#i watched too much better call saul while drawing this

[raverhm]

wind sock

[starbuck]

been thinking about Them so i redrew a screenshot to cope (it made me worse)

[richeeduvie]

the princesa’s bullying anon again 😭

thank you soooo much for doing the drabble. you r doing gods work for real for reallll. ever since i started reading madman and following you i keep acting like saul in the first season doing magic to my phone hoping that we will get new princesa and lalo contents (ABSOLUTELY NO PRESSURE if u have to take a break and or dont feel comfortable with it anymore please do. i just want you to know that i really love it and enjoy every thing to the fullest)

re-reading madman and lalo master list again because i want it to be semi-canon to the show and your series so i can come up with more scenarios to bully princesa.

and im starting to think that if i come up with sth lalo will personally appear in my dream and choke me for keeping thinking sick thoughts about his princesa (not gonna complain tho).

THAT being said heres another thought, yk how some tvshow/anime will have a filler beach episode. i think they need that. a hope-to-god-relaxing trip to the beach.

they already see each other body butt naked and have nonstop freaky sex but come onnnnnn the bikini, the pastel yellow floral bikini is a bit too small/revealing still makes princesa shy and conscious abt her body and lalo is staring too long at her ,with dark eyes and she cant see any thoughts, when she ask him to help her put on some sunscreen (hes actually one minute away to cancel this trip and take her home because instinct) (and sometimes in the corner of her eyes nacho is looking at her too - i dont know why the hell they need nacho there maybe extra body guard i just want nacho to see how beautiful she is and cant do nothing about it im sooooo sorry baby 😭)

but princesa ayyyy she in the bikini and she has this red hibiscus behind her ear, a seashells necklace. oh my shes sooooo pretty and cute. lalo watching her drawing on the sand a big heart and then their initials in it, picking every shells that she finds beautiful and put it close to her ear and lalos and say “can you hear the waves” and giggle. the sun the breeze the sea everything seems like making her even more beautiful. (sorry for not mention anything abt me, lalo, im obsessed with my girl. but she also about to climb him the moment they walk out of the changing room. and nacho have to witness all of it)

and something super dumb and very stereotypical happens like shes waist deep in the sea and ohhh noooo the waves are too strongggg and arghhhh her…..her top slips awayyyy. someone please help princesa. but shes just standing there panicking because nacho just tell lalo that he has a phone call from lets say eladio bcs that is someone will make him to go up to the shore and nacho is keeping an eye on her.

sooooo she has to wave him over and ask him to tell lalo abt her “little problem” while she feels like theres smoke coming out of her head.

the rest is lalo style teasing and also instinct but its something really funny…hilarious to him too because he doesnt think it will actually happen.

Anon, this is REALLY showing just how much of a crush you have on Princesa. I was getting hot for her while reading this like damn. I love this. I love this so much.

Lalo and Princesa have seen the other extremely naked and in many, many sexual positions and scenarios, but every time Princesa's in a pretty bikini or swim dress that's downed in florals and a mesh cover-up? It's a new, fire-like sight for Lalo. But he'll have to handle. There's that snaps and sharpens at the idea of taking her in front of Nacho, but something like instinct comes down harsh at the idea of Nacho seeing Princesa while she's at her most...open.

Nacho watches the ocean as best as he can, it's a better visual than Lalo massaging sunscreen into Princesa's skin. And her ass. You can't leave no spot at risk for sunburn, right?

Of course, the man who never sleeps, is very, very close to knocking out when Princesa comes over him to lather his back and legs with sunscreen.

"It's a great day for a swim, right, Lalo? Lalo?"

"...What you said, yeah...I think you missed my ankles, sweet girl."

Princesa offers to help Nacho out with his application with a great amount of shyness, as if they're back to square one in terms of friendship because she'd be touching him bare, but sunscreen is important.

Nacho struggles to get his back by himself. Lalo snorts.

Lalo bullies Princesa for her love of pretty things, a tourist at heart. But he buys her everything. Shell necklaces that are too expensive. Trinkets. He'll make sure she wears it all the time and too much. She'll make him wear it and he'll call it girly, but keep it tucked inside his shirt.

Their initials wash away in the white sloshing of water, but Princesa just draws in again, feeling the wet, tight sand under her nails. She feels like a teenager with how she writes her and Lalo's name over and over, but she also draws hearts. And she tries to draw a bird.

Lalo smokes over the ocean, knees bent beside Princesa.

"Lalo, the ash."

He blows smoke. "It's not like the I set the sea on fire, Princesa. Don't be so worried. Now, help me draw this gun."

He dashes the Salamanca name under the sand-doodled handgun. Nacho might be asleep under the sun.

Lalo's not listening to the waves when Princesa puts the cold shell to his ear because Princesa. Just that. Just her. He'd rather listen to her breathe and watch her try to find the ocean in the shell. Their faces press together and Lalo doesn't smile in how he watches her, not in the blacked-out stare.

He presses his wet toes into hers, deepening their feet in the sand.

"Lalo!"

Nacho's woken by the screaming and the chasing, Lalo yelling out with throaty laughs when he throws Princesa over his shoulder.

Swimming is calmer, and he can't see her body or the way she moves when they're both in the water.

"You okay?"

Lalo's watching them from the shore, because business. Always the family career he's so proud of getting in the way of things. He's expecting a call, so he just gets started on lunch with a sandwich stuffed in his mouth.

The phone rings, the waves crashes. Princesa struggles.

"I know how to swim."

"I would hope so, kid."

"It's just-these waves are not making it easy. You must think it looks so embarrassing."

Nacho blinks up, then down. "You're fine-"

Waves crash.

"No. No!"

A top slips away. Or...more like floats off into the waves, and Nacho barely realizes what's happening until the blood rushes to his head and face.

"Oh...fuck. Fuck. Hold on, don't move."

Princesa sinks herself in the water, cheeks aflame while she watches Lalo busy on the phone. Watching Ignacio try to swim for her bikini top is the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to her, and almost everything is embarrassing.

It's already off into the sea and Nacho would rather not be pulled away with it. He curses hot under his breath, wiping his face with salt water.

"Just-"

"I-I'm sorry."

"...Why are you sorry? It's just...don't move. Fuck. Lalo better find this funny."

Princesa can already hear his teases and feel his nipple pinches.

Lalo's brows curve when he sees Nacho coming out of the water looking odd, more than how the guy usually is. Just in time with the phone call ending.

"What's that out there?"

He feels like he needs those damn...the things you look through, glasses. Damn. What is it?"

"She...she lost her top. I think you should-" Nacho closes his eyes, as if a stutter will reveal something to Lalo. He starts over. "I think you should help her."

Lalo doesn't blink.

"...Did you see anything?"

They forget the one time Nacho saw anything.

"No, no. I didn't try anything but to get her top but that is gone with the water...so, it should be you?"

"...Yeah."

His mouth is thin, eyes dark before he smiles brightly. He slaps Nacho's shoulder.

"Yeah. That girl. Always something, look at the little top in the sea. Princesa! You cold?"

Princesa feels like steam and streams of tears. Her hugs herself more, breast pressing on her arms.

Lalo walks off. "Get to the car, eh, Nachito? Good man."

He jogs into the water, laughing with every wave.

"Don't laugh, plea-please. I didn't mean to-it is cold."

Lalo coos. "Aw, poor Princesa. My poor, poor Princesa. Don't let your nipples swim away too. What would I do without them?"

"...Lalo."

It's a long, soft whine that makes Lalo laugh. He pulls her in and kisses her head.

He squeezes her a bit too tightly, and not out of choice, just something that happens with his arms when he sees Princesa like this.

"I'll warm you up, huh?"

"I should get a towel."

"In a bit."

Princesa's head slumps. "Lalo-"

"Don't whine, nipples. This is what happens when you pick something so small for the waves."

"You said you liked them."

It's high, almost cracking. Lalo coos again.

"Sure, Princesa. Sure."

Princesa accepts his tight, instinctual hold on her better than she accept his continuous bullying in the cold waves. Nacho dries off in the car for ten minutes.

[malignedaffairs]

Love your art very much! So much talent.

Besides Naruto, what are other anime’s or shows you like to watch?

Thank you very much!

I'm assuming you've found me because of my Morgott drawing and now discovered that all my artwork from the past 10 years is the same two guys from the same fandom over and over again :D

It takes a lot for me to get into any new media, much more even to get to levels of brainrot that require me to draw fanart of it, but when it happens it happens hard! I have a feeling it's been happening with Elden Ring in the last months, it is an incredible experience that really doesn't leave me alone. I'm sure this wasn't my last Elden Ring drawing.

The things I enjoyed in the last ten years to that extent were the mangas Vagabond and Blade of the Immortal, a bit less intense but still there was Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, ASOIAF quite a while back, too.

[nathsketch]

Did you used to be a lawyer? If so, how has been the career switch?

Yes, that's right! It's so funny to see people's reactions when I tell them I never really got to properly study Art but instead, I studied something that couldn't be more absurdly different :)

To be honest, I haven't worked that much in the legal field. I graduated and got my Bar license, but I never had that much time to practice Law. I was too busy drawing when I should have been looking for a job in a firm or studying to be a judge or a prosecutor. It's weird because I really enjoyed studying it while I was in college. Constitutional Law and International Law were my favorites. But the day-to-day work wasn't that appealing, although all that knowledge is now very useful when I sign contracts! I don't regret it, not one bit. I just wish I had also studied Art instead of having to learn it all by instinct or by trial and error.

So now, the only thing that interests me about the Law is watching Better Call Saul (and drawing it too 😆)

Thanks for asking! ⚖️

Find me here: Instagram | Website & Portfolio

[haissitall]

overall thoughts about the country girls i've been drawing sometimes

what is this?: country humanizations with focus on Russia, America and China. tagged "nothetalia", ie "not-hetalia". maybe i'll come up with a better name one day

the overall concept: it's focused on international politics, so the characters' behavior is more alligned with their country's behavior on the world stage rather than with national stereotypes. modern-day focused. the characters exist on another plane of reality, so they can do magic, turn into animals, change appearances and undergo mitosis (about this later)

the design philosophy: all of them are women, no exceptions. because of the political focus, their clothes tend towards "business casual" to reflect that. sometimes inspiration can be drawn from the looks of prominent female politicians of a country. most of the times it's taken out of my ass and based on vibes.

the mitosis thing: because the characters are on another plane of existance and have to reflect political reality, they are very... fluid. for example: if a country is divided by civil war, then it gets split into two characters with the same face, same memories and even a mental link akin to telepathy. if they grow apart further, the link can get weaker to the point where it's almost entirely broken, and the twins are very much separate entities. an example of such separation: Britain and America (America started off as Britain's "double" so they still share a face and some physical features. i think they still share a mental link of sorts.) the characters can sometimes refer to their relationships as familiar, but it's very arbituary. America and Britain switch between calling each other "sisters" or "cousins", and Russia would think about the Union as her (late) mother (although technically current Russia is her "double" with the same memories and arguably the same-ish "consciousness", whatever that means)

relationships which interest me the most:

Russia & China: they have these vibes of "we are adults. we know love doesn't exist. we know we can't get attached. Healthy Distance, ok. not like the last time. this time we're sooo careful." i explored a very optimistic outlook on this dynamic in this fic. being so different means both some inevitable mistrust and an actually smoother dynamic where there's, like, less to argue about. i think they're very complimentary in essence. when China speaks Chinese and Russia speaks Russian, they understand each other perfectly. but only when they're drunk.

Russia & America: you know it's a great dynamic when in the "you're not rocking with me!? im gonna kill myself" meme each of them can be both the one breaking up and the one threatening to kill herself. (although im of the opinion that it's America who's responding to the break up text, but that is debatable.) i explored their dynamic a little in this and this fics. i think they're on the stage of very personal and visceral hatred and you cannot have them in the same room like two territorial and agressive cats

Russia & Germany: Germany refused to have friday beers with Russia so for a while she walked back and forth outside of Germany's window like an impatient tiger in a cage. Germany was too scared to tell her to leave so she just quietly closed the blinds

USSR & East Germany: im a bit insane about them tbh. i once saw a picture from i think better call saul (i haven't watched it, full disclosure) where he and his love interest lie in bed together but they're both dressed in business attire? yeah like this is their dynamic. but they're in military uniforms.

honorable mentions i'd like to think about more in the future:

America & Britain: i feel like they have something very messed up and entertaining going on Russia & India: a lot of wholesome potential. Russia & Iran: united by love for the geranium flowers Russia & North Korea: Russia appearing out of nowhere like heyyyy so, still friends, right?)) and Korea is like uh-huh. "welcome home cheater" vibes. Russia & Turkey: they're friends. they hate each other. they know the other very well. the most toxic and duplicitous "friendship" in the world and that's why it can be so fun

[elvenbeard]

Get to know me

I've been tagged in three separate memes with that title by @timaeusterrored and @katsigian, thanks a lot for thinking of me! :D For brevity's and simplicity's sake I'm just gonna throw all of them together in one post ~ Won't be tagging anyone in particular, but if you read this and feel inclined to share some stuff about yourself, pick and choose from the questions listed here and feel free to tag me in your posts! :D

Favorite color: Purple, Turquoise, and Black

Relationship: single

Currently reading: when I'm not re-reading my own stuff for editing purposes, I currently just really enjoy reading everyone's Cyberpunk drabbles and OC lore posts because I live for that stuff! for having been a very bookish kid I don't really read much anymore admittedly D:

Last song Played: "A Dialogue In B Flat Minor" by In Flames (it's on my V playlist and a very Vince and Johnny song to me XD)

Song Stuck in my Head: "Gloves" by Saint Punk (I'm obsessed with it because it fits Vince so much and I'm working on something inspired by it)

Last Movie: oooof... I think it was "The Shawshank Redemption", I was recently in the mood of rewatching some 90s classics while drawing!

Last series: If youtube series count, I'm currently rewatching Buzzfeed Unsolved: True Crime for the 11th or so time XD I've loved true crime stuff for as long as I can remember and BFU is also just really nice as background noise for when I'm working on something for a few hours at a time. Looking forward to diving into Mystery Files xD (the last "actual" series I watched before that was "Better Call Saul", rewatched it from start to finish in English for the first time xD)

Sweet, spicy, or savory: ooohhh hmmm.... dammit, I guess I'm too much of a sweet-tooth to not pick sweet xD

Favourite Food: Pizza with lots of different cheeses

Craving: to quit my dayjob, because objectively, it would just be really fucking funny to do. We're chronically understaffed and simultaneously also being forbidden overtime to catch up on the backlog, so it's just extremely exhausting at the moment.

Tea or coffee: Coffee, but tea is nice too :3

Dream Trip: everywhere... but my top 3 are Japan, Iceland, and Canada. I'd love to go to Japan during cherry blossom season, spend one week in all the big cities and another more on the countryside, going hiking, looking at temples, forests, and spending a day or two at a ryokan with onsen. Iceland I'd also like to see as much of as possible, I'd actually love to do a guided tour on horseback across the country xD And honestly, same for Canada (without the horses though), also a trip across the country visiting all kinds of sights and cities along the way would be awesome.

Last Thing I Googled: 2023 Conventions Germany

Currently working on: the final stages of my new Kerry x V drawing, editing some VP shoots, writing Vince's background lore fic (6 chapters done, about 6 more to go!), started writing a post-canon fic (but only have a few paragraphs), and my ongoing Cyberpunk 2077 Let's Play videos XD cause I always wanted to make a full Let's Play like that and given my current obsession it works. Looming on the horizon are also some short comics and ideas for mods and even more VP!

Are you named after Anyone?

After an OC of mine, if we go with Elven as the name I'm predominantly using atm XD Long story short, but "Elvenbeard" was an elf OC I once cosplayed as and who got his name from a friend of mine during a very long and funny train ride to the convention we were headed to. Good times XD

2. When was the last time you cried?

A couple of days ago. I think it was a mix of stress and having too many feels about Kerry xD

3. Do you have kids?

Nope, and don't want any. Unless pets count.

4. Do you use Sarcasm a lot?

I would never do such a thing.

5. What Sports do you play/ have you played?

None xD I was the short fat kid that got relentlessly bullied by my PE teacher for years which completed ruined any interest in sports I might have ever developed.

6. What's the first thing you notice about other people?

Honestly... I think I've gotten quite good at picking up people's vibes first. Picked up a very bad "stay-far-away-from-them" vibe from someone a couple of days ago, and when I met them again a little while later one of the first things out of their mouth is transphobic bullshit. I (sadly) felt rather validated with my first impression.

7. Eye Colour?

Hazel.

8. Scary Movies or Happy Endings?

Both can be good! I don't like overly gory movies or stuff that relies heavily on jump scares, but a scary film with a good story and some unexpected twists I really like (some of my faves being "Hush" and "The Conjuring"). I'm also a sucker for Happy Endings though. Best thing overall? Angst with a Happy Ending.

9. Any Special Talents?

Does hyperfocus count as a special talent these days? XD

10. Where were you born?

Somewhere in rural Germany.

11. What are your hobbies?

Yes... Drawing, writing, sewing, crafting, cosplay, gaming... and the newest addition: virtual photography!

12. Do you have any pets?

Yess, a cat!

13. How tall are you?

160cm/ 5'2 - smol and full of rage

14. Fave Subject in School?

Art, History, and English as a secondary language

15. Dream Job?

Creating things that make people happy and being able to live off of it ooooor anything that allows me to finance that kinda "maker of all kinds of things" lifestyle I'm dreaming of. Ideally, if I have to keep a dayjob, I'd like one that only takes place in the timespan of Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Friday, and doesn't start at 5.30 in the morning, but at 9 or 10. Or just generally the option of home office would be nice. I don't wanna be rich, but I'd like to have financial security for myself and my cat, enough time to do my silly little arts and crafts, and travel somewhere cool once a year or so.

