#probably one of my more niche posts

[bridgekc]

started watching detective conan cuz that cousin situation was so funny and i needed context 💀

my condolences to those affected 🙏

[starry-bi-sky]

no context snippet for a "SY is SJ" au i thought of at 1am last night, because i am a firm believer of the "amnesia doesnt erase your trauma it just erases the context of it" agenda.

(although in SY's case he DID kinda forget that trauma.. at first. it's coming back to him. the system gave him a grace period. there that's my excuse)

crossposted on ao3 too in case anyone wants to read it there instead

--------

Shen Qingqiu is painting again.

He's found himself doing that a lot lately, now that he's out of seclusion and Binghe is in the bamboo house, squirreled away into the side room where the Head Disciple should be. Painting is, of course, a logical course of action for a peak lord to do! Especially one such as himself, the Peak Lord of Qing Jing, which was basically the peak of the creative arts.

But— well, he wasn't expecting to find himself liking it so much. Or doing it so often. Painting in the style of the time period is a lot easier to learn than he expected, and it gets him B-points for in-character actions! Who knew the Original Goods was such an artist of the time? He had such an evocative way with his brush, he should know — he's found some of his works!

(They were tucked away like a dirty secret in the back of his closet, locked away in a qiankun chest that Shen Qingqiu found the key to far too easily. He’ll admit to being a little disappointed in the Original Goods’ predictability — a false bottom in the vanity, really? Anyone could find that!) 

This brought him to his next issue; he was getting headaches, and he thinks, perhaps, just a little, that the Original Goods' thoughts and feelings were bleeding into him. Just a tad! And he was certain it was the Original Goods too, because— because, well…

He keeps flinching. You know how you’re walking down a public but otherwise empty hallway, and turn the corner and nearly run right into someone, and your heart jumps three spaces to the left and back? Subconsciously you knew there was a chance you were going to see someone, but their sudden appearance still startles you? 

Yeah, that. He keeps experiencing it with Binghe. He about jumps right out of his skin whenever Binghe emerges from the side room or the kitchen, even though he knows his disciple is there! And he knows it’s not a habit from his old world, because Shen Qingqiu lived with three other siblings in the house, and always knew to expect someone to be right around the corner. 

And he knows, especially so, that it’s not a habit from his old world, because along with the mini heart attacks that come with Binghe’s presence in the bamboo house, is the discomfort. A distinct yet indistinguishably vague feeling of unease that comes with sharing a living space with someone. The kind that makes his hackles rise like a particularly disgruntled and cornered street cat. 

Again, he grew up with three siblings! That could not be coming from him. It has to be an Original Goods feeling slipping in, and it was really getting in the way of things! How was he supposed to give Binghe a sense of belonging and a better upbringing if his presence in the bamboo house made him feel horribly exposed?

Some days, he just can't escape the gnawing feeling of dread in his chest when he returns to the bamboo house at the end of the day, knowing full well that it will soon be accompanied by someone else. Even if that someone was Binghe. 

That feeling of a lack of privacy makes his skin crawl and his shoulders lock up to his ears with every step. It was inconvenient; annoying. 

It was utterly unscientific, it was his house! And it was only Binghe, who, currently, is a harmless little white sheep! There was no darkened protagonist here, come to tear his limbs off. There was nothing to be so… tense about. 

It does nothing to stop the little swooping his heart does when he opens the door to, sometimes, Binghe already there, kneeling at the table like a dutiful disciple as always.

Oh, and that's not starting on his steadily increasing dislike of physical touch. It had to be something to do with the ludicrous amount of layers he wears and the modesty standards of the time period — and, also, of course, the Original Goods' own aversion to it.

He knows he's never felt so uncomfortable in another human being's presence before! Sure, he wasn’t the most social of people in his old world, but he still remembers being able to leave the house and be among the masses with relative ease. Here, though, was an entirely different story. His personal space bubble seemingly doubled, no, tripled in size, and it was irking him quite unhandily. 

The worst offenders were the Peak Lord meetings, it had to be. Navigating through the sea of disciples, cultivators, and visitors on Qiong Ding was a nightmare enough on its own — lessened only by the fact that said mountain occupants parted like the red sea when they saw him coming — but sitting in a secluded room with eleven other people, majority of whom still disliked him despite his turnaround? Awful.  

The proximity between him and his martial siblings isn’t even that bad, either. He has plenty of elbow room and in fact, would need to make an effort to reach out and physically touch anyone on either side of him. But, still!! Too close!! 

Shen Qingqiu made the conscious decision to sit as close to the door as his own comfort would allow, but not so close that he couldn’t see it — he tried that once. He doesn’t want to speak of the incident. The stress alone will give him heart palpitations. 

