#still very accurate tho

[dcrtmund09]

Why is this me during every BVB game?

[hauntedorpheum]

i like how your blog display makes it look like you “have been crying for 25 years about tv and movies” bc same. was that on purpose

Yeah that was totally on purpose

[isjasz]

Memories that aren't yours (thinking about the. scar multiverse...)

definitelynottober- day 14 in the webs we weave inspired by this post 💥💥💥💥💥

[potatobugz]

dugon my friend my buddy my pal

[sysig]

How far did you get? (Patreon)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.

[ink-the-artist]

forgive me if you've been asked this before or if its annoying, but how did you learn to use colored pencils like that? your art is so special to me.

ty :) I took an art class for a few years where our teacher had us buy prismacolor pencils as one of the art supplies and had us use them kinda like paints, pressing down hard right away and blending the colors together. its not how youre supposed to use them she was just trying to teach us to use color and ig this was more to the point. I picked them up again years after i stopped going to that class just bc they were there and i wanted to play around w them a bit and ended up actually enjoying it when doing it on my own terms lol

[cyellolemon]

His everything

oc: Olive (he/him)

[kittyoverlord]

Never Stop Blowing up is populated with groups that like making animal noises. No particular reason... nothing to do with the man who created the universe... nosiree...

Jacob's evil laugh is phenomenal also.

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach’s Issue with Queer characters (3/3)

[1][2][3]

So then there’s Giselle (and to a less canon extent Shutara) who I think Kubo erroneously categorizes as similar to both eachother and to the above gay men stereotypes.  And I think understanding Kubo’s approach to Giselle hinges on what he set up (but didn’t follow through on) with Shutara.

I’ve mentioned before, but I’m pretty certain think Shutara Senjumaru is meant to be a kabuki onnagata*.  Not in-world, mind you; I don’t think she is somehow employed as an actor in a literal kabuki theater. (i would hope that was obvious, but one can never be too sure...)  Just like Tier Harribel isn’t literally a light skinned, dark haired person doing gyaru/ganguro fashion, her presumably naturally tan skin and blonde hair is based on the general aesthetic.  Shutara likewise is channeling distinct look and feel that draws from a mix of oiran, geisha, and kabuki aesthetics. (granted all three are closely related in influencing one another’s aesthetics in the first place)

But while the look and even the demeanor tend to play all three ways, I think the particular fixation on clothes, costuming, and the somewhat adjacent theme of “disguise” that Kubo has shown to put emphasis on in this kinds of situations, as well as the fact that he gave her a distinctly masculine name, Senjuumaru, point to her being some form of queer, albeit something Kubo seems to pretty clearly lack the understanding to better articulate himself.  Is she a trans woman?  Gender fluid?  A male identifying transvestite?  There’s not enough real material for us to draw that particular line, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that she’s not a cis woman.

*Kabuki is traditionally an all-male theater form, and “onnagata” refers to actors who specialize in playing women roles.  Generally all actors train in the delineated masculine and feminine styles, but an actor’s career sticks to just one or the other...

...There is a whole big thing about how cultural institutions like kabuki and takarazuka theaters’ creation of socially acceptable and even celebrated, public and professional genderqueer spaces creates a myriad of gender dynamics that just don’t exist in the West, and it’s something that has made the attempt to adopt a globalized understanding of queer identity a little trickier in Japan:

In the West the gender binary was rigidly enforced such that to explore alternatives was basically uncharted territory (that’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean; There’s a lack of contiguity with those who came before) but with japan there were already nonbinary spaces in place, and the lines around those don’t neatly line up with the ethnocentric western ideas some people try to pigeonhole those into.  In general, it gets dangerously close to just flat up colonizer rhetoric.

(forgive the outdated reference image, but honestly I don’t know what even counts as a recognizable example of a “““trap””” character these days.  And I use that term with GREAT reluctance, but I want to differentiate the exploitative cliche usage of a trans caricature from any actual representational trans character.)

(ya know what, let me pull these out of the tags because not everyone is seeing this from my original post and obviously the context has changed around bridget since i wrote this... #geez this thing is so old that bridget wasn’t even reintroduced to guilty gear yet #in fact strIVe wasn’t even a thin on the horizon this far back)

Anyway...  That all just leaves Giselle.  And let’s be real, there’s no excuse for this one.  Maybe that seems like a weird anticlimactic place to take this series of posts... like, after all this, maybe it feels like I should’ve had some equally obtuse logic to explain this one away as a matter of escalation or as a Rule of Threes.  But no, not really.  I just think it’s a little unreasonable to treat the massive screwup that was Giselle’s portrayal as part of some sort of bigger ongoing trend, when it’s really more of an unrelated outlier in a bigger umbrella subject.