[rookie-critic]

Linoleum (2023, dir. Colin West) - review by Rookie-Critic

I love it when a movie surprises me. Some of my favorite moviegoing experiences from the last few years have been going into something relatively blind, and coming out with something I will absolutely never forget. It gave me C'mon C'mon, my top film from 2021, it gave me The Worst Person in the World, my #3 film 2021, and it has now given me Linoleum. The film follows Jim Gaffigan's Cameron Edwin, an astronomer who hosts a declining children's science show à la Bill Nye the Science Guy who, due to the said decline of his show as well as his marriage, which is on the brink of divorce, is in the middle of a well-earned mid-life crisis. Also, a car with an award-winning astronaut in it falls from the sky next to his mailbox and he is the only person who witnesses the "accident," and nobody believes it really happened. The film invokes a lot of magical realism and, from the opening scene, evokes a Gondry-esque dream-like quality not too far removed from the French director's films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.

The film is mean to it's protagonist, but not in a malicious way: his daughter Nora (portrayed by Katelyn Nacon in a fantastic performance) is disrespectful to him in a way that teenagers often are, but clearly has a love for him as she watches and seems to genuinely enjoy his children's show, his wife (portrayed by a fresh-off Better Call Saul Rhea Seehorn in an equally fantastic performance), who is in the process of falling out of love with him, still shows the hallmark signs of lingering care for this person she'd built a life with. Everything feels very domestic and real in it's dreaminess, but still, something about the full picture isn't quite right. That is, until the third act, when the film slams all of its individual, seemingly disjointed and mysterious pieces together to form a complete 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a moving and incredible story about how we live our lives and how, looking back, it is a beautiful and wondrous miracle that we all get to spend any amount of time on this small, blue rock we call planet Earth with one another. It shows us that, between despair and hope, between love and hate, that ultimately, hope prevails, love wins, and our intrinsic curiosity about the universe drives us forward towards something fantastic. What that is will be different for everyone, but there is beauty in that unknown, and we should all strive to close our eyes and let the universe form that fantastic something around us and guide us through it.

Normally, I'd take a handful of sentences here to talk about things I didn't like about the film. I could say that the film's final act takes big, artistic swings that will most likely not please all viewers. I could say that elements of the story don't mesh well with the answers to the film's mysteries. These are things that I can see people complaining about with Linoleum, but I would urge those people to watch it again, and really open your mind up to what the film is doing with that third act. Don't be the person telling Cameron to be more practical and that the answer is "not that simple," because the truth is, much like we're told in the film, it probably is. I used to not cry at films at all, and I would tell people that something would have to be truly, uniquely moving to draw tears out of me. Over the past few years I've realized that is no longer the case (maybe it never was), and I openly and proudly cry frequently during movies and shows. I genuinely believe that, had I seen this back when I didn't shed the frequent tear, that I would still have done so while watching Linoleum. It ticked all the right boxes and did all the right things to make it an instant classic in my eyes, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Score: 10/10

Only in theaters as a limited release. Check your local listing to see if it's playing in a theater near you.

[liskantope]

I finally got to the end of Better Call Saul a couple of weeks ago, dragging it out so that I only watched one episode a day and inserted a one-episode-a-day rewatching the entirety of Breaking Bad in-between the 9th and 10th episodes of the last season of BCS. So I've arrived a little late to this party, but here are a few scattered thoughts.

[Major spoilers for the ending of the series under the cut.]

For the most part, people around me were pretty good about not spoiling much about the ending even though I didn't announce to anyone that I was drawing out my watching until months after the final episode actually came out (it helps that, while a very popular show, BCS isn't quite at the level of Game of Thrones about which everyone had to post some kind of vague reaction on Facebook after each episode.) I did see someone on Tumblr write "poor Jimmy" and saw a few YouTube videos pop up which were discussions of the BCS ending and which showed the main character standing behind bars, so I had an idea that things weren't going to go well for Jimmy/Saul/Gene, that he was about to get his comeuppance and almost certainly wind up in prison. This hadn't fully occurred to me as an ending for Jimmy but at the same time somehow didn't actually feel like a major spoiler or a huge shock. The Breaking Bad finale was widely praised (and occasionally criticized) for leaving each character exactly in the place it felt like they were meant to be, and I knew that if BCS reprised this trend, well, prison (as opposed to death, or further sunk into a life of crime) is pretty obviously exactly where Jimmy/Saul belongs.

There's something that felt a little underwhelming for me about the last four episodes of BCS, taking place in the post- Breaking Bad black-and-white timeline, a sort of new simplicity to the story and a restriction in the creative possibilities for how everything would be wrapped up. This is understandable given that Howard is now gone, and between S6E9 and S6E10 of BCS, most of the interesting characters (including Mike, Gus, and the remaining Salamancas) meet their fates, and we're left really with only Kim as a character in Gene's life (or actually, no longer in it until he eventually manages to draw her back). I'm not sure what more the writers could have done; I certainly don't have any better idea. But something about the final part of the story pales in comparison to the intricate and meticulously-crafted ending for Walter White and the complex array of characters around him.

The ending of Jimmy's character arc can be summarized as follows: anti-hero gets in major trouble one final time; anti-hero displays the amazing powers that made him so enjoyable to watch, enabling him to come out victorious (i.e. Saul uses his arguing power to get his sentence down to 7.5 years); anti-hero redeems himself by surrendering anyway. This is satisfying in terms of watching Jimmy wind up where we want him to end up, but less so in terms of keeping us at the edge of our seats watching a less trodden-on path unfold for our anti-hero. I'll just say that it feels like this type of path has been done quite a bit before, although the only example that comes to mind right now is Luke Skywalker, hardly even an anti-hero, showing us that he's attained enough skill with the Force to defeat Darth Vader in battle but then giving himself up to the mercy of Vader and the Emperor -- we get to have our cake and eat it too, by seeing Luke demonstrate being a total badass but then morally rising above it so that the good in him ultimately triumphs.

In the case of Jimmy, I found it slightly predictable (I knew something was up as soon as he declared that he had something much juicier to testify to about Howard Hamlin's death, and I guessed that maybe somehow he was setting things up to flip things around by redeeming himself), and I wish there had been some kind of bigger, cleverer, more elaborate set-up where we might have a concrete idea of Jimmy being up to something even more evil to get himself out of even the reduced sentence, only to find that we the audience were tricked. It also came across, in some aspects of the dialog, that Jimmy was confessing mainly just to impress Kim, or to get her back in his life and on his side, which doesn't feel quite like true redemption (although shouldn't having good people in our life and on our side be something each of us value highly as part of a virtuous life? One can still argue that).

My biggest criticism of the last season has to do with Jimmy's final transformation into Saul just before the old timeline breaks and the Breaking Bad timeline begins: in Episode 9, I just really didn't like how abruptly we switched from Jimmy/Saul pleading with Kim not to break up with him to full-on-Saul in full Saul mode. It felt like one moment he's protesting that Kim shouldn't break up with him and then next moment he's paying a hooker. I wanted to watch that final stage of the transformation happen -- Kim was the main thing tying Jimmy to humanity, the face of the best side of Jimmy's character, and it was more or less literally stated (in the Season 5 desert sequence) that she was the only thing he lived for. So we should have gotten to see how utterly broken Jimmy must have been with her gone and exactly how this led him slipping down a path to becoming completely heartless and soulless later on. Instead we cut straight from very-corrupted-but-still-basically-human-and-a-protagonist Jimmy to completely-empty-and-unlikable Saul with literally nothing given to us in between, leaving me to have to speculate on what Jimmy went through in the wake of the break-up and to infer what made him go from man to zombie.

This bothered me a lot after watching Episode 9 and, months later when I went back and watched the final four episodes, I was glad to see that this was very briefly addressed by Jimmy's confession in the final episode: "I'm the one who ran away", although I needed to see that scene a second time to understand in this line he was referring to his choice to sink blindly into his Saul persona at the end of Episode 9. Vince Gilligan also explained it very well at this point in this linked interview. But I think we should have gotten to see it for ourselves, to acutely feel his pain and emptiness. It's arguably the single most important, pivotal point in his transformation, even more significant than losing his brother, and I still hate that it was completely skipped over.

Another minor point: when a fictional character has a change of heart, I'm used to being able to directly see the moment when this change occurs; maybe I missed something and just need to re-watch, but in the finale of BCS I'm just not clear on when this happens (is it when Jimmy/Saul is on the plane, between the two conversations with his lawyer about Kim and Howard?).

But, while I can criticize as much as I like, it was still a great ending to a great show. I don't think I'll ever quite fall into the "Breaking Bad was the best TV show ever made, but Better Call Saul turned out to be even better!" camp, but BCS sure did manage to hold its own.

