#so heres a tumblr post about it instead

[wardingshout]

ALTTP december warm ups and doodling (and one from today, happy new year)

[sergle]

I'm thinking abt that pretty fall leaves embroidery pattern post and about how like... it is categorically a repost, it's a reupload. right? a thing that is generally disliked. but because it's credited, it's genuinely boosting the artist in question. and it could ALWAYS be like this. reposting content could ALWAYS be a symbiotic relationship, but because sourcing back to the original creator of something is so uncommon, it's just easier to ask people not to repost it at all. and people still don't understand the difference. or they'll go to the effort of cropping out usernames/signatures to repost something, which is More Effort than literally crediting the creator of something you liked enough to want to repost. Like. I literally don't actually care if my own shit gets reposted, you have to understand. I just don't want it STOLEN. But "do not repost" is easier to write on my art than "you can repost this, but don't alter the image/remove my signature, don't you dare write 'credit goes to the artist' because that is not credit, please link back to my original post or someplace that you can actually find me. please use an actual link/url instead of writing a non-clickable link of my username, because making it text instead of a clickable link cuts the number of people who will go to the effort of visiting my own page in Half." All those aggregate themed accounts, those fuckin annoying as hell instagrams and facebook groups that are like "body positive art we love wamen 💕 hashtag feminism" and then MASS-STEAL plus sized art created by women, if pages like these that always go and steal my older self-portraits and other works... If they just put a link to my prints of those pieces in the text of those posts, or, fuck, my commission info page? I would literally be living on the moon right now. I would have a house on the moon

[unforth]

I had a day off yesterday.

And I can already practically hear the assumptions that such a statement is prompting the reader to make. Those assumptions are wrong. I don't mean I didn't work. I did, for about 8 hours. That's not at all what I mean.

I mean my wife took the kids out at 9:30, spent the night with her mom, isn't back yet the next morning.

There are things I NEED people on this website to understand about parenting. And I've talked about it before, and I'll talk about it again, because honestly the way that Tumblr as a cohort talks about parents makes me sick. Multiple polls have shown that only about 2% of people on here are parents. We're a huge minority, and we're constantly talked over, ignored, or accused of being bad parents (like, personally, I have had people reply to my comments or come on to my posts and tell me I shouldn't have my kids). In my case, being a parent means I'm almost 41, I'm married to @ramblingandpie, and our children are inching up on being 8 and 6 years old.

My entire day, and therefore my entire life, revolves around them. I'm up most mornings at 5 AM, because that's the earliest they're "allowed" to wake up, and so my brain just defaults to being awake around then - better to wake up before them, at least then I get a few minutes in the morning. Between 5 and 7, I sit with them, do my social media, work on side blogs, study Chinese. Then it's helping them get ready for school, then my wife or I or both get them on the bus, and then I work until the last possible minute, which is either when I need to go pick them up for an after school activity or when I need to go down and meet them off the bus. My afternoons are after school activities, chores such as washing the dishes and cleaning up toys, talking with them, working with them, playing with them. Their bedtime starts at 7:40, and my son gets scared if I leave before he falls asleep so I sit with him until about 8:15. As soon as he's asleep, I go fall on my face, sleep as best I can, then wake up and do it again. Overnight, it's hard to sleep deeply, because about once a week someone will wake up in the middle of the night and need help. That could be as minimal as a hug or as complex as having to completely change the bedding on a bunk bed at 2 AM while also comforting a child who is afraid they'll be in trouble, or afraid they're sick, or afraid of their nightmare, or, or, or. Further, if a child is awake, there is always noise. I usually study Chinese with two or more competing sources of noise. I read the same way. My life is loud, and active, and consists of constant interruptions.

I adore my family, and I love my children, but this is terrible for me.

