#that’s the kind of story I’d LOVE to make. they’re all different characters all going through their stories in the only ways they know how

[urgentkettle]

I think you’ve hit my point exactly. Dracula (book) and Nosferatu are fundamentally telling different stories. They have the same kind of monster, a similar cast of characters and story beats, and then they diverge both narratively and philosophically. They’re just different.

Let me be clear, I don’t think friendship would have saved Ellen. Nosferatu (the 2024 version especially with that opening scene) is rather fatalistic in this way. Ellen is doomed to die by the story no matter what happens. The only way to stop Orlok is for her to sacrifice herself, which is the only real choice/agency she is offered. She can die like his other victims, die and stay at his side as a monster, or die distracting him until the sun rises. All bad choices. And she is fighting like hell to live (and keep her friends alive) until it is revealed that there is no alternative. The fact that Ellen chooses to kill Orlok is an interesting and inline with the themes of domestic abuse and power. The 2024 version centers Ellen as the protagonist. This is a story about her.

Just as you said, the men are doomed in this same way. In the book there are months of time to collaborate and ride trains in order to defeat Dracula (DRAMA queen indeed). Even more so, the Scooby Gang are first bound together by their love for Lucy. which becomes their solemn quest to defeat Dracula at all cost (thank you Art’s fat wallet) and save Mina. As is shown by their affection and recognition of her cleverness, the whole Gang comes to love her too. Dracula is a story about the Scooby Gang. On the flip side, Friedrich can barely stand Ellen before things go off the rails. He throws Ellen and Thomas out on the plague streets when he’s had enough of her hysterical lady talk! As a group, the Nosferatu crew (help me workshop a more clever name please?) are bound by fear and an aggressive ticking clock. They don’t stand a chance.

Did you see the 1922 version? How’d you like it? I’ve got thoughts about that too. If I hadn’t seen it before the 2024 version, I would have liked this new one even less for not meeting my “but it’s Dracula!?” expectations. Going in knowing that the two are different made it easier to open my heart to this new one. If that makes sense. I’ve got the 1979 version on my watch list.

Bonus thoughts that are only spoilers for Dracula (book) under the cut

You didn’t say it did, but I’d like to point out that book Dracula doesn’t have a pretty ending either. Mina is saved, but not before she is brutalized by Dracula repeatedly. Jonathan is barely holding it together in Transylvania. Lucy dies and is damned. Quincy dies fighting in the final battle (justice for my man, they keep erasing him). Many of the film adaptations do make the ending prettier/neater. And I’m like, babes this is horror. The count is supposed to be scary; he’s a monster. This shit is pure suspense I wanna feel fear in my veins. But I digress.

I think a fundamental difference between book Dracula and Nosferatu is how the protagonists work as a collective. In Dracula, they are the Scooby Gang (trusting, collaborative, polyamorous). In Nosferatu, they are the teens from an 80s slasher (suspicious, deceitful, jealous). The count can be defeated, but only the power of friendship can save Mina.

[the-100-days-of-junkan]

Day 98

What’s better than this, girls havin fun by Oxidize

That’s right our final piece in the fanfic marathon is once again from Oxidize! A fact that surprised the fuck out of me when I found it out, given the drastic difference in tone between this and Burning Lungs.

It’s also a Chatfic! Which like, how the fuck do I draw that?? I’ll tell ya! I didn’t! What I actually did was I made art inspired by the fic rather than actually based off of it. Does that sentence make sense? No fucking idea! 

But you all know what this is. It is THE fic, the one that started everything off. Until I found this story my connection was Junkan was thinking it was a no good, toxic as hell ship, but also something that could be pretty funny if you played it as “Junko derails her entire plan because she thinks Mikan is hot.” And when I say prior to this fic I’m talking like, 2017-2018. Since that joke was based on a convo that was had in a server I’m no longer apart of and have no plans of returning too, which I left in 2019. 2019 was a real blank year for me and Junkan from what I remember. 

Anyway, there is just a little build up to this fic, but it isn’t Junkan related so I’ll try to keep it short.

So once upon a time I had just gotten into Danganronpa, conveniently I also discovered AO3, a treasure trove of stories about girls kissing. This was at first used for me to read as much Tokomaru as possible, something which would totally have no massively scaled effects on me as a person such as say, my egg cracking and me realizing I’d be happier as a woman. But we all run out of fics eventually, and it didn’t take many insomnia fueled binge reads of the Tokomaru tag for me to run out of stories. So what did I do? Get addicted to Chat Fics!! What the fuck else would I do, right? I just looked up Danganronpa and Chatfic and went to town, I initially avoided them on my Tokomaru binge because when it comes to ships, I’m pretty much always going to prioritize a fic where they’re the focus rather than a fic where they have like, 5 paragraphs of screentime. I would see a Fic, check the tags to see if it had Tokomaru, and if it didn’t, I moved on. And funny enough given current events, if it had a ship like Junkan, I also skipped forward. Oh how the fucking times change. 

I got addicted to these for like, a month or two I think. I would find one, start reading, and couldn’t fucking stop reading until it was finished. I just loved seeing the stupid antics the different classes would get up to, moreso when they interacted with eachother. I vividly remember laughing my ass off at one storyline where a few of the characters get lost in either an ikea or a costco? Hard to remember but god it was funny. These fics could change tone rapidly, had their own series of tropes and plotlines that’d recur throughout different ones, one fic got really fucking dark out of nowhere and it was jarring as hell, they were amazing. I kinda miss the days when I read them in such excess, I always kind of wanted to make one but also god no I could never.

If there was one perk to these Chatfics, aside from more Tokomaru, it was that it definitely broadened my horizons for what ships I was interested. Prior to this I liked Tenmiko and Tokomaru, that was about it. But through these chatfics I got into stuff like Irumatsu, Celesgiri (Fell off of that though), and most importantly and relevantly, Ikuzono.

So I of course, would eventually go on a quest throughout the Mukuro x Sayaka tag on AO3, sometime during early 2020. And unfortunately that was a significantly rarer pair to find fics for, especially for me at the time who was a lot pickier and only looked for Fluff on most days. 

So of course, I see this fic, and I almost skipped forward when seeing the Junkan Tag. But then I read the rest of the tags, emphasizing that it wasn’t gonna be abusive. So I thought “Fuck it” and went for it.

And thus the second domino fell.

Ironically while reading it I wasn’t focusing on the Ikuzono parts, helped partially by the fact that the relationship wasn’t established yet. But the Junkan? It wasn’t the deepest thing I had ever read at that point. It was like most Chatfics, silly, goofy, probably a little out of character, the usual stuff. But this felt different, it was something I had no experience with, and why would I? Up till now I was under the impression that Junkan was one of the most bottom of the barrel ships available in Danganronpa. Y’know cause I was like, only 2 years past my teens so my brain was still made of soup. 

But this was god damn adorable. Mikan was sweet and adorable, Junko was silly and showed nothing but support and love for Mikan. She calls her a Cinnamon Apple! And the fact that I’ve never stolen that nickname is a fucking crime!

There isn’t really a lot to talk about in terms of what actually happens. Junko does cute stuff with Mikan, Junko dropkicks Hiyoko in the head because she’s bullying Mikan, and Junko gets in detention, resulting in antics. It is just a really cute, pleasant fic that makes me really happy to read.

As you can tell that makes doing art based on this, as chatfics don’t lend themselves super easily to visuals. The best I could do is the aforementioned Junko dropkicking Hiyoko while Mikan watches, but it’s been a few years and I don’t have hatred in my soul for Hiyoko anymore.

So I opted to make something inspired by the vibe of the fic instead! And also add in some 2000s energy! Because I have an obsession with the 2000s aesthetic, and it has as much of a violent grip on me as Junkan. 

