#minxy

[leatherbelt1295]

Your Daily Smile #3156

Minxy

[godofthemonth]

God of the Month of July 2024: Cleavage

Sometimes, cleavage can make it nearly impossible to not fall in love at first sight.

[dreamofysl]

Vogue Arabia 6th Anniversary issue in celebration of Arab designers

[min-xie]

neuviyuri

[ese1anime]

Bath time for both Funnybunny and Showtime 🛁

This belongs to @the-amazing-digital-kingdom-au

[minxi-mink]

Merry Christmas to everyone! Here’s my gift for @be3zbvb for this years @codesecretsanta ! I’m honestly happy with how this turned and I’m really glad to see Willodd in people’s wishlist hehe

I’ve done two other Willodd pieces for this annual event and I’m glad to add in another ! I hope you like the little comic, that’s technically a bonus as I was only planning on drawing a bridal style piece at first. Sadly the legs weren’t coming out how I wanted them to so I had to crop my original piece.

ALSO PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR DRAWING WILLIAM USING SUPERSMOKE IN HIS OG FIT, my plan was to design new outfits for them both as a way to show it takes place after season 4 but I just couldn’t get the idea I wanted so I opted for these designs instead D:

[utilitycaster]

I don't know if you are doing controversial opinions still, but I've needed to get this one off my chest for a while. I think Dani is an excellent lore keeper for CR, but her intense involvement in CR twitter actively hinders some 4SD conversations, especially around relationships and shipping.

I am (I am still about half an hour out from my home train stop) and. yes but I would not put this entirely on her. Like, off the top of my head, the idea of "Did she know?" being someone other than Liliana or making a big deal of Relvin not specifically saying "I love you" is, and I say this as someone who not only watched the entirety of the original Gossip Girl but read the TV Without Pity summaries religiously and who is under no illusion that Critical Role is highbrow, Gossip Girl Level analysis, and those should not have made it to 4SD.

However, I also have felt that in general, even with the cast cutting down DRAMATICALLY on their responsiveness on Twitter (which is a good thing to be clear) CR needs much, much stronger vetting of their questions. Almost every panel has some question that boils down to "if the circumstances were wildly different would my ship have happened"; there was that one person that basically asked Liam to reveal his mental health diagnoses; I find that a lot of the fireside chats fail to separate out "things only this person can answer" and "questions you could probably find on a corgi/DMing/Burning Man subreddit in five seconds". And I am fairly confident that is a lot of stuff well outside Dani's purview. Obviously 4SD would benefit by treating Black Heart Purple Heart Twitter as the bucket of brain-melting solvent fumes it is, but there's a larger conversation to be had of like, how does one exist as a crew member and a fan of the show with one's own preferences while also serving the entire fandom, not just the ones who don't know how to act and therefore cross the most boundaries.

[tiny-prom]

Being an artist means I can do whatever I want forever

[bibones]

so far this book has been like 45% bones flirting with spock. he's feigning disappointed that spock can't hulk open the sealed doors on a romulan space station, hip and head cocked, trying not to smile. ffs

[leatherbelt1295]

Your Daily Smile #2841

Minxy

She's the absolutely sweetest little kitty ever. 🥺

[cherubgorearchived]

a preview i guess of smt i want to do lol

[annemarieyeretzian]

MINXIE MY BELOVED

[min-xie]

hold still

[flowerakatsuka]

i've been listening to the little shop of horrors soundtrack while working on af stuff so uh. i had to draw kuroba and kara ii as a lil break doodle. :)

[minxi-mink]

Decided I wanted to redesign the Mystery Inc gang so why not start with the easiest to redesign? Velma! Well easy in the sense she tends to hardly change. Nevertheless hoping to do the rest of the gang eventually! Who would you want to see next?

For my made up world for this reboot series, I imagine Velma is still that super intelligent brainiac she tends to be but I’d also imagine she’s sassy and witty (like the mystery incorporated reboot). I also imagine before joining the gang she is best friends with Marcie (from the Mystery Incorporated series again) and the two were inseparable until Velma went off to solve mysteries. Also for this reboot series idea I imagine they all probably attend college (Coolsville University I suppose?) so the gang would be somewhere between their 18s-early 20s!

[utilitycaster]

Do you think this new option could lead to a break up in the party and some of the characters leaving the group? Because I can't see everyone agreeing that this is the best solution, but I also think Ashton is stubborn enough to refuse to consider anything else

This is going to be a very long answer for what is a pretty short question that could be answered in one sentence, and here's why.

I've gotten a lot of questions in the past week or so that are specifically asking me what I think the future will be - for campaign 3, and for Critical Role generally. And I've gotten a little frustrated by them, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of me because I love having opinions, but the fact is, I don't know and I don't even have strong opinions. So I dug into that, and why people might be asking these things more than usual, and I really think it's because the narrative of this campaign is so constantly under threat of derailment or going in the same old circles that pretty much anyone in the fandom with any sense of narrative structure, and what makes for a well-crafted story is like "so...what's happening." Which is translating as coming to me, a person who is very good at sounding confident and knowledgeable.

I do not fucking know. I share this frustration, and I cannot be the person to clear it up. i am not even the best at narrative or analysis in this fandom; as I pretty frequently state I took the hard STEM option with regards to my education so while I read a lot and have a pretty good sense for the lay person, there are actual like, trained and published writers. For what it's worth several of them are my mutuals and while I'm not putting the rest of this post on them I do feel safe saying they agree that the lack of narrative direction is at the heart of most people's frustrations with this campaign, even if they enjoy the characters. But getting back to the point, I do not know.

Here's where I stand on the actual plot before I go back to the bigger picture. I think that unless Bells Hells decide on their course of action pretty quickly, no ending will really feel satisfying due to that sense of directionlessness - and there are arguments for Bells Hells to take either the Arch Heart or the Accord's plan, though I think the Accord's is far superior, but they need to pick one.

Because of the ongoing issues with this party lacking perspectives that tied in well to this story and having to hinge everything on either one singular interpretation of one single instance in extraordinary circumstances (eg: Dorian), or stuff that feels, as I've said before, retconned, I have generally been extremely amenable to Bells Hells losing party members either through a split or through character deaths. This is not out of any sort of vindictiveness or dislike of characters, but just a hope that now that they know the vibe, the cast will make a character who has a perspective that is relevant to the story (which, FCG is not an ideal example because they happened to be the character who had perhaps best grown from their original concept to fit into the themes of this campaign, but Braius obviously is a very strong character informed by the story as well). I also think that a lot of the indecisiveness is part of the characters' various natures and that will also be a factor, especially since a new character can be both decisive, have a clear point of view, and be a lot more comfortable pissing off the rest of the party to assert it. So: if Bells Hells as they currently stand can decide what to do quickly, no need to break up! But if they can't, yeah, it would be to their and the story's benefit to do so. That's before we get into, for example, the sacrifice required from specifically Imogen or Fearne for the Arch Heart's plan; Ashton is not the one who has to risk their own autonomy for the rest of eternity. They might die in battle, but they will not become a husk housing an ancient hunger. I think the people who might have to do so get to decide.

Now: it may seem counterintuitive to demand a clear direction from a TTRPG, when part of the appeal is that we don't know how it will end, but the thing is, with the past campaigns, we did not know if the party would succeed but we knew that they wanted to do. Vox Machina could have fallen to Vecna but we always knew they were going to fight Vecna. The Mighty Nein's decisions not to get involved with the war are not indecision but rather a very clear decision (do not get involved). Their later reversal of that decision similarly follows from who they are and the richness of their pasts.

Bells Hells does not have that, and the endless circular conversations are both circular in game and a vicious cycle out of it; because we've always been focused on this plot from very early on and because the characters were not developed as strongly, we have a lot of very indecisive people who are too trapped in this crisis to develop and become decisive. In a way, it feels like Matt's been something like the Arch Heart here: saying "oh, THIS would be interesting, I wonder what will happen" at everything when it's like "ok but consequences are like, important, and maybe you should let things play out. I mean, two cycles isn't great but it is still only two; maybe you should actually let your children/players figure this out, even if it doesn't fit your idea of what should happen, instead of throwing yet another new thing at them."

So: I don't know and I don't have answers about Campaign 3 events at this point because, again, as someone who has a pretty good sense of what makes for a satisfying narrative, it has frequently subverted those requirements (which, to be clear, is bad - it's not genre subversion or a masterful play on expectations, it's subverting actual satisfying narrative beats; as someone said on one of my other posts in not quite so many words, it's like storyline-baiting). I know I tend to present my points with confidence, and I am pretty confident about a lot of things like CR lore and said sense of narrative, but like...maybe this guess on the fandom vibe is incorrect, but I think I'm getting these questions because people are saying "hey, do you know where we're going? I think I am reading this map wrong" to me and I'm here to say "no, you're reading it fine, we've gone off the road and are just kinda crashing through underbrush, and maybe we'll hit another road and continue on that and I can give some insight, but also we might go off a cliff, no way to tell."