#idk maybe this has been a thing forever but

[i-may-be-an-emu]

the other day I watched Wine Under The Bridge again and had some. Thoughts.

Mainly about Troll-Father and Troll-Son’s dynamic and how the whole play can be interpreted as a metaphor for queerness

anyway uh here’s my long, unorganised observations and thoughts :)

troll son seems nervous to talk to his father and be around him (poor boy is so scared because he’s a “closeted” non-goat eater/wine drinker/maker)

troll father implies that he thinks “little floppy trolls with the colourful hair” aren’t “true trolls” (HMMMM THAT SOUNDS FAMILIAR)

“Do you want to be big like troll-father?? or do you want to be little and floppy forever.” - guilt tripping him, trying to make his son another version of himself.

Troll son seems to imply that he is little and floppy and he initiates the conversation about not eating goats, he wants to talk to troll father about it even though he knows he won’t understand deep down. (HE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT BUT HIS FATHER DOESNT GET IT)

“Your floppy hair is too colourful my boy” - troll father disapproves of floppy colourful trolls. He doesn’t seem mad just like he wants to change his son to be like him. He seems to think that being floppy and colourful = weakness (because his son won’t dare speak of his mother’s death) (HMM THINKING THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE FLAMBOYANT(?) ARE WEAK HMMM OK OK)

“I want you to be big and tough like me”

Not being supportive of his wine idea and dissaproving

Calling him and seeing him as “goat son”

Troll father decides to exile him just for not eating a goat and wanting to try other foods and drinks

Troll father says “you have shamed me this day” he feels ashamed of his son (LIKE COME ON)

troll father gets upset with troll brother for being with a non-troll

he has a strong reaction to troll brother not confirming to seemingly conventional troll standards

Gets angry when troll brother says he eats food that’s not goat

But after learning about comfort zones seems to understand a bit more (HES LEARNINGGG)

“I chose to cut HIM out before he could cut ME out! Troll father feel safe inside!” Like just this quote, like- idk how to explain it but COME. ON.

“I maybe think there other way” (troll son challenging his fathers beliefs and saying there’s other ways. what if I just cry.)

troll son saying he’s been exiled hurts at first but then he becomes proud of it and keeps saying it (Oh gee being ashamed and hurt about something about yourself that people don’t approve of but then learning to be proud of it instead woah that sounds KINDA. FAMILIAR.)

troll father overhears him being proud and decides to not forgive him (even though there’s nothing to forgive) almost as though he was hoping to just forget about it all and ignore it, then he heard his son embracing it and knew that wouldn’t happen.

when troll father tastes the wine he says he tastes “being out of comfort zone” and accepts his son. Like. Idk. It makes me feel things.

troll father says he’s proud of troll son and that he’s “more troll than any of us” (LITERALLY WHAT IF I CRY. LIKE.)

Calls troll son beautiful when his colourful hair becomes apparent, learning to not only accept but to also love his son even though he’s different.

Also don’t even get me started on how the plot basically mirrors HTTYD. It’s so similar.

[signanothername]

Do you have any tips on how to study an artist style because I haven't been able to find a video on YouTube to help me☹️💔

Oof yeah Youtube usually just has the “how to find your artstyle” vids (which are all bullshit tbh but I digress)

Ok tbh I barely do art studies, so I would try and explain how I would do an artstyle study myself and hope that helps dhhxhxhx

The thing about an artstyle, is that it’s a bit unique to each person, and not just in terms of one single thing, but everything from how they do their lineart, to coloring, shading, etc

Not only that, but an artstyle changes and grows with the person as they learn more and more about their preferences, no artstyle stays the same forever

Not only that, but depending on the artist’s artstyle, it could be really easy to study cause the artist is consistent with their art, or really difficult cause the artist has no set artstyle and they change constantly

That’s why I’d say the best way to approach it is to study it bit by bit, and not to overwhelm yourself trying to take in how an artist does something all at once during practice

But the biggest thing that I’d say would make you understand another artist’s artstyle is observation

Take multiple artworks from the artist you wanna study and just take them in, observe everything about them

Do they use lineart or are they lineless, if they use lineart are their linestrokes thick or thin, is their lineart clean or is it messy, if it’s messy, how messy? Is the lineart angular or round generally? Or maybe they use both angular and round edges?

Are their lines curved or very straight? Does their line weight change in the same linestroke or does it have the same line weight throughout? Do they tend to do their lines in one single clean stroke, or do they tend to re-emphasize their lines by 2 or 3 more strokes in the same place?

What kinda brush do they seem to use? Is it a very textured brush or is it a very clean inky brush?

How do they color? Do they use bright and saturated colors or do they go for muted and dark colors? Maybe something in between? How do they shade? Do they use cell shading with hard edges, or do they use soft shading, do they blend it in or keep the edges of their colors bold and sharp? Maybe both?

How do they shape certain things? Maybe their artstyle relies heavily on rectangular shapes, maybe their artstyle shapes certain things to be round and others as cubic in the same artwork

And so on

Then after observing as many artworks by eye as you can, go for actual practice

Take a shot at trying to replicate their artstyle, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just as close as you can

Again, try it to take it one step at a time, at first try to focus on the lineart for example and nothing else, just try replicating that, just so you won’t overwhelm yourself with information and end up thinking it’s way harder than it truly is

Hell maybe you aren’t really interested to understand their lineart, maybe you like their coloring, and so just focus on how they color and try coloring the same way they do with your own art

Sometimes you get really stuck with something, or you try and replicate something and you genuinely couldn’t at all, in that case, I would say, if possible, try contacting the artist you’re trying to study the artstyle of, many artists would be happy to help where they can and give you a direct response and instructions to how they do a certain thing in their artstyle (I definitely would)

So, with all that out of the way, Imma give you an example, it’ll be a very quick example without much depth, but just to give you the general idea to use as a basis

(I’ll be using my own artstyle as an example cause idk if other artists would be comfortable with me using their art without permission dggdgdggd)

Again, this is just a very quick example, you can actually take one artwork and study it to every little detail, then work your way up to multiple artworks at a time

Uuuh that’s all I can honestly give, hope it helps, good luck with your artstyle study <3333333

[thealogie]

Gotta preface it with ‘I’m not from the US, so obviously don’t understand lots about how election results affect everyday life of people living there’. Also, if I suddenly, still being myself, became a US citizen with a right to vote, I can’t imagine voting for Trump. Saying all that, I don’t think labelling half of the country, tens of millions of people, genuinely evil is very productive or even mentally honest.

I am from the part of the world, which suffered from both republican and democrat US administrations, and lately most of the geopolitical games resulting in tons of blood, have been played, obviously, by democrats. I have to say that I find their utter hypocrisy deeply disgusting. At least your republicans, how I see it, don’t even mask being monsters, they say it like it is. When two negotiating sides state their goals outright, it is possible to come to an agreement at least marginally better than when one side is always being two(3,4,5)-faced, making a point to wrap their actual goals (if they even know them) in pretty words about democracy while double-crossing their negotiation partner even before the ink has dried.

I know that you’re from Iran and are aware of how deeply destructive US foreign policies can be, increasingly so since the start of this century. With one caveat that Trump seems to be especially hostile to Iran, and a democrat would’ve been marginally better when it comes to the US policy regarding Iran. It’s not the same for all parts of the world though, so we might not all be unbiased observers here.

I know that foreign policy doesn’t decide US elections, I only wrote this longwinded nonsense to say that maybe there are solid reasons for half of the US to prefer Trump and reject the democrats, like for the rest of the world there are reasons for either. Economic, political, whatever. Maybe liberals should look into these reasons before dismissing millions of people as genuinely evil, like Hillary did in her time. Idk about you, but when she called half of the country ‘deplorables’ or whatever, no one I know and no one I read (not from US) felt sympathetic. It just sounded incredibly entitled and delusional, and plain dumb. And it looks like since Hillary democrats haven’t learned or even attempted to learn anything, it’s still ‘half of our nation is broken and evil and we can’t do anything about it’. But it’s not how people work, in my opinion. Yes, they might not care about minorities first, they might care about themselves first, but doesn’t it mean that politicians should identify their problems and offer solutions? Isn’t it how it works? Dehumanazing Trump supporters will only radicalize them more, isn’t it what in fact happened, and how it always works with people in general?

Idk about life inside the US, like I said, but how I see it, the only ones to blame here are democrats and liberals in general. If people in the world, and I’m sure inside the US, will see that they finally start addressing the problems instead of hiding behind empty rhetoric, if the level of hypocrisy and delusional entitlement decreases at least to some degree, the support for right-wing populists will also decrease, I’m sure of it. Because most people are not ‘genuinely evil’, but they become embittered and cruel when their concerns are continuously dismissed, things start to fester resulting in ugly political outcomes. I mean, I know you know all this, sorry for being so boring and longwinded. It’s just that I usually like your takes (I came for MASH and stayed for the neighbors as well), including political ones, but here I got a bit of a whiplash, sorry.

I appreciate this thoughtful note. You don’t have to like my takes for us to be on friendly terms. And to be clear I do forever and always blame democrats and liberals for not energizing the people who agree with them.

But as you say you don’t live here and so there’s no way for me to convey to you without asking you to spend months reading right wing political accounts here and talking to people here that a sizable number of the people who support this man are genuinely bad people and want me and people like me out of this country.

This comes from hundreds of personal encounters over the past 8 years and spending the past three months reading dozens and dozens of pieces of reporting that are like “I went to talk to voters in a small town, here’s what they had to say.” And the things you hear are: purge this country of immigrants, make America a dominating force in the world again, get us back to traditional values where women are popping out babies…oh yeah and also the economy would be better under him.

Like idk what you want me to call sexist, homophobic, white supremacists but I think they are evil. And I think it used to be that the Republican Party was more polite about all of these beliefs so I could understand people being disaffected and voting for them for reasons other than hating other humans but now we’re just saying the quiet part out loud and there’s no plausible deniability

[youruinedmylifebynotbeingreal]

Shut UP he has “left” and “right” written on the bottom of his shoes

[imgonnagetyoubacktv]

it's not sinking in that today might be the last day in my house and town for many months to come

[forestgreenlesbian]

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[girlpetrarca]

gang I'm not sure I have the courage to come out to my boxing coach

[laurmaus]

another one +uncolored ver (can u tell i skipped school today

[james-spooky]

this is a test

[sonknuxadow]

going to start this post with the fact that im not trying to be a hater right now im just genuinely confused . anyway. the thing about sonic and shadow is that i dont think its a bad ship or that its entirely baseless or that their relationship is meaningless or anything like that. my feelings on so/nadow are complicated but i do like it to a degree . but i also feel like people are exaggerating how much is there in terms of canon backing for the ship (at least in the franchise overall if we're talking sonic prime specifically that makes more sense but prime is also like the spiders georg of so/nadow). like they have their moments but i dont think its as frequent a thing as people act like it is (again at least not in the games/comics) . like theyre just not as close or as obviously in love in the actual source material as some people seem to think they are ..??? some of the stuff i see being passed around as so/nadow moments is just them existing in the same frame .. ??? im not even saying its wrong to ship them or make them be in love in the headcanon sonic universe that exists in your head or whatever i just think that saying its basically canon is a huge stretch and idk what people are seeing between them that im not . sorry please dont get madat me. scampers away like a frightened little animal

[termagax]

re: "good girl" i think they say it once randomly as a joke and its just one of those things that gets him wayyy more than they expected it would. so now its their secret weapon and they use it very sparingly and every single time he gets super embarrassed about it but it works ill tell you what.

[jonsnowunemploymentera]

There are a lot of theories out there about the true identity of the last hero, but I think the one that makes the most thematic sense is that he was a member of the original Night’s Watch. See the last hero’s identity is shrouded in mystery but his deeds live on forever and he is attributed with having led to the defeat of the Others. The legends show that his actions are famous, but the man himself is forgotten.

This seems quite close to what being a member of the Night’s Watch entails. The Watch’s vows dictate that members, who are the sword in the darkness and the fire that burns against the cold thus directly marking them in opposition to winter and the Others, shall hold no lands, wear no crowns, and win no glory. They are known to the rest of the kingdoms as those who guard the realms of men, but their identities and individual triumphs are largely unimportant.

This is a shared parallel between the members of the Night’s Watch and the last hero. We don’t know anything about his name, house, or background. Even the title ‘the last hero’ is merely an identifier - note that it’s in lower case. So it would make sense that the last hero’s identity is to remain anonymous if that was the entire point of it all; he was a man of the Night’s Watch and thus, indirectly, swore a vow of anonymity. And better yet, we don’t even know who his twelve companions were. We know only that they rode out with him and died in the process. However we do know that in the north, there are two figures who are directly identified as having been responsible for the ending of the long night: the last hero (as per folk tales narrated by Old Nan) and the Night’s Watch (see the Night that Ended). It could be that the legend of the last hero and his twelve companions is a glimpse of the NW’s last stand.

I also think it’s interesting that we have various last hero parallels in the text who are members of the Night’s Watch. We first have Waymar Royce who seems very last hero-y in the AGOT prologue. Then we have Jon Snow who is implicitly identified by the narrative as a last hero figure. And it gets even more interesting when we consider that Jon has at many times stated that as a member of the night’s watch, he is to remain a shadow among all shadows. His greatest deeds are to go unnoticed and his name is not to be spoken in the halls of men. His deeds could live on, but his name won’t; even more interesting when we consider that Jon, due to his bastardy, technically doesn’t actually have a name to begin with. And what makes Jon’s connection to the last hero so poignant is that while the last hero’s name has been lost to history, Jon has a whole thing about being a lost and forgotten prince/king.

But there’s a rather unexpected last hero parallel in Sam Tarly, also a member of the Night’s Watch. Sam is not magically special, nor is he marked as someone with a particularly important bloodline or destiny. However, he is the first person in thousands of years to slay an Other. And he did that using a shard of dragonglass, which provides an interesting callback to the last hero’s dragonsteel blade. There’s also the parallel of both heroes being the last men standing after an Other attack. But interestingly enough, there’s a slight deviation in that though we still do not know who the last hero was, we do know of Sam the Slayer.

So it’s entirely possible that the last hero was one of the members of the original NW. And this makes for a rather interesting foil in another character who is explicitly stated as having a relationship with the Others - the Night’s King. It’s interesting if both figures have some background with the NW due to the dichotomy that arises. The last hero kept his vows and wore no crown and got no glory, but the Night’s King very directly broke his. The last hero protected the realms of men, while the Night’s King embarked of a path of destruction. And he was, quite famously, a member of the Night’s Watch (and is even identified as having been the 13th lord commander). But it’s interesting that while we don’t really know of the Night’s King’s true identity, we are actually given multiple clues by the narrative. We’re even told that he may have been a Brandon Stark - thereby having a name which the last hero doesn’t. But even then, just as it was with the last hero, the Night’s King has deeds which live on forever even though his name (very deliberately) has not.

[jackklinemybeloved]

went into this episode excited to see ylfa and the beast interact and crossing my fingers for a good elody and gerard union and came out with an existential crisis about these young nihilistic women running themselves into the ground and destroying everything because they don’t know what else to do

[suddenlymicah]

has anyone considered henry possessing glamrock freddy or am i being a little silly right now

[delightful-69]

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[opens-up-4-nobody]

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