To capture that 2000s energy I tried to make this look like an ancient, shitty photo taken off of a flip phone. Cause I love flip phones, and hate Smart Phones. Which is why there’s a third version of this art that was purely an excuse for me to draw a Flip Phone. I don’t care if a chatroom like this realistically wouldn’t exist on them at this point in time, I hate Smartphones and I will be petty about it. 

Adding to the attempt at making the photo feel aged as shit I also tried to recreate the red eye that could be sometimes found in old photos from this era. As for the designs, ya’ll probably noticed by now that I drew Mikan similar to how I did for the Burning Lungs art. That’s because ever since I found out this fic was made by the same author, I’ve just kind of headcanonned that this fic is takes place sometime after where Burning Lungs would have ended, which I assume would have involved the two getting together. 

Now, the keen eyed reader will probably realize that wouldn’t make sense because Mukuro and Sayaka were already together in Burning Lungs. Whereas in this fic they aren’t together at all. And you’re right, that is in fact a big flaw with me considering these to take place in the same timeline.

But also. Look at the past 97 fuckin days. And all the other shit I drew while these were posted. It is safe to assume that when it comes to details that conflict with something I’m really into, I am just a little willing to ignore those details.

So Mikan gets her cute little bandaids, her itchy sweater which I imagine Junko would really enjoy cuddling into by this point, and a small detail that was only noted for a moment during Burning Lungs, but a chipped tooth as well. It was really nice gettin’ to draw this version of the characters again! Even if I still lack a lot to talk about with this piece, I simply hope ya’ll enjoy it!

And with that I think I’ve told all there is to tell in terms of how I got into this ship. Only took me 98 fucking days to explain it all properly, and backwards no less! Almost like this wasn’t thought out super far in advance or something! I feel like I should have more to say here but really, I kinda just, don’t? Hope ya’ll have enjoyed the Fanfic Marathon! As I’ve said before I really wanna show more love to the writing community for Junkan in the future, both for currently available fics, and the fics that have yet to be written! 

For now though, there are only 2 days left. And I have hopefully saved the best for laugh in terms of my own personal contributions. Ya’ll ready for another comic? 

As always, Reblogs, Comments, and Little Notes in the Tags are appreciated!~ They always make my day!~

[existentialcrisis-24-7]

Godddddd it’s such a pain to be hyperfixating on your own ocs. It’s a fucking nightmare. I just want these guys to do their thing and tell people their stories but nOOooOoOooo I have to write it first! But that’s not the medium I want to tell it through so I have to learn how to make comics! Or animate! Liek anfucking idirot

[valeriehalla]

I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:

I sorta just did some research into book typography...?

Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.

I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:

This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.

I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!

You should never, ever, ever do this.

This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:

Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?

*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.

2. Picking a font.

I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:

It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.

3. Adjusting the line-height

Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:

Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?

I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!

Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:

Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.

Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:

It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!

4. Paragraph spacing...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:

I did this for a few reasons:

It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.

A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?

Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:

Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.

Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!

But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.

5. The tragedy of justification.

You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.

This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.

Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...

Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!

Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.

I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.

As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.

That’s all! Hope you learned something bye!!!

[essycogany]

Small Things Can Make Big Differences 🩷

Hi, Fans Of Amy Rose!

This is my opinion and we don’t know what could happen between now and Sonic Movie 3. Anyone can disagree. I’m 100% fine with that and this isn’t going to tarnish my enjoyment of the film at all, but I’ve got to get this off my chest. I’d love to see Amy Rose in Sonic Movie 3 and would be disappointed if she wasn’t in it. Yeah, she’d probably not have a HUGE role or time to develop as much. I get it, but at the same time, I personally don’t think we should shy away from characters having small arcs.

Tails had one in Sonic Movie 2 and I wouldn’t say the movie would’ve been better without him. I don’t think we should have to justify a main character like Amy who’s existed before KNUCKLES (and debatably Tails) being in a movie about her own franchise. We shouldn’t have to wait a whole year for it either. Stuff takes time sure, but other movies with Pokémon, the Avengers, Mario, My Little Pony G4, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many others did it and did it well for the most part. Most of these have tons of characters that they wasn’t afraid to show in one movie. Characters with smaller roles still impacted the movies and in a memorable way too. We shouldn’t be so timid in bringing Sonic characters in Sonic movies. They’re just as marketable as these other franchises. The successes of the Sonic trilogies proved that.

Without Amy or other characters it doesn’t feel as full as it could be. Not saying we should’ve got all of them from the get go but a little more would be nice.

I’m saying this respectfully but that doesn’t make sense especially if we have enough time to flesh out the human core characters/side characters who aren’t even part of the main franchise and not the ones most audiences came to see in the first place. I’m neutral and understand both critiques and defenses so you can decide where to go to on that.

Back to before, you don’t need long drawn out character development in order to be written well. Tails turned out fine despite his small role. Heck, Amy’s roles in the GAMES were usually small but not less impactful because of it. Amy practically helped save the entire world with her “small roles” and one for an emotional and impactful moment with Shadow. Even small things can make big differences and that’s one lesson you can learn from Amy.

Amy’s interactions with Gamma in SA1 impacted the robot to the point of him sacrificing himself to free a Bird he needed to stay alive.

Amy believed in Sonic when the whole world (or Silver) was against him in Sonic 06.

Amy showed kindness to Sonic as the Werehog and gave her closest friend encouragement. She still loved him regardless of how he looked.

There’s more examples, but these are the most well known. Do you notice how most of them were small actions or small moments of development in small roles. And still managed to make Amy a wonderful character while impacting the stories?

I’ll also just show this too.

Also, don’t worry about her stealing time from Shadow. The film’s called Sonic Movie 3 not Shadow The Hedgehog. He can share the spotlight. Knuckles did in SM2. There’s no excuse in my opinion.

The movie doesn’t have to have Amy and wouldn’t be worse without her, but I think we shouldn’t overlook her importance to the franchise even if what she does is small. Or feel bad for being more aware of what little we get in these movies. It’s okay to admit certain flaws. Nothing’s perfect and not above criticism as long as we’re respectful about it. And for the kiddies who would like to see a cartoony animal girl character for the first time in these films, Amy would be a fantastic way to start.

Amy debuting in Sonic 3 and interacting with the boys would be a lovely way of establishing that close connection between the core four of the franchise. They’d literally have the definition of love at their sides. Again, small changes can make big differences. That’s all I have to say. Now I’m going to continue to be excited for the 3rd Sonic movie.

[physalian]

When can you "tell" instead of "show"?

Based on some beta feedback I got, I have thoughts on a narrative style that is very “tell” over “show” and when it might be useful to be a little leaner. This is highly, highly subjective and no matter how much potential a story might have to be entertaining, some readers will get turned off by the lack of “immersion” no matter what you say to them. Doesn’t make the book bad, doesn’t make the reader wrong, you just can’t please everyone.

So I got some feedback on my new novella, Tell Me How Long, about a group of marine biologists with the chance of a lifetime to save a Mer, sick from the epidemic of bleaching coral reefs. Outside of fanfic, where I don’t have to tell you the worldbuilding, it’s all been done by the canon, I don’t write short stories. My usual wordcount is 100k+ words, easy, for sci-fi and fantasy.

TMHL was written like a fanfic, in many ways. I’d pulled the OC characters from my other work and tossed them into this little ficlet because I was suffering some writer’s block and I like mermaids and here we are. It’s 20k words and is bereft of the following:

A main villain character

Romantic subplots

Manufactured drama for a 3rd act “falling out” between characters

Lengthy backstory for all but 2 characters

Lore or magic

The main threat is simply time, the ravages of a disease, and the nihilism of the MC raging against the creep of global warming destroying the reefs she loves so dearly.

