of imprinting.

TLJ is when the really meaty part begins for Rey. In broad terms, TFA was Kylo’s romantic/sexual awakening to Rey, and TLJ is Rey’s to Kylo.The peaceful, safe setting of Ahch-To and the fact that through the force bond they can communicate but NOT hurt or manipulate each other draws Rey out of her fight or flight mode, allowing her to explore on her terms Kylo’s character, and all the questions and doubts he arouses (heh) in her.

In their first force bond interactions, Kylo is calm and collected. In the other scenes he’s had so far he’s a hot mess of boiling rage and hurt (just minutes before, he smashed his helmet and launched an attack to the Resistance in which he thinks his mother perished), but with this girl who slashed his face in half and left him bleeding like a pig in the snow, he’s quite the soft spoken gentleman, lol. I think he’s been thinking a lot about Rey, he came to terms with his fascination for her, and now he wants to make Rey think about him too. He tempts and taunts her, from a place of relative knowledge/wisdom (or so he thinks). Rey’s the one who is in emotional turmoil.

^ Initially, she tries to stick to her feisty heroine script, and she still has a lot of genuine rage and disgust for him, but mostly she can’t make sense of him. She feels insecure in what she knows (not just about Kylo but also about Luke, the Force, her role in this, everything. Nobody is telling her anything!), so she overcompensates with knee-jerk aggression and a false display of confidence (”I know everything I need to know about you!”).

She also calls him “murderous snake!!!!”, which is hilarious and very revealing. IDK about snake symbolism in the GFFA, but here on earth, and especially in western culture, snakes symbolize insidious seduction, and that’s certainly the authorial intent behind this choice of words. By saying this line, Rey is framed as the quintessential virtuous maiden trying to resist (sexual) temptation, that biblically goes hand in hand with knowledge—which is exactly what Kylo offers.

On a subconscious level, I think she already recognizes Kylo as a seduction.

^ This is the first thing that throws her off balance. She was probably expecting some angry shitty warped-moral-compass rebuttal, instead he quietly agrees that he’s a monster, while also “coming into the light” to let her see his face better. To make her see him. During the whole conversation, and part of the following force bond scene as well, Kylo is almost morbidly insistent to share with her the details of his past (”Did he tell you what happened? Did he tell you why?”). He wants her to see him, ugly as he is (in a spiritual sense).

At this point, Rey’s sexuality is GETTING ANSWERS AND FIGURING SHIT ABOUT HER ROLE IN THE FORCE. And Luke (the biblical “God” of the island) is giving her none of that, other than hippie lessons about how the Force is a superior power blah blah and you better not fuck with it blah blah don’t go in the dark wet hole and remember that the Jedi aren’t supposed to intervene in mundane shit, blah.

I actually think the deleted fish nun party scene is important to understand Rey’s state of mind entering the third, and crucial, force connection. The point of that lesson—at least the way Rey understands it—is teaching her inaction and second-guessing her instincts. Luke is projecting his own disillusionment on her. He’s telling her to stop believing in heroes, when what Rey actually needs is believing in herself as a hero. She comes out of it feeling more frustrated and humiliated than ever. Depressed, almost.

Kylo, instead, gives her answers. Not definite answers, but something that propels her into action. He tells her, “do this and this in order to become the person you’re meant to be”. He strokes her ego. He talks about her destiny. He echoes and validates her suppressed anger and frustration. He digs up a painful truth about her family, and encourages her to face it. Even as she demands to know the reason he murdered his father, he makes it all about her. First, he made her see him; now he’s making her see herself through his eyes.

And, of course, he’s half naked through the entire thing. This is the first time Rey is confronted with something textually (as in, not simply existing in the subtext) sexual. The shirtlessness is obviously here for a meta reason too (to loudly communicate the romantic undertones of the dynamic, to symbolically strip Kylo of his layers, and to give the audience an eye candy) but even Rey the character is aware that this has to do with sex, someway.

^ That’s why she stutters and averts her eyes. This is the unmasking 2.0, only this time the sexual implications are in the forefront. In a pg-13 format, of course, but still largely readable even for children.