I do all of this as an neurodivergent introvert. My clinical depression is at least medicated, mostly because post-partum depression after I gave birth the first time nearly drove me to suicidal in under a week (we were expecting this and were prepared, fortunately, getting help was as simple as a phone call). The constant noise and interruptions and forced socialibility are about the worst combination of home-life I could be subjected to. I spend far too many early mornings just breathing deeply and gearing myself up to be subjected to the wall of Loud, Boisterous, Needing-My-Attention that is every minute when anyone else in the house is awake.

So what did my day off look like?

I helped get the kids ready to go and did some morning chores. I'd been up at 4:30 AM so I also had already social media'd and studied. Then, while my wife finished the preparations, I started work, and I worked from about 8 am to about 4 pm, straight. I didn't get hungry so didn't bother stopping for lunch. No one interrupted me, no one asked me to look at anything they'd built, no one broke my concentration, no sounds could be heard except those I'd chosen myself.

I'd been out the day before at a local shopping street and listened closely to the things the kids said they wanted, so at 4 I grabbed a couple orders I needed to ship for work and drove to our local downtown, dropped the orders in a post box, then went back to the shops and did some Christmas shopping in the 45 minutes or so before everything closed. I think I'm basically done with what we'll get them - other bigger things will be left to grand parents - so that's a load off, I literally had a stress dream earlier this week about it being 12/24 and having forgotten to do the shopping and having to go to (oh horrors) the mall on the day before Christmas. (Reminder: I'm a Jewish atheist. It's just virtually impossible not to Holiday in the Culturally Christian Hellscape that is the US. Also, my wife is Christian. So.) Found something cute for my wife, too, even tho I already know the main thing I'm getting her. Then, I realized - one of my favorite restaurants is on that block. So. I went there. I sat by myself at a table, only the indistinct restaurant hubbub around me. I read four or five chapters of my book, and ate a savory crepe, and drank lovely fruit tea, and got a scone to-go that I'll eat for lunch today. It was more than I probably should have spent on myself - about $25, including tip - but fuck it. I only get maybe a handful of days off all year, and I'm allowed to indulge a little.

Then I came home. There were no lights on. There was no noise. I had considered doing some more merch work while watching TV on the actual television (my kids are too young for subtitled shows, so usually if I want to watch My Shows I either have to do it on my computer when they're not around, or put them on and read all the subtitles aloud while trying to keep up and process the actual meaning of what I'm reading). But when I got back, the quiet and dark was so goddamn NICE that instead I curled up on the couch and read more of my book. I did that until bedtime - still about 8:15, because I'm exhausted. Then...I went to bed. And I slept long and deep, knowing that there was no chance I'd be interrupted and woken up, I didn't have to be, even in sleep, alert to every noise and possibility that I'd be needed.

I'm still exhausted and burned out, but even one night to myself felt really, really nice.

Saying "Tumblr does X" as a universal statement is doomed to failure, but generally speaking, the parenting posts I see on Tumblr, the ones with tens or hundreds of thousands of notes, speak what's apparently widely seen as a truism on here: that unless someone wants to spend 24/7 with their kids, to be 100% emotionally available at all times, is always kind and patient and perfect, they are a bad parent, maybe even abusive. I remember when covid started, there were multiple posts actively mocking the "oh god, my kids are now home all the time, how am I supposed to do this?" attitude that a lot of parents posted in despair. WhY dId YoU hAvE kIdS iF yOu DoN't WaNt To SpEnD tImE wItH tHeM?

Look at what my usual day looks like.

Look at what my day off looked like.

Do you really think I don't want to spend time with my kids? Do you really think I don't love my kids?

But I'm not a fucking MACHINE. I'm a PERSON. That's what people on Tumblr seem to forget. PARENTS ARE PEOPLE. The same tumblrinas who post ~uwu be kind to yourself rest if you need to, you should forgive yourself for that mistake you made~ will turn around, with zero sense of irony, and post "you're a bad parent if you ever raise your voice around a child."

