#salt hours over

[loverofpiggies]

can we see more of your comic with Winter King being:

Hey! I do my best to update as often as I can, and thank you so much for reading it! I appreciate the heck outta all the reblogs and comments and all that!

Updates might have to slow down a bit though, I do all the writing, drawing, coloring- the whole process is me! And doing as much as I've done for the last month has been a bit insane so I'm trying to have a better comic/life balance. That, and work balance. Comics are my passion but they unfortunately do not pay my mortgage!

Don't you worry though! It'll update soon, I'm working on coloring page 4 of the chapter, but YEAH I definitely have to slow down from my insane pace a bit.

[frikatilhi]

Artistic rendering of what happened

Bojan (beaming): Look, I'm Finland's son-in-law!

Jere: You go wedding?

Bojan: It means I'm your husband!

Jere: good chips

Bojan: MARRIED. I DON'T MAKE THE RULES. GET WITH THE PROGRAM

Jere: *eats more aggressively*

Bojan: asdfghjkl

[museaway]

what would you take from my room?

I was tagged by @rosemirmir, tysm!! This is adorable. I'm in my kitchen right now so the items are from that room.

tagging anyone who sees this & would like to play!

[iamthepulta]

i did it u_u

[siphisket]

Skirt Toge made a special appearance while drawing online with friends!

I ended up really liking how it turned out so I cleaned it up a bit, keeping on theme with the funky colors my friend drew behind him lol

[kelbunny]

After seeing so many bad TriStrat takes about something I've developed a new opinion.

They should have locked the golden ending behind NG+. Like even if you did everything correctly your first run you wouldn't get the scene that prompts you into golden.

I'm sick of people being told "hey don't do Golden on your first run, you'll regret it" and do it anyways and whine the route intended for NG+ is hard on a new game file.

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Finished Reckoning of Roku. Not a lot of good to say about it, even ignoring the Kyoshi factors.

Anyway lots of thoughts. Need to organize. And I'm about to be completely and totally normal about Kyoshi. *eye twitch of a totally sane person*

Did you know she was mentioned about 34 times in the novel? :'D

[s0fter-sin]

is there an actual medical reason why my body just doesn’t respond to medication and if there is please tell me it can be fixed bc this some bullshit

[wildflowercryptid]

awl really is just chock-full of little details so i wanted to talk about one jumped out at me now that i've gotten to year 5. mild spoilers for a wonderful life below, ya'll know the drill.

a quick run down for anyone who hasn't played the game yet ; an important peice of furniture in your child's bedroom is their bookshelf, which you can interact with to see what books they have and read excerpts from them. typically, the first book will correspond with what their current highest liked interest is and you'll find a new one to check out with each passing year.

bea's current major interest is in academics so when i checked her bookshelf on day 1 of year 5, the first book really caught my eye.

the wording of the title might be a little confusing at first, (when i looked up chaos training, it seemed to be a method of body building,) but it's definitely a book about chaos theory based off of the excerpt. i don't fully understand chaos theory myself, but in layman's terms, it's an interdisciplinary field of scientific study & mathematics that focuses on the underlying patterns that determine a seemingly random outcome. it sounds really complex and a lot of the jargon flies right over my head, (which goes to show how smart my kiddo is! 😤✨️)

an aspect of chaos theory that people might be more familiar with is the butterfly effect, which is an underlying principle of chaos. it's the idea that one small change to something can end up resulting in a large difference down the line. ya know. like how buying your kid the building blocks from van can potentially result in them pursuing academics as an adult. it's wild how stuff like how often you cuddled your kid as a baby or what items you gifted them as a teen goes on to affect them later on.

i just think it's such a clever detail to have this be a prominent book in bea's bookshelf in year 5, when all the different aspects of your kid's life truly start to come to a head and determine the trajectory of their future. it's really fitting.

[goldkirk]

.

[torchickentacos]

i feel like commentary youtube has a subsect of videos that come down to 'this could have been a tumblr vent post'

[notmoreflippingelves]

Hi! I just read your post about Mateo recently. If I may, can you give me any specific instances in the narrative of the show where Mateo isn’t called out as heavily as they should have? I’m just curious?

During the Shuriki returns arc in particular, Mateo makes some pretty glaring mistakes that I feel like he should've gotten much more flack for (and based on what we see elsewhere in canon, I feel pretty confident that if Gabe, Naomi, Isa, or Esteban at least --and possibly even Elena-- had made these mistakes, they wouldn't have been swept under the rug nearly as quickly as they were for Mateo).

While it's unfair to completely blame Mateo for Carla's manipulating him during the "Rita" arc, I feel like it's reasonable to hold him a *bit* accountable. He did after all blab highly confidential information (on more than one occasion) to try and impress a pretty girl with how clever and important he was. (Something tells me that if any of the others had done likewise, they would've been called out for it. But because it's "beloved" Mateo, we don't even get "wait, you told Rita how to get into your workshop? And you've known her for only a few weeks? What were you thinking, Mateo?") Moreover, he never even apologizes for this or promises to do better/be more careful with such important, sensitive information in the future.

Even more aggravating is his behavior in "The Scepter of Night." Mateo is so eager to play the hero and claim all the glory for himself that he twice (!) disobeys a direct order/abandons the plan and goes looking for the scepter piece on his own. This directly leads to Fiero and Victor finding the scepter piece and (temporarily) stealing it. And it's really only due to luck and very conveniently-timed infighting amongst Shuriki's allies that Elena and co. are able to get the scepter piece back. While Mateo does receive some (brief) criticism, it's nowhere near the level that it should be.

