#oc: electra

[thegreatobsesso]

mmkay. well. I can already tell this is gonna be my favorite new painting. :|

I... am excited. My brain has never been more satisfied than it was coloring in those tiny slices and I have SO MANY MORE TO GO. buzz buzz buzzzzzzzzzzzzz 🧠

[mutatedmech]

you were born reaching for your mothers hands / victim of your father's plans / to rule the world

electra, the fallen star

[decrepitdeer]

DAY 3: Unnecessarily Complex Fit

Featuring one of my OC's, who's only character trait is to be a living rainbow.

[kuixotic-arts]

Lil bit of planning while in Mistralton City 🍃

[thegreatobsesso]

....... 👀

i will never be tired of That Character that underwent a traumatizing event, was betrayed by their family, taught not to love and became someone who they are not proud of slowly coming to terms with their experiences, meeting people that make them want to be a better person, finding or making their own family, and finding happiness as they become the hero of their own story

[phopollo]

Sniffling and holding them up,,

Design update/cleanup for the cartoon steamers,,,,,

The entirety of the main cast has their updated/tweaked designs now,,,, here they are just so I can have them all on one post too,,

[mysticalcats]

my doodles from whiteboardfox >:))) it was fun (featuring @margo-mania's ferny being besties with connie)

[electraslight]

more of electra since i posted a doodle of him. hes a hyper religious gun nut survivalist, and the blonde boy is called sam, and he is satan incarnate

[the-orion-inexpirience]

Just some Sanji.. +him and Electra.. i missed them..

[whoartthoueventhough]

more stex art + renders yahoo

Renders of sketches I've already posted :]

TALL PEARL APPRECIATION GANG‼️‼️ whyyyy do people make Rusty the tall one it's beyond me frankly

Silly little comic my friend thought of hehe

"I hear you, you're knocking, it's shocking!"

"I hope you're satisfied with what you've done!"

"you could have had your choice and picked my ONLY ONE"

"oh come on Dinah, it's only fun. So quit cryin', quit cryin'"

reblogs appreciated!!

[thegreatobsesso]

Writing Pride Tag

My friend @pertinax--loculos tagged me to share some writing I am proud of, yay!!!

I haven't written much since the election - easing back into it word by excruciating word - but here's a bit I have always been fond of from The Insuppressible Electra Ray (Electra POV):

She could see it.  Lying at the center of this stone cathedral like it was waiting for her, a twinkle of gold.  “What’s that?” Dig muttered after her.  He sounded like meaningless static against the pounding beat of fulfilled destiny. She ran to the thing, cold water splashing under her shoes. She went to her knees and scooped it up, admiring it in her palm.  A heavy locket adorned with intertwining knot work, hanging from a delicate, simple chain. And it sang - oh, it sang, bold and beautifully, perfectly harmonized. A song about the end; the last song.  She let her false form melt off her like candle wax. Her own magic surged back in its wake, a volcano exploding in reverse. It was her body that rose back up in the gloom of the cave.  “Hey,” said the voice behind her, distant and utterly insignificant. “Can you hear me, kid?”  Sorry, stupid old Professor Dig. No kids here.  She uncoiled her magic and struck. 

Tagging @space-writes, @diphthongsfordays, @itsthenovelteafactor and @beatlesandbards... 99% sure you have all been tagged for this extremely recently but hey, never enough sharing bits you're proud of 🥰

[buff-electra-truther]

When you actually Americanize Starlight Express, Electra suddenly becomes a Reaganite boogeyman of Amtrak as a “welfare queen”- A “Dark Side of the (T)Rainbow” esque fascinating synchronicity

(Yes, that term is racially loaded and I am using it very deliberately for reasons to be explained later.)

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: I was way too wishy washy on this in the original version of the post (which got picked up by some bigger names and spread around) so I want to make this very clear. This is all a giant “Immer Pünktlich!” situation where the original creators could have never foreseen how it comes off wildly different in another country. Most of the traits discussed here were not present in the workshop version of the character. They just arose later on mainly through pure coincidence. I am VERY aware of Electra’s original intent and origins. I would be astounded if Brits in the 80s knew this much about the long-suffering US passenger rail network, even most Americans today don’t know if they don’t actually ride these trains or live in the northeast.  Starlight’s central themes of bootstrapping and “being under your own control” are associated with conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan, but that’s basically it in terms of actually intended elements. This is a wild reinterpretation of things by someone with a wildly different viewpoint than the original creatives.

People often make fun of how Electra makes such a big deal of being electric and futuristic when electric trains are just kind of the norm in most countries with substantial rail networks.  But when you take into account that toothpaste-era Electra is considerably Amtrak-coded and look into the politics and railroad history of what they’d be like irl…. Their framing goes from kind of stupid to pointedly malicious in oddly specific ways.

You know what else WAS the norm in the US (and still is in much of Europe) until Reagan started treating it as a radical freak? The big bad “liberal agenda” of the government actually funding things like social programs and infrastructure, including railroads.  And you know what kind of trains are almost completely dependent on that kind of government support?  Electric ones.  EVERY SINGLE REPLICA NATIONAL represents a country that (at least circa the 80s) had a nationalized rail network that actually invested in electrification. It’s not impossible for private companies to fully fund themselves but very hard, especially now.  

Who are “electric train politics” heavily associated with in the US?  Black people, LGBT people, damn near every minority, which coincidentally, Electra regularly was early on.

You may not realize this if you’re from elsewhere, but the US has very, very little rail electrification vs other rich countries.  You have some commuter rail and local transit systems in a number of cities, the Northeast Corridor and Keystone Corridor, and that’s…. about it.  Intercity service between a line of the big northeastern cities and that’s it.  The rest is all diesel domain irl.  Behold the wikipedia page for electrified lines in the US and see just how many are GONE. (Passenger service is also absolutely threadbare if not nonexistant in most of the non-electric network and often offensively slow, not even local road speed.  But that’s a whole separate can of worms) 

Why is this?  Heavy simplification, but the government subsidized highways and airports instead after WWII and that along with antiquated laws and losing mail service made passenger rail a massive money pit for most the railroads forced to continue it.  Instead of passenger rail service and infrastructure improving like basically all the other Nationals’ countries,  routes dropped like flies and many railroads sank into financial ruin until Penn Central’s collapse in the late 60s.  That’s when the government finally stepped in and took over passenger services as Amtrak.  Electrification infrastructure and equipment was dated then due to years of desperate finances, and while there was active rail investment in the 70s to improve, Reagan’s administration was hostile to it and it’s been an on and off uphill battle since to get enough funding to keep things going, let alone improve or expand.  Literally left decades behind by the system.  The 2013 tour is the most accurate version of Electra as a realistic reflection of electric passenger rail in the US- a guy who’s been at it since the 80s that still looks like a decades-old vision of the future in a notably cheap, torn up, worn out costume.  Actually the AEM-7 locomotives used then date to 1978, even older than that.

“Electra must be rich” sounds like something a stingy conservative politician would say about Amtrak needing billions of dollars (to just be barely functional due to years of neglect).  Yes, they were intended to be a celebrity for separate reasons early on, but the massive contrast between being shown as “rich” but representing an infamously NOT rich rail system really feels like something a nasty conservative politician would try as a smear campaign in another timeline. Oooo handouts bad.  Oooo you must be so extravagant if you need that much.  You “welfare queen” sucking government funds to blow on exotic pets and glitter and other frivolities. You “strapping young buck buying T-bone steaks with food stamps”. Those are Reagan’s quotes, not mine, I hate even typing them out but god, can it be more obvious?  Painting those who need government assistance (usually coded as black) as extravagant has been weaponized to destroy social programs and further inequality.  The gap between Electra and reality always felt kind of jarring for me, but the longer I thought about it, the more I realized how much uglier the implications were.

“Or unreliable”- electric trains have so few moving parts they tend to be notably reliable in terms of the physical locomotive/multi unit*.  A lot of their issues are actually due to structural failures with powerlines, and this is ESPECIALLY true with the NEC and other ooold electric commuter lines in the US.  This has also limited the maximum speed of trains at times.  See video below for more on this, also explains a lot of the stuff I’ve mentioned earlier.  Huh.  Gee whiz.  Someone held back and suffering due to structural problems being blamed as personal failing.  What DOES that sound like? 

*technically CC 40104 used as Electra’s helmet actually was an unreliable model because it was a weird complicated niche thing with four voltages for a uniquely European situation but that’s downright cherry picking.  The other Nez Casse engines with that styling actually were reasonably reliable and realistic Amtrak Electra from the 80s to 2018 would be an AEM-7 (common fanon choice too) that was also fine.

When you think about it, the likes of “only you have the power within you” and “needn’t beg the world to turn around and help you” might be the most offensive things you could say specifically to an electric train in the US besides“lol they shoulda replaced your line with even moar I-95 lanes”

Anyways, isn’t it funny how people conveniently ignore how steam preservation was actually very popular (compared to almost any other obsolete tech) in the 80s and had been since at least the 60s?  You had steam engines pulling the 1976 Freedom Train.  A small, relatively “young”, mechanically functional steam engine would have tourist railroads FIGHTING over them back then.  That was the era when the majority of the steam engines left in Barry Scrapyard were scooped up and preserved, Crown Metal Company was making new build ones for amusement parks, and some tourist railroads even bought new builds from the last company in China building steam engines for regular service.

But you know what did go out of favor in the late 30s and was treated as downright laughable to go back to after the 50s, just like the regular revenue use of steam locos in the US?  

The kind of small-government conservatism Reagan preached.  And the steam engines in the show promote.  Barry Goldwater was openly mocked for it in the mid-60s.  It was thought genuinely unthinkable to go back to.  

So, those laughably historically inaccurate depictions of electric and steam engines.  Isn’t it uncanny how near-perfectly those unrealistic traits of them align with other things?  

Also a funny aside: probably 90% of those new build Crown Metal steam engines were dressed up in western themes.  Literally cowboy actors, just like Reagan was.  

(I’ve got an extended unhinged analysis of Starlight accidentally resembling the rise of Reaganism and it unexpectedly spreading world over and destroying everyone else’s railroads too.  That’s still in progress though. But these two aspects are so freakishly dead-on I really needed to get them out.)

[shadowsstarwc]

ungracefully places them down

[thescrapbrainzone]

I’m in looove with the cashbot

[railzreceptive]

Not home rn but I did some whiteboard doodles on my phone, Swindon, Buffy, C.B, Greaseball, Electra, Pearl and Joule designs all from memory </3

[phopollo]

(Stex cartoon post)

Rusty after having a really bad day: Sometimes I wish I were more like Electra >:(

Rusty's dream that night: