#should never have left

[srfiv]

this is never getting finished

[inkskinned]

but i am sick of climbing / i am sick of crawling on hand and knees and scraping myself along the ground / i am sick of self-help skills and persistence and patience / i am sick of pushing myself and burning out and thrashing about hopelessly / i am sick of being a goldfish in a hot pan / i am sick of reinventing myself every season / i am sick of this feeling / i would claw this out of me if you gave me a sharp enough object / i am sick of feeling unsafe around sharp objects / i am sick of never finding an object sharp enough

i wish you knew the answer and could tell me and pour it down my throat until i gagged on it / i made my therapist cry when i said i had a lacking in me / i told her that a train could drive through the spaces i put into myself / the lacking is what does it, not the wanting, the lack, the dullness / barely-breathing with my teeth clacking in the cold water / it's the same fucking bridge it's the same dream and the same stupid kid / i wish sometimes i had drowned in that pool / i wish i had been different, not even that it was easier but just that i had enough strength to endure it / i wish it went away / i wish i had one good fucking reason

[jez-bez]

P'Cir, hurry up.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Burning Rotten Bridges

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[starssoblue]

“things were so hard with dad in recent years...how did he go from paparapluie to père? i wish i could face him and understand, but while he was still here i didn't dare try to tell him [any of my feelings] and now...it's too late.” * paparapluie is a pun on the words papa and parapluie (umbrella) since the plush is a frog. père is the french word for 'father.'

[witless-winion1]

A day before the Ithacans leave for war

Eurylochus: My dear sister, may I have a word with you in private?

Penelope: yes, of course, Eurylochus. What did you wish to speak with me about?

Eurylochus: Would you do me a favor...please, can you look after Ctimene? I know we leave for Troy soon, but I’m worried for her health- recently, she’s been very unwell in the mornings, and frequently tired, and if neither me nor Ody are here to take care of her, I fear…just please watch over her, would you?

Penelope, realizing: oh

Eurylochus: …what are you thinking? My queen, you seem pale-

Penelope: it’s nothing, forgive me. Yes, of course I’ll look after her. But thank you for alerting me to her…condition.

(inspired by @notsolonedesert, aka the queen of Eurymene- Aha that rhymes- anyways the comic)

[xxplastic-cubexx]

crusty evolution redraw. in theory.

[screwpinecaprice]

I was trying to eat noodles neatly and for some reason I got sad midway. So I drew them messy eating a biscuit and a strawberry to combat sad noodle blues.

[kaiserouo]

"Huh."

[kit-screams-into-the-future]

drawing your favorite guys being silly is very effective at keeping The Horrors at bay

bonus doc from a different canvas:

[elkkiel]

catboy spotted in the wild

[whitherwanderer]

Shaaloani Cabin [A/FC]

Just out of sight of Sheshenewezi Springs sits a cabin built by a pair of tired souls. 🏜️🐂

[frankenfran]

that post that says "she should be at the club" isn't about literally being at the club... what the hell are you on about yes it is? when i say toriel should be at the club i mean she should be out there sweating and shaking her ass in a skimpy outfit high out of her fucking mind making goat noises. "the club is not a place it's a concept" no it's in fact a very real physical place you go to. this might surprise you but some people actually go clubbing. you can't just high school literature that to mean something else entirely lol

[nell0-0]

Artblock be like:

A+ for effort, he's trying.

HC: Mask just has never tried this before. The most experience he's had with drawing was helping carve the tree with Skull Kid and drawing stick figures in the mud with a stick pfpfpf

[chaiaurchaandni]

4 year old Ahmad Shabat - an israeli airstrike hit him, his parents & 4 siblings; he survived, they didn't - then they hit him & his father's relatives; he survived, they didn't - then they hit him & his uncle; he survived, his uncle didn't - both of Ahmed's legs have been amputated because of injuries. He survives.

i hope Ahmad gets to live. i hope he has a beautiful and fulfilling life. i hope he finds love and safety and comfort and success. i hope he finds happiness. i hope he heals. i hope he continues to survive. in spite of the violence, in spite of the trauma, in spite of the horror. in spite of the world.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.