[mauesartetc]

This is a bit generalized so my apologies if it's not well worded, but as someone who tends to draw primarily animals/creature designs I'm used to designing patterns and color schemes on fur feathers and scales, however I tend to struggle with knowing how to design outfits for characters when it comes to giving them clothes. I know to reference from real life when it comes to drawing the clothes themselves and from time periods, but it's specifically when making up characters who might be in a modern or less specified and exact time period, that I tend to be at a loss for what clothes to put on them outside of something vague that doesn't really tell anything about them, but instead is just clothes to clothe them that doesn't really tie into who they are. Do you have any tips or maybe recommended videos to check out regarding how to go about designing outfits for characters? Thank you!

I’d say the first thing to think about where clothes are concerned is the character’s lifestyle. What kind of job do they have, and what sort of garb does it require? Are they rich, poor, or in between? Are they more outdoorsy or indoorsy? More athletic or more stationary? Do their clothes fit the climate they live in? Is it more important to them to dress for practicality and comfort or to follow the latest trends? How much do they care if their clothes get messy or damaged?

It also helps to watch live-action media and take notes on how different characters dress, and what that says about them. Take Gus and Mike here: 

Gus took the time to look professional, stylish, and put together, with a color-coordinated shirt, tie, blazer, and overcoat. He’s very fastidious and cares a lot about his presentation, which is crucial if he wants to keep his status as a high-ranking cartel member a secret from the people of Albuquerque. Mike, on the other hand, doesn’t put much effort into his appearance, going for a comparatively casual look. Just a basic button-up with a t-shirt underneath and a plain fleece jacket on top. Not too fashionable, but it gets the job done.

Don’t sleep on accessories, either. To continue with Better Call Saul as an example, a bunch of those characters sport little accents that are unique to them. Jimmy has the pinky ring, Kim has the triangular earring/necklace combo, Howard has the knit ties and tie bar, Nacho has the snake earring, Tuco has the boxing glove necklace, etc etc. Those subtle touches can show a lot of personality, and if the accessory has a backstory, even better. 

Something else that’s hugely beneficial is the ability to name each piece of clothing the character wears. If you have the vocabulary to differentiate between, say, a polo, a V-neck, and a muscle tee, it’ll be much easier to gather options and expand the clothing variety through the whole cast. You could hit the websites of stores your character might patronize, browse for specific items they’d wear, and take note of the labels given to them. Then you could make a list or a mood board to flesh out each character’s fashion sense.

Shape and color symbolism will also factor into your choices here. If a character is sharp and stern, their clothes could have more angular edges, while if they’re more friendly and welcoming, those edges could be round and nonthreatening. As for color, your character could wear their emotional demeanor literally on their sleeve. If they’re hotheaded or otherwise passionate, a fiery red would probably be their go-to; orange if they’re energetic; yellow if they have a sunny disposition; blue if they’re more calm and collected, and so on. You can look deeper into color psychology, why certain colors affect us the way they do, and which colors have different meanings in different cultures.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Hope this helps!

[allronix]

Carth and Force Sensitivity (crossposted from Reddit r/kotor)

This is for @k-she-rambles:

Okay, so while we're shooting the bantha crap over on KOTOR fan theories, u/134340Goat mentioned my all time favorite "Have you been chewing spice?!" fan theory when it comes to KOTOR: Is Carth Force Sensitive?

So this one starts with a story. I mentioned my brother in law, who is pretty much Keeper of the Jedi Archives. Seriously, he's an English teacher and my sister is a librarian. They met at a sci fi convention and their first date was Phantom Menace. We're taking not just geeks, but geeks who can throw the damn bookshelf at you. Brother in law bought KOTOR on the day it launched and turned it into a week long binge watch at his house. And because brother in law is that kind of geek, he's translating the characters into the West End D6 system. I'm watching him do a playthrough, and he's got Canderous and Zaalbar at Ajunta Pal's tomb.

Allronix: Huh. That's odd. Why aren't commenting on anything when Ajunta is speaking?

Bro in law: Oh. They can't even see Ajunta. You have to be Force Sensitive to see a Force Ghost The stronger your Sensitivity, the better you can see it.

Allronix: Really? Then how come Carth can see it?

Bro in law (gets the "holy shit, I gotta confirm this" look): Really?! He just sees something out the corner of his eye or something?

Allronix: No, he sees Ajunta just fine. Understands what the dude's saying too.

Bro in law instantly rolls back to his last save, swaps Zaalbar for Carth, and sees the bit in question.

Bro in law: Oh. Dear. (Goes over to make some quick scribbles on Carth's character sheet)

Okay, so maybe that was a lore fail. I didn't really think about it too much until I hit that False Level Up glitch and ran around with Carth and Mission as Sentinels. Now, while I couldn't really see Mission as a Sensitive, that little bit with my bro in law nagged at me. And became a "once you see it you can't unsee it." Apologies to TV Tropes, where some of these were my additions to the Wild Mass Guess entry on this topic.

Any one of these on its own is pretty easy to blow off. After all, man is career military, and knows All this Shit is Weird. I also like to think of Sensitivity as a spectrum and not a switch. If all life is connected by the Force, then all life would be Sensitive to some degree or another. It’s just a matter of to what degree. It’s only as the list gets longer and longer does the case start looking damning...

What are the odds of surviving that attack on the Endar Spire, getting to the escape pods, sharing the last escape pod with the mindwiped Sith Lord, piloting through the chaos, landing in what passes for the "good" part of town, remaining uninjured, pulling the badly injured mindwiped Sith Lord from the wreck, evading Sith detection while all this is going on, and just happening to find a dump of an apartment where the landlord's not asking questions? That is one amazing string of coincidences and good luck. Get that many in Star Wars, and it's definitely The Force sticking its nose in things.

Piloting the escape pod to land in the Upper City, piloting the Hawk through the Sith Blockade of Taris, the random Sith patrols, the escape from the Leviathan, and the fleet around Lehon along with the crash landing that left the ship easily repairable. Now, compare to Atton who we know to be an excellent pilot and drawing on The Force who still manages to crash the ship at least three times.

He's a scary good judge of character if you're interacting with other NPCs. If you watch him with other NPC characters, he's got a pretty good compass as to which characters are being helpful and which ones are full of shit. The only one he calls incorrectly is Rukil, who is probably also an untrained Sensitive (the age, the "marked" comments) and half senile, which is probably throwing him.

Related to that, his distrust and wariness about something not adding up with the PC, the Jedi Council feeding the party a line of bull, that things just aren't adding up. And on all of it? Dead on. He's 100% right about the Player Character, he just expected something a little less crazy than "that's Darth freaking Revan."

If you play Female Revan, then Carth's the one who gets fried in the torture cages on the Leviathan. Saul comments how strange it is that Carth takes so much punishment and still remains conscious. Now, this is a low level thing, but in lore, Force Sensitives have drawn on it to keep them alive or conscious under duress. Explicitly, the first sign we got that Leia was a Sensitive when she withstood the Imperial torture droid.

Another of his scary ass judge of character feats? In the comics, Zayne (who is on the run from the Jedi, who framed him for the murder of his classmates) has a vision that Mandalorians are coming for Serroco. Saul? Laughs it off, throws Zayne in the brig. Zayne's own friends don't even believe him. Carth gets one of those creepy hunches and starts calling in "duck and cover" sirens as far as he can broadcast, which sends seventeen cities and millions of people heading for shelter. It saves their lives and Carth is called a hero for it. Armed with another hunch, he disobeys Saul (remember this is before Saul nukes Telos) and lets Zayne "escape" from custody. Mind you, not even the Jedi or his party members believed Zayne. Carth did.

Carth makes a lot of creepy weird offhand predictions about the future. He says he knows on some level he'll be there when Saul dies. That certainly pans out. He makes an offhand prediction that the Jedi have set the party up to take a fall. Right again. He tells a female PC that she'll have to make a choice soon, one she can't walk away from. And then we get the temple top. He even blurts out that "I sensed you would have to make a choice soon, and that was it*, I can feel it!"* If you specify a LS Female Revan, his recording for T3-M4 says he's had a hunch Revan would leave without warning. Again, spot on.

Specify a LS male Revan, and Carth will remark to Bastila that seeing the Exile reminds him "there are worse things to lose." The only other people who can see just how screwed up the Exile is are the Jedi Masters, Chodo Habat, and the Force Sensitive party members.

Specify a LS female Revan, and Carth will insist that he would know if Revan were dead (again, scary ass intuition) and that there's an "emptiness" where she used to be. Now, remember one of the things about a broken Force Bond? It would simply be "empty, a wound."

You know how your party members in KOTOR 2 feel upset or even horrified as they realize they feel compelled to protect Exile and can't being themselves to leave, even when said actions are kicking puppies? And how they swing wildly from being crazy, almost stalker level possessive of them to being scared out of their wits and clamming up when you try to pry anything out of them? And the more potent (and untapped) their Force Sensitivity, the more they get hammered with the effect? (Mira and Atton in particular) Yeah. Now, Carth's "I don't wanna talk" looks a bit different, doesn't it? It could also account for that romance arc, especially if you roll a DSF Revan and go for that "everyone dies" ending.