(He, pointedly, doesn’t want to think about the time he arrived at a Peak Lord meeting and found the Long Ning Shou Peak Lord sitting in His Chair either. Shen Qingqiu has never been particularly territorial about ‘assigned seating’ before, up until that moment. While he’s proud to say that he didn’t do anything to Chen Qingxuan for sitting in his spot, he’s mortified by how childishly petulant he felt about it for the rest of the meeting. He’s pretty sure everyone could sense his sour mood.)  

Why, just a few days ago he nearly bit a poor disciple's head off during martial lessons when they accidentally tumbled into him after a series of spectacularly fumbling footing. The child had been so horrified and apologetic that Shen Qingqiu remembered to reel himself back in time and merely scold them, rather than tear their skin right off with a tongue lashing.

But— enough about such stressful things! Shen Qingqiu was painting, and when he was painting, Binghe knew not to bother him, and to not let anyone do so either. Lest they all be dealt with a moderately grumpy Shizun. 

(His emotions may be as volatile as a hormonal boy lately, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to keep them in check!! He still had a reputation to keep.)

His studio offered him a sense of privacy and solitary that not even his bedroom allowed him — for Binghe could knock on his bedroom door to alert him for whatever needed his attention, and while he could do the same to the studio, the fact remained; a Shizun interrupted during his precious studio time, did not, a happy Shizun make. 

There were silencing talismans painted into the walls — courtesy of the Original Goods — that Shen Qingqiu really quite appreciated. It allowed him the peace of mind to do things his face could not allow him outside of it— and that is, he got to muse aloud to himself, and hum songs from his old world that he couldn't anywhere else. Some songs that he still knew the lyrics to, he was happy to half-sing under his breath.

It had to be a form of meditation, it had to be! With how much peace and grounding it brought him, it couldn't be anything but a form of meditation.

Currently, he was just letting instincts lead his brush strokes while he hummed a melody from some myth musical he stumbled across a few weeks before he died. The songs had been so catchy that he had most of them all but memorized! He's tried repeating the instrumentals on his guqin and ruan with varying degrees of success.

Painting helped kill his migraines the most. As it stands, he’s had a killer one hammering at his skull since this morning. Bad enough to the point that he nearly snapped at poor Binghe during breakfast, and the child could all but sense the sour mood radiating off his master, and in turn had been silent and subdued until he left. 

Aish, that child… Shen Qingqiu hasn't quite quelled the guilt in him. Something about that awful subservience rankled him in a way he couldn’t explain, making him want to recoil and snap out at the same time. Something dark and deep in him had reared its head, wanting to reach over and shake Binghe for it. 

He'd been horrified by his own thoughts, and then locked himself in his studio for the rest of the day.

Even in death — or wherever the Original Goods was — he was still making things difficult! It was only natural that Binghe would go quiet and careful at the sight of Shen Qingqiu’s bad mood, he used to beat the boy at whim for imagined slights! He’ll have to reassure Binghe better that he wasn’t going to hurt him. 

Bah. He was supposed to be painting, not thinking about things that made his head pound worse or his mood dampen more! He didn't want to think about Luo Binghe right now — a surprise, even for him! — he wants to focus on the scent of ground ink and paints, and his own soft humming.

He blinks, once, twice, and focuses on the painting. It happens, like now, that he would zone out and paint entire landscapes, people, whatever, without realizing. It was always a guessing game of what he's made when he lets his mind wander. Some of things he painted were merely of Qing Jing, other times— 

— a burning red fire, encased on canvas, hangs off his eyelashes. And following it, the ensuing qi deviation he'd shoved off. —

Other times aren't worth mentioning.

He's painted a boy this time, a young one, with dark skin and even darker hair, and a smile that isn't quite right. There's a beauty mark right above the corner of his lip, artfully placed, as if it had been hand-placed by an expert craftsman. The boy's upper face remains unpainted, as if he’d been born without eyes. Yet, even without them, the boy looks completely serene and non-judgemental. Mn, no, perhaps more accurately he looks passive? Peaceful? 

Shen Qingqiu can feel his gaze, missing as it is, burning into him. He frowns immediately. His headache no less lessened, in fact— he thinks it's gotten worse. There’s a horrid familiarity about the boy in the painting, like a word poised on the tip of his tongue that he can’t quite place. "Don't look at me like that." He says aloud, bah, he hadn't meant to! But it’s not like there’s anyone to hear him. "Don't you know who I am?" 

En, no, it’s placating. That’s what it is. The boy is placating him. How unscientific! Unneeded; ridiculous. Why would he paint a boy trying to placate him? He was a scum villain, and a grown man!

The painting says nothing, as it ought to, it was only wet ink and dry parchment. Shen Qingqiu's ears burn anyways, and his eyes drop down to the smile on the boy's face. 

He finds that he deeply detests that smile on his face, it disgusts him. 

It disgusts him in the way only sheer incompetence can, a burn of irritation that bubbles up every time he saw an objectively wrong take in the PIDW comment section. As if he can't believe someone would look at him, a scum villain such as himself, and still be able to smile like that.