It has themes, too, asking the question of whether commodification of the natural world is necessary for preservation, of which all the main humans have different perspectives on.

My merfolk cannot speak, so while they can learn Sign and can understand English, there’s no place for lengthy conversations between mer and humans or opportunities for explanations of backstory.

It is absolutely a very “telling” story, lots of speeding through the MC’s days while dealing with and treating this disease. She does get moments of introspection, this is my only WIP from the past 9 years of my writing career that does not have multiple narrators. It’s all Finley all the time.

But due to the nature of this story and setting, 4/6ths of it is set on and around a single boat anchored in the Great Barrier Reef, there is no justification for extra scenes away from the action.

Nor are these mer trapped by anything except the need for medicine and while they do trust these immediate humans, they’re itching to leave as soon as they can, so there’s no precedent for longer, fluffier moments, when half the characters aren’t invested in establishing a long-lasting friendship with the other half.

I wrote it this way because you’re not here for Finley’s (MC) daily hum-drum of life. You’re here for the mer. Who is she outside of this job? Not important. What’s her family life like? Not important. What’s going on in the rest of the world? Not important. What’s the backstory for the rest of the team? Not important.

So much I could add simply does not matter, is not important, and would only detract from the reason you’re reading it: You want to know if they’ll save the mer, and if, in doing so, they’ll tell the rest of the world that mer still exist.

Does this leave some threadbare characters? Absolutely. The story I wanted to tell was not one of individuals with great depth and symbolism, it’s the collective effort of a generation facing the consequences of inaction by our elders.

And in that way, I think “telling” in terms of not having those slower moments, in not being all that flowery, in not giving the individual humans many solo scenes to really define who they are and what they stand for, works for this specific kind of story.

There can be a time to hold back on the rich character development, I think, when “what they do” matters more to the story than “who they are”.

I do plan to go back and add in some extra detail, but we’re talking 400 words at most across the entire story, a sentence or two here or there for clarity.

But at the end of the day, this is the story I wanted to tell, written in the way I wanted to tell it.

[angelmichelangelo]

Any thoughts/opinions on TMNT 2007, either in comparison to other iterations or about the characters/relationships in general?

oh boy have i got some thoughts on TMNT 2007 !

straight off the bat i’d say it feels so set apart from all of the other ninja turtles movies we had/have at that point. they’re a little older (i can’t remember the canon ages but wasn’t it pretty much fanon for a long time that they were at least early 20s?) and starts their story off kinda at their end.

2007 was also supposedly a continuation of the 1990s movies. whether you want that to be solid canon or not (personally i don’t) but either way, they’re kind of in “retirement” stage of their lives with everything with shredder already happened and this is kind of just the aftermath of that.

the relationships in this movie !!!!! oh my GOD it’s just near to absolute perfection. i usually don’t always super love the classic raph/leo tension just because sometimes it feels a little overdone and can really take away the shine from other aspects of the movie, but i really do like how different it feels here.

raph is so obviously not coping with having so much of his family dynamics changed. and i think that’s why the whole aspect of the movie being set after all of their biggest most heroic adventures works well, because in a way, this movie just highlights how much their lifestyle has impacted them. imo raph struggles with having leo so far from home. he’s going through a little bit of separation anxiety, can’t regulate his emotions properly and lashes out bad.

leo obviously takes this all the wrong ways. he’s going through something too so he’s blind-sighted to the fact that raph isn’t intentionally trying to piss him off. they’re back butting heads maybe because it feels most familiar in a way that hasn’t been since leo left.

b-team in this movie is just. chefs kiss. so much to unpack here, too.

donnie who is finally being highlighted for how much he does for his family behind the scenes, normally quietly bumbling along, now here he is, trying to keep a sense of normality and feeling under appreciated!! which rightly so!! he kind of just gets this shit load of responsibility thrusted onto him when leo leaves and raph distances himself. he’s treading water in the deep end, barely afloat but rarely does he really lash out because he wants to do good, and keep peace (mostly for mikey’s sake, I would argue)

and mikey. oh mikey. easily one of my favourite interpretations of mikey in this movie. he’s kind of mellowing out and maturing in a way that i think hits leo with full force when he comes home from south america. all because he’s had to grow up and pick up the pieces left behind in the wake of their family kind of slowly crumbling apart.

they’re all hurting in this movie but mikey’s hurt is so painfully obvious and so masked when he’s putting up with a job he really hates, barely seeing much of either brother he has left because of their schedules and feels cooped up. he trips over himself with just pure glee when he sees that leo is finally home. he’s still that kid at heart, despite everything, that truly believes that his big brother can mend this. it’s a really bittersweet thing to think of him just hoping his life would fall back into place again after it being so out of sorts for so long.

TMNT 2007 isn’t a perfect movie by any means. whilst i adore the way the turtles have been written, is still falls into the trap of making don + mike background characters towards the last half, giving leo + raph the limelight once again, and sometimes leo does act a little out of sorts but i could just pin that down to him having some sort of PTSD, so it remains high in my ranks regardless.

it’s not perfect but it’s still really really good. the animation holds up pretty well. it paved the way for 2012 in regards to CGI turtles. the voice acting is something i don’t see hyped up enough. nolan north as raphael?!!! i feel like as a fandom we definitely sleep on that fact way too hard

the plot is original and fresh and it’s clear that this wasn’t just a cash grab, but a real love letter to the franchise and to the fans:) the people that made this cared for these characters and this world and it shows :)

the fight scenes are really fun and easy to follow. the leo raph rooftop scene is just incredibly done. whoever wrote that.. please always be involved in tmnt wherever you are.. honestly pure fire some of those lines

nobody feels like a caricature of themselves here, which often happens with tmnt when a new universe is introduced, just to establish their character roles. i really love the thought of them in the wake of the fight and after the dust settles and they’re trying to cope with their feelings and problems separately because they don’t know what else to do. they need a million hugs, please, i would love to see more of this that isn’t just the last ronin. show me the turtles in their 30s trying to adjust to their lives changing drastically as they’re getting older and recognising their trauma, finally. i would eat that up!

in anyone hasn’t seen TMNT 2007 (which, i’d assume most of my followers probably has) then i would absolutely recommend it !!

forever mourning the mikey centric sequel we were supposed to get before the studio shut down and forever sending wishes up that there’s someone out there with enough money and a dream to bring it to life in some way shape or form (i’ll take a comic. a mini series. anything lmao)

TMNT 2007 will always have a special place in my heart :)

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

While I don’t think the senti-kid story necessarily works if the writers wanted to keep the show focused on kids, I think it would’ve gone over a bit better if it was just Felix who was the senti, rather than also Adrien and Kagami (especially Kagami, she was a complete retcon in that regard).

Picture this:

Gabriel, Emilie, and Natalie find the Miraculous (Butterfly and Peacock) because they have an expensive hobby (archeology/collecting rare items, as wealthy people like to do), not because they need the magic at all. They just heard a rumor of an old Tibetan monastery and wanted to check it out, got lucky in finding the two jewels. The Peacock doesn’t even have to be broken.

We can keep the basics of the backstory shown in Representation- minus the detail of Adrien being made with the Peacock. Gabriel and Emilie conceive Adrien normally, but Colt and Amelie aren’t able to like in canon, so Colt has that same jealous outburst at Gabriel. Because Emilie feels bad for her sister, and Gabriel sees an opportunity to make a deal, they lend, or maybe trade, the Peacock to them to create a child. As in canon, Colt uses it, and his jealousy makes Felix a physical copy of Adrien.