This is where Rey starts wondering if they could actually touch. Gee, what a coincidence.

The shirtless scene is a huge turning point where the romantic build up becomes, for a short while, glaringly sexual. It would be easy to say that this is when Rey’s physical attraction is born, but that’s an oversimplification. Everything in this movie and in the movie before has been building to this. Kylo Ren has been at the forefront of Rey’s thoughts since Starkiller. She has a powerful psychic connection to him, talked about him with Luke, wondered about the reasons of his patricide, questioned his backstory, exercised frantically to blow off the steam of their encounters.

This isn’t when Rey first begins to feel attraction to Kylo—it’s where she’s first faced with the reality of it, and us with her.

And facing this reality is, in part, what prompts her to go into the dark side cave—the one the older male authority figure forbade her from going, the one in which she already subconsciously expects to walk a threshold. The threshold of knowing what happened to her parents, the question that she’s been avoiding for so long, that kept her bound to Jakku, to a version of herself who never grew up past childhood because growing up would make the years and years of abandonment painfully real, rather than just notches on a wall.

The cave scene has all the markings of an archetypal rite of passage into adulthood (and womanhood). The water, the near-drowning experience, the visions, the multiple selves, the mirror. Rey goes into it fully understanding that however it goes, it will imply a loss of innocence. Thematically, it’s a direct continuation of the other loss of innocence she’s just experienced—the sexual one, with Kylo.

Rey doesn’t get the answer she hoped for, but one that forces her to mature and come into her adult self—it’s time to take responsibility and be the hero of her own story, because the adults she were waiting for are nowhere in sight. So she comes out of the cave as more mature… but also desperate for human connection. Or rather, for connection to a specific someone. She feels “relief” when she senses Kylo’s presence in the Force inside the hut.

And when she sees him, she thinks again of touching him.

In the movie we don’t get how the conversation started, and the novelization doesn’t delve into details either, and boy what would I pay to know what sparked Rey’s confession. But we can imagine. By this point, Rey already feels a kinship with Kylo, and her distrust and skepticism for him has eroded. She sees her own loneliness in him. She feels they were both betrayed by parental figures on some level. She’s made the mental connection that if Vader was brought back, then Ben could be too, by someone who loves him. Their force connections have been strange but they also gave her the chance to discuss stuff she would have otherwise bottled up. He’s physically attractive to her. He doesn’t judge her for going into the darkness. And when he tells her what she needs to hear the most—that she’s not alone—she makes that leap and reaches out to touch him.

It’s an olive branch, a comforting gesture towards someone she feels is just alone as she is, but it’s physical contact she seeks. She could have offered her sympathy in any other way, yet she chose to reach for his hand. Remember, she’s been thinking about touching him for a while already.

Kylo, after a moment of confusion, responds by taking off his glove. This is such a loaded gesture in terms of its romantic/sexual meaning that I’m still in shock it actually happened. He’s baring himself to her, so that this contact happens without barriers. His skin is not covered in first order leather when he touches hers. This is the real him.

^ And then they have their visions of the future, and that One Perfect Tear falls down Rey’s cheek and Luke blows up the hut and this is where my analysis can stop because by this point it’s completely obvious that our girl has FALLEN HARD, and since she’s the *shoot first, ask later* type, she hops on the Falcon to get her boy back before she can admit to herself she’s stupidly in love with him.

Rey saw a vision of herself with Ben Solo at her side, and she’s so blinded by the beauty of it that making it happen as fast as possible becomes her number one priority.

But feelings for someone don’t change overnight so radically. If she’s so massively affected by that vision, it’s only because her romantic attraction for Kylo has been building up at a consistent pace since the start of the movie, getting her to a point where she spontaneously sought an intimacy with him.

It’s the same for Kylo. Rey literally ships herself to him, but he’s no less reckless than she is in barreling into this promise of a future idyll. When Rey gets on the Supremacy, he already knows this has to end with Snoke’s death somehow. He doesn’t know how to do it, but he will. He will sacrifice his master to be with her, just as she did.

