#it makes me feel so hopeless.

[swagging-back-to]

im just praying trump doesnt win because if he does our country is going to actually crumble. I'm genuinely terrified of another trump presidency. what biden is doing with israel is horrible but trump would do so much worse.

[lotus-pear]

hngghh domestic......

[lazylittledragon]

do any other artists feel like. yeah you're a 'good artist' because you draw things that look nice, but like. TECHNICALLY? you're really not great

i really hate that i can recognise that yes, my art is good, but is it VARIED? is it dynamic?? is my anatomy good? is it full of texture and colour theory? do i know how to do This? can i do That? no, not really. and that's quite painful actually

[ifisawyoueverydayforeverwill]

Y'ALL NEED TO SEE THIS PANEL

[fumifooms]

NOO NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND LAIOS’ SUCCUBUS AKA MOST ALLURING FORM IS MARCILLE SMILING

[thyhauntedmansion]

“Why am I the only one who remembers?”

…

[aurosoulart]

one of the things I wasn't prepared for as a trans person in a big industry was the absolutely OVERWHELMING emotions around being accepted for who I am. ;__; some highlights from the past couple months:

a prominent speaker at a UK media company showing my work to his son, casually saying: "Do you like this picture? Ewan drew it." I've never spoken to this man, but he respects me enough to not only show my work to his child - but to future students as well. these kids are going to grow up knowing the work of a publicly trans artist, and with any luck it will be normal to them.

Tilt Five publicly replying to my TDOV post with THIS, from their official corporate account.

Tilt Five also featuring me in a blog post on their website, and using they/them pronouns!!!!

and even more Tilt Five positivity: being INVITED TO DEMO IN-PERSON AT GDC FOR HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE. I'm in this picture but you can barely see me because of the crowd. again, I'm visibly trans here - long hair, stubble, voice deepened by testosterone... and it was a non-issue.

and lastly: not only being able to publicly fundraise for LGBTQ+ causes like the Club Q healing fund without fear, but actually receiving support & donations from my employer while I do so. technically, I get PAID to fundraise as long as I use Figmin XR, like with Cover The World With Flowers!

and that's just a handful of examples!!! there was also the whole getting accepted into AR House thing (where I'm one of MULTIPLE trans people in the community), and then PERFORMING LIVE at the Marriott HQ, and then my art making it onto Adam Savage's youtube channel???!?!

I keep saying this, but I legitimately don't have words for the level of gratitude I feel. I've had other trans folks reach out and say that my visibility gives them courage, which makes me want to fight even harder to show that trans joy is REAL and POSSIBLE and that there is still so much love, despite everything.

I don't want to take for granted that it is still very much radical to just exist publicly as a trans person - and even more radical to exist publicly as a HAPPY trans person. I would be lying if I said I wasn't scared being in this position, but at least I know I'm not alone. there are still so many good people fighting for us.

[mcrizzystardust]

[gecemi09]

Hey. Just sat down and realized that Endeavor spent 23 terrorizing his family. Even if you say he was a good person for a good while (which, I mean. He still bought his wife so.) then at least 15 years based on Shouto's age.

15 years spent abusing and terrorizing and hurting and breaking his family and. Nothing. No consequence. He got everything he wanted, being Number 1. He's still a good person in the eyes of everyone. His family are still around him. He is still popular and liked and rich and. The only hitch there is his own son (whom he caused the death of). But that son is considered 'insane' by everyone so no one even deigns to actually listen to him so what's the point? Endeavor got everything he wanted.

Just thinking about it.. it doesn't make me angry per se, but just empty I guess. 15 years. And he just got off scot free.

23 years or 15, does it really matter?

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

What if what if I what if if I what if if I could what if I went crazy what then what then what then

I know Sonic does manage to turn into Super Sonic just in time to save everyone after that idw panel, but at the time of reading all I could think was how Classic Sonic had arrived in the nick of time to save him before in Forces

But that this time there is no Sonic to show up out of nowhere to defend him or comfort him🥲😭

[metukika]

ill say it before and ill say it again. hc that teru doesnt like serizawa at all.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[uncanny-tranny]

I think as we grow up, we have to be really conscious of romanticizing the world we grew up in in order to scorn how the next generations are growing up.

Nostalgia isn't inherently bad, but especially in political spaces, be very wary of this idea that there is an Ideal Past we must Harken Back To.

It sucks to feel left behind, but such is the human condition. It isn't bad to feel nostalgic, but that doesn't mean that these new generations are inherently "lost" and "need to be saved (by you)", and I think that is very important to remember and try to be conscious of.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

The most interesting thread to me in Olivia Rodrigo's writing really is how she keeps saying she got what she wanted! She created the life she wanted! And it wasn't good!!!

[queenlucythevaliant]

Northern Lights

.

I heard a voice that cried, “Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead!” 

.

Who knows what to call the lonely exhilaration of gazing out into a bright Northern sky? Who can name it? 

Jill could.

It was the same feeling that came to her at the teetering edge of a cliff at the end of the world. The same feeling as when she said her goodbyes to Puddleglum and Scrubb before they freed the prince. It was the same feeling that engulfed her now, sitting in the professor’s library with a volume of poetry before her. 

.

The wild northern wastes were well named: utterly wild, perfectly desolate, and terribly Northern. 

It was lonely there and often cold, but the sky was an endless whorl of gales and gray clouds. The stones were indigo under the pale winter sunlight, and at sunset they glowed a soft gold, as though lit from within. The gorges and moors lay before her, and Jill loved them for their vastness and their distance. Little grew in that country, but that which did was full of vigor. The grass was short and coarse. Every tree was victorious. 

On a still, deep breathing winter night, Jill lay on her back beneath a covering sky. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it until her tears began to blind her. Yet even then, she still couldn’t look away.

She felt bigger here in the wastes, like the landscape. Stronger, wider. The further she walked, the more she felt herself stretch out. One of these days, maybe, she would catch hold of herself at the edge and tug, and Jill Pole would open up clear as the Northern sky. 

.

And through the misty air passed the mournful cry of sunward sailing cranes.

.

The thing that surprised Jill most about the battle with the serpent was this: there wasn’t any yelling. Always, it seemed, whenever she read stories about people fighting with swords, the combatants would let loose some guttural yell before their blows fell. They would scream and writhe in pain as they died. They would shout instructions to their fellows, “Look out!” or “Hit him there!” But the whole affair with the serpent passed with very little noise. 

The poison-green coil constricted around the prince; he raised his arms and got clear, struck the serpent hard, and then Scrubb and Puddleglum dispatched the creature with heavy, hacking blows. The monster died writhing, but not screaming. And then it was over. 

The thing that surprised Jill most about the moments before battle was, of course, the noise. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. She couldn’t stop listening to her own breathing. Every footstep rang out like a gong, and any words exchanged rang with a kind of finality that made them sound louder than anything. 

“You are of high courage,” Rilian told her when it was over. 

Yet the thing in Jill’s chest just then didn’t feel like courage. It was a deep breath, a plunge, and a release. It was loud and quiet all at once, till she was standing, blinking in the night air as snowballs whizzed round her, and maybe that was something like courage after all. 

.

And now, there was a stirring in her chest as she reread the words on the page. Sing no more / O ye bards of the North / Of Vikings and of Jarls! / Of the days of the Eld / preserve the freedom only / nor the deeds of blood! 

She thought of grief. Of freedom. 

The lonely ache in her belly grew stronger. She felt herself uplifted into the huge regions of sky that were just beyond those cliffs, weightless as the breath beneath her buoyed her up, further, further…

.

When she saw Caspian up close, Jill thought that he looked like the sort of person who was meant to live in a castle. A silly thought, perhaps, since she knew he was a king– only she wasn’t thinking of Cair Paravel. No, Jill was picturing the ruins of an old British castle she’d visited once on holiday. She still remembered how the stonework had loomed over her, all towering arches and crumbling walls. That was where Caspian seemed to belong. He had an air of ancient tragedy about him. 

When Rilian disappeared, all things had wept but one. The serpent coiled beneath the earth and flicked its forked tongue, spewing poison. 

Now, the king half rose to bless his son. He whispered a few words as he caressed Rilian’s cheek, words meant only for those beloved ears. Jill saw Caspian’s lips move and wondered what a man like that could possibly say, when time ran so short. 

.

They laid him in his ship, with horse and harness, as on a funeral pyre. Odin placed a ring upon his finger, and whispered in his ear.

.

Jill furtively took Myths of the Northmen and held it up to the professor with a question in her eyes. She was still shy around him and Miss Plummer, though she wished she wasn’t. 

“Would you like to take that with you?”

“...Please.”

.

It takes a certain kind of person to be exhilarated by the heights. You’ve got to love vastness more than you fear falling. 

.

They walked to the train station with an autumn wind blowing hard, and though Jill couldn’t fathom why, she turned and saw Lucy grinning, fierce and joyful– grinning and reaching a hand out towards her friend.

Jill reached back and grabbed it. “What will you do, once we’re back in Narnia?” she asked. 

The wind blew harder. The feeling of anticipation grew and grew, until it felt so big that she couldn’t dream of containing it. And there was Lucy, holding Jill’s hand and laughing like it was easy.

.

Preserve the freedom only, not the deeds of blood!

.

The second time Jill went to Narnia, she found herself not at its edge, but at its end. 

The thing about the Norse apocalypse is: it feels believable. It doesn’t reach beyond earth’s horizon to pull down hope beyond hope. It’s only the kind of courage that hopeless humans have: you are going to die, so you might as well die bravely. 

They found the last king of Narnia bound to a tree. His eyes were faintly red from crying, and his wrists and ankles red from the coarseness of his fetters. 

In the Norse myths, Loki broke free of his fetters at the end of the world. He escaped to the helm of a ship made from the fingernails of the dead.

The last king of Narnia fell forward onto the ground when Eustace cut his bonds. Jill crouched down beside him and watched as he rubbed feeling back into his legs. He wasn’t so much older than her, she thought. Jill was sixteen years old; the last king of Narnia could not be older than twenty-two. 

In the myths, the gods were ancient, hewn from the bodies of giants old as the earth. 

Jill put out a hand and helped the last king of Narnia to his feet. Not for the last time, she shivered. Something deep inside her (deeper than her chest, than her heart, than the marrow of her bones, deep as her soul, deeper) was singing an elegy and she didn’t know why, or how, or where it had come from. The king clutching her hand, who could have been her older brother, would have no heir.

Yet when he asked, “Will you come with me?” Jill could only smile. 

“Of course,” she said. “It’s you we’ve come to help.”

.

And the voice forever cried, "Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead!"

.

“This really is Narnia at last,” murmured Jill. The springtime wood had little in common with the wintry lands she had traveled the last time she was here– but it awakened the same feelings of Northernness in her chest. 

Their party may as well have been the only people in the world, for how isolated their little wooden path seemed. Yet it wasn’t lonely, really, cocooned in all that green with the wind in the leaves and the primroses nodding and blue of the sky peeking through above. 

Jewel told stories about what ordinary life was like when there was peace here. As he spoke, Jill could almost hear the trees' voices speaking out of the living past, whispering, stay, stay. She was caught up to a great height, looking down across a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance. 

“Oh Jewel–” Jill said with a dreamy sigh, “wouldn’t it be lovely if Narnia just went on and on– like what you say it has been?”

She needn’t be a queen, as Susan and Lucy had been, but Jill would’ve liked to stay. She would've liked it all to stay, if it could. She might have been a woodmaid in a place like this: with the turn of the seasons, the swaying trees, swords into plowshares. Oh, if only she could stay!

Ahead, the last king of Narnia was softly singing a marching song. Jill tilted her head back and let warm shafts of sun caress her face. 

.

I saw the pallid corpse of the dead sun borne through the Northern sky.

.

“So,” said the last king of Narnia, “Narnia is no more.”

He tried to send them back. Jill shook her head. It was very loud and very quiet. “No, no, no, we won’t. I don’t care what you say. We’re going to stick by you whatever happens, aren’t we Eustace?”

They couldn’t go back anyway. Neither would they flee, not south across the mountains nor North into the great wide wastes. No, they would stay. They slept in a holly grove on the edge of ruin, waiting for the bonfires to light.

Jill slept fitfully, but in between she dreamed. She was high up in the air, buffeted by clouds and pierced by shafts of silver sunlight. 

.

They all died, in the myths. Jill knew that. It seemed beautiful and brave when she read it in her book, tucked away safe in the Professor’s library. It was terrifying now– and yet it was beautiful and brave still.

The dogs came bounding up, every one of them, running up to the king and his men with their tails wagging. One of them leapt at Jill and licked her face, tongue roughly lapping up the sweat and tears that had dried on her cheeks. 

“Show us how to help, show us how, how, how!” the dogs were barking, almost ebullient in their enthusiasm. Jill bit back a sob. How lovely, she thought. How terribly beautiful. How dreadfully brave. 

.

So perish the old Gods!

.

The white rock gleamed like a moon in the darkness when Jill finally reached it. She ran back to it alone, her hands shaking, while her friends stayed forward with their gleaming swords and Jewel’s indigo horn.

The while rock gleamed like the moon. Jill’s first shot flew wide and landed in the soft grass. But she had another arrow on her string the next instant. It was speed that mattered, not aim. Speed, and turning aside when she cried, so as not to drip tears on her bowstring.

The white rock gleamed. In the myths, a wolf devoured the moon. Peter’s wolf, slain many thousand years ago in this world, opened his jaw wide and darkness fell over everything.

Her next arrow found its mark. After that, she lost track. She pulled, and she prayed that her hands kept still another minute. 

The unique thing–maybe the appealing thing–about the Norse myths, was that they told men to serve gods who were admittedly fighting with their backs to the wall and would certainly be defeated in the end. Jill let loose another arrow, felt the white rock at her back, and she knew that the clawing fear–beauty–bravery deep in her gut was the same feeling that she felt on the heights. The same feeling, but a different face. You’ve got to love vastness more than you fear falling. 

.

“I feel in my bones,” said Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning. I can think of a hundred deaths that I would rather have died.”

“It is indeed a grim door,” said Tirian. “It is more like a mouth.” 

“Oh, can’t we do anything to stop it,” said Jill. Better to be dashed to the ground than it was to be devoured. 

“Nay, fair friend,” said Jewel. “It may be for us the door to Aslan’s country and we sup at his table tonight.”

A hand tangled itself in her hair and started to pull. Jill braced herself hard, for a moment, until her strength gave out. She was standing on the edge of a high, Northern cliff. She took another step, and fell.

.

Perhaps when the moment comes, our bite will prove better than our howls. If not, we shall have to confess that two millennia of Christianity have not yet brought us to the level of the Stoics and Vikings. For the worst (according to the flesh) that a Christian need face is to die in Christ and rise in Christ; some were content to die, and not to rise, with Father Odin.

.

The world inside the stable was beautiful. It made Jill’s chest ache in all the loveliest ways. 

.

Build it again, O ye bards, fairer than before!

[wizardsix]

the greeks are claiming gale as one of their own . have you Seen him?? his last name?? that man is greek im being so serious