Emilie gets sick for non-magical reasons. (I wouldn’t mind having her use it for funsies and not realizing it was broken, but it’s very obviously cracked, and I can’t imagine at least one of their two kwamis not giving them a warning.) As for what happens to Colt, I’m on the fence about him being alive in present times because that kind of abuse is really heavy, so maybe he just dies for unsaid reasons (though I vote Amelie poisoned him or something).

This version would allow for a really cool contrast between Adrien and Felix’s stories and characters. You have Adrien, a normal human, capable of disobedience, but who bends easily under others and is a people-pleaser. Versus Felix, a senti being magically compelled to obey orders of whoever has his amok, but fights to be free every chance he gets. That contrast would also further Felix’s frustration and jealousy of Adrien, in addition to his own father’s hatred of him and being identical to his cousin, because Felix would kill for Adrien’s free will, but he squanders it. But then there’s also the issue that he’s essentially victim blaming Adrien, not realizing that magic isn’t the only way to force obedience- not to mention ignoring the times that Adrien did stand up for himself (like running away to school). I think that would be a really great discussion of free will, how jealousy can blind you, family conflict (and resolution), and how different kinds of abuse/trauma aren’t automatically better than each other just because they’re opposites (ex: someone with heatstroke shouldn’t be jealous of someone with frostbite. Both suck.) The intensity might be worse for each circumstance (since Felix has magical abuse and physical+verbal abuse), but he would be in the wrong for saying Adrien has it easy.

(I think at this point my ADHD is over-explaining, so I’ll leave it at that lol)

Do you think a route like that would’ve improved the show at all? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The sentiplot has many issues and one of the big ones is that it's not a great fit for a show where Marinette is the one and only main character. They've given Kagami, Felix, and Adrien this massive weight that begs for them to take center stage for at least a few episodes, but probably a whole season or two. The show isn't going to do that, so it's near impossible to really fix the sentiplot without truly massive changes to canon.

That being said, I think that this idea would have vastly improved the sentiplot in its current form! Right now, the senti thing truly doesn't matter to Adrien's character. His mom could have gotten sick for any random reason and the only meaningful change would be that Gabriel couldn't use the rings to keep Adrienette from kissing that one time. Outside of that, Adrien's status has no meaningful effect on the story. It doesn't even keep him out of the final! He does that on his own! The senti thing is just there for cheap drama.

There's also the issue that the current storyline makes the Agreste's look awful which is clearly not the story's goal. Emilie is supposed to be an angel and Gabriel is supposed to be a grief-stricken man who loves his family. That doesn't fit with the kind of monsters who would make a magical designer slave to be their child and then wear his control rings around as daily accessories. Remember, they picked their freaking wedding rings for his slave collars! Most people wear those every day. The implications are nasty!

It makes way more sense for the Agreste's to have the peacock for more mundane reasons and for Colt to get it somehow. Maybe even have him steal it after he finds out about it to really remove the Ageste's from the perfect slave child issue. This allows for the contrast between Gabriel and Colt that canon so clearly wanted, but failed to write. It also makes Felix's actions towards Adrien make way more sense. It feels like canon Felix hates Adrien and we still don't know why that is.

As nebulous as Felix's character is, he still feels like the kind of character who needs to be tied to something like the sentiplot. It's part of the reason I don't think I can use him in my own stuff. The sentiplot is - or at least should be - such a major, defining thing for him that the only possible way to use him is to keep that plot or to give him a plot about freeing the Kwamis since they're also slaves and his abusive childhood could make him feel a bond with them.

Focusing the sentistruggle on Felix instead of spreading it out to include Adrien and Kagami would also keep the sentistuff from dominating the story. Making the male romantic lead an artificial being without true free will whose creation killed his mother is a massive thing that needs to be the focus of his character for the rest of the story. People are on the edge of their seats waiting for Adrien to learn the truth and want this to be a big plot. I do not think they're going to get that, but they should.

Having a side character be the artificial human allows this to be something that is dealt with and then Felix either leaves or fades into the background once his story is over because his story allowed to have an ending whenever they want it to. That's not true for Adrien. Adrien's ending is happily every after with Marinette and the sentiplot needlessly complicates that plan because it means that Adrien's character is always going to be center stage, making people want the sentiplot to mean something since it's apparently impossible for him to ever be a real boy who has true free will. That's such a massive thing that it begs for Adrien to be the main character, which is an asinine writing choice. I have no idea why they keep giving Adrien all this massive narrative weight. You don't do that if you want the female romantic lead to be the main focus! You do it if you want them to be true costars or if you want the male lead to get the majority of the focus. This is writing 101!

As you said at the top, I'm not sure how well this works for a show aimed at five-year-olds because it's still a pretty heavy stuff, but as a general idea, I'd be down to watch it! I didn't have a ton to add to this one because your pitch was already excellent!

[pedroscurls]

Dirty Little Secret (Part 1).

Character(s): no-outbreak, age-gap!Joel Miller x fem!Reader Summary: You meet Joel Miller, the father of the bride. Word count: 1.9k A/N: Lol, I said I was gonna post this tomorrow, but I couldn't wait. I hope you guys enjoy this first part and thank you to anyone who reads this! As mentioned, idk what to call this, best friend’s fiancée’s dad!Joel x fem!reader? Lol, I feel like that's a bit complicated, but there's an age gap in this story. This is also pulled from my own experience (only the sexual tension... unfortunately nothin' happened lol🫣) Warning: age-gap (Joel is in his 50s, reader is in her early-30s) SERIES MASTERLIST

“So… Can you make it?”

“I wouldn’t miss it, Drew.” you tell your best friend, gently nudging his shoulder. “I just still can’t believe you’re finally settling down. I never thought I’d see the day.”

He laughs. Andrew - or Drew - has been your best friend since you were kids. You had moved into the neighborhood with your mom after she and your dad divorced and you remember how Drew and his family had welcomed you with open arms whenever your mom was too inebriated to take care of you. 

Living next door to Drew and his family was a godsend to you, especially at the young age of eight. They protected you. They made you feel safe, made you feel loved. It was always a stark contrast between your home and his. Drew’s house, from the moment you stepped foot inside, always gave you the warm feeling in your belly and you always found yourself never wanting to leave, not wanting to go back home to the empty and lonely feeling that you experienced every night. 

And now, over twenty years later, Drew and his family have maintained that unspoken promise to keep you safe, to protect you, and to always make sure that you were loved. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Drew rolls his eyes. “What about you? When are you gonna settle down?” 

Now it was your turn to laugh. You grab your wine glass and finish the last remaining liquid. “I’m not the marrying type,” you respond. 

“You won’t turn out like your parents,” he says softly. 

“Drew, I know,” you sigh. “I just– I don’t want to open myself up like that. It’s too scary.” 

“You never know,” Drew smiles. “I thought I liked being single, being with a different woman every week or so, but Sarah…” he lets out a sigh of contentment. “She’s just– It’s been four years since we’ve been together and I think I fall more in love with her every day.” 

“Okay, lover boy,” you chuckle. “We get it. You’re in love. You’re about to get married… But I agree with you. She’s the best, and she’s the only one of your girlfriends where she didn’t feel intimidated by me or our friendship.” 

Drew sighs, “I know. It’s the curse of having a woman as a best friend.” 

“Whatever,” you roll your eyes. “The women before Sarah were just jealous and not confident or secure in their relationship with you.” 

Drew nods. “That’s true. Besides, you’re like a sister to me.” He smiles, wrapping his arm around your shoulders. 

“Like a big sister?” You tease. “Just kidding, we’re only a year apart.” 

“Yeah, and I’m the older one.”