If you asked either of them if they’re in love with each other, I bet they would stare at you with uncomprehending eyes—it’s like they lack the basic lexicon to understand their feelings, let alone verbalize them. So Rey’s like “save the fleet because it’s the morally right thing to do!”, and Ben’s like “join me to rule the galaxy!”, and they’re both like, “you’ll stand with me!”. They’re trying to express the love they already feel but they’re doing it in non-romantic terms, because that’s all they know.

(gifs are credited with the “ ^ “ - click on it and reblog the op!)

#anon #asks #sw asks #sw for ts #//#reylo for ts #sw**#reylo**

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kingofthewilderwest · 6 years ago

Text

ACCENTS (An FMAB Drabble) - 1183 words

(WHOA LOOK I AM ACTUALLY WRITING AND POSTING SOMETHING??)

A/N I probably have better things to do with my degree, but as a linguist, I can’t help but love language headcanons. For FMA, I imagine that Amestris follows some fairly typical dialectical patterns. Rural accents would develop in areas that make little contact with urban areas. There’d also be a dialectical distinction between people of lower and upper socioeconomic status. Dialects that fall outside of a “standard” urban upper middle class would have unique phonological features that give some peoples’ pronunciations negative stigma. Speakers of these “nonstandard” dialects would pronounce many words in ways that could be considered “funny” or “embarrassing” to others (or themselves).

I do want to note here that all dialects ARE equally grammatical, all dialects are equally **CORRECT**, all dialects are valid and beautiful, and there’s NOTHING that makes one “better” than another. It’s just cultural perception.

Still. I find intriguing, even amusing, that many main characters in FMA would have those “less than desirable” accents. Ed, Winry, Al, and Jean–coming from small Eastern towns out in the middle of nowhere–are no way in hell going to have the same accent as people from Central or Briggs. As for people like Roy Mustang… well… everything about his origin suggests he’d have some sort of stigmatized Central lower class inner city accent. Which is where the inspiration for this little drabble began…

“I can tell no one’s working,” Lieutenant Hawkeye said as she stepped forward. The cluster of men before her were hunkered down and whispering, clearly hoping their quiet conversation could avoid detection from the colonel on the far side of the room. But Hawkeye, knowing what types of motivation prompted this quartet to whisper, asked them, with an expression so neutral it was actually intimidating, “What pointless topic is distracting you now?”

Breda kept a cool face. Havoc shrugged nonchalantly, but a betraying smile twitched around his cigarette. Fuery and Falman both had the conscience to wince.

It was Jean Havoc, of course, who dished out the details, not at all ashamed to be caught gossiping on pointless frivolities. “We’re talking about the colonel’s accent.”

“Or what should be his accent,” Breda amended.

Hawkeye felt her eyebrows rising.

Still wilting under the lieutenant’s stern stare, Fuery tried to justify their time debating this rather than handling time-sensitive paperwork. “You see, you see, you can usually tell where people are from by their accent.”

“The Standard Amestrian Dialect is heard in the center of the country, the northern regions, Central, and most large urban areas.” Falman, as always, was able to recite precise information from memory. “Specifically, for those in the middle and upper classes. People from the lower class who live in inner city Central have a unique dialect, while…”

“You’ve got country bumpkins in the East like me,” Havoc pointed to himself with a grin. Rather than cringing around the East’s rural hick reputation, Jean here embraced it, drawing out his drawl with more emphasis than usual.

“So what does this have to do with any of our present investigations or reports?” Hawkeye asked.

“Nothing,” several of the men admitted, while at the same time, Havoc insisted, “But what this does have to do is with the colonel. And that’s work-related.” He gave his stretched excuse with an impish wink.

“I accidentally stumbled into information about Mustang’s family from reports of one investigation downtown,” Breda said. “The crime took place in the ‘bar’ of a certain Madame Christmas. Chris Mustang, who if I’m not wrong–and I know I’m not, because I just looked her up–was the colonel’s guardian.”

“Which means, given how he would’ve been raised, he should have an inner city accent,” said Falman.

“Not the posh whatever-it-is he’s using now,” said Havoc. The second lieutenant, Hawkeye realized, was probably the most entertained by this prospect, as it would mean that he would no longer be the person in the room with the least desirable and most embarrassing accent. It would be the colonel.