Again, Ajunta Pal. Seeing a Force Ghost? Yeah. Some degree of Sensitivity needed. Understanding what he's saying? Yeah. Takes a bit more than that. And Carth makes a weirdly insightful comment about the Dark Side on top of it.

Notice that this a wall o text argument already, and I'm now just getting to the "Yeah, his kid is able to throw around mid-level Dark Side powers and packing a red lightsaber." Given the jawline and the muleheaded attitude, no way Morgana was fooling around with the pizza delivery boy. That's definitely Carth's kid, and that's definitely Force Sensitivity. Now, while it can skip a generation (see Theron Shan), it tends to run pretty heavy in families.

Lastly? Gee. He comes from a planet settled by and heavily populated by descendants of Force Sensitives who failed their training. I'm also willing to bet some bastard children of Jedi get passed off as "foundlings" and "orphans" and dumped there, too. Jedi are forbidden attachments, but not sworn to celibacy, so...yeah, bastard kids are gonna happen. There's probably a Jedi or two in that family tree. It's circumstantial evidence at best, but it still supports the case.

Now, any arguments I missed? Counterarguments?

And the million credit question: If there's a character who gets to break this news to poor Flyboy, who do you think would actually take that on? How do you think Carth would take that kind of news? And what, if anything, would come of it?

I kinda figure Jolee might be the only one nuts enough to poke that with a stick...I also kinda figure "Sentinel" would fit best. Consular? Hell no. He hired Mical for that. Guardian works with the feats, but the whole "ferreting out deceit and injustice?" Yeah. That's Carth.

[it-was-all-a-beautiful-dream]

Silva Lining (Saul Silva x Reader) Chapter 16

Warnings: Swearing

Word count: 2.1k

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The barrier was abandoned as you head back to the school. What was Aisha thinking? Telling the teachers their plan?

You huffed as you walked into your mothers office. Saul had stayed behind at the barrier with the Specialists while you and Aisha were escorted back by your mother and Mr Harvey. Stella, Terra and Musa were the only ones there, Bloom no where to be seen.

“Before you say anything, I didn’t say a thing, it was all this ones doing.” You hitched a thumb in Aisha’s direction. “The only thing I found out was Rosalind has been after me this whole time and has been using Bloom to get to me. She somehow knew the truth about who my mother was and knew she couldn’t use me to free her. So please please please tell me nothings happened yet and Bloom is just taking her time in the creepy hidden room?”

You sucked in a breath, forgetting to breath during your mini rant. The girls just looked shocked, less shocked than normal, they probably expect this kind of stuff now, nothing was easy when it came to your life.

You watched as Farah came back through the door way, having gone in search for Bloom. “They’re gone.”

So here you were, sitting around your dorm, having been shouted at by Mr Harvey; who you don’t think you’ve ever seen angry before. Terra stood up to him and then he locked you all in using magic…. could anything else go wrong. Oh wait, you spoke too soon.

You kicked back in your chair, leather boot clad feet up on the table as you listened to Stella go in on Aisha for being a snitch.

“Bloom is being selfish, the last thing Miss Dowling needs is to be worried about Rosalind.” That made you stir in your seat. Your feet came off the table with a thud.

“Stell, she does have a point there. You know how much shit we’ve cause Dowling, I know with the new found relationship status I could come across as bias but after all, all this shit is happening because of me once again. Can we just stop arguing for one second and figure out how were going to help?”

Your speech was interrupted by the flickering of lights. “Okay did anyone else see that or am I having some weird magic stroke?” The rest of the room murmured. Okay, not a stroke.

“This shouldn’t be happening, Alfea is an outpost it runs on magic.” Terra paced and Musa and Sam joined the rest of them in the room.

Sam, being able to walk through walls, decided to go and check it out. See what was happening.

“Wait I can come with you..” You volunteered but he had already vanished. “Okay thennn.” What felt like seconds later Sam was back through the wall screaming in agony, his stomach sliced open, blood soaked through his clothing.

“There’s a burned one in the school!”

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The courtyard was the busiest you’d ever seen it. Your mother was using magic to slam windows shut, fire fairies were welding them shut completely. Saul was on one side dishing out armour and weapons to anyone who’d take it. Mr Harvey had set up a medical bay for the suspected casualties. Your mind was spinning. The voices had started when Sam came through the wall. Whispers in your mind almost like it was your subconscious. It was fucking annoying.

Looking around you saw a hell of a lot of scared faces. Your heart beat rapidly in your chest, you hadn’t had a panic attack in months but it sure felt as if you were having one now. This was happening because of you. Innocent people were going to be hurt because the burned ones wanted one thing. You. Your eyes scanned the courtyard as your mothers speech rang out. Saul caught your eye, and gave you a look. Scared, worried, love. He conveyed it all with just one look. He was going to get hurt. Because of you. In that moment you knew what you had to do.

Trying to sneak away had failed. Since meeting Stella you knew you’d had a bond more stronger than friendship. You were blood and something about that gave her an edge. She knew you were about to do something stupid, she could literally feel the dread running through her veins.

“Please tell me you’re not going out there alone, how many times is it going to take for you to realise were better off as a team.”

Stella made you jump as she spoke up behind you, with her was Aisha and Bloom. Your ran your hands through your hair, pulling the long strands up onto a bun, the bobble on your wrist secured it in place.

“Actually, I could use some help.”

So the plan was set. Bloom would stay and distract Saul and your mother. They’d been keeping such a close eye on her lately that they were certain she was going to be the one to do something stupid and reckless. Oh how the roles had reversed. Aisha and Stella were coming with you, you needed Stella there to help you ground your powers. Like you’d always said, she was the light to your dark and vice versa. Aisha, well, she was a fucking powerful and smart fairy, couldn’t hurt to have her on your side.

Sneaking behind a wall just off the courtyard, you held your hands out allowing smoky black tendrils of magic flow freely from your shaking fingers. The portal opened and with one last look back at all the fear and chaos inside, you stepped through.

-Saul’s POV-

We got back to the school just in the nick of time. The courtyard was full of scared, fear fulled fairies and Specialists and all Saul could think of was his girl and why the fuck she wasn’t in the courtyard with the rest of the students.

His heart beat rapidly as he gave orders and handed out weapons and armour to every student he could. He was alerted to Y/N’s presence when he heard screaming and panicked cries from across the room. She was helping her friends carry Harveys kid, his torso clawed away at by the hands of a burned one.

He was too distracted, he couldn’t go to her straight away people would notice, even amongst all this chaos, they still had to be clever and careful. He was busy talking to Sky, still trying to keep his girl in his sights but he failed. Now seemed the only chance that he might get to tell Sky the truth about Asterdal and that’s what he did. How he killed Skys father to save himself after Andreas turned on him. Sky didn’t want to believe and he was pissed, but it needed to wait until after. After the burned ones weren’t knocking on their front door. He looked around again for you, wondering where the hell you were.

“Are you seriously looking for Y/N after you told me you killed my father?” Sky seethed, rightfully pissed off. “I don’t know where she is but she asked me to tell you she loves you, and she’s sorry, she said she would have said it herself but it would have been too obvious.” With that Sky walked away to the front line before Saul could ask him what she meant by sorry.

The burned ones were banging on the doors, windows, you name it. They had arrived. Farah parted the crowd of scared students like the red sea, Marco behind her telling people to keep their nerve. Saul joined them at the front armed and ready. Screams erupted as glass fell from the towering ceiling above. A fairy shot fire from his hands directly at the burned one who had fell through the roof. It charged it’s way towards the specialists, swords drawn, they charged forward, only to stop when the burned one changed coarse, leaving the students behind.

“What the hell was that.” Terra panicked and looked around for more signs of burned ones.

“They’re all moving together… like they’re looking for something.” Saul looked at Farah, realisation dawning on his face.

“Where’s Y/N?”

-Your POV-

The air was colder than usual. Maybe it’s because deep down you were scared shitless and the nerves were getting the better of you.

“Y/N you do know my mums gonna be here soon, with an actual army!” She ran after you, trying to keep up with your long strides.

“Stell, the burned ones have always been after me, from the start. I can’t stand back and not do anything. I know how to stop them, I’ve had the power all along, I’ve just been too afraid to use it. I need to draw on more power than I ever have before. That’s why I need you both here, so you can try and stop me if it gets out of control.”

You could hear the burned ones getting closer, their menacing growls echoing through the spindly trees. Shadows bounced around the outskirts of the space you were standing in. You didn’t realise you were crying until Stella brushed your tears away. Both fairies grabbed your hands.

“If anything happens, tell Saul I love him. I’ll never stop loving him even in death.”

You gave Stella one last hug and did the same with Aisha, taking a deep calming breath you stepped forward, your heavy boots squelching in the waterlogged field that overlooked the school you’d come to call home.

When you knew your friends were far enough away you opened up you senses, giving in to the power you possessed. Your eyes turned black and your body began to slowly lift from the ground, arms outstretched. You could feel the power swirling inside you. It’s presence made you gasp. Around you, a smoky black fog, your body was consumed in it, a visual representation of the power you held. You looked down to your fingers, to your body and smiled.