She is in fact a bad case of the long standing anime/manga fetishization of transwomen as a concept, as a spectacle to be gawked at and made the butt of jokes or to be included specifically as an anomaly.  And in Giselle’s case her specific depiction as a depraved, physically/sexually abusive villain on top of that is an explicitly toxic combination.

In spite of that, I still don’t think Kubo actually meant for it to reflect poorly (not that that matters or diminishes its harmfulness) I think he genuinely just has no real grasp of what that kind of characterization means.  I say that largely because of the way he treats a lot of her role in the plot.  Not that she’s integral to moving it forward, but that she occupies space and survives in the plot as long as she does, even when she could've been conveniently (and frankly more neatly) written out;

He seems to like drawing her and gives her a range of expressions and gestures (something he doesn't afford all his characters, even some of his major ones)

He likes to expand on her powers and gimmicks beyond what was necessary if he'd been aiming for minimum effort

He even paired her off against his personal favorite character, Mayuri.

Point being, Kubo seems to personally like Giselle as a character, but he took a horrible insensitive and ignorant path in writing her character.

But an undeniable fact is, she’s not alone as this kind of villain, she’s just the only one that happens to be trans.*  Mayuri himself, Aaroniero, Szayelaporro, Zomarri (just a little bit), Tousen (at the very end), Tsukishima, As Nodt, Gremmy (a little), and Askin all to some degree dip into this shtick Kubo does where his villains aren’t just sadistic but ecstatically so, to the point of intoxicated, gleeful derangement.  Yet in spite of that, those characters are all usually meant to be “cool,” not detestable.

Remember, Mayuri was initially written as, hands down, the most despicable characters in Bleach —he was abusive and sadistic, misogynistic, actually physically grotesque, predatory, dishonorable sneaky & underhanded, complicit in a genocide, just in general a clearly communicated mad scientist villain, and he was all of this in direct and deliberate contrast to Uryuu’s chivalrous personality type(already established in his defending Orihime from Jiroubou) as well as Nemu’s noble stoic subservient victimhood— and yet he’s also Kubo’s favorite character in the series.  Kubo doesn’t actually write Giselle any particularly worse than the others, BUT he also doesn’t disassociate her being trans from her being villainous, and again, even incidentally, that manages to perpetuate a harmful narrative in the overall.

*(Actually, I’ve kinda touched on it before but I sort of suspect Mayuri could be trans, in which case; OOPS, that makes two, and that doesn’t make it better....)

[1][2][3]

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

out of all the things I COULD be hoping to see during GW2's black friday sales, what I most want is for them to put all the mount select licenses on sale so I can FINALLY finish collecting Ruju's creatures--

[xxplastic-cubexx]

sorry if you've already mentioned but what (re?)ignited your love of comics/x-men/cherik? curious because there are so many different adaptations of them

i think im gonna speak for a few (or a lot of) people when i say that TL;DR the wolverine x deadpool movie that came out this summer is what pulled me back into comics and i COULD leave it there but i will go into excruciating and unnecessary detail instead because i love an origin story and i love oversharing.

under the cut tho because im nice sometimes (there's also wxdp doodles in here. if you want to see that)

ironically (and probably commonly), growing up i was more of an avengers kid. Kinda. Loosely <- binge watched the cartoons and movies and read copious amounts of comics and fics and i am hoarding fanart in my old dresser as we speak ok 'loosely' is a modest lie.

embarrassingly i remember getting into discus cause of captain america LMAO so yeah needless to say i was a Humble Fan- me joining my school's comic class/club didnt help either (shoutout to my teach from that she was the realest one out there for. A Multitude of reasons). she definitely is was inspires me to even draw still and make comics and i often think bout the tips i learned from her class tbh she was great

back to the movies t and comics tho, i got into em because my brother would offer to take me and that's how we'd hang out (i rarely saw movies in theaters and i even more rarely went anywhere as a teenager. still kinda like that today tbh ooops) and yk. it just snowballed after that.

my brother and i have always liked comics- he just more than me for a while (though he still very much loves comics and As We Know From My Posts we still talk about them whenever i see him To An Exhausting Degree)

durin then i was really into stony and i have a few surviving doodles i made but those are between me and god. and anyone who asks tbh LOL

'snap can you make this related to x-men again this is long' ok so fast forward to This Summer again I Still Don't Really See Movies but my brother offered to take me and this was the first time i'd actually seen an x-men movie in full

as a kid i only remember seeing the 'perfection' scene between erik and raven in first class while i was channel surfing. pretty sure i changed the channel after seeing mystique naked cause i was scared my parents would get mad at me if they caught me watching it LOL