Old memories drifted up from the back of Riza’s mind. She thought about the teenager who’d studied alchemy with her father. He’d indeed had an inner city accent then, before he met Maes Hughes and tried to copy his best friend’s upper middle class dialect best he could. By his early twenties, most–though not all–of his childhood speech had been changed. But Hawkeye wasn’t going to encourage her colleagues’ conversation by bringing these memories up.

“I told you, I think he’s hiding it,” said Fuery. “You’ve heard how he says ‘dog,’ right? That’s slightly off. The vowel’s weird.”

“I’d have to hear it again.”

“What about ‘coffee?’ ”

“Ohhhh. Oh yeah. I think you’re right.”

“No, you’re imagining it. He doesn’t say ‘coffee’ any different than I do.”

“He does. Just listen for it next time!”

“And if you don’t believe me on ‘coffee,’ try ‘short.’ He’s messed that one up, too.”

“You’re right, you’re right! I always thought that was just a weird quirk of his. But no. That’s totally the colonel hiding an accent.”

“You guys are making things up. You’re not any better than conspiracy theorists.”

“Don’t listen to him. We’re so right.”

“Look, we just need to pay closer attention. The evidence will be right in front of us. What’re words that he’d pronounce different? Things like… uh… ‘hot’ and ‘thought?’ It’s that ‘aw’ sound that gets changed, right?”

“Yes. That is one distinctive feature. Vowel shifts have lowered that vowel. And the ‘æ’ sound in words like ‘black’ are more likely to be diphthongized, and drawn out almost to the point a single syllable word sounds like two.”

“Falman, you know we have no idea what you just said, right?”

Intense discussion persisted.

“If any of you have to work overtime because of this,” Hawkeye said, finally turning away from the heated whispering session, “don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”

However, instead of returning to her own tasks, the lieutenant stepped straight toward the colonel’s desk. Something about her brisk step alerted Falman, Fuery, Breda, and Havoc, and all of the men, sensing some unique internal motivation within Hawkeye, paused to watch the conversation.

“Sir, I’m heading down to the cafeteria for lunch.”

“You don’t have to tell me that, lieutenant.”

“You look rather busy,” Hawkeye observed. If she were indeed planning something, none of the eavesdroppers could yet determine it. This sounded like nothing but typical conversation between the two. “I was wondering if you’d like me to bring food up for you to eat at your desk.”

“Oh. Well, aren’t you thoughtful,” he grinned.

Coincidentally, that word ‘thoughtful’–which contained ‘thought’–was one of the words the men had just been discussing. Glances passed between the four, facial expressions wordlessly debating and disputing whether they had heard anything phonologically unusual here.

“Something like a hamburger or a hot dog?”

“Couldn’t complain to a hot dog.”

Everyone at the other side of the room froze. Both the words ‘hot’ and ‘dog’ had been on their List of Possible Mispronunciations, too. ‘Thoughtful’ on its own could have been a handy accident. But getting Mustang to say ‘hot’ and ‘dog’ one after the other seemed too well-timed to be mere chance.

“Something to drink?” Hawkeye continued.

“Coffee.”

Fuery bit back a laugh.

“Anything in it?”

“You know me. Just black.”

Gawking, Havoc slapped his hand on the desk–repeatedly–as he turned to mouth the words black coffee to Fuery and Falman.

“Alright.” Hawkeye gave a nod, but as she turned to go, commented, “I should be back soon, assuming the lines are short.”

“At this time? They should be short. By the way, thanks, lieutenant.”

She turned to leave. By this point, everyone sitting in the back of the room covered grins with hands clasped over their mouths, and half of them were also audibly sniggering. Mustang seemed completely oblivious to both their laughter and how Hawkeye had played him. Havoc was almost cackling, though, from the revelation of what had just passed. The fourth word from their list–and the fifth–and the sixth–had all been pronounced… slightly strangely.

Still maintaining a perfectly even facial expression, Hawkeye stepped past them. She didn’t turn to look anyone in the eye as she headed for the door. But all of them heard the comment she gave in a low voice.

“You should have heard him when he was sixteen.”

And with that, Lieutenant Hawkeye left the room.

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