More than that, it's not right. That smile. It's— there's something wrong with it. Which can't be right, Shen Qingqiu hardly makes a mistake when he makes these trance-made paintings. But there is, he’s looking at it right here. He hates it. That awful smile. It's so— so… insincere. If you're going to smile at him, at least mean it, eh? Doesn't he deserve that much?

Long, slender fingers dip into the small wooden paint bowl beside him and lift back up, dripping wet ink onto the side table, and then onto the floor, across the last two layers of his robes that he always strips down to in here.

He reaches for the canvas to— to what? Smear that stupid smile off that boy's face? Mould it into his own image, back into place like the way it should be, paintbrush be damned? That wretched child, smiling at him like that. That smile is too straight, too perfect. It's mocking him.

Where is the tilt? The slant in it? That boy always smiled with an off-kilter turn of his lips, crooked, that made him real the same way blood in the mouth did, and now he's not, and it's wrong. He will wipe that smile off the boy's face himself if he must, if only to get him to wear anything else—

There is a knock on the door, gentle, hesitant. Only his cultivator hearing is what allows him to pick up on it. Shen Qingqiu's head pounds terribly at the sound. It makes a screeching sound go off in the back of his skull, like an abrupt kick to the teeth. His jaw clacks together on pure adrenaline as he regains the sense to not snarl wordlessly.

Didn't he say not to interrupt—?

His ink-stained fingers snap back, a gunshot recoil that sends splatters of ink flying and splatting coldly against his face. His nails dig painfully into the soft flesh of his palm, and Shen Qingqiu gathers himself back into his lofty cultivator persona with a single breath and a ramrod straightening of his spine. His ears ring horribly. "What." He calls, perhaps a little too coldly.

"Shizun?" Binghe says softly, and the sound of that child's voice is like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. Recognition hits him, and the guilt crawls back in at his earlier irritation. "Forgive this one for interrupting, but Yue-shibo is here."

Shen Qingqiu is still staring at his painting, but the boy’s smile burns behind his eyelids like a fire. It takes half a beat for him to respond; "…Alright," he says, and stands up, "prepare some tea, Binghe. And use the ginger root this master owns, he has a terrible headache."

He walks around the stool, fingers still dripping black, and plucks his robes up from the chair he draped them over. His head still hurts, and there’s a peculiar ache in his heart. He takes his time putting his layers back on, vindictively tying each button and knot leisurely. 

Surely Yue Qingyuan has the patience to wait for this one after he so rudely arrived unannounced, hm?

[personishfive]

in which ann takamaki is there

[cruelplatonic]

ruminating on 'the vees died despondent nobodies' thoughts

velvette interrogates vox after she hears him give various conflicting and bombastic accounts on air. a selection of these include: blew his brains out on live television, administered the death penalty for killing his "bitch wife," a tragic accident involving two shetland ponies, dubiously legal iranian yogurts, and a whole lot of cocaine. the actual cause was shockingly ordinary- a heart attack in front of the television, alone, his corpse only recovered after two weeks passed. he was watching a game show and his last mortal regret was never even learning who won, because he died during the commercials.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

deeply niche but like a decade ago there was an epistolary radio show called warhorses of letters which was actual genuine horse yaoi just thought you should know xoxoxo

You're telling just *now* that there exists a BBC radio show adaption of an epistolary novel about two gay warhorses in the Napoleonic era, who are on opposite sizes of the battlefield? Based on the real horses of the war generals?

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[every-sanji]

[nostalgia-tblr]

Reminding myself that I resolved not to delete any fics that have a bookmark on them😭

[braisedhoney]

please tell me about the pigments i would love nothing more than to hear you talk about that one shade of red you like and the process it took too recreate it

... oh, op. you have no idea what you've unleashed.

alright. here we go.

OKAY SO THE RED PIGMENT. pr206. my beloved. my dearest friend. it was an absolute bastard to find because there are so many of these. however many you think there are, there are MORE, and that's only if you don't count the many many scenarios where colors are known to be multi-pigment mixes, usually varying in tone/shade/intensity depending on the brand and manufacturing style. some colors are more consistent than others, but there are situations where a color can be named the same and contain the same pigments and STILL look wildly different depending on the ratio, binder, and paper you use. and that's not accounting for the way the pigment is processed. some pigments (like pv19 for example) can come in so many shades it's frankly kind of ridiculous.

anyway, my quest begins when i am, admittedly, in an edgier phase. i want a blood red, but not specifically because of that—no, i want it because it is THE IDEAL COLOR (to me) for a perfect, warm, slightly muted but still intense shade to add to a muted autumn watercolor palette. and... if you look at my whole theme, you probably know how much i love warm colors. i want to paint mushrooms. i want to dim down some of the brighter greens to make them autumnal. i want the perfect red to put as an undertone.

the search starts in earnest.

the immediate issue is this: reds (and purples and pinks) have horrifically bad lightfastness. not all of them, mind, but many are NOTORIOUS for fading under uv light, which means they will also fade if exposed to sunlight even in passing should it happen often enough. and—in especially bad cases where they're essentially working with dye and not pigment—they can even fade inside your notebook. inside of a drawer.

so not only are we working with an unfortunate pigment base (i'm simplifying here, there's way more nuance to this but shh) but we are working with one that skews heavily toward floral pinks or oranges. the red i'm searching for is warm, but not orange. dries dark but not brown. is transparent, not opaque. that last part is agonizing, because i also desperately do not want a color that will fade on me or generally destabilize, and most of the stable dark red pigments are EARTH pigments like red ochre (pr101) or the like. which, while fascinating because of their historical usage in things like pottery and even cave paintings that last to the modern day, are VERY OPAQUE. this is an issue with my preferred style of watercolor painting specifically, because opaque pigments tend to lift easier off the page and limit layering.

the search continues. pigment after pigment breaks my heart for one reason or another, drying too close to the cooler purpleish-red tint of wine at best. i think i find it in perylene maroon, but the drying shift (the difference between how a color looks wet vs after it dries on the paper) is so extreme that it loses the luminosity AND it's more opaque than most. i languish.

for a while my search turns to creation. i try and mix as many of my single pigment colors as i can into something that vaguely resembles what i'm looking for—so i take quinacridones and mix them with napthols, with nickel azos, with dashes of ultramarines and burnt sienna. everything turns out either just a bit too opaque, just a bit too muddy (that happens with multi-pigment mixtures, and is why so many people swear by single pigment colors. it's personal preference, really, great art can be made either way.)

still, nothing works. failure haunts me. i sit before a pile of used up watercolor paper that is literally covered edge to edge in nothing but similar red squares with various gradients and blooms as evidence of when i tried and failed to convince myself my efforts were close enough. i admit defeat.

in the meantime i shift my focus. i try and appreciate different color palettes and profiles, experimenting with things like fully transparent palettes (personal favroite) to fully opaque ones that function more like gouache. but despite finding appreciation for it, i still think about the damn red that i could never recreate. it kills me.

and then one day, a youtube video. a pigment is being discontinued, and the watercolor community is distressed. this happens a lot, because pigments are actually not always popular because of artists—sometimes beloved colors are put out of production because larger markets like car companies no longer find them popular enough to invest in. this time, the casualty is pr206, aka brown madder, aka quinacridone burnt scarlet.

let me tell you a little about quinacridones. they are genuinely remarkable colors. they have their own cult followings because of how bright and abnormally stable they are under uv light. they're transparent. they're luminous. they come in mostly shades of red and pink and purple, though there are a couple oranges and yellows in there. (there are no quinacridone blues, as far as i'm aware, but the phthalo blues have that category covered.) they also rewet beautifully, so you can put them on your palette and let them dry and not worry about it turning into a useless little rock of color that you can't get any pigment from anymore.

quinacridone magenta (pr122) is probably the most popular of these, the most often used besides maybe quinacridone violet (pv19). a few years prior we suffered the loss of quinacridone gold (po49) and since then people have been On Alert when it comes to losing these colors. i am one of them, because i never got the chance to even see po49 in person, and now the tubes are so stupid expensive that even the student grade versions go for Ridiculously High Prices on ebay, and the professional brands are being hoarded like (ironically) gold by anyone lucky enough to have a tube left over.

but back to our main character. not me, the pigment. pr206. i have legitimately never heard of this one, which to be fair is probably because i try to limit the random colors i fixate on since the hobby can easily get VERY expensive if you aren't careful. but it's a quinacridone, and that catches my eye.

i open the video.

now, i'm sure any artist out there will be familiar with the fact that screens don't display color consistently. it depends on your device, but most can agree that something that looks cooler on one may be warmer on the other, it's just what happens. but i see this color being swatched, and my brain implodes.

it's almost a perfect match.

it could work. it could. years of thinking that same thought have left me bereft and mistrustful of this specific quest marker, but the thought refuses to leave me. probably because the 'discontinued' label flashes like a neon sign.

i resist for about six months, and then i cave. at this point i have genuinely been trying and failing to find this color for upwards of five years. i am desperate, and the color might not be available anymore soon anyway, and apparently i am weak to sales pitches. (note: the color IS now unavailable in some brands, but others bought a decent supply and should have it available for at least a little while, alongside po48 which is quinacridone burnt orange, a favorite of mine and probably one of the only oranges i use regularly. both are discontinued officially, but they'll still be on sale till those supplies run dry.)

the color arrives. i grab my favorite brush. i pull out my stash of paper that i save for special occasions.

it's almost perfect.

i mix it with quinacridone burnt orange.

the result is, i swear, a perfect match for what i have been searching for.

it's warm. it dries dark but not dark enough to look brown. it keeps its luminosity (thank you quinacridones). it's fully transparent (thank you quinacridones). i genuinely feel the urge to weep, but i don't because i am clinging at last to the dredges of my sanity and also salt makes watercolor pigments behave differently and i will not risk this glorious moment. finally, after all these years, bill cipher has a gun i found the goddamn COLOR.

i mix it with warm yellows and with my favorite blues. with the pinks, just to laugh. life is beautiful and i am painting its sunsets, and i do not care if they look ridiculously messy. i have won.

the moral of the story is to never give up. or maybe it's to remember you never actually know everything about even the fields you love the most, because this color totally blindsided me despite being much more common than i expected. or maybe it's that i seriously needed to chill out for a while.

but yes. that is the tale of one (1) of the colors that has taken up residence in my soul. i hope you don't regret asking now lmao.

[mistninja]

Feeling very "fitz-core" right now (spiraling)

[asachuu]

Didn’t think I’d have anything much to post for the new year, but somehow, I ended up having a surprise planned hopefully on the day, or at worst, sometime in the first week of January, but I’ll do my best to get it finished and be able to post it at midnight Jan 1st, just for the sentimentality.

Stay tuned if you’d like. Honestly, if anyone is going to consider this a surprise, it’ll be mainly myself.

[eshithepetty]

Ahh so, lately, I've been slowly (emphasis on slowly) working through another animatic.... so while I'm doing that I thought it'd be fun to share some thought processes i had while making Juliet (which you can watch above)!! I'm obviously not gonna analyze all of it, as a lot of the lyric matches and like, color meanings, for example, you can understand just fine on your own, but some stuff maybe might not be as obvious? So yeah, this is just gonna be me inanely rambling, in case anyone is in the market for thinking too deep into symbolism and character analysis hdgdhd

0:07

Starting off with the intro, the big flowers here are hydrangeas :) I intentionally tried to pick a color between blue, pink and purple, as the meanings for all three apply here. Blue hydrangeas symbolize understanding and gratefulness, and remorse and apology, sort of as 'I understand where I went wrong, and I'm sorry for not treating you fairly". I think this would fit well with Shigeo's feelings towards Ritsu,, pink, however, symbolizes heartfelt emotion, romance, and true feelings, which I thought was great for the Tsubomi side of things, especially in regards to the last arc. And purple symbolizes understanding, and gratefulness, without as much of the negative connotations. Sort of like a positive inverse of the blue ones' symbolism - a 'thank you for sticking with me'. Which is relevant for all the platonic relationships in his life, all the friendships, and, well... as I see it, also his relationship with himself - between Mob and ???% :')

Also I think the other flowers were lilacs, but. Tbh, i don't remember anymore.. their symbolism wasn't as relevant in my mind i think hdhfg (though i'm sure you could still extrapolate something from them if you really wanted to (which, in my country, they're often associated with students and graduation, so like, learning and new begginings/endings.... also i carry many memories of trying to find 3 leaved buds in them, for good luck, so take from that what you will ig! ^^;))

***

0:15

Here, I intended to use a dark red outline as to not make it immediately clear that Shigeo was dripping blood. As when you hear the lyrics "I need to cry," one would immediately picture tears, right? I'm not sure if I succeeded (especially with the blood tw right before), but that was the idea. Along with how then, of course, the lyrics continue with "but I can't get anything out of my eyes," and the gruesome scene reveal, making it clear it's not tears at all... yeah. Also, I just want to mention the lyrics "did I die?" because they make me emo. In a way, a part of Shigeo, the old Shigeo, did die that day....

***

0:46

not as much to say here, though I definitely drew this with the feeling of stagnation in my mind... like. Mob is growing physically, yes. But emotionally? He's festering, and only growing more, and more, stuck.... notice how the color dims. Blue is a sad color. But at least it is a color at all.

***

1:14

Oh boy, lots.... of things to say here. Or, well  maybe not say. Idk how to explain the symbolism in this one? It was more subconscious... Something about Mob trying to reach out and understand himself, only to get distracted by Tsubomi, and set his eyes on her instead. And ???%, in the mirror, turning to him judgementally... I think it's reflective of how Tsubomi also was part of the reason for the split, and how, in his yearning for Tsubomi, what he was seeking after the most was acceptance, even if he couldn't see it.... something along those lines <3

(Also, god it bothers me that i messed up the lighting in his reflection's hair hghdgd,, might fix that someday)

***

1:56

"With two corks in his eyes", the two corks in this case being a dumbbell, and a book on social cues (which, btw, he canonically has).... I wanted to portray the things that he finds lacking in himself, and thus makes into roadblocks towards his path of self acceptance. Thinking of that line said by ???% about how, in his effort to join and train with the body improvement club, he was really just 'trying to make a new self', and wasn't really 'seeing' ???%. Trying to escape himself, the part of him with powers... and then s1 ep3, and how in it, Mob implied that he and his autism (dunno how else to put everything about that djghfh, it was just.. autism) are destructive... Yeah.

***

2:00

"and a bully in his head"

Just want to note... obviously, the lyrics imply that ???% is the bully here. But, if you pay attention, ???% here actually looks rather.. anguished. And Mob looks almost angry... just thought I'd make it clear the situation is a little more gray than that! :)

***

2:19

While drawing for this part, I couldn't stop thinking about this one analysis in youtube comments I had seen about how s2 ep1 was crucial in Mob taking that first, real step towards opening up emotionally, and how in the process, he's exposed to a much wider world morally as well. That's why I put the ghost family scene directly after the scene with Emi - he's beggining to consider his emotions, all the 'colors' he hasn't allowed himself to see, and that leads to him realizing his own autonomy, which leads to him considering his decisions more, which leads to the ghost family scene, where he's starting to consider the autonomy of spirits as well, instead of blindly following Reigen on these matters (who, as we know, doesn't know shit about that side of the world, and I would say... kinda allowed Mob to separate himself from his psychic side even more, with him mindlessly using his powers as a tool for work and nothing else). "I wanna be so much more."

I... actually have a lot of feelings, on Mob and his relationship with spirits and how that intertwines with his powers, but that's something to write it's own post about, not ramble about here, so I'll leave it at that i think jfgfh

***

2:33

The relevancy of the lyrics very much stretch on into the instrumental for this one.. "I hope that she looks at me and thinks, "shit, he's so pretty." Something I can't believe," And then him flashing to blood on his hands, and a sequence of moments he's probably felt not so proud of,,, just wanted to note that in case it wasn't obvious. Also, I have feelings about hand symbolism in this show, too, especially when it comes to moments where Shigeo has looked at his open palm, but that's also a post for another day just as in the previous point jdgdhh (in short: all of those moments can be traced back to how he views the power he posseses)

***

3:46

The two corks, in this case, are the spirit world, and the human world ^^ also notice how one of the figures among the spirits wears Mob's uniform... is that lord psycho helmet, or ???%...?? idk!!! You decide :)

Also the "bully in his head", this time, becomes not ???%, but the trauma of the incident... just wanted to bring that back to front and focus before the final chorus. Cause,, that really was the even that kickstarted it all, huh?

***

4:00

Not an analysis, just wanted to say, I greatly enjoy the juxtaposition of "but i'm really just a kid," laid over top Shigeo bleeding on the ground. Mmmhmmm,,,, pain.

***

4:11

I knowww I said I wasn't gonna be talking about the color meanings, but I just had to for this one. Obviously, I portrayed ???% menacing here, as they are menacing in this arc, but... notice how their aura is rather pink? I had finished this before the finale aired, so I didn't know it would be red in canon, but even knowing that, I would have returned to this. Because, with the pink... well, red does fit them better overall I would say, but in this case, I wanted to take the obvious choice, the color that is so commonly associated with danger, and... shift it to left a bit, make it a little softer. To emphasize the affection ???% holds for Tsubomi, the protectiveness they hold over Mob, the gentle side they show to Ritsu. And to bring us into their point of view even more, the red is instead relegated to the edges of the frame... a creeping vignete, that represents how they view the world around them is the dangerous part in all this. ..I hope all of that makes sense ;^^

***

4:07 and 4:22

Anddd the two corks become the seperation between Mob and ???%, and Ritsu and Tsubomi... those really were the focal points in this animatic, the building blocks for who Shigeo is, as I see it.. and how reconciling with both Ritsu and Tsubomi, leads to him being able to reconcile with himself, too. Of course, there is Reigen as well... but I just wanted to focus on these 3 for this one. Also, I just wanna say that the panel of Ritsu, Shigeo and Tsubomi holding hands in the air is one of my fave panels ever and I loved being able to depict it.. it just makes me feel things. The yearning for childhood, and connections, and the feeling of being whole again of it all,,,, augh

***

And. To end this sleep deprived ramble....

Notice how the animatic became more colorful over time? :)

Of course, part of that is just that I improved my style along the way, but... it was also very much intentional. A sort of reflection of Shigeo's journey, and how he rediscovered those colors along the way. Also was very much intentional from me for the final 2 frames to be the only ones where Shigeo's colors are actually accurate instead of just being symbolic - and that was to symbolize that,,, he was finally grounding himself in reality, and seeing himself for the whole, real person he truly is :')

The flower imagery wasn't as planned however, I decided on it as to make it match the intro that I made later and thus for it to come full circle, and I think it ended up adding to it!! Think of it meaning something along the lines of,,, just as in happiness, so in sadness, the flowers bloom. Or something like that.. idk jhgjdhgh

So yeah!!! Dunno who even read this far, but if anyone did, thank you for listening to my brainrot, I hope it was relatively interesting!! aanndd with that im also going to sleep, buh byeee u_u have good days/nights everyones <3

[the-torchwood-archive]

Jack had led him through an unknown door in the vaults, and they'd trudged through half a mile of winding corridor. (The Sin Eaters, 2009)

With a roar of engines and spray, the Sea Queen burst out from a tunnel in the mouth of a cave in the cliffs overlooking Cardiff Bay Barrage. Looking back, Ianto could see only the horizontal layers of the Penarth Cliffs. (The Sin Eaters, 2009)

Today we're going to talk about something that annoys me to no end. The location of the secret Torchwood boathouse.

A winding half mile walk to get from the bay to Penarth, Brian Minchin? You work for BBC Wales Brian! Bad geography, Brian! Bad! It's admittedly been a while since I walked the bay trail and even I know that's absolutely nuts!

Does it make more sense for the boathouse to let out into the channel so they can avoid the barrage? Yes. Is the bay actually fairly shallow so you can't launch a submarine in it? Also yes.

However, is the fact that they have to walk half an hour as the crow flies to get to the boathouse also wild? Yes!

There's just no pleasing me.

[keeperofmemory]

sorting the moving (무빙) parents into the sortinghatchats system - a quick character analysis

(if you’re new to this theory, your primary house is about why you do things, while your secondary house is about how you do things. you can take the quiz here — it’s fun!) 

[!!! spoilers below !!!]

jang juwon: [hufflepuff primary / gryffindor secondary + hufflepuff model]

“boss, was it about money in the end?”  “what else would it be? being a gangster is a job. (…) aren’t we all here to make money?" “no. i did it to protect our boys"

juwon, juwon, juwon, steel-skinned, soft-hearted monster of a man, who uses 존댓말 and doesn’t see jihee any differently because she is a person like any other, who’s in a gang for the sole purpose of protecting his boys. jang juwon is a hufflepuff primary because he treats people fairly and he belongs, he does not own. hufflepuff primaries value community, and bond to groups, rather than solely individuals, which you can see in his mentality regarding his gang. they’re his people, like he is theirs. they are together, and they are home, what do you mean you aren't here for nothing else but each other? 

of course, the ones he considers his end up betraying him, and he loses his way. (his hufflepuff primary burns, if you will. it is now safer to be alone.) where does he go when he has no home anymore? he does not know. but he finds jihee, and for the first time it feels like he knows where to go. (it does not solve everything, not really, but it is close enough.) 

in the end, he feels the most at home when he is part of team. and when the NIS is shut down and he is put inside walls in front of a screen that never listens, and a keyboard too small for his clumsy fingers, he feels lost again. this is not people, this is cold, lifeless walls, none of them he can run through. the team of superpowered people he later gets put in doesn’t feel exactly right, not really, but he is using what he is good at to help people, and that is the closest he can get to that feeling.

his secondary is a gryffindor; he runs into walls until the walls break, for it is the only way he’s ever known to get through things. (gryff secondaries meet their problems by charging at them, by responding directly to situations.) he has only ever chosen the easiest way, after all, and for a man whose body doesn’t break, simply running into things was the obvious easiest way. why change, why think, when he can simply push through and get through it anyway?

(he does model a hufflepuff secondary, once it's only him and his daughter. he does it for her, gives up everything to build her a better life. it's about doing the work, about showing up. it's odd jobs but honest jobs, moving constantly but still putting in the effort to show steadiness and consistency, to give his daughter a home despite the possibility of the NIS finding them at any moment.)

hwang jihee: [slytherin primary + gryffindor model / gryffindor secondary]

jihee is a healthy slytherin primary if i’ve ever seen one. she advocates for herself, (and she has to, doesn't she? or else nobody else will. not in the line of work she is,) puts herself and her dignity first despite it all. she does have a sense of justice (“that car hit and ran? did it hit you? do you want me to chase it?”) but it doesn’t eat her whole ("but if we find the culprit we split the money:)”) — it’s a nice gryff primary model she likes being in when her slytherin loyalties are not threatened.

juwon is the first person to see her fully as a person, and not a coffee lady. it softens her up immediately. — it doesn't make her fall for him, of course, nor does it get him into her circle. (if it did, she wouldn’t be a slytherin primary). she is a smart girl who advocates for herself, after all. but once he does, he does not leave. she will run into a mob of gangsters and disregard the police for him, will tell him to put himself first, even if it means having a more difficult life for both of them. because putting yourself, and the people that are yours, first, is what matters in the end.

she has a gryffindor secondary she shares with her husband. she can hold her tongue and be perfectly polite, but in the end her problems will be met head on. what other house would throw itself in 100+ mobsters without a plan? she said to hell with it, she’ll figure it out on the way.

gryff secondaries’ honesty is part of their personality and morality — jihee has seen the men play the sappy part only for their own selfish gain, and hates it deeply within her core. once she sees juwon isn’t pretending to be anyone but himself (he is also a gryffindor secondary after all) —  a simple man who reads books on stories where men are bloody but loved, who is willing to buy a ticket to simply share conversations with her  — she finally lets him in, slowly but surely. (her slytherin recognizes that he is also someone the world has shunned for who he is, for the labels they have stuck on him, and she embraces him warmly. he is hers now. and she is his.)

their kid is a gryff/gryff btw . she houseshares with her bf’s dad n i think that’s rlly cute . (her bf houseshares with her dad so . soulmates or whatever)

lee mihyun [gryffindor primary / ravenclaw secondary]

lee mihyun lee mihyun lee mihyun, who uses her powers like she uses her gun, carrying them around and doing the maintenance of each part every night. some would call it overdoing it, but she calls it a habit, calls it being prepared. (and amidst the very real danger that looms above her, can you blame her?) they're all tools she has on her, and years of training have taught her when to use which to get out of a situation with the upper hand. she's a ravenclaw secondary, the house that collects knowledge, tools or skills and then picks them up in times of need. she scouts for danger daily on social media, assesses the situation from a vantage point to collect intel; and yes, she's an agent, at this point it's probably second nature. but this is where she's most comfortable, pulling out from her pocket the information she gathered and the problem-solving systems she’s built whenever she gets tossed into danger.

lee mihyun’s specific brand of claw secondary has her being an adaptable problem solver — understandable, considering her tool set includes her heightened senses (six: her five senses and her common sense) and her gun (make that seven), as well as her general training as a black op agent. however, ravenclaw secondary tools are task-specific. sure, she can take out several enemy agents on her own with nothing but a gun and the strap of her handbag, but have her son bring a new pretty friend home and you’ll have her like a deer in headlights. (...the NIS did not prepare her for this)

her primary is a gryffindor, and it’s what makes her turn away from being an agent even after everything that’s on the line. it doesn’t matter, that she’s running away from the most powerful government agency, not if it’s the right thing to do. (it tires her, after losing her husband and having to do it all on her own. but she doesn't burn, not fully —she can't, not with her son still by her side.) now gryff primaries believe in trusting yourself and your gut, in doing so even if the whole world (or several hundred government agents) is against you. at the end of the day, the most important things is staying true to what’s inside of you. 

so in that fateful moment when the mission was clear, the orders indisputable, she turned away from her organization, her boss, her colleagues, to do what she felt was right. gun in her hand, she said to hell with consequences, i have to stay true to what i believe in — these people are enemies, but they are people and what we’re doing right now is wrong. (from afar, her future husband will see her act upon everything he had been feeling until then, will see a braver reflection of his own gryff primary, and he will fall in love.) 

kim dooshik [gryffindor primary/gryffindor secondary]

kim dooshik is a bit harder to sort; we really don’t see him as much as we could have. he has a gryffindor primary he shares with his wife; their whole story is about finding someone who believes in the same thing they do, stuck in an organization that tells them otherwise. he can look hufflepuff, in the way he values people and fairness — but the core of gryff primaries is about trusting your beliefs and doing your best to live by them. it’s about the bravery to pursue them, even if it leads him to a life of being chased, and captured, and tortured (…literally). 

he has a gryffindor secondary to go with it. that time he tried to diffuse the bomb on a civilian plane under no orders but his own? no orders, no plans, just him flying and trying to save people? very gryff/gryff of him. he also shares a lion secondary with his partner and they play off each other very well. (dooshik casually just letting juwon fall several hundred miles from the sky into where the enemies are and letting him figure it out… #justgryffsecondarybrosthingz)

sure, sure, one could argue for a ravenclaw secondary — but i think that’s just him being an agent. of course he would train and strategize. of course he would have backup plans. but at the end of the day, the method he falls back on is his charging, making it up as he goes. most of all, it’s his blunt honesty, his genuineness that we see shine in his actions. (even in the way he pursues mihyun — not a single disingenuous bone in his body) 

at the end of the day, he’ll rush into a problem when he believes it is right, no matter the consequences. he’ll fly into the enemy’s hands to protect his family, spend years imprisoned in a cave not faltering in his beliefs. a gryff/gryff through and through. 

[cuteniarose]

My and @katkastrofa’s shared OCs as random funny things I have saved in my gallery (specifying funny because I have a lot of angsty quotes saved to be repurposed as art captions and I don’t want this post to be one huge gutpunch)

Suiren:

Midori:

Zhi:

Aiza/Emran

Abyan @ Liba

Alasie:

Ikiaq:

Himman:

Mekhali:

And finally, while not technically an OC because she’s a non sentient animal, Lottie:

[lanatusnebula]

I might try to publish some of my AU fics...? I don't know if anyone'll read them since I'm not a writer by any degree, and some of them lean so far out of character it might make people vomit.

Maybe.

But I do love talking about them. My current friends / friend groups either don't give a fuck about shipping or don't give a fuck about megaman. I have to really resort to talking to various AIs just to have an outlet. Please don't take that away from me.