Fairies used to have wings but they had lost the ability to perform transformation magic so adapted and didn’t need them anymore. So it came as a surprise when you felt giant wings burst from your back, glowing black and white. This is what it meant to be the answer to all the realms problems. You smiled again, tears threatening to spill due to the feeling of being whole. This is who you were meant to be all along and now you had finally found yourself.

The burned ones sprung from the depths of the forrest. Your boot clad feet hit the ground with a thud and your smoky, bright wings fanned out behind you. You were ready. They charged towards you, their growls filling the air. Your hands shot out and your black tendrils of magic shot into their chests, ripping out the spark inside them. You watched as one by one they crashed to the ground around you. Their monster like growls no longer.

Your wings retracted and you breath deeply. The burned ones that had once surrounded you no longer deformed and burned. But there, laying on the ground, humans.

“What the fuck?”

You heard running footsteps and looked up dizzily to see your mum and Saul running towards you in worry.

They stopped, looking around at what had unfolded. “Well done Y/N.” You mother was tearing up, shocked, happy and proud. You stumbled towards Saul. He ran to you, swooping you up in his arms.

“Farah what’s wrong with her?!” Saul was panicked, brushing the hair back from your sweaty forehead. Your mothers hand came to rest on Sauls shoulder.

“It’s okay Saul, she’s just weak, let’s get her back to the school.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

That night, the lights came back on in Alfea. Your friends surrounded you as you lay in bed, all talking about the events that had unfolded and how you had earned your wings. How Stella and Aisha had helped you in your time of need. How Terra and Musa had helped save Sam, and how Bloom had helped distract everyone to make the whole plan a possibility.

As the girls chatted and laughed, you zoned out, looking around at each of them. You couldn’t believe how lucky you were. A girl from no where in England, finding out she was a fairy, finding an amazing group of friends who she knew she’d have for life. Finding Saul, finding her mother, finding herself. She couldn’t help the happy tears that fell.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh my goshhhhhh! I hope you liked this chapter! I really enjoyed writing it! So much dramaaaa <3

As always please let me know what you thought! Comment, like, re-blog and if you wanna be in the tag list let me know!

CHAPTER 17.1 -------- CLICK HERE

Tag List

@tinktohispan

@azure23x

@alexiapayne12

@codykosuckmytoe

@lllyyysss02

@kingunder221b

@a-scrumptiouslywingedstudent

@music-of-melody

@cecedrake2217

@anreeixcobra

@sporadicsaladcloudgoop

@616hotchners

@janelongxox

@lflores2008

@shadowhuntyi

@bshelley322

[myhahnestopinion]

THE AARONS 2020 - Best TV Show

It was prime time for TV in 2020, with many more free hours to fill. I managed to get through a lot of my backlog in fact, finally getting around to watching shows like The Strain. It’s a show about a deadly disease that tears society apart because a lot of arrogant people think they are exempt from quarantining. The disease turns people into vampires, so it’s technically escapism. Here are the Aarons for Best TV Show: 

#10. The Plot Against America (Miniseries) - HBO

It’s not TV, it’s not HBO, it’s real life. The Wire-creator David Simon’s penchant for illustrating the human fallout of institutional failures made him a perfect collaborator for HBO’s Plot Against America, an adaptation of Phillip Roth’s alternate-history novel. Following a Jewish family in New Jersey navigating the increasingly-fascist America of a hypothetical Charles Lindbergh administration, the show is a terrifying warning of what happens when hatred and conspiracy theories are allowed to accumulate political force. Notably, while the book ends with history back on the right track, the closing moments here are left ambiguous. The show was a limited series, but in many ways, The Plot Against America is ongoing.

#9. Mrs. America (Miniseries) - FX

Its interests are married to The Plot Against America, but Mrs. America traces the country’s rising extremism from a more historically accurate perspective. The miniseries centers on political activists in the 1970s on opposing sides of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, but its dialogue isn’t a strict dichotomy. The episodic format is expertly utilized to build out intersectional ideas from the likes of Rose Byrne’s Gloria Steinem, Uzo Aduba’s Shirley Crisholm, and Margo Martindale’s Bella Abzug, detailing the difficulties in building a diverse coalition, and the dangers of a single-minded one. Drawing parallels to current debates, its compelling centerpiece is how conservative Phylis Shafley (Cate Blanchett) successfully defeats the Amendment; voting against your own self-interests, Mrs. America says, is as American as apple pie.

#8. The Outsider (Miniseries) - HBO

Societal collapse comes from within in the two shows mentioned above, but the threat in HBO’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 2018 novel is decidedly an “other.” King clearly had his mind on modern manipulations of truth when crafting the ingenious premise: a man is arrested for the murder of two young boys due to irrefutable DNA evidence, only to provide an air-tight alibi for the crime. To match King’s procedural prose, HBO brought on The Night Of’s David Price, who layers the original work with meticulous mysteries. The Outsider has all the pulpy jolts expected of the author, but the show’s true horror lies in its overbearing grief, best brought to life by Ben Mendelsohn’s Detective Anderson. To say more would be to spoil its secrets; you’ll want to be on the inside.

#7. Perry Mason (Season 1) - HBO

Just like the famous fictional attorney, HBO can’t seem to lose, with Perry Mason marking its third entry on this list. The reimagining of the long running court drama actually takes place before the character’s illustrious law career; here he’s a down-on-his-luck private eye caught up in a scandalous child kidnapping case. The result’s a gangbusters production of old-fashioned moody noir: political corruption, femme fatales, and a more morally-complicated Mason, as played by The Americans’ Matthew Rhys. The lavish period details and character-actor cast, including Shea Whigham, John Lithgow, and Tatiana Maslany, will help draw viewers in, but, I’ll confess, I was already hooked by the season’s chilling opening moments.

#6. Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (Season 1) - NBC

Dour seasons have dominated this list thus far, but Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist sings a different tune. It’s a lovably oddball premise: an accident during an MRI causes a young woman, played by Jane Levy, to hear other people’s thoughts in the form of popular music. It’s all karaoke, but, emphasized by the presence of Skylar Astin, a worthy inheritor to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s musical-comedy crown. The tracklist, workplace antics, and love-triangle drama all exist in a comfortingly familiar network TV realm, but the show takes additional steps for inclusion with stories highlighting Zoey’s genderfluid neighbor (Alex Newell) and an American Sign Language performance of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.” During a year in need of shuffling off stress, there was no better time to queue up Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.

#5. What We Do in The Shadows (Season 2) - FX

FX’s expansion of the mockumentary feature film of the same name lit up some of the darker corners of its universe in the show’s second season, transforming mundane-seeming material into something completely, uniquely batty. Each creature of Shadows took their turn in the spotlight this season, from a middle-management promotion gifting energy-vampire Colin Robinson unlimited supernatural power, to undead Nadja befriending a doll possessed by her own ghost, to Matt Berry’s Lazlo forging a small-town persona as a bartender/volleyball coach to escape a vengeful Mark Hamill. As always, it was the sympathetic Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), a Van Helsing descendent desperate to become a vampire, who gave the show its emotional stakes, and the vampires within a different kind altogether.

#4. Stargirl (Season 1) - DC Universe

Shadows was lit, but few things burned brighter this year than Stargirl (perhaps too brightly for the flamed-out DC Universe). The superhero drama is one of several that will outlive its original streaming service - fitting, given its obsession with legacy. Based on a character created by DC Comics stalwart Geoff Johns after the tragic loss of his sister, the show finds a young girl taking on the mantle of a fallen hero after moving to a town run in secret by supervillains. With sprightly fight choreography and an unabashed embrace of its comic book lore, Stargirl outshines the overabundance of small-screen superheroes out there. Its highlight is the bright performance of lead Brec Bassinger; put simply, she’s a star, girl.

#3. BoJack Horseman (Season 6b) - Netflix

Throughout its run, BoJack Horseman garnered acclaim for routinely delivering unexpected pathos, and the final season kept it on that track until the end. ...Get it, because horses run on tracks? The unexpected porter of television’s legacy of antiheroes ended in much the same vein as its sister shows - with consequences finally catching up with its protagonist. No amount of fanciful animal puns could soften that painful catharsis, as the show finally trampled its tricky web of abuse through bittersweet means. The series closed out with an especially thoughtful scene, the kind viewers who looked past the wonky pilot years ago were regularly blessed with; to the very end, BoJack, you were a gift, horse.

#2. Better Call Saul (Season 5) - AMC

As good as Bad ever was and better than ever before, the fifth season of AMC’s spin-off completely upended the world of its eponymous lawyer while bringing Vince Gilligan’s universe one step away from full-circle. Saul Goodman found himself in way over his head, and viewers found themselves way on the edge of their seats, as his first foray into “criminal” lawyering swiftly dovetailed with an escalating drug war. Despite the emotional distress of watching fan-favorite character Kim Wexler placed in perilous situations, there are no objections to be had with the drama’s continued masterful storytelling. Ramping up the slow-burn storytelling, season five saw Kim and Saul’s relationship develop in rich and unexpected ways, while still keeping their final fates unresolved. Fans are thus waiting with bated breath for the show’s final call next year. 

#1. The Great (Season 1) - Hulu

Who could be the best but The Great? There was a minor television controversy this year over Netflix marketing The Crown as a historical drama despite its fictional interpretation of events; The Great has no such pretentions. An asterix adorns every title card of the show, letting viewers know that its take on Catherine the Great’s coup against Emperor Peter III of Russia is only “an occasionally true story.” The show indeed is not great for education, but it’s the most entertaining television of the year, locking stars Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult in a battle of wits and a fight for the country’s soul under the watch of The Favourite co-writer Tony McNamara. The uproarious comedy slyly collates leadership based in cruelty with leadership based in goodwill in the background of its quite bawdy escapades, a subtle bit of relevant political maneuvering that lets it successfully claim the crown this year.

NEXT UP: THE 2020 AARONS FOR BEST TV EPISODE!

[rodpupo2]

Research: Storytelling project

JOCK

Mark Simpson, best known as Jock, is a Scottish comic book artist and illustrator. He began his career in 1999 working on the British comic book publisher 2000 AD (where most of the British artists and writers, began their career, before going to the major leagues like DC and Marvel), and started working with characters like the Judge Dredd.

The artist began his career in the USA with The Losers, at Vertigo (a subdivision of DC comics), and some issues of the Green Arrow.

He also have worked with conceptual arts for various films such as Iron man 3, X-men days of the future past, and Star Wars episode VIII.

I have known Jock for a while, I have seen many of his works in the comics, and he is known for working mainly with covers, where he does extremely surreal works, mixing various types of colors, and always uses a lot of shading, not worrying if the characters are in the correct proportion, because that is not his proposal.

But I know he did some works as a sequential artist, like The Losers, for example, where he makes extremely tight pictures, always focusing on the expressions of the characters, and especially on the hands that he most likes to do.

His storyboards or sketches are very different, because his drawings do not follow the traditional way of being centered on the pictures, many of his characters are jumping over the pictures, to show the size of the action scene that Jock wants to do.

It is worth remembering that he mixes his drawings made with pencil and nanquin, with digital, often taking pictures of different landscapes or scenarios, and drawing over them, and mixing with his drawn character to make an interesting composition.

Despite all this, he has a very peculiar style, which many people complain about the lack of movement and poses that his characters does. That his lines are also very dirty and dark. But Jock says, that this is his way of drawing, that he likes to have a not so commercial style, like many other artists. He likes to play with colors and likes to draw his characters, in a little more simple poses, and glorifying the background.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, he’s known for designing movie posters and title sequences.

For 40th years, he worked with Hollywood greatest filmmakers, such as Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Billy Wilder.

Bass was born in New York in 1920, to a Jewish family, he was all ways drawing when he was a child.He graduated from James Monroe High school in the Bronx. He studied part time at art students league in Manhattan, and moved to Brooklyn College, where he had classes with György Kepes, a famous Hungarian painter and photographer.

He began in Hollywood in the 40’s, designing prints for films like champion (1949), death salesman (1951) and the moon is blue (1953).

He became widely known for creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger’s The man with the golden arm (1955), which’s about a jazz musician, addicted to heroin. Bass decided to create a poster which dialogues with the controversial subject, so he chosed the arm as the central object, as is a image which relates with heroin.

For Alfred Hitchcock, he provided memorable posters, like Vertigo(1958), North by Northwest(1959) and Psycho(1960).

For Martin Scorsese he had done the posters of The Goodfellas(1990), Cape Fear (1991), the Age of innocence (1993) and Casino (1995).

For Stanley Kubrick, he designed Spartacus (1960), and probably the best poster in his career, which is the poster from The Shining (1980).Kubrick, however, wasn’t amused. On the sketches themselves (which were later discovered in his personal affects) he wrote “Looks like science fiction.”Title looks small, looks like the ink didn’t take on the part that goes light,” and “Maze too abstract and too much emphasis on maze,” and, the most scathing of all, “Don’t like artwork.”

More discussions followed, and Bass agreed upon an illustrative approach of a large head peering through the title.As Kubrick instructed, the poster evokes both “terror” and the “supernatural.”

Bass once told,that his main goal for his titles sequences is “try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story".

James Cameron

James Cameron is a famous film director, which is for having two of the greatest box office films of all time, which are Avatar and Titanic. In addition, he is always revolutionizing in special effects, always bringing something new and revolutionary, but it all starts on his drawing desk, with his sketches and storyboards.

James Cameron has always been known for creating extremely interesting worlds, and completely out of the ordinary. Starting with the film Aliens, the sequel to Ridely Scott's film, where he expanded this world by creating an ecosystem for the aliens, in addition to showing futuristic equipment, for the space army that faces the aliens.

He also created concepts, for the Terminator films 1 and 2, where it was an idea never before seen of a robot that travels in time to kill a person. Its detailed perfectly drawn storyboards show one of the most interesting scenes in the film, where the terminator does a self surgery, revealing his true form.

And finally, once again creating a whole world, with a fauna and flora never seen before in the movie Avatar.

Cameron always wanted to create worlds, so he putted everything on a piece of paper when he was a child, where later, he took courses of drawings and did art colleges, to get a clearer idea of ​​how his worlds and characters could be.

Before being a director, he wanted to be a writer and an artist, but he never thought his ideals could be just in a book, he wanted to expand these ideas in a way never seen before.

Perhaps what impresses me most about James Cameron, besides being a creative force, is all the care he takes with his works, he said in an interview, which he always preserves all his storyboards, even from those films that he never made or did not work, and said that almost every day, he sits at his drawing desk and tries to come up with possible scenes for any film he is making. And when he creates an interesting scene, he tries to invent a whole story, to get to that specific scene.

 https://issuu.com/dteditore/docs/spidercameron-screen-eng/1?ff

Glen Keane

Glen Keane was born on April 23, 1954, in the city of Philadelphia, United States. Early on, he became interested in art while watching his cartoonist father Bill Keane draw. After finishing high school, he turned down a scholarship to play football and signed up for CalArts- California Institute of Arts.

Keane signed up for the painting program, he wanted to be a visual artist. However, his application was accidentally sent to the animation department, then Film Graphics. The college vetoed him to change course, so he stayed there.

Glen’s passion for painting helped him tremendously in animation, since the first skill an animator must have is knowing how to draw. Do not simply draw, but really know anatomy and how to give the illusion of weight.

His first work was Bernardo and Bianca in the kangaroo land. In the following years Keane worked on other features such as the Hound and the fox, Oliver and his gang , treasure planet, and the list goes on.

But it’s was at the time called the Disney Renaissance that Keane stood out. He animated Ariel the little mermaid, Beast from the beauty and the beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and most recently, was Rapunzel (Tangled).

At the time, Keane and the animators, had to use the traditional animation (by using paper), so him and his crew had to plan, all the scenes and poses, by doing storyboards, and later drawing on the paper frame by frame (the frequency to project a film in the cinema is twenty four frames per second, twenty four drawings in total were needed for each second of animation seen on screen).

There is no professional on the animation field, who does not know the name Glen Keane. He is the reference to all of them. What sets him apart, is his passion for his characters. During the production of the animations, Keane understands them and is thus able to perform better.

[belizedeservesbetter]

Octet is Wonderful!

It’s definitely not for everyone but I honestly and truly loved it

I don’t think Octet is a musical. Not really, anyway. It’s more of a meditation and a ritual. This musical made me feel some kind of way, like I felt super out of body during it but also incredibly present. I felt like I was right there with these characters - especially because of how immersive the whole space is. 

The show, then, is about a group of eight people (or an octet) at a support group for technology addiction. The show is filled with plot holes because there is no plot, and somehow it works. We hear of this guy named Saul who brings them together, and we hear some mysterious things about him too. But that’s it. No answers about him. We hear vaguely about different characters’ backstories, but nothing else. You fill in your own blanks, essentially writing the story as you watch it. 

I think Dave Malloy is one of the best musical theatre writers of the generation, and maybe ever. His style is unique and has a unique flair to it that draws on many different music styles while still being completely his own. Octet is very clearly a Dave Malloy piece and you can tell right from the get go. You mostly hear about a writer’s “voice” in terms of playwriting but Malloy has the most distinct musical theatre writing “voice” I’ve heard in years and years and years. I can definitely see bits and pieces of Great Comet and Ghost Quartet in there, but it is definitely its own original piece that lives and breathes on its own. And I didn’t think I’d like the acapella either, but it felt like the perfect extension of the characters and the world they live in. 

I suppose that all was a long winded way of saying the music in the show is absolutely divine. Like wow. Every song was lovely and intense and felt like both a hypnosis and an awakening at the same time. This whole show felt like it was putting me in a trance. I love really visceral theatre like that and I wish more theatre did it. This show is bold and different in its style and choices, which I wish more musicals did. 