Expecting parents to be perfect means expecting parents to be inhuman. It also means that a parent can't be poor (can't spend all your time being the perfect parent if you have to work multiple jobs or weird hours!), can't be introverted (can't be a perfect parent if you're not completely emotional available, god forbid socializing is exhausting for you), can't be on the ADHD or autism spectrum (what do you mean you forgot to get your kid to a doctor's appointment once? what do you mean over-stimulation can make you angry? how dare you get angry at a kid!), can't be depressed (gotta get out of bed every single day, gotta always be upbeat, patient, happy, or else that's Evil), can't be (like my wife) physically disabled (what do you mean your hands hurt too much to hold a child's hand? are you denying them touch?? CRUEL). And when the only answer you can offer to that is, "if you can't be that perfect you shouldn't be a parent," then you're saying people who aren't middle class to wealthy, people who aren't neurotypical, people who aren't physically able, shouldn't have children.

And honestly...what the fuck is your problem?

I'm not perfect. I tell my kids to just leave me alone sometimes. I raise my voice, especially when one of my kids starts punching the other, but also sometimes just cause I'm exhausted and Can't Anymore. I've forgotten an appointment by accident and felt like a total fucking idiot, and I've skipped an after school activity because I just wasn't up for taking them. I've served them more unbalanced, unhealthy meals than I can count. I've made many, many mistakes, but I've also done my best, and I love my kids, and I hope that when they grow up, they'll still love me even as they recognize that I wasn't perfect, just as I've come to accept my own parents' short-comings while still loving them very much. They're people, too, and the older I get, the more I understand where they were coming from.

When I fuck up, I apologize.

When they tell me they're unhappy with something I've done, I apologize, and I try to do better. Sometimes I even succeed.

This shit is hard, yo. And it's getting harder every year.

I'm BEGGING Tumblr: you need to start seeing parents as people. The way y'all talk about parenting on here is toxic, and genuinely harmful, and frankly exhausting. You have no idea what the reality of raising kids is like, and you need to shut the entire fuck up.

I had a day off yesterday.

I might get one more before the end of 2023.

I already can't wait. I am so, so, so tired. sigh

(if you actually read this whole rant and even a single word of it resonated for you, please reblog it. I'm tired of never seeing positive posts about parenting while I see negative ones with a bajillion notes.)

[luckyartdrawer]

(Warning: Body horror, Dead bugs, Blorbo in bad shape, Sap that looks like blood)

Putting the art below since I think a good chunk of people may not wanna see their blorbo be stuck in a tree covered in bugs. :)

(Apologies for the 10 seconds of dead air, Tumblr won't upload music without it!)

I am the honeybee

Drink the blood of the tree

I can't breathe, I can't see

Evil wind comforts me

Buried deep inside of me

Acarine

Buried deep inside of me

Acarine

vvv Alts and Yapping below! vvv

(Wish we could do more than one break rip)

No Bees, No Post Processing

Goofy ahh starting sketch

HEHEHE BE SUBJECTED TO THE MIND OF A CYCLE PATH

But actually you are being subjected to my music tastes, literally this whole idea comes from my interpretation of lyrics from the hit band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. ✨✨✨

Like imagine this: You wake up one day after years of being offline, only to find that you've been abandoned for so long that a full on tree grew through you. (Like how some do with stop signs or other posts.) The sap is all mucked up in your gears and all over your body, and then you notice all the little bees eating the sap. But oh- they aren't moving. With a quick scroll through the ceaseless database in your mind, the answer finds itself. You, the tree, and these bees are infested with Acarine.

Hope y'all enjoyed the art and the little snippet of the song I added in! :3

It just didn't feel right to not add the song I mean C'MON THE MOOD OF THIS MAN- THE SONG IS SO MOODY

AND ITS ONLY A TRANSITION SONG UAGHHH- I love this band <3

Anyways, combining both of my hyperfixations has proven to have done magic for me, so follow your heart lovelies. lololol

(Definitely not the last time Imma do that either oop-)

I have multiple art projects I already started but I cranked this one out in 5 hours because I needed it out of my head. I also thought it would be an amazing lighting practice and a good excuse to try new brushes and techniques. :333

It seems like with how busy I was in both October and November, I didn't get all the spookiness out of me yet. I've been thinking of horror stuff so much lately. o3o Hopefully this lets me embrace the holly jolly now lol

Man I'm so glad fall semester is over, I needed this-

I also need to go to bed 2:30 already uagh-

[coolnonsenseworld]

A little promo with my little obsession on the side...........

Reminder all items are shipped from Poland - for details on shipping times check out FAQ or send me a private message!

 mmezzy.bigcartel.com

[ziracona]

I can’t include them all so here’s a combo of ‘came to mind first,’ ‘talked about positively most often by fans,’ and ‘stuck in my head’.

Public Apology Big Iron isn’t here. There were a lot that didn’t make the cut but that one specifically I stg I put in and only realized after posting had not. It was 100% meant to be on this list and I’ve failed us.

[dreamsy990]

hi i wanted to draw my own au so have a snippet of scene i rewrote like 12 times and will likely rewrite again

[xagave]

Sorry for all the text posts lol but every day I wish tumblr was the popular social media site again bc I can't go on twitter without it immediately souring my mood >_> (if you leave me a comment on twit and I never respond I'm sorry it's bc I try to limit my twitter usage for my own sanity)

[geodesick]

[ID: a lineup of four oc's from tallest to shortest: rox, alax, bit, and kip. rox is thin with brown skin and shoulder length wavy brown hair, standing with her hands in her pockets. she's wearing a cropped red t-shirt with a bunny on it over a grey and white striped shirt, with a long dark pink skirt and brown boots. alax is fat with dark brown skin and short black hair, standing with his hands on his hips. he's wearing a purple shirt with a panda on it, a spiked choker, a black vest with cut off sleeves, black ripped pants, black boots, and fingerless gloves with longer mesh gloves underneath. he also has on black lipstick and thick eyeliner. bit is slightly chubby with pale skin and dyed blond hair shaved on one side, making a peace sign with one hand and holding the other behind their head. it's wearing a sports bra that says "boob" across it, sweat pants that are half solid gray and half checkered, a short sleeve jacket, yellow crocs, and yellow tinted glasses. kip is fat with a light complexion, a dark mullet, and a beard. she's wearing an orange bra under darker orange overall shorts, orange socks, and brown boots. end ID]

ehehe . my sillies

[forbiddentaako]

more monochrome practice I suppose

[front-facing-pokemon]

[hallowclave]

What a whimsical looking young man I wonder if he has received any job offers recently

Original photo

[cak31ssuperi04]

fun fact: Them

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

wither rose alliance........gneder

i assume this is in reference to the transgender/appearence headcanons post so thank you for your service anon gender you will get. for all of them, even. you will get it under the cut however because empires has so many members to discuss and they're all getting a good two paragraphs worth of thoughts.

ok so first things first just wanna establish the rules we're working with here, cause i think about this a lot. for humans (so the entire wra, joey, joel, and pix), we're living in a sort of medieval era in terms of science for trans folks, though not medieval attitudes. this is not to say there’s no transphobia or anything, cause like, there is and there isn’t. i’m not gonna be discussing anyone experiencing really aggressive transphobia here, but i’m still gonna be discussing gender norms and worries and passing and stuff, y’know? it’s a much more modern attitude towards gender than medieval times, that’s for sure, but it’s not a perfect world cause i like to project. but generally they don't have like, hormone therapy or anything like that. for the non humans, each race has varying approaches to gender, so i'll touch on them when i get to them.

starting with the humans!

fwhip

fwhip uses strictly he/him pronouns and is a trans man. he's the shortest member of the wither rose alliance, not because he's actually particularly short, but because the rest of them are all 6' or taller. depending on how i'm feeling for the day, he's somewhere between 5'6" and 5'9", but he's also constantly wearing shoes with subtle lifts in them, so most of the emperors are under the impression he's about two inches taller than he is. he's also the skinniest of the wra due to being just slightly malnourished (a thing i could get into but i will not do that here).

fwhip realized he was trans when he was in his mid-late teens, around 15-16, and spent no real amount of time in the closet. this was also around the time fwhip was beginning to be abruptly trained to be the emperor of the grimlands after gem ran away, so he didn't have great control over his gender presentation until he became emperor. at that point, fwhip chopped his hair off and began to present significantly more masculine, binding (i am giving them binders, for no reason other than i want to), speaking in a lower register, and defaulting to more bulky/form concealing clothes. this is partially because of the gender, but also because of the aforementioned "kinda small and malnourished looking in comparison to most of the people he hangs out with" so it is also in an attempt to look more intimidating.

gem

gem uses she/her pronouns and is a trans woman. gem is the tallest of the wra, standing somewhere around 6'2"-6'3". she is similarly lanky to fwhip (as she also is a bit malnourished, again for reasons i could but won't get into), with most of her being legs, but she gets a bit more muscle as the series goes on and she starts training more in martial fighting alongside magic. she also has a tooth gap, and is very pale and freckles easily.

gem leans pretty heavily into feminine presentation, skirts and very long hair and chest padding and all that, as she is much more used to the gender presentation of the grimlands, moreso than any other empire. gem realized she was trans not long before she ran away, and had slowly begun to come out of the closet when she decided to run away (that and the wizard thing are not related to her being trans, no more than they are related to her being alive, y'know?) the crystal cliffs has only ever known her as a woman, and she greatly prefers it as such. generally, the roseblings are the members of the wra who care the most about passing. gem also got her name from her late mother.

pearl

pearl uses she/her pronouns with most people, but if she likes you enough you might get he/him privileges, and is transfem. her gender is probably most adequately summed up as lesbian. pearl is about 6' even, and she's very muscular, with broad shoulders she's a huge fan of. she's built like someone who fights regularly, but also like someone who's been doing farm work since she could walk. powerful bones and muscles.

she has long hair, with an undercut, in order to make keeping it out of her face easier and to keep her cool in the heat. other than the long hair, she doesn't tend to lean wildly feminine in her presentation. she wears dresses pretty frequently, but it is simply not practical to do most of the work she does in a dress, so her closet's about a 50/50 split. she also doesn't do any of the cosmetic stuff (including shaving super frequently, but she also doesn't grow much facial hair naturally, just some stubble) and doesn't wear a bra. simply not her thing! also, pearl is her birth name, her parents were going for cool and gender neutral and then she became transgender.

sausage

sausage uses he/any, in the way that he knows exactly how he looks and presents and that most people will default to gendering him as male because of the way he looks, carries himself, dresses, etc. and he doesn't really care enough to correct them. their gender would probably most accurately described as genderqueer, but the better descriptor for both his gender and sexuality is bear.

as you might've guessed sausage is FAT and STRONG and HAIRY. she has very dark and thick hair literally everywhere, including a very thick beard. he's the middle of the road in terms of height for the wra, either the same height as pearl or a hair shorter but it evens out when they're in shoes. and i'm saying it again because i truly cannot stress it enough- sausage is fat and has a lot of muscle mass. that custom sword was a great sword those things are fucking heavy.

joey

joey is a trans man who uses he/him pronouns. he stands around 5'9" (the lucky bastard) and is very twink-ish. just generally very lithe but in an actually well fed way this time. he doesn't wear a binder because he doesn't really feel the need for one, and also he's in the jungle hanging out with solely animals all the time anyways. who even cares. joey kind of naturally passes well but he truly doesn't care about it at all outside of keeping his hair short, and even that's more a practicality thing than anything else.

joey has been locked into his gender ever since he was very young, and most of the people he grew up with only ever knew him as a man. he also absolutely abandoned those people and moved away, but this is also the only way the other emperors have ever known him to be, so. joey generally doesn't put a lot of thought into his gender outside of "i am a man", and frankly, good for him. also yes i'm implying he's just walking around tits out all the time and YKNOW WHAT. good for him. fuck it who cares.

joel

joel uses any pronouns, though he usually defaults to he/him, she/her, and whatever neopronouns you want forever. joel is the shortest of the human emperors, standing around 5’5” (sometimes shorter depending on how i’m feeling), and he only accuses his friends of transphobia when they make fun of him about it sometimes. ze is a very compact person, fitting a surprising amount of muscle into a (comparatively) small frame. joel is definitely wider than ve is long, y’know? also joel’s a butch lesbian argue with the wall if you think otherwise.

joel, despite being human, doesn’t quite have the usual human conception of gender. she's been on her own for a very long time, as her parents passed away when she was very young. he’s been a wanderer for most of his life, never really settling down long enough to get entirely mixed into the culture of any given place. the only human empire that joel spent any significant amount of time in as a kid was pixandria, which already had a laxer approach to gender than most of the other human empires (i’ll get into it), and most of joel’s childhood was spent in various small settlements or caravans that had a ton of non-humans in them anyways. this results in a joel who doesn’t really have a grasp on “traditional” human views of gender, and who doesn’t really care to learn. like, if you asked, he’s probably going to tell you he’s a man, or maybe transmasc if you really press, but it’s not a label that xe particularly cares about.

pix

pix uses they/he pronouns and is agender. they’re one of the tallest human emperors, standing somewhere around 6’2”-6’4”. gem’s usually still taller than them in heels, but they’re probably around the same height if neither of them has shoes on. pix is strong, i’m thinking like an mma fighter build. you can’t really see the muscle under all those flowy desert fabrics, but if you get into a fight you’ll know it’s there.

pixandria, due to being so far away from most of the other human empires, has a lot of more notable cultural differences. one of these things is their approach to gender, which has always been a lot more lax in regards to people who aren’t really a man or a woman. as a result, pix has been agender basically his entire life. as a side effect of this and being the oldest of the emperors, he was also inadvertently gender awakenings for a lot of them when they first met for diplomatic reasons. and sexuality awakenings for some, because they’re also so pretty. they’ve got very beautiful tan skin and hair that falls somewhere between their shoulders and mid back, depending on the time of year, and a bit of facial hair and they are just peak gender.

and now for the non humans!

lizzie:

lizzie uses she/they pronouns and is probably most accurately described as transfem, but labels get weird in this section. she’s about 5’7”-5’8” when in her human form, and then solidly 10’ in her ocean queen form. they’ve got broad shoulders as well, and is pretty much the definition of a swimmer’s build. she presents very femininely solely for the joy of it- flowy dresses and spiny skirts are so fun!

lizzie and jimmy are not the only fish people in this world, but they’re the only ones who are Like That, but they do both have experience with the fish folk that is reflected in their views on gender. due to becoming an amnesiac after crawling out of the water, a teenaged lizzie was taken in by some of those aforementioned fish folk who integrated her into some of the land dwelling fish cultures before she struck out on her own. fish folk do not have anything even approximating the human concept of gender. some fish can change sex depending on what their environment needs, like, let’s be real with ourselves here. the fish folk are aware of the concept, obviously, they interact with humans all the time, but most of them don’t do that and never have. lizzie, as such, has no concept of gender either. she uses she/they pronouns because she sound nice next to her name and just Feel Right for them as a person. they don’t have the gender attachment to these pronouns in the way a human would, but an attachment is absolutely there, and it feels very weird and strange for her to be referred to with any pronouns outside of she/they.

jimmy:

jimmy uses he/they/se pronouns and is a trans man. i know jimmy didn’t get the same ocean orb transformation lizzie got, but i’m letting him be at least a bit different on either side of getting his memories back. when he’s at his most human, jimmy’s about 5’6”, when he’s at his most fish, he’s about 6’7”. yes se gains literally a foot of height, it pisses off everyone in seas immediate vicinity. jimmy is very gangly and even after living on land for years, not super used to walking like a person, and it shows. he and lizzie are also two of the palest emperors, as they both are deep sea fish who are not meant for the amount of sun they get.

partially due to having integrated into land dwelling society when they were younger and partially due to the codlands being right on the border of mythland (and having a lot more shared culture than most human and non human empires would usually have), jimmy has a much more human understanding of gender than lizzie. hence the fact that he identifies as a trans man- when they crawled out of the ocean, people called them a girl, and jimmy found that to be not right, so here we are. the cod folk have different concepts of what being a certain gender means than humans, since they’re incorporating the idea of gender into a culture that didn’t originally have anything even close, but they have still picked up the gender thing more over time, y’know? jimmy’s more open to fucking with sear gender due to being a biologically different species from everyone sea grew up with, so yes, sear a man, but only in the ways that matter to sear, not everyone else (codfather vs codboy is partially a gender thing for jimmy. trust me. this is the voice of a person who thinks about this jimmy clip everyday.)

katherine:

katherine uses she/fae pronouns and is a trans woman. she’s 5’4”-5’5”, and has a very lithe and lightweight build so that her wings can actually support her body. those things are so small her bones have simply GOT to be light as hell. she has very long hair, coming to around her butt, that she spends a whole lot of effort on perfectly maintaining. fae presents very femininely, less out of a desire to pass and more because that’s just how fairies present in general, regardless of gender.

fairies have a concept of gender, though there’s a lot more nuance to it than human gender, with it being a wide spectrum rather than a binary. (obviously i am aware gender is not binary i am literally nonbinary but you know what i mean here). the fairies have just wildly different social hierarchies and systems going on, so their views on gender are a lot more complicated and tied into that. because fairies are also so tuned into magic, they’ve also got the closest we can get to medically transitioning in this universe. y’know the shrine that the wizard has in stardew valley that allows you to change your name, appearance, and gender, and nobody will ever comment on it and they’ll act like you’ve been like that the whole time? yeah that’s basically what katherine did as well. fae’s got her own gender she presents as to the fairies, but it has a similar sort of effect on non-fairies as well. no one remembers faer name before fae was katherine, for example, and she likes it that way!

shrub:

shrub uses he/she pronouns and is non binary. this is one of the most important ones on this list to me, to the point that i forget it's not canon and think people are misgendering shrub sometimes by accident, lol. shrub is the smallest of the cast by far, at 4'3", and is short and stocky. she is also fat btw. important for you to know this. his hair is quite short, mostly because he hates putting in more than the absolute basic amounts of work to keep it maintained. as such it never gets to be more than a bob. similarly, he defaults to shorts and pretty simple shirts because it's the easiest things to wear and run around in.

the closest things gnomes have to a gender binary comes in the form of pronouns. they don't have gendered pronouns like we do, but they do have different pronouns that are specifically used to signal what type of job the person in question holds. this means they have a ton of them, as you might expect, though there's obviously not one for every individual job, but rather groups. this also means that depending on the locale you're in or the dialect you're speaking in, what jobs correspond to what pronouns can vary a bit, for fun and profit. shrub is kind of aware of the human concept of gender, but her closest friends on empires are a fairy and a man who doesn't super care about all that, so the grasp she has on it is slim. as such, he doesn't lean particularly into any given presentation of gender, and defaults to he and she pronouns when asked because he likes the mouthfeel of them, honestly.

scott:

scott uses he/they pronouns and is nonbinary (though this is another one where the labels are weird). scott is tall for the emperors, at about 6'7", but actually pretty short for an elf. he is all limb, with very long arms and legs, and they're on the skinnier side. they also have the light bones thing i mentioned with katherine, but their wings are much more adequately sized, so it's not as intense. scott tends towards more masculine gender presentation, but in the ways elves are usually masculine in fantasy media. it's a very pretty and flowy masculinity that also sometimes includes skirts if you're scott, but only sometimes. also his hair is naturally blue. elves just have weird as hell hair colors (xornoth's hair is naturally magenta, for example).

elves simply live too long and are too generally disinterested in human matters to have human concepts of gender. that's a human problem, not theirs. due to scott's status as a diplomat and prince/king of rivendell, however, he's been engrossed in human life and culture his entire life, so he's very aware of the concept. this is doubly true for him specifically because every other emperor in his generation is also trans, and because the closet human empire to him growing up was the grimlands, which has the closest equivalent to real life strict gender roles. scott is well aware of the fact that he doesn't really have the same understanding of gender as his human friends, but he really wanted to fit in as a kid so he just started grabbing at things that they heard about from various humans they interacted with frequently. thankfully for him he gravitated towards nonbinary as a label very quickly, and he and they pronouns were just what everyone was calling him when he went places, and it didn't feel wrong, so, sure, why not?

(i'm not giving xornoth a whole paragraph due to the.... craziness, but xornoth is also nonbinary and uses he/they/it. when it was human, it defaulted to a more masculine presentation, such as growing facial hair, and never really going for skirts in the way scott does.)

[seaofreverie]

Sparkstember Day 11: Angst In My Pants (The Decline And Fall Of Me)

Album two of two in the series of Sparks' immaculate new wave releases! Iconic in every way imaginable from the music to the artwork to ONE music video. I think it's more musically (and lyrically!) varied and mature in tone (besides... a couple exceptions. Yes, an album called Angst In My Pants) than its predecessor, which is a very good development. These songs will leave you chuckling and bopping along and also pondering the intricacies of human existence. Ok, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but it can't be denied that behind much of the earnestness and theatricality here, there's lots of quite emotional, introspective and thought-provoking stuff to be found.

Thematically, this album goes everywhere. One moment we are in Sextown U.S.A, the next we're visiting Disneyland, California where we make friends among people and animals. On a more serious note though, I think the biggest emotional whiplash one could experience between different songs on an album is between Mickey Mouse and Sherlock Holmes. And yet there's still a very prominent element of humour, even in those songs that are on the more serious or dramatic end of the scale.

I said a few days ago that I'd try to return to the topic of Sparks' brand of humour and how it works, but I don't feel intelligent enough to analyse that today. And I'm pretty sure that from what I've seen, Other People And The Maels Themselves (Said It Better Than Me). So instead, as a little send-off, please remember: if a mouse can be special, well, SO CAN YOU!!! 🫵

Favourite songs (and other highlights):

Angst In My Pants: literally no other song like this one in this world. I can't tell why that is but it's just. So great

I Predict: I had a weird kind of effect where I heard this song in my early days of Sparking and it felt VEEERY familiar to me. I think it was due to the genre / style here, it reminded me of something specific, at first I thought it was very glam rock but I'm pretty sure that this is not it but something else (and I don't know what to call it in that case!). Anyway, banger song

Tarzan And Jane: whoa wait, am I already skipping to the third-to-last song on the tracklist?? I guess I am. This one's great and one of my early favs too (I wonder how long it will take until I run out of things to say about my fav songs and it all just becomes this list of 'it's very good and I like it a lot. next.')

The Decline And Fall Of Me: it's great!! I like it!! And, of course, "check out my pizzas"

Eaten By The Monster Of Love: personal reasons that lead to a printed and framed mini-comic of my making appearing on my desk, which features some of the lyrics of this song, which caused me to have it permanently stuck in my head for a pretty long period of time. And this way I ended up liking it much much more than I did in the beginning, when it still seemed somehow pretty unremarkable to me

[ithacanradio]

"do you miss kissing?" is a bonkers line to say to your newly acquired ghost friend as you're dying of hypothermia ily charles rowland