#i'm really very rusty

[originalartblog]

@bsdfanweek's skk Valentine's week day 2: Camellias and Floral Troubles

Dazai's love life is so hard. This is in reference to my recent skk post!

[ask-modern-patrochilles]

hope you guys are doing okay (you too mun!)

Achilles: A lot’s been going on!

[crabsnpersimmons]

CRAB IS YOUR MOON OKAY WITH HUGS?

PLEASE THIS GUYS NEED SOME AFFECTION

LET ME JUST-

GHHHHHH-/pos

[suave-hogan]

First drawing of the New Year is always the first Havve of the New Year

[op3ra]

rusty roundup (pls pls pls click for quality)

design credits, left to right:

@honey-dont / @commander-spaceboy /@tabooiart / me! / @animatronathon / @nauticaltrainofthe80s / @green-planets

two more rusties + a starlight rusty under the cut! check them out!

design credits, left to right:

@captainmvf / @savs-avvy / me!

[thecheesecracker]

The wind in summertime 🎋

[syn0vial]

a messy sketch as i practice drawing this guy a lil' faster

this is the teenage version in my mind and thus i don't have to render any of the adult version's battle damage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[rhonuscorner]

Have a WIP to show that I'm not actually dead when it comes to drawing DCA stuff. Also, new AU yaaaaay! No I haven't forgotten about my circus theater AU, but these two suddenly decided they have a right to take up space in my brain and wanted a story to go with it, so that's a thing now. I can't wait to actually show off their designs, so happy with how they came out.

I'm calling this AU the Eclipse Protocol and I'm really excited about it 👀 I say that while I still haven't uploaded the first chapter of Cirque des Célestes, which is still sitting unfinished at 14k+ words which is way too big and I have yet to figure out how I'm gonna tackle that and make that story manageable. I don't have the brain power for that right now, so I'm giving the new AU priority for the moment.

I also have a love/hate relationship with drawing robo hands/joints/parts aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. It's fun but it hurts my brain.

[seaweedraindraws]

Mission Objective: Capture or destroy Rusty Rose and take down the rest of the crew. Mission?: Failed?

[the-cosmic-yeet]

cooking mushrooms feels weird now that i know more about fungi. i have this being of decay (personsonable & miaislying, 2018) chopped up into thin slices on my nonstick frying pan, and im sauteéing this thing, i guess. these organisms for the several blessed years of childhood i understood to be plants (because they dont move and they're in the produce section of grocery stores, duh) before i was hit by the harsh realities of the classifications of life in middle school. as years progressed i learned that on the cellular level they're a lot more similar to animal cells than they are to plants, but the button mushrooms sizzling and shrinking away on my pan don't bleed, do they. i think it would be pretty fucking metal if they did (i am aware of the strawberries and cream fungus but apparently it "tastes so bitter as to be inedible" (Fearnley, 2016) and that makes me want to scream and cry). at some point our ancestors diverged and here we are today still interacting in ways that are coded into our very beings. i consume fungi and i suppose in the end they will consume me too. and it's not that i feel guilt for eating a fellow organism. i still eat meat, and i definitely eat plants, so i have no qualms about eating these non-animal-non-plant weirdos. and yeah, the fact that fungi are, in fact, a separate kingdom from both me and the garlic i sauteed it with shouldn't be so groundbreaking of revelations but i can't control my emotions to things, okay, that's not the point. but here in my parents' kitchen the contents of my pan have turned to a passionless shade of brown and i just think about how weird fungi are (and they're everywhere oh my god) and that i should probably finish reading that fungi book by sheldrake but it's time for me to dump these bastards on a bowl of rice and go yummy yum yum

-

References

Fearnley, K. (2016, July 5). Weird & Wonderful Creatures: Bleeding Tooth Fungus. AAAS; American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://www.aaas.org/news/weird-wonderful-creatures-bleeding-tooth-fungus

personsonable & miaislying. (2018, June 16). me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit. Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/miaislying/174932522589/forest-of-stars-and-wind-miaislying?source=share

[localcatcatcatcat]

Changed my URL (formerly indistinctlyaverage) and PFP (a scribble I did in 5 seconds to not look like a bot) last night and totally forgot to like. post about it. I did some art of my fursona and now I have a sightly better URL and a PFP of my own art, which came out pretty good imo.

Absolutely crushed in quality but I can be proud of it nonetheless. I dedicate this turn into having an actual face and identity to being trans and also getting ADHD meds.

[brettanomycroft]

I've had exactly 2 beers and now my brain is like "Why not an Aardvarkavist?" Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk

[ruvviks]

– WIP CHOICE AWARDS.

TAGGED BY: @adelaidedrubman, thank you so much!! TAGGING: @reaperkiller, @aartyom, @swordcoasts, @faarkas, @morvaris, @shellibisshe, @strafethesesinners, @katsigian, @dickytwister, @devilbrakers, @aragorngf, @baldursgate2 and YOU! RULES: make a 24-hour poll with (the names of) your wips, let it run, then write one sentence for every vote the winner received!

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

Thinking a lot again about actually making a proper roleplay group within the GW2 community... I've been sitting on a lot of things regarding the Tideturners as a fully functional Mists-based group, but most of what holds me back is just a lack of confidence.

There's definitely a niche there that needs filling though, and it doesn't seem like anybody else is really doing anything with it.

[guinevereslancelot]

so proud of myself for putting a big part of my last paycheck in my savings like an adult but now im gonna spend all my savings like an idiot 😵‍💫