Octet asks a lot of hard questions about technology use and cancel culture and how we’ve substituted artificial feelings for real ones, and vice versa how everything online is still very real and how calling everything outside it “the real world” isn’t true. It also says a lot about how entrenched we’ve become in it and we really can’t turn back now because we’re in too deep. It asked a particularly interesting question which I keep thinking about, which is what is this current generation of kids going to turn out like? They make a point about the horrible things they can easily view and what’s that doing to their brains? How they think? How they behave? This show really forces you to think long and hard about the device you hold in your hand and the one you sit in front of staring for hours. A stale pale light, they call it.

This show still has left me thinking about it. Different things stand out about it. It’s a show I’ll be thinking about for a long long time.

Performances are uniformly excellent, with Alex Gibson and Margo Seibert particularly standing out. I remember Gibson being good in Great Comet, but I had no idea he was this good. His song in particular was my favorite and actually made me teary-eyed. 

The set design was particularly interesting as well. You’re literally in the show if you’re in the first row. The moment you walk into the theatre you’re in this church basement, complete with posters and free coffee. My seat happened to be one of the folding chairs on the stage and I felt very much a part of that world, almost like I was there. There is also something incredibly supernatural about the set, and in turn the show, which was fascinating. 

This is kind of a side tangent but I’ve been thinking a lot about eye contact in theatre recently. In Octet, there are many instances when characters sing directly to the audience and purposely look people in the eye, almost like you’re there with them in the support group too. It isn’t audience participation, but almost audience confrontation. You can’t pretend you aren’t hearing and experiencing what the characters are. Almost immediately after Octet, my best friend and I went to Sleep No More (again, I know. I gotta see it while I’m a student cause afterwards when I lose the student discount I’ll never see it again) and in that show there’s a good amount of pointed eye contact and connection through that. Same thing, I can’t pretend I’m not seeing and hearing and feeling everything the characters in that show are, especially because they’re staring right at me. There are times in that show when two characters in particular have stared at me and their stare feels like they can see everything I’ve ever done and it’s intense and makes you painfully present. Oklahoma! does the same thing, especially with the house lights on. Curly sizes up the audience around him. Jud makes sure you know you’re witnessing the exact amount of pain he’s feeling. Aunt Ellar’s stare very clearly says, “You’re a part of this too and you better not go against what the community wants.” All of this is very confrontational, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It forces you to engage with the art you’re viewing in a different, more intense way. It very personally rips emotion out of you and throws it right onto the stage. It’s visceral and raw and gives theatre a different kind of edge than I’m used to. And I love it. I love that this kind of theatre can grab right onto you and only let you go when it’s over and done. Or in Sleep No More’s case when it physically grabs onto you. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’m sick of theatre that’s so passive and I’m sick of theatre that makes me feel very middling feelings. I want to feel something when I go to theatre. Otherwise I could just stay at home. 

ANYWAY back to Octet. Go see this if you can. You will not see or feel anything quite like it. 

Oh yeah side note, this show is definitely not for everyone. My best friend and I LOVED it but I ran into two separate friends before the show and texted them afterwards and they both HATED it so there you have it 

[brokenrealitylooper]

What do you hear?

Nothing but the rain.

I’m gonna preface this by stating I’ve not seen the series in years, and half or more of my “current” knowledge is heavily influenced by fanfiction I’ve read in the last few months.

So, basically, expect this to be heavily AU even before I start my time looping shenanigans.

While I’ve thought of doing a Loop through nuBSG, this attempt is greatly inspired by “it’s all been done before” by coffeesuperhero [address: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125137 ]

[start]

Moving to continue down the corridor, decommissioning speech in hand, Adama stumbled a single step. To the crew around him he huffed and continued on, but in his mind he was reeling.

All this has happened before.

And before that.

And before that.

And before that.

And before that.

And before that.

And before that.

Too much for right now. Too much for the day he knows he’s about to have, has had for a lifetime’s worth of days before, over and over.

A shake of his head, and Bill steps into the CIC.

“Nothing but the rain my frakking ass.”

“Something doesn’t feel right.”

Saul leaned against the DRADIS table, glancing around before focusing on Bill, “What is it, Bill-” a grin, odd to see without a patch over one eye “-age catching up to you?”

Bill shot him a narrow-eyed look, “Maybe. Feels like an itch I can’t scratch.”

Right in-between my temples... Leaning against the table as well, Bill looked at the crew and tried to be as relaxed as he could, knowing what would come in the next few hours, days, and years.

He just wished one of him had thought to check the time of Picon’s in-the-clear broadcast...

“It’s the frakking Cylons, Chief.” Bill yelled into the phone at Tyrol, annoyed that he has to state what should be obvious, “Anything networked is grounded until you cut those links. There’s no way they wouldn’t try that trick again now that we’ve had forty years to advance while conveniently forgetting what they could do back then.”

“Commander Adama.”

Bill blinked, for a moment wondering what he’d done to piss her off before Roslin’s tone registered, “Yes, L- Madam President?”

“I wanted to thank you.” she said, watching him a moment, “for jumping in to retrieve the other civilians. From the ships that couldn’t jump.”

“You were right. I couldn’t leave them behind.” he’s voice was gruff, but he relaxed. Maybe they didn’t have to fight as rabidly as last time, “I just don’t appreciate tactical decisions being made by civilians. I’d rather be given sound counsel.”

Or maybe they would. Knew I couldn’t stop myself.

“That’s the second attempted bombing, Bill.” Saul growled, slamming a fist on the DRADIS table but keeping his voice low, “There’s a Cylon on this ship!”

“That’s obvious, Tigh. I’m just glad I had the marines make extra rounds.”

This time, out of all the times he could remember, Bill knew Boomer would draw on him. 

So he stepped in close, grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the gun, and jerked it to the side while she fired into the deck.

Swinging a right cross, Bill noticed something he should’ve before: the blank look in this Eight’s eyes; lights on, but nobody home.

“Lock her in the brig!”

Boomer started to sit up, groggy and obviously confused, as two marines grabbed her arms, “Wha- what happened?! Commander, what-?”

“At ease, Boomer, just go with the marines. We’ll talk later.”

“Bill, have you frakking lost your mind!?” Saul bellowed as the hatch swung closed, “If she isn’t a Cylon, she’s a traitor!”

“Lights were on but no one was home, Saul.”

That made his friend draw up short, “A sleeper?”

“I’d say so. Better not be any more surprises, I’d hate to space her and find out she was a Cylon.”

Because no way in frakking hell was he alienating Boomer and sending her back for Cavil to screw with.

“I don’t want to be here, but we’re not splitting this fleet. The president wants to poke around some ruins, we’ll poke.” Bill growls, but in reality he’s not bothered. Sticking together and searching now makes it less likely the Cylons will catch up. Plus, he knows Kara will come back here with Athena--can’t call her that yet, Bill, nobody else knows about the Eights yet--And he’d rather have Laura and the fleet backing him before the mess with Cain.

“Marines! Stand down!” Bill barked, the order slowly followed while Athena, Helo, Anders, and Kara stood or crouched clustered on and in the Raptor, “Better have a good explanation, Lt. Valerii, for there being two of you.”

“She’s pregnant.” Helo blurted out, and Adama found some amusement--quickly buried--in the annoyed look Athena shot him despite her obvious fear.

“That wasn’t the question.”

She looked down, “I’m a Model Eight, sir.”

“Are you? You look like Lt. Valerii, but so does the one in my brig.” Bill stomped up to her, glaring, “Which is it? Valerii or Eight? You got any hidden programming like she did? Gonna auto-pilot and trying killing me while sleep walking?”

She jerked upright, snapping a salute, “Lt. Valerii, sir!”

“Good.” he glanced at Helo, “Escort her to the brig, but don’t put her in the cell with Boomer.”

“But-”

“You don’t get to be Boomer.” Bill snapped, “I’ve known where she was since the attacks. You showed up on planet, ended up frakking one of my pilots, and helping get three more people to the fleet is the only reason you’re alive right now. So you get a new name... Athena! Get your ass to the brig and wait for me before you get all buddy with Boomer.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Frakking hell, Bill.” Saul breathed, pouring a shot for himself, “Boomer’s a frakking mess, and you know we’ll have to ground... Athena, in a few weeks once Cottle gets us a timeline on her frakking pregnancy.”

“No shit.” Bill rumbled and dropped onto his sofa, “At least we’ve still got her. Airlocking her would’ve broke her, Saul. She’d’ve lead them right to us after they got their hands on her.”

True, he couldn’t be completely sure what happened with Boomer after she resurrected, but it couldn’t have been good.

[fin]

Continued Here

Well, here is part one. I’ll be dragging through the entire series a season or so each time. I’m not super worried about continuity, and I’m mainly focusing on the changes that come from Bill remembering previous timelines. Like how he’s avoided the coup, and is trying to get Boomer to accept being a Cylon while also getting Athena settled among the crew.

All the while, Bill can’t let them know he already knows the story. Though you can bet he’s gonna surprise Saul when the man finally confesses.