Just as you were going to say something, Sarah steps out into the backyard and walks in your direction. You look over at Drew and smile to yourself, seeing the way his eyes light up when he sees her and how he immediately stands up to meet her half way, enveloping her in a tight embrace. 

“Hi, baby,” he whispers, gently kissing her temple. “How’d dinner with your dad go?” 

“It was good. He was asking about you. Same with Uncle Tommy.” 

“Ah,” he chuckles. “They’re gonna give me shit the next time I see them, aren’t they?” 

Sarah grins and you swear that you see Drew fall in love all over again with the sight of her smile. You can see her deep dimples on her cheeks and how her eyes soften and also seem to smile. It was one of the first things you noticed about her: the kind and warm look she gave you – it was the same look that Drew and his family looked at you. 

“You know it. Now, let me go say hi to my girl. Can you go inside and pour me a glass of wine?” 

Drew nods and kisses her cheek before he disappears inside the house. Sarah takes his seat and looks over at you, arching her brow. 

“What?” you ask. 

“I might have someone that is interested…” she grins. 

“Sarah,” you chuckle. “You and Drew need to stop playing matchmaker. The past two blind dates I have been on have been terrible.” 

“You didn’t even give it a chance,” Sarah sighs. 

“You know I like older guys,” you smile. “I just don’t want to settle down. Getting married and all that doesn’t have to happen for everyone.”

“I know,” she leans against you. “I just want you to be happy.”

“And a man isn’t gonna be the answer.” You look over at her. You can see the concern on her features – that was another thing that you learned about Sarah. She wears her heart on her sleeve and whenever she gets worried about the people she cares about, her face and expressions tell it all. “I’m fine,” you reassure her. “I got you and I got Drew. That’s all I need.” 

“Maybe I should set you up with my Uncle Tommy,” she teases, letting out a quiet laugh. “He’s older. Single. He needs a good woman to anchor him down.” 

“And why’s that?” you smile. “Is he trouble, Sarah?” 

She laughs, shaking her head. “No, he just hasn’t found someone yet.” 

“Like me,” you point out. 

“He’s older,” she chuckles. 

“Well, your engagement party is this weekend. I’m assuming he’s gonna be there?” you tease. 

“Oh my god, are you serious?” You see the light in her eyes, the excitement across her features. 

“No! He’s your uncle, how weird would that be?” 

“Not weird,” she laughs. “It’d be weird if it was my dad you were interested in.” 

“Isn’t he like fifty?” 

“More than that, fifty-six.” 

Drew steps out into the backyard with two glasses of wine, one for Sarah and another refill for you. 

“Is this an early celebration?” you tease. 

“We just wanna celebrate with you one-on-one before the pre-wedding festivities begin. It’s gonna be a lot,” Drew replies, sitting next to Sarah and wrapping his arm around her shoulders instantly. 

“Well, whatever you both need, just let me know. After all, I am your best woman,” you tell Drew. 

Sarah smiles and leans against Drew, bringing the glass of wine to her lips. “It’s gonna be fun,” she adds. “But Drew’s right. It will be a lot, so this is kind of like the calm before the storm.”

“Well, cheers to that then,” you laugh, raising your glass. “Cheers to you both and cheers for what’s to come.” 

You’re running late and by the time you reach Sarah dad’s house, there are so many cars that you have to park at the end of the street. You’re practically sprinting to the house, hearing the music and laughter coming from the backyard. You’re wearing a sleeveless navy blue satin dress that stops just past your knees, the thin spaghetti straps resting on your shoulders with a cowl neckline. Their engagement party is semi-formal and you can feel your feet begin to ache from the heels you’re wearing. 

Your hair is in loose curls and you’re about to knock on the door when it swings open. You look up at the man, feeling your breath immediately escape you. His hair is slicked back, tinges of gray in the dark brown. You notice his beard, patchy in some areas, his plump lips begging to be kissed, but as you obviously ogle this man, you don’t realize that he’s actually speaking to you. 

“Are ya lost?” his voice is deep, rough, and you just want to hear it against your ear as he’s thrusting– “Are ya here for the party?” 

“Yeah, sorry. I’m late. I’m Drew’s best woman–”

“Ah,” he interrupts. “You are late.” 

You can’t think. The sounds of the music and laughter drown out as you stare up at this man. He’s wearing black slacks and a dark green button up with the sleeves folded to his elbows. He’s staring at you too, though, hand remaining on the doorknob as he looks at you in amusement. 

“You gonna let me in or stand guard all day?” you say, trying to snap yourself out of this trance. For a split second, you forget why you’re here and all you can think about is talking to this man and having him take you up to his–

“That depends,” he smirks, the dimple on his right cheek appearing. “You gonna be polite and say please?” 

You blush. You’re sure he didn’t mean for it to come out the way it did, but you can’t help but notice the way his eyes linger on your frame. It gives you a bit of confidence as you step up to him, inches now separating your bodies. 

“Please,” you whisper. 

You see his smirk falter, his jaw tighten and instead of responding, he nods and steps aside to give some space between the both of you. 

“They’re in the backyard,” he adds. You step past him, looking over your shoulder at him to see that his eyes had fallen on your backside. When he looks up at you and realizes that you had caught him staring, he immediately clears his throat and points towards the driveway. “I’m just gonna–”

“Wait,” you interrupt, reaching out to rest a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t get your name.” 

“Joel,” he responds. “Sarah’s dad.” 

Then, he removes himself from your grasp and walks out, shutting the door behind him. You clear your throat, biting the inside of your cheek. 

“Shit,” you whisper to yourself. “He does not look fifty-six.” You turn on your heel, following the sound of chatter and music as you try to rid yourself of the lingering thoughts of Joel. 

Joel isn’t expecting Drew’s best woman to look like you. When he opens the door and you’re standing on his doorstep in that dress, it takes every ounce of him not to look at you from top to bottom. It helps, though, that he notices you staring at him like you want him. It actually gives him confidence that a pretty thing like you is finding him attractive enough that you’re distracted enough not to hear what he’s actually saying. 

But then he hears you say that you’re Drew’s best woman. It all but crushes him, crushes any ounce of hope he was holding onto that maybe at the end of the night he’d take you to his bed. You’re off limits and you’re certainly too young for him, but he can’t help himself. 

He can’t help but ask you to beg and say please to come in. 

And when you do, without any hesitation, he feels the blood immediately rush towards the center of his pants. When you step closer to him, Joel has to tighten his jaw and tighten the grip he has on the doorknob. It anchors him, gives him something to ground himself or else he is going to lose his resolve… quick. 

When you finally step inside and walk past him, he turns just slightly to glance at your backside. The dress you’re wearing accentuates every curve while remaining modest enough, but he can’t help himself. Though, when Joel does look up, he feels embarrassed that you’ve caught him staring. 

He has to step outside, has to create some distance between him and you, but then he feels your soft touch on his forearm and it causes a shiver to run down his back. After he tells you that he’s Sarah’s dad, Joel doesn’t bother to wait to see your reaction. Instead, he leaves you standing there while he steps out of his house, shutting the door behind him and shutting the door to the inappropriate thoughts that fill his mind.

next.

[crabsnpersimmons]

I know those Eclipse posts are tagged 'suggestive' as in, yknow. But my brain keeps suggesting that Eclipse wants to literally eat us. Hannible Lector style.

...

Anyways I'd let him.

LOL

well

Hannibal Lecter is a chef 😏

Fun fact: early on while i was still figuring out the details of the AU, i did consider going for a mystery/thriller kind of story.

the main theme of the AU is the identities we present in public vs. our true, genuine selves—and what happens when we neglect our ourselves (mirroring how we can nurture or neglect ourselves with food)

Sun and Moon’s personalities were actually going to be closer to their canon depiction, only to reveal later that they’re very different—Sun doesn’t feel emotions and he’s only acting cheerful and bubbly, while Moon pretends to be cool and aloof but is hungry for attention and love.

and Eclipse? he wasn’t going to be a main part of the story until later. he was going to be the “skeleton” in their closet, literally locked up in the basement of the restaurant because unlike Sun and Moon, he can’t act. After Eclipse’s code was taken to make Sun and Moon, something changed in Eclipse and he became… uninhibited and wild. In a sense, all of them believe that they are broken and incomplete because they’re all programmed with scraps of code. (in my mind it was like: Sun has no heart, Moon as no brain, and Eclipse has no control). Sun and Moon try to make the best of their new lives as chefs, but Eclipse wants out and he wants to be whole again… even if that means getting rid of Sun and Moon.

why i didn’t go with that story?

my control group of friends really liked charming waiter Eclipse—and that wouldn’t work if Eclipse was locked up in the basement 😂

also, it’s already hard enough to suspend your belief that 3 robots can run a small restaurant, it’s even harder to believe that 2 robots can too 😅 and YEAH they can have human employees, but Sun and Moon would have to make sure those human employees stayed out of the basement and i’d also have to create a cast of new characters, which i didn’t really feel like doing 😂

i also just couldn't come up with a compelling end-game. call me basic, i like a happy ending. i like characters learning about themselves and finding love. and i direction the old story was going just wasn't as compelling for me compared to the current direction of the AU

i liked the old idea, but i'm also very happy with the silly trio as they are now. the story may not be as dark, but their characters are still deep and complex, and now with the added benefit of being fun and silly!

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! Sorry if this is a stupid question but I was wondering about representing disabilities/things in general that you don't have.

I always see people say that they want characters to be represented properly, and to show their disabilities and lives in an accurate way, but I also see people talk about how you shouldn't write about the struggles a POC/minority/person with a disability/etc. faces because you don't experience that and you're speaking over them or only using their story for "trauma porn" or whatever.

Maybe it's just because I'm autistic but I'm really not understanding how those two things coexist. How do I show how someone lives, especially with a disability that might be painful, without writing about the things they face?

Obviously it would be super weird if the character's entire personality was just "My life is awful because I'm so different, I can't do the things everyone else can, my life sucks."

But what about normal things that they struggle with? Like "Yeah I only have one arm, it's a pain in the ass to do dishes but it's not the end of the world." or "I have albinism so my depth perception is shit but whatever" or "It's fucking annoying when people stare at/judge me because I look different, but if they don't like it that's their problem, not mine lol."

Is the problem whether or not a characters ENTIRE story revolves around their disability? Using my own as an example:

A story, specifically, about how Funky Bungus, as an autistic person, lives in the world and what struggles he has due to his disability, VS a story where Funky Bungus is trying to stop two kingdoms from going to war and there's a short scene where he feels bad about not being able to make eye contract with people, before going back to the Kingdom War Drama.

I just want to use my stories as a way to educate people about disabilities and make people go "Hey, that character is like me!" or to make people think about their actions, like having a character complain about people staring at their scar/missing arm/etc. so maybe people will read it and go "Wow, I guess it IS rude when I don't mind my own business, from now on I won't stare at people."

Sorry if this got long and incomprehensible 😬

I guess the question is "How do I write about the struggles someone with a disability faces without coming across like I'm writing trauma porn or speaking over people" but I just have the Overexplain Everything So I'm Not Misunderstood Disorder™ lmao

I believe you have it right; the problem with many stories about disabilities written by non disabled authors often lies in when the story relies entirely on the disability.

It’s absolutely fine to write about the struggles a character faces — for an example with one of my disabilities, say a non-disabled author wrote about how a character kinda hates their chronic pain and wishes they didn’t have it. But otherwise there’s other stuff going on in the character’s life, like friends and family and hobbies, not just self-pity, and there’s other things going on in the plot, like maybe a mystery to solve or an Item to find or an adventure to go on or something.

That would be perfectly fine, and I’d love to read it actually, and really writing is kind of a balance of using what we know already and mixing it with things we haven’t experienced but have researched and/or thought about.

That’s how you show an authentic character with disabilities — they have struggles, things they can’t do or can’t do as well as others, but that’s not all there is to them. There’s things they enjoy doing, things they’re good at, people they spend time with and things they do.

Good intentions combined with research and knowledge (and good plots!) will make for good stories that feel authentic.

Hope this helps!

Mod Sparrow

Hey!

I think that there can be good stories that have disability/ableism as its primary focus, but they should be #OwnVoices (as in, made by people who experience said thing). That's largely because it often gets very specific and thus easy to misrepresent even if you have good intentions. Sometimes it can end up like "being disabled is so sad and everything is inaccessible, how tragic" and end up pitying the character - rather than actually sympathizing with them - just because that nuance is missing.

To use the same example as you did, "character complains about people staring at their scar sometimes" would be a completely normal way to include ableism as a part of life that does happen, while "character gets bullied for 300 pages for having a facial difference" would be in the torture porn category (when written by someone who doesn't have that experience).

I think that what Sparrow described is the best if you're not describing your own experiences. Including ableism as a thing that happens from time to time or as a tertiary focus is totally fine. That's how it is in real life - sometimes things do suck, but there's still a whole lot of other things that we do.

I think your desire to educate people is admirable, and it should be very much doable with the solutions you presented. Good luck writing,

mod Sasza

[heloflor]

So this was supposed to be part of my other fop post but it got way too long (both posts did tbh) and is a different topic than the other one. So yeah here’s a bunch of random thoughts about the show in general from what I’ve seen of it. For context I’ve only seen the first 4-5 episodes + “Battle of the Dimmsonian” + the Cosmo-Wanda-Peri scenes in “Lost in Fairy World” and “Operation: Birthday Takeback”.

SPOILERS for “Operation: Birthday Takeback” for the last three dashes (2.4k words below):

- Putting it in first since it’s still related to Peri but I’m pretty amused by the whole “Tumblr sexyman” situation. I mean, less than two weeks ago all canon pics we had of him were baby pics. It’s the same deal when I see people call him a father figure to Dev, I can’t help but be like “wdym father figure? He’s barely an adult! He’s too young!”

It’s like imagine you have a neighbor who have a baby when you’re 9-10, then they move out and 20 years later you meet their kid as an adult. You can clearly tell they’re an adult and treat them as such but also it’s a bit weird bc your last and only memories of them were of a baby. Idk, I see Peri’s character as an adult but also he’s still a bit of a kid, you know? I feel like I explain this better in the other post tbh.

- In retrospect it’s also very funny to see how, when people talk about the decline of fop, they point at the inclusion of the new characters, including Poof. Yet look where we are now! If you thought the baby was the problem, apologize to him, now! /j

But yeah more seriously, personally I never minded Poof. He was definitely a useless addition, like outside of the handful of episodes focused on him he mostly just stands there looking at the other characters, but he was also a cute baby, so I’ve always been fine with him being around. He’s a useless but inoffensive addition, and I think the decline of the show around that time had less to do with him and more to do with the writing as a whole.

- Last thing about Peri before moving on to the show in general, which tbh I could've put in the other post: I've seen people talk about the idea of Hazel and Dev switching fairies and I kind of agree with it.

Not only because Cosmo and Wanda have the experience needed to help a kid like Dev (though it wouldn't be all sunshine and rainbows) while Hazel's situation is easier for Peri, but also it's worth noting that Dev needs a parental figure, which Cosmo and Wanda can be, while Hazel misses her older brother, who Peri is around the same age of. Idk, I feel like this could work, or at least make things easier for everyone involved (but also especially for Dev).