BUT MOVING ON As A Kid i think it's also natural you'll sometimes watch 92 if it's on And I Did though evidently it didn't stick too hard (i do remember really liking beast and gambit though.... still do really): my knowledge of x-men was. INCREDIBLY sparse. like diabolically so so i didnt have too much expectations (aside from the fact i vaguely liked deadpool beforehand).

tbh i dont know why my bro never took me to see any of the x-men movies. it's not like he doesn't Also like x-men (90% sure nightcrawler's his favorite but my brother will be caught dead saying he has absolute favorites like that)- he owns a bitch load of deadpool comics/omnibus sets too (of which ive read over the years and reread this year) but Shrug moving on

Much Like Most Of The Internet i fell down the rabbit hole that way. i have some doodles i made a couple days after seeing WxDP that i now have an excuse to throw at all of you Look And Perceive

and so. As I Do. i got curious and told myself i'd binge watch all the x-men movies the week before i went back to school And Then I Did ft. My Brother Sometimes and then i said i'd binge watch all of '92 and And I Did That ft. My Brother Sometimes But Less So and now we're here. currently watching Evolution...

once i got to school i realized i lived near a comic shop and started getting into the comics that way (the first ones i got since going down this rabbit hole was Magneto Was Right!, The Resurrection of Magneto, and The Trial of Magneto. if you were curious !!!!! clearly i didnt care too much about context i just needed to see My Guy jelvejlkvj i have no regrets and Evidently ive read more since)

i'm pretty sure what dragged me into cherik specifically was the fact i saw a clip of The Famous ending to 92 where erik's aghast at the notion jean even has to question his love for charles. i think that was what officially had me refocus my lens on them: not a single poolverine thought after that LOL (all the cherik posting i saw on twitter definitely helped too but that was the nail in the coffin for any other interests i had: i was locked into cherik and x-men in general now)

that clip specifically, i was surprised at the fact they- frequently even- have the x-men franchise say erik loves charles and vice versa so bluntly. even if it's not meant to be romantic, i fear im just a fan of how casually the word's thrown around with them two and i got tender bout it all. Then Yk. i just live for the drama. the hilarity even. the sincerity .... they make me sick if i think of them too long so im gonna end it here

before i go tho ironically enough, the first x-men issue i owned was This one (story a this is that while stuck in some wacko dimension charles accidentally gets himself trapped in logan's mind while utilizing his astral projection. if you were curious). pretty sure i got it for free with another comic set i got years ago since our old comic shop loved to do that, but it's poetic aint it. maybe ill doodle something referencing it..

i should probably look into finishing this arc someday im Dummy curious to even know how it started and how it ends.....

[theultimatekamehamehavoc]

Sometimes, I feel Kyoko is like the Bonnie of Trigger Happy Havoc.

This sounds very weird to say but hear me out. Or... read me out since this is text.

This is unserious by the way but also a part of me is curious cus my gosh is she a hassle to find a good color to consistently give her.

Basically, in FNAF, the consensus on what the hell Bonnie is colored is all over. Is he blue? Is he purple? Indigo? It's always been questioned. Meanwhile, with Kyoko, though I haven't seen a ton of discussion around this, like, what IS her hair color. Actually. Cus sure. She's always been associated with purple and when you color pick her hair, it's almost always near the purple part of the color wheel. But also like, what color IS her hair?

I've seen it been drawn more purple, sometimes even white or silver. Hell! Her hair is described as silver in the first chapter of the game! So, what gives! Like, it's never consistent, even in official artwork!

Case in point:

This is how pale her sprite hair is btw

Also, it's not that any other character's been consistent with this in the series. Then again, at least I can tell that Byakuya's blonde, Makoto's a brunette, that Sakura has white hair and that Leon's a red head.

Plus, I feel that the shade of her hair is what MAKES it look purple. Which leads me to question more. Is it leaning closer to white? Silver? Does she just have purple undertones but it's not actually purple. And like, did her purple hair lighten with age or something cus novel Kyoko's hair is a lot more obviously purple compared to when we first me the girl. Or, does she dye it? Like, make it look like a darker purple in Dr3? Would she even have access to hair dye with the state of the world?!

And like, girl, I get it. You got your mysterious bit going on. But, dang it girl! Pick a lane!

[ryssbelle]

My cousins made their own troll Ocs and I drew them in my style.

They were very excited about it

[why-the-heck-not]

Forget spotify wrapped; my grocery store does a wrapped thing. I’m top 7% in ”vegetarian snack fans”

[sysig]

Those wacky skeletons ♥ (Patreon)