Also noteworthy Elena doesn't really get particularly "mad" at him (especially considering how angry we see her get at other characters even for more minor things) . She's not truly, actually angry at Mateo (and Gabe and Naomi are only a bit angrier); she's just a little frustrated and disappointed at him in the moment. And apart from a (very short) little "do better next time" speech, Mateo doesn't face any real consequences or lingering resentment unlike other characters who do.

When Isa obeys direct orders in "Sister of Invention," she has to face consequences (Elena grounding her). Similarly, Elena holds a grudge against Esteban for days (if not weeks) after he interfered with the Feast of Friendship (a much lower stakes mistake than Mateo's imo). Moreover, it's possible to interpret Esteban's staying behind in Avalor when the others go to see the Norberg Lights as a punishment (either self-inflicted or imposed by Elena) for his actions in the previous episode.

In contrast, Mateo just gets a brief "I expected better from you" speech from Elena and Gabe jokingly assigning him push-ups as punishment (which he immediately takes back when Mateo tries to do them). I'll give Mateo a little bit of credit for actually apologizing this time (which he doesn't always do). But it's still frustrating that everyone is so ready to forgive and forget Mateo's missteps immediately while this same courtesy is seldom shown to others.

I think it's worth directly comparing a few Mateo-centric episodes with a few more similar ones that focus on other characters so that we can see how there does seem to be a noted narrative bias in his favor compared to the others.

Let's start with two "feeling kind of insecure" episodes: "Spellbound" for Mateo vs. "Naomi Knows Best" for Naomi. In the former, Mateo expresses doubt that he's capable of rising to the occasion as royal wizard. No one (except Gabe and he gets over it by the end of the episode) blames him for not having reached his full level of confidence and potential right away and not being able to immediately solve the problem. And Elena in particular (and by extension the narrative) gives him so much validation and support. Whereas in "Naomi Knows Best" (and to a lesser extent "Finders Leapers" and the "Carla-as-Rita" arc as well) the narrative "punishes" Naomi for her feelings of self-doubt. We're told that *if only* Naomi had trusted her gut instincts and stood her ground right away, Elena and co would not fallen right into the trap and that Naomi needs to screw her head back on straight and embrace confidence ASAP to fix her mistake.

When Mateo feels insecure, the narrative gives him every reassurance about how capable and special he is, that he can learn at his own pace, and his insecurity isn't really such a problem after all. When Naomi feels insecure, the narrative encourages her to get over her doubts as quickly as possible because unlike with Mateo, there's "no time" for her to wallow in self-doubt and actually the fact that she even had said doubt in the first place is what "caused" the disaster.

On a slightly different note, Naomi is also called out for taking a little free, fun time for herself in "The Last Laugh" when the group needs her, and yet somehow I have a feeling that Mateo would've been allowed to take a day off if he wanted without any protest. He complains about long hours in "Movin' on Up" and Elena gives him the big royal wizard's chambers for him to relax and unwind in. Naomi asks for one (1) day off to spend with her childhood friend for her birthday , and suddenly it's big drama. (And at the time, Naomi asked for said day off, all Elena needed from her was help doing paperwork. The Team Ash stuff came up unexpectedly.)

Similarly whenever Gabe and Mateo get their little rivalry on ("Spellbound," "Party of a Lifetime," "Captain Mateo" and a few other examples) , the narrative either presents them as equally at fault or Mateo as the only one in the right.

When Gabe brings in Bronzino to train the Royal Guards in magic, it's specifically because Mateo failed to explain how and why he was training the guards in the way he was. If he'd just explained how they were going apply the seemingly basic exercise they were doing to real magic, Gabe likely would've allowed Mateo to continue the training at his own pace.

(Also like. it's super hypocritical imo for Mateo to get annoyed at Gabe feeling impatient/impulsive about their apparent-lack-of progress when Mateo himself is easily the second most impulsive character in the show after Elena.) Mateo feels entitled to keep important information to himself (or blab it to a cute girl he barely knows) even when its no one else's best interest. He's only okay with being "cautious and patient" when he specifically is the one setting the pace. And yet, Gabe is the only one who is called out for his behavior in this episode--even though he might not have acted as he did if only Mateo had trusted him and the guards with an explanation in the first place.

And then there's just a few other "dude not cool" little moments that never really get acknowledged/Mateo never apologizes for. For instance, there a two low-key terrifying Mateo moments in "Captain Mateo" that are not only not acknowledged but are also framed in context as Mateo being just "so funny and quirky". Near the end of "Should be in Charge," Mateo magically gags Gabe so he can't protest anymore about Mateo taking over as leader of the mission. And this is after having already enchanted one of the stationary suits of armor to come to life and fight Gabe. (Gabe admittedly does lightly shove Mateo out of the way during his parts of the song, but that's still a far cry from literally drawing a sword on Mateo as Mateo does via magic to Gabe.)

It's played for laughs (The Grand Council is just smiling happily in the background throughout the scene which is so yikes), so it's easy to overlook what's actually happening. Frankly, it's pretty horrifying that Mateo's natural instinct upon his experience/authority being questioned is to literally attack and then silence. (And attack and silence someone who is supposed to be one of his best friends and closest allies at that!)

Rather than the narrative acknowledging that maybe it's a bad idea to immediately grant power to someone to someone who is so retaliatory against fairly minor criticism, the Grand Council just gives Mateo exactly what he wants and doesn't even offer a "maybe next time, let's not gag or attack our friends, okay?" alongside it. I mean sure Mateo does step down as captain at the end of the episode, but it's very specifically presented as his and Gabe's voluntary choice and not an order from Elena/the Council.

[salt-baby]

I think the take-away from my near death experience is that I am simply unkillable

[i-looktothe-stars]

.

[pepsinister]

delicious double duck dinner yesterday

[blood-orange-juice]

What are some things you like the most about the sea?

I was once in love with a girl who reminded me of the sea and now every sea in the world is her.