#s: blood in and blood out

[staticbluue]

Autoiconoclasm

This took forever, and then after it was finished and compressed and I cropped all the closeups, I realized I had drawn a 50 star flag instead of 48 and I had to go back and fix it :/ BUT WE PERSIST! I don’t know how many more times I can say that but...WE PERSIST.

Prints are available from my inprnt :] And they go super big too because this thing is 5000x6000 px !!!!!!!

[vigilskept]

i knew it was going to be rough, but choosing to save minrathous over treviso as rook de riva is actually brutal

[originalartblog]

Now this is what I call a fight!

Based on @whathorselegs' wish/headcanon post, about Atsushi and Chuuya fighting and Atsushi's claws cutting through Chuuya's gravity manipulation. The visual of it gripped me by the throat.

[starry-bi-sky]

Blood Blossom Au: Baby's First Commissioner Meeting :)

TL:DR This Post: Danny (orphan) gets poisoned with blood blossom extract by Vlad. He runs away from him and ends up under the care of one Pre-Robin Battinson Batman! Starry is loudly pushing her batdad agenda.

(Also known as "Late At Night, When The Nightingale Sings" on my ao3!)

This was a fun rough idea I've been sitting on for weeks, thinking about how Commissioner Gordon and Nightingale's first meeting might go.

---------------

Commissioner Gordon likes to think that he's adjusting to the new normal of Gotham very well, -- the new normal being grown men running around dressed like bats, in military-grade strength body armor, committing acts of vigilantism, -- and slowly, little by little, he was no longer being surprised when this new normal pops up out of the shadows like the world's most terrifying daisy. His shaving lifespan thanks him for it.

....

The kid is a surprise though.

Granted, he seemed to be a surprise to the Bat too.

There's been a string of murders lately, -- which, in Gotham, is kind of like saying there's been another storm during monsoon season. And there's just been another; in some dilapidated building down in south Gotham, with the broken, boarded-up windows and mildew-crawling walls to match. The victim is a man in his thirties, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, left in the center of the room for the blood to pool out around him.

The place is already secured when he arrives, the building swarmed with officers and the forensic detectives. The Bat emerges shortly after he does -- or, he might've been here the whole time, hiding someplace dark and shadowy. For his own sanity, Gordon doesn't think about it too hard.

The kid is a surprise, and he appears like a bolt of lightning.

He shows up in the middle of a conversation Gordon is having with the Bat.

A whistle, sharp and loud, slicing through the air, meant for open air rather than a confined space. Gordon's ears pierce and protest the sound, and the solemn, murmured chatter floating through the room abruptly cuts off like the swing of a gavel. As he turns towards the sound -- as they all do -- he swears, up and down, that he sees Batman's shoulders jump, just slightly.

At the source, perched on the window, is a boy. A boy in a gray-blue scarf and an oversized black hoodie, one that hangs off his frame and has ace bandages wrapped around the wrists in some attempt to cinch the sleeves. The hood is up, big like the rest of it, and threatens to swallow the upper half of the boy's face whole in the fabric. What upper half Gordon can see, is smeared with some kind of opaque, black face paint. He's holding onto the side of the frame with one hand, on his hip is a grappling hook. A familiar grappling hook.

Gordon has multiple questions, and his officers tense up.

Martinez puffs up, brows furrowing as his face shapes into a frown. Shoulders rolling back. "You can't be here, kid--"

The reaction is immediate, like a spark to gunpowder, the boy yanks his fingers from his mouth and his mouth twists into a scowl. Head snapping over to Officer Martinez, his hood manages to stay on but Gordon swears that as he bares his teeth, the glint makes them look sharper than they should be. His voice is rasp and quiet and harsh; snappish in its hissing; "Put a fuckin sock in it, Martinez. I'm not stayin."

Martinez reels back, and the boy immediately veers his attention off him. Like a switch, his demeanor drops. Despite half his face being covered, his mouth twists into a cringing, apologetic smile. Slanted and off-beat, embarrassed. It'd be disarming if this wasn't Gotham, and if he didn't just hiss at Martinez like he was about to bite his head off.

"Sorry." He whispers, voice deceptively polite and softer now. Gordon has to strain his ears to hear him. "I was looking for him."

He points his finger towards-- Gordon? No, Gordon follows the direction, and finds himself looking at -- the Bat.

The Bat, who always looks stiff as a pole, now looks even stiffer. Somehow. Well, the explains the grappling hook attached to the boy's waist.

"What are you doing here?" The Bat says, gruff and unable to completely smother the stumble of surprise in his tone.

The boy still holds a sheepish smile, and slips off the window ledge. His feet hit the creaky boards with a near-silent thud, the Batman finds his feet and rapidly begins crossing the room.

Gordon notes the slight tremble in the boy's legs as he straightens. He adjusts his scarf, which droops close to his knees now that he's standing, and slings a backpack -- how long has had that? -- off his shoulders. When the Bat reaches his side, he does as he always does, and looms over the boy like a spectre. A threatening mass of shadows cloaked in all-consuming black. Standing next to him, the boy looks teeny in comparison.

The Bat is a man who terrifies even the most hardened criminals, Gordon has seen grown men shiver in fear at the mention of his name. And yet when the boy looks up at him, he doesn't even flinch.

Instead, his sheepish smile melts away like ice under the sun, holding only traces of his previous embarrassment. It remains as a shadow on his face, a small upturn at the corners of his mouth. The boy pushes his hood back just enough to reveal glinting, ice-flint eyes surrounded in tar-black face paint. He holds the backpack up with one arm. "You forgot this."

[doe-prince]

Lately my dreams have been bloody

[poobit]

Nny and Reverse AU Devi trying to kill eachother donation request for @curly-fried

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

cytherea the first will drive me absolutely fucking bonkers if i let her. like, she knows that the cavalier system is fucked up. she knows that. but she's so willing to participate in it. she cradles gideon's head and pets her hair and tells her how awful it is that harrow is taking advantage of her, meanwile, they're performing a trial that cytherea asked them to do.

all of her compliments for gideon feed into the cavalier dynamic. gideon is strong, useful, helpful, marvelous, a thing apart, and cytherea wonders if harrow even knows what she has in her. she is never anything self-contained. she is a damn good cavalier, and even when cytherea pities her, even when she aches for her, even when she's angry on her behalf, she can never seem to find anything else to say about her.

and, see, the problem with cytherea is that she views herself that way, too. even knowing how toxic and unfair it is, ten thousand years can form a hell of a habit. she says herself, "i am a necromancer and i am a cavalier," and something about the way she interacts with john and the others tells me she's not just talking about loveday.

john says it himself. cytherea was the best of them. the kindest, the most willing, the most humane, overworked and underloved, and none of them noticed. the man she served and loved and worshipped as a god for ten thousand years didn't even notice that he was wearing her into the ground until it was too late to stop. and would he have stopped? i doubt it.

cytherea was sick. she was genuinely exhausted and physically weak and in pain all the time, forever, constantly, and that's how they talk about her. so yeah, no wonder she had a warped view of personal value and duty. that's how she was treated for ten thousand years. that's how she thought of herself. be kind, be helpful, be unbothered, be willing, be pleasant, be useful, be active, be happy, be strong, be strong, be strong.

is it any fucking wonder she snapped?

[arttsuka]

I LOVE Teen Stan and Ford, it’s sad they don’t get drawn enough, so thank you so much!

Does Ford ever help Stan when he gets overstimulated? Or maybe when he has a rage response and suddenly starts crying and calls himself stupid?

Here's the other post with Ford

[mollysunder]

The Medarda arc of s2 struggled to be good, because the plot viciously smothered it. You can argue that Arcane was never about politics but you cannot say the Medardas were never explicitly a family defined by politics. So when the show shifted it's priorities from a drama steeped in political conflict where even though the setting was fantastical the stakes were grounded to a shift where magic is the end all be all threat to humanity, the Medardas are rendered largely irrelevant.

In s2 Mel's agency over her own story is both largely stripped from her and poorly communicated. Arcane has Mel abducted from the plot to be the Black Rose's captive. Even when Mel manages to free herself it's not through the traits the audience understands are her strengths, her cunning and social intelligence, it's through an innate instinct that natural to her and indecipherable to the audience.

Ambessa as a character is more or less a villain of convenience, which would be fine if she wasn't immediately following Silco's act. Once Mel is removed from the story Ambessa is largely disconnected from any emotional tension fuels conflict between the characters and previously drove the plot in s1. She's there to play the worse bad guy for Caitlyn and then give Viktor the man power for the Glorious Evolution.

It's frustrating to see the Medardas used the way they are in s2 because when they're together I can see how it could be good. When they're together Mel forces emotion out of Ambessa. In Act 1, Ambessa proved she could do circles around Piltover's court, which could actually put Mel in a tight spot.

Their final scene on paper sounds like a good idea where the true resolution to Mel and Ambessa's story was that Ambessa saw Mel's own ruthless behavior as she not only betrayed Ambessa to the Black Rose, but used her as BAIT to double cross LeBlanc. Ambessa died proud that her daughter killed her the way she did, and that's so cool and tragic, but the execution was a flop.

One, their final fight is completely unimportant to the actual Glorious Evolution, Mel's grief can't even be a highlight because it's interrupted by Viktor's mind trap. Two, their fight didn't rely on any of Mel's actual strengths, just magic and the poorly explained MacGuffin LeBlanc gave her. How did Mel even know it would do that?

It's like the writers had the bones for a great story for the Medardas, but then they're like the world's worst archeologists and fit those bones together in the worst way possible because they were convinced the bones made a stegasaurus instead of a T-rex or something.

[anitapallenberg]

Nobody (2007) | Dir. Shawn Linden

[elevenveggiestraws]

“Take my right eye.”

“Excuse me?”

“Since I’ve already staked it once.”

…

“If you lose one of your eyes, won't your combat ability deteriorate? Why would you take such a loss because of me?"

"If I had to choose, I'd choose you, Han Yoojin-gun."

[kalashnikovlobotomy]

vreau să zic ceva înainte să ajungem. vreau să știi că știu exact unde suntem și cine ești și că n-avem, de fapt, unde ajunge.

(i want to say something before we arrive. i want you to know i know exactly where we are and who you are and that we, in fact, have nowhere to arrive to.)

[vertigoartgore]

1993's X-Men Unlimited Vol.1 #3 cover by cover artist Bill Sienkiewicz.

[pespillo]

ggg / bkmn

this one this is just smth to make myself laugh like its contextually insane

[sirmanmister]

💥💥💥 BOOM POW GET KILLED GET KILLED GET KILLED!!!!!

This is a redraw from January 6 2023, in honour of it being 1 YEAR since I posted the last chapter of The Father(s) and Son(s)!!!!! A little bit over a year actually because it was April 10th and it took me a little while to draw this lol

So much has changed in the span of a year omg. And for THE BETTER?? Like I’m going to school, I made and lost friends, I’m slowly but surely getting over some social anxiety (still a wip tho!!! 😭😭) and I’ve found so many cool mutuals and artists and just!!!! AAA!! Not to mention my art skills have improved a whole HELL of a lot!! LMAO

I don’t write as much as I did when I wrote my fic initially, and I feel bad for that sometimes, but it’s just a testament to how things have gotten a lot better for me and it’s not bad that I’m busy. I’m still trying to cobble together some more writing to eventually get another fic out, cuz I do genuinely miss it, but we’ll get there when we get there!

Anyway. TYSM TO EVERYBODY THATS STUCK AROUND FOR SO LONG/CAME HERE FROM MY FIC IN THE FIRST PLACE I LOVE YOU ALL AND YOU MADE MY LIFE BETTER!! 🫶🫶🫶🫶

Pspsps closeups/old pic under the cut!!

[forcebookish]

whumptober no.7: (alt) forgotten