- Something I originally wanted to put in the tags of the other post but fuck it: I’m really not a fan of them releasing the episodes so soon one after the other. With serialized shows, I’m always been more of a fan of having an episode a week you can chew on and theorize about, rather than being given everything at once. Also it takes a while for the cargo to get on the ships if you catch my drift.

I’d also complain about seeing all those plot-related episodes one after the other with none of the more casual stories in-between that give us more character moments, but honestly that’s on me for looking up spoilers.

- Going to the early show, I think the first episode is such a good introduction! I especially like the amount of focus on Cosmo and Wanda, it’s good to have them reintroduced given how flanderized they became in the og show. I’m especially happy with Cosmo! He arguably had it worse than Wanda in the og and it’s so good to see him shine this much in this first episode (also I love his human form having a bit of a gut)! On that note, they did a fantastic job having them around a lot while still giving Hazel enough time to be introduced properly and get us to care about her as the MC!

But yeah I really like this first episode, fantastic beginning to the show! The only issue I “really” have with it is the way Cosmo and Wanda go back to being godparents just because Hazel made a strong enough wish or something, it felt a bit arbitrary rather than them just telling her who they are.

And on that note, big fan of that one scene where they immediately notice her trying to run away and try to talk her out of it. I love the contrast between them starting off as disasters being barely capable of passing off as humans at the beginning of the episode, and them being perfectly in their element the second they start talking to Hazel about her running away in this scene. It’s such a good way to see how much experience they have with taking care of kids!

- I’m not going to go episode by episode but one thing that bothers me a lot in the second one is that rule of “kids should get whatever they wish for”. Doesn’t that...go against the whole concept of having rules in the first place???

They should’ve replaced it with something along the lines of “a kid should always get the fairy that fits them the best”, not only bc it would work perfectly well for the episode, but also from what I’ve heard Foop (now Irep) is coming back and I could 100% see him use that rule to his advantage given Peri and Dev were such a bad match (I’m guessing anti-fairies don’t actually follow Da Rules but maybe they could still use it as an excuse regardless since fairies do have to follow them or something?)

- Call we talk about the fact Hazel is clearly autistic? Like is this a canon thing in the show? Are there people out there talking about it? No because seriously:

The fidget toys (Cosmo and Wanda’s disguises), her special interest for rocks, her anxiety over making new friends which is reinforced as uncommon when that one girl she befriends comments on how easy and not scary it is to approach other people (also Hazel’s “what am I supposed to talk about with them? School lunches?” comment in the teachers friend episode), her liking for fries which could be seen as her being potentially picky (bit of a stretch tho), her comment about liking the DMV if only for the reaction she gets that makes her seem “different”, her struggles to come up with a wish on the fly with minimal/vague instructions (episode 2), her character arc throughout the show apparently having to do with her not wanting things to change (me too girl), her being considered mature for her age, the angry outbursts when things don’t go how she hoped, pretty sure there’s also a lot of stimming that I have yet to pick up on (see if any of them repeat often). Like, there’s no way ALL of that was a coincidence!

I’d also like to mention at the beginning of the Dino episode, when her dad is explaining things to her, he starts talking louder and louder in excitement until his wife tells him to quiet down. Makes me think her dad’s likely neurodivergent as well. Also this moment hurts my soul a bit, as someone who’s both been on the receiving end of it and done it to someone else, in both cases it sucks.: /

- Took me until like episode 4 to realize the town she lives in is named after the Dimmadomes, with the hat in it (the very first shot of the intro). Also you can see their infinite house in the background, both in that shot and the show in general, and I absolutely adore that they committed so hard to this joke! That giant ambiguously-shaped-like-a-hat skyscraper that we never see the top of is just *chief kiss*.

- On that note Dev’s introduction in the first episode made me laugh, if only for the references. I also find it kinda funny he has such a big speaking role considering he doesn’t do anything for the rest of the pilot and the next few episodes. Then again I guess it’s in character for him to make such a show of introducing himself.

- Still on general stuff, I’m a bit curious about how the timeline went in regards to Cosmo and Wanda retiring and going on vacation “right after” Timmy (iirc they don’t voice it like that in the show). Like I’m having a hard time believing they would just ditch their then-child son to go on vacation, and then come back when he’s an adult. So I ended up having a bunch of headcanons.

Basically, after leaving Timmy they do take what was supposed to be a short leave to think of their future since it feels strange to get a new kid after so long with the same one + I like the idea that Cosmo and Wanda’s marriage did suffer while living with Timmy and they want to work on it before getting a new kid (the whole thing about them feeling confined, made worse if the “stopping time for 50 years” wish is canon) + Poof/Peri is struggling with the reality of having to leave Timmy behind and is nervous about his parents having a new godkid because of it.

Eventually they decide to retire, got to marriage counseling, possibly get Poof/Peri into therapy, and raise their son until he’s an older teen/young adult, at which point they leave for their vacation. And while the vacation is 10 thousand years for them, it’s like, 5 years at max in their present. And in that meantime, Peri starts his godparents studies (or however it works), leaves the house and changes his name.

Btw Cosmo and Wanda would 100% invite him to the vacation, he’d just refuse in a mix between wanting to be away from his parents for once, wanting to maybe surprise them a bit with his work and/or just get started with work, and not knowing how long the vacation would be. He’d also probably tell them to just use this time as some new honeymoon to finish rebuilding their marriage (though by that point it must’ve gone back to being strong). Oh and Cosmo and Wanda would send Peri postcards every so often, which would also let him know how long they’ve been gone.

Once they come back from vacation, I’d imagine there’s like less than a month between them “moving to the human world” and meeting Hazel, hence why they didn’t reconnect with Peri. They didn’t really know how to contact him and were busy with the move, and afterwards they had a godkid to take care of so they couldn’t exactly go back to Fairyworld.

As for Peri, he hears through the gravepine that his parents are back, and would be happy until he realizes they’ve been gone for 10 thousand years, hence him freaking out about meeting them again (he doesn’t know how much they might’ve changed with how long it’s been). Also he can’t contact them bc he’d hear about them coming back due to them taking in Hazel, meaning they’re in the human world and he doesn’t know where. Also he might be intimidated to contact them, which doesn’t help his decision-making.

So yeah, that’s all for how I could imagine this whole vacation thing going and how it fits with them having a child.

- Since I’m talking about Cosmo and Wanda’s marriage, I’ve heard about the whole “they fixed their marriage” before watching the show and oh my god I can’t get over how fucking adorable those two are in this show!!! I fucking love them.

- And on that note I’m incredibly amused that this show had the balls to reference the mpreg. Twice. Especially since it doesn’t even specify the whole “that’s just how fairies work”! In the eyes of people who never watched the og show, “A New Wish” just casually dropped the fact that Cosmo’s a trans man (bc let’s be real, how else are you supposed to interpret those lines if you haven’t watched the og show?) or you get the vibe that the writers wanted to make him trans (+ Wanda by proxy since she’s Peri’s bio mom) but weren’t allowed so that’s how they got past the censors.

And I love this because you just know Hartman would be furious about it! With our current society more aware of trans people and how men can in fact get pregnant, I could definitely see him sweep the whole mpreg thing under the rug, hoping people would forget about his “”accidentally-progressive”” (and also very sexist 😒) episode, but nope! New show said Cosmo was pregnant and gave birth! And better yet it didn’t even elaborate further! It just goes “btw this guy has an uterus and was once pregnant, here’s his bio child if you need more proof” and then walks on like nothing happened, I love it!

- Going back to the episodes talk for the last three dashes, there’s that shot at the very end of “Operation: Birthday Takeback” that I really dislike. It’s the one when Dev lashes out on Peri, with him hovering over Peri who’s laying on the ground in fear.

