#that doesnt make me one

[x31043]

I guess im just bothered that when youre born an called a woman youre then constantly told to shut upforever,but when the opposite is true youre constantly encouraged to speak up.Youre ridiculed for not doing it, but to me thats different than being hurt or even killed FOR doing it. That means that childhood sucks. Adolescence sucks. Youre really in a place of forced subservience for your whole existence. You have to break out of that so hard. Youre physically smaller. You are trained to ignore yourself until you are broken. You are trained to be something that someone uncaring will shove themselves in and take, take over. You are literally raised to be an object to be used and discarded. That is UNIVERSAL. I know some people epxerience that without being born & assigned women, but for those of us who are this is literally a universal experience. You are fucking made to be a fucking sex robot and a servant and an agreeable nodding nothing whose opinions dont matter and nothing else. You are TRAINED in social cues and spend your whole life noticing every little thing and forcibly keeping all your opinions inside. Everyone should be lifting our voices up!!! Trans people should be screaming up at the sky not at others to keep their voices down!!

This literally makes me want to scream. Women are not treated better than men. Why would trans men be treated better than trans women? Where are you seeing that, where??? They have SPECIFIC, DIFFERENT experienes and also many that are the same! Because its a fucking spectrum, remember that discourse? When youre trans it doesnt work all neatly in two categories like that. I look like a trans women. Many trans women look like me. Many of us are non-binary and our gender is basically the same regardless of how we were brought up. Why can you ask me my genitals now and if i dont answer i get canceled. what the FUCK is that. Why has it become like this. It started as “our experiences are different, we need a space to talk about the ways they are not the same.” and now its-- disclose whether youre dmab or dfab to be a good ally to trans women. We have to talk about it ALL THE TIME. WE have to go based off genital differences to determine how you are privileged or not. That’s not the fucking way to move our community forward or to connect as individulas. And Guess what?? Trans women don’t even want it!!!

TME is a term that trans women made for VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES. It can be applied to SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES which require a very nuanced and exact language. I may be fucked up for saying this but There are times when trans mascs and butches face a speciifc, different type of transphobia to trans women, too. And they deserve a space to talk about it, too, while still DEFENDING trans fems from terfs. This seems fucking obvious to me. when its white ppl it all pales against transphobic racism anyway.

And that’s the long and short of it, bc trans women arent the ones I see taking about TME. They arent the ones actively claiming they have worse epxeriences with gender and dysphoria. Thats all like cute Nonbinary transmascs typically who are white telling me my experience was a lot easier than others in my community. And to me thats a part of this fucked up socialization--always talk youself down, and hold others like you accountable for reaching beyond their capacity. Other DFAB people telling me to shut up about my transness is fucking ironic in a way that doesn’t make me want to laugh. You were told to shut up your whole life, so now you’re going to put that on me?? Why are we doing this in the first place then?? WHy if not to reclaim the voice that was stolen from us?!

My genitals are thought of as absolutely inconceivable. The 20 pounds of weight on my chest is thought of as a dirty thing I literally need to press and constrain into tight and uncomfortable shapes or I will be violated when I go outside. Do you have any idea what that does to a kid?  I bet you know what it does to an adult. It’s a very similar experience! We need a space to talk about this without being called terfs or told to check our TME privilege. I am going to one day be a man with a beard in a dress. Whats not clicking?

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[emberglowfox]

birds of a feather

[stromblessed]

Mizu, femininity, and fallen sparrows

In my last post about Mizu and Akemi, I feel like I came across as overly critical of Mizu given that Mizu is a woman who - in her own words - has to live as a man in order to go down the path of revenge.

If she is ever discovered to be female by the wrong person, she will not only be unable to complete her quest, but there's a good chance that she'll be arrested or killed.

So it makes complete sense for Mizu to distance herself as much as possible from any behavior that she feels like would make someone question her sex.

I felt so indignant toward Mizu on my first couple watchthroughs for this moment. Why couldn't Mizu bribe the woman and her child's way into the city too? If Mizu is presenting as a man, couldn't she claim to be the woman's escort?

However, this moment makes things pretty clear. Mizu knows all too well the plight of women in her society. She knows it so well that she cannot risk ever finding herself back in their position again. She helps in what little way she can - without drawing attention to herself.

Mizu is not a hero and she is not one to make of herself a martyr - she will not set herself on fire to keep others warm. There's room to argue that Mizu shouldn't prioritize her quest over people's lives, but given the collateral damage Mizu can live with in almost every episode of season 1, Mizu is simply not operating under that kind of morality at this point. ("You don't know what I've done to reach you," Mizu tells Fowler.)

And while I still feel like Mizu has an obvious and established blind spot when it comes to Akemi because of their differences in station, such that Mizu's judgment of Akemi and actions in episode 5 are the result of prejudice rather than the result of Mizu's caution, I also want to establish that Mizu is just as caged as Akemi is, despite her technically having more freedom while living as a man.

Mizu can hide her mixed race identity some of the time, and she can hide her sex almost all of the time, but being able to operate outside of her society's strict rules for women does not mean she cannot see their plight.

It does not mean she doesn't hurt for them.

Back to Mizu and collateral damage, remember that sparrow?

While Mizu is breaking into Boss Hamata's manse, she gets startled by a bird and kills it on reflex. She then cradles it in her hands - much more tenderly than we've seen Mizu treat almost anything up to this point in the season:

She then puts it in its nest, with its unhatched eggs. Almost like she's trying to make the death look natural. Or like an accident.

You see where I'm going with this.

When Mizu kills Kinuyo, Mizu lingers in the moment, holding the body tenderly:

And btw a lot of stuff about this show hit me hard, but this remains the biggest gut punch of them all for me, Mizu holding that poor girl's body close, GOD

When Mizu arranges the "scene of the crime," Kinuyo's body is delicate, birdlike. And Mizu is so shaken afterward that she gets sloppy. She's horrified at this kill to the point that she can't bring herself to take another innocent life - the boy who rats her out.

MIZU'S ONE MOMENT OF SOFTNESS AND MERCY, COMING ON THE HEELS OF HER NEEDING TO KILL A GIRL TO SPARE HER THE WORST FATE THAT THIS RIGID SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER WOMEN, AND TO SPARE A BROTHEL FULL OF INNOCENT WOMEN WHO ARE THE CASTOFFS OF SOCIETY, NEARLY RESULTS IN ALL OF THEIR DEATHS

No wonder Mizu is as stoic and cold as she is.

And no wonder Mizu has no patience for Akemi whatsoever right before the terrible reveal and the fight breaks out:

Speaking of Akemi - guess who else is compared to a bird!

The plumage is more colorful, a bit flashier. But a bird is a bird.

And, uh

Yeah.

I like to think that Mizu killing the sparrow is not only foreshadowing for what she must do to Kinuyo, but is also a representation of the choice she makes on Akemi's behalf. She decides to cage the bird because she believes the bird is "better off." Better off caged than... dead.

But because Mizu doesn't know Akemi or her situation, she of course doesn't realize that the bird is fated to die if it is caged and sent back home.

Mizu is clearly not happy, or pleased, or satisfied by allowing Akemi to be dragged back to her father:

But softness and mercy haven't gotten Mizu anywhere good, recently.

There is so much tragedy layered into Mizu's character, and it includes the things she has to witness and the choices she makes - or believes she has to make - involving women, when she herself can skirt around a lot of what her society throws at women. Although, I do believe that it comes at the cost of a part of Mizu's soul.

After all, I'm gonna be haunted for the rest of this show by Mizu's very first prayer in episode 1:

"LET" her die. Because as Ringo points out, she doesn't "know how" to die.

Kind of like another bird in this show:

[creekfiend]

I saw this on FB today and I wanna try and express something about it. Like, you know the curbcutter effect? Where when curbcuts are put in it benefits everyone (bicyclists, people with baby strollers etc) and not just disabled people?

There is also whatever the opposite of the curbcutter effect is. And this is that.

This isn't just anti-adhd/autism propaganda... this is anti-child propaganda.

Kids have developmentally appropriate ways that they need to move their bodies and express themselves and sitting perfectly still staring straight ahead is not natural or good for ANY CHILD.

Don't get me wrong, I was punished unduly as a kid for being neurodivergent (and other types of kid will ALSO be punished unduly for it... Black kids come to mind) and thus UNABLE to perform this -- but even the kids who ARE able to perform this type of behavior are not SERVED WELL by it. They don't benefit from it.

This is bad for everyone.

The idea that bc some kids may be capable of complying with unfair expectations, those expectations don't hurt them... is a dangerous idea. Compliance isn't thriving. Expectation of compliance isn't fair treatment.

[taiturner]

Why could I never stand up to Dad? I should've stood up for Ben. I should've stood up for the family. I just... I should've stood up for Sloane.

DIEGO & LUTHER HARGREEVES in a deleted scene from season 4 of The Umbrella Academy

[mafuyuakgae]

even if I came to love humanity in the end, there’s no proof I was ever here, right?

[girlboyburger]

i heard you folks might like fluttershy? 🦋

[nova-rpv]

a redraw of the first drawing i posted here to celebrate the fact that ive been in tumblr for more than a whole year posting my shit and havent deleted my blog in panic yippee \:D/ (mushy rant in tags)

[hinamie]

playing around w slightly different hair renders

[just-null]

wrestling to be the first to greet you (they broke into your house)

[terrys-min-catl]

hey, i made smth (weird)

this is so bad, that it makes it double better

[xxplastic-cubexx]

[right to left]

finally finished This Wip from Ever ago and so now i ask you ever look into another dudes eyes and suddenly want to do whatever he wants

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

world's longest staring contest GO-

[choccy-milky]

(ominis is already on his family's plan but he's there to annoy seb anyway)

[deoidesign]

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!