Really not a big fan of this shot bc 1. It makes Dev look way too much like a villain, especially with the way Peri’s laying like a servant that gets beaten up, and 2. Peri, honey, you’re a grown ass man; why are you so scared of that 10 years old scarred kid that’s lashing out while in a very vulnerable mental state? What are you doing on the ground buddy? I’m not asking for him to fight back but at least stand up! Don’t act like that kid can actually hurt you! Btw I’m completely fine with Peri afterwards looking like a dejected puppy (after Dev makes his wish), it’s just that one shot with him on the ground that I dislike.

- Obviously I’m genuinely curious to see how things are going to go in the next episodes (which apparently air tonight?). Like obviously Dev is going to spiral but if you have a scene at school how will it go? How will Hazel feel about the whole thing? What about Peri? Is he going to be gone for a few episodes? Be a temporary third fairy to Hazel? Crash at Cosmo and Wanda’s for a while?

(Personally I’m hoping for the third option, it would be a good way to still give him appearances to show the main plot’s still going without giving him to much screentime, which could take away from Hazel. Also given how much he wants to appear independent, I don’t see him being a third fairy to her, though I think he’d be ok with staying at his parents for a bit, if only for emotional support (though tbh I doubt they’ll do that, most likely he’ll be doing his own thing off-screen for an episode or two). Also I want to see a “human” design for him)

OK so I wrote this yesterday before the Irep episode came out, so on one hand nevermind all that but on the other hand I’m letting it in bc I AM curious as to how things are going to evolve with our main cast, especially with Dev spiraling and pushing both his bestie and fairy away.

- Btw is nobody going to talk about how Vicky’s dress might be a reference to one of the “Oh Yeah” shorts?

- VERY LAST SECOND ADDITION, SPOILERS FOR IREP: So yesterday before I finished both this and the other post the new episodes dropped, with a few clips shared on Tumblr. And OH MY GOD IREP’S DESIGN!!! The fact that they kept him as a cube makes me so happy!!! I was HOPING at least ONE part of him would be a cube and they delivered!!! He looks like absolulte dogshit I love it!!! Bc yeah for some reason I remember Foop as a character you’re not supposed to take seriously at all? And as a result I really like how stupid Irep looks. A+ design right there! /gen

[jamiehashands]

Can you ramble about Ellis ggy?

Okay, okay, where to start, I think there’s like, a lot to go over so I’m gonna try to start from the beginning. This is gonna be a long post so strap in folks. (and ignore my discord nickname, it's an inside joke)

The Descent into Madness

Back in January/February of this year I decided to pick up writing as a hobby, I started off with little blurbs of a potential SB rewrite I had cooking up (and still cooking up today), however that’s not relevant to Ellis, so I’m skipping to the fic he’s actually include in. So, on February 4th I drew this as a joke, but then I wanted to expand on it and make it a fic.

(You can tell this is old by how light Ellis is and comparing him to my current design LMAO) (and the "like the show?" is supposed to be a reference to transformers)

That being said, that fic wasn’t even entirely focused on him, the basic premise was Greg came out to Ellis as nonbinary and Ellis would go “like the code??? XDDDD!!!!”, isn't he so quirky and not like other girls?? /j

“Guys the worms” haha, if only you knew dude.

Okay anyways, the thing was, I don’t think I got that far into reading GGY because most of it SUCKED and was really out of character. I didn’t even used the names “Rab” or “Boots” which actually annoys me so bad I don’t even wanna look at it. Sorry to the Instagram followers who wanted to see it, it’s in the garbage now and I hate it, but that’s completely okay! It was a learning experience for me, which lead me to my next fic that I am. Technically. Still. Working on.

I think this was the moment I realized I grew to be in love with Ellis’s “character”, in quotation marks because he’s not really a character y’know. This is also when I found a way to read GGY properly, so that means I’d have my fic more accurate. I actually documented my reading on my instagram (same username) if you’re interested, though it’s kind of corny looking back on it, definitely exaggerated some of my opinions on it.

If you follow my Instagram, you can see in a story I revealed that I currently find the fic really unfun to work on, and that I enjoyed working on a different one. Let me just explain, I believe that the fic is like, angst with no merit, someone might enjoy reading something like that but I don’t like writing it personally. Right now, I’m in the process of replanning, which is why I’d like to thank our today’s sponsor, Milanote!!!1! Kidding, but Milanote has genuinely made things easier for me it’s kind of insane. Obviously I’m going to keep some aspects in the fic (not spoiling though ^_^) but I hope to make it fun for me to work on again this time around.

I forgot to put my uquiz answer description thing I make for him here wait:

Ellis has a minor role in the short story ‘GGY.’ He is described as being impatient nearly all of the time, bouncing on his heels when he is. He often jokes around with his friend Tony, purposely calling him Tinkerbell instead of the pseudonym Tarbell, and telling him that he thinks too much. He immediately brushes off the writing assignment in Mrs. Soto’s class, saying that the story is due in two weeks and they’ve got plenty of time.

His dad insists that Sundays are for family time. He considers Tony’s real life investigations lame, making a dramatic snoring sound effect when Tony tells him he was people watching. At the end of GGY, Ellis ends up changing Tony’s story completely, albeit probably because of manipulation from Greg/GGY himself, he also compliments the changes they made by saying “it gets better.” (It doesn’t get better they’re probably going to get an F 🫶)

Ellis Fan Design(s)

In this section I’m just going to be rambling about Ellis fan designs, not naming any names though because it’s not really a specific design, just specific design aspects. Soo my first thing is: please stop making him grey/ashy or hell, incredibly light😢😢😢 it reminds me of when I was like 11 and all of my black characters were borderline grey. My second thing is that I’ve seen a handful of designs where he just. Doesn’t have curly hair. It annoys me sooo bad like guys please 😕😕 umm another thing is when people don’t give his square jaw, like maybe they do but it’s just really subtle??? Idk!!!

Anyways my Ellis design went through many changes actually, but one thing that remained consistent was the long hair with the. Brown?? Idk how to describe it lmao. Here are some sketches from old sketchbooks!! There are some more but those are kind of spoiler territory for my fic so >_>,, gotta wait another 8 months for those! /j

Way before these sketches were even created, I had an idea on how Ellis would dress, it's um. It's definitely a fashion statement...!

These were the drawings that had the designs I wanted to stick with, and have stuck with to this day! I took the idea that he would be a Monty fan and ran with it, for the jacket you can actually see it in the "im nonbinary" "like the code???" doodle I did, however looking back the short sleeved jacket and the long sleeved was kind of ugly.. In one of the doodles above, I drew him with ripped jeans, while they're quite fun they wouldn't really fit with the design I have now (and also I can't fit the rips on the current jeans anywhere)

However, that is old art, so here is his current ref I made for art fight! You can actually view his profile here!!!

The he/him/she/her pronouns (for simplification reasons I will only be using he/him in this post) and his birthday being on April 5th actually has some reason to it BUT we are not there yet!!! Oh!! And what's that thing at the bottom? Songs I associate with him?? what!!!

Ellis Playlist WHATT

Pretend I had a really smooth transition into this next topic, ANYWAY!! I'm going to pick a small handful of songs from the playlist and make them relate to Ellis in some way, because I. am really normal. ════════════════════════════════════════════

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Just Take My Wallet - Jack Stauber's Micropop

hope you like the formatting on this section, anyway

Your mama's crying Your mama's crying for you Mama's lying Oh, what's she trying to do To you?

I think this is self explanatory, after Tony's mom lost her only son a natural instinct is to cry her eyes out. For the "Mama's lying" part I'm just going to bullshit an answer that's relevant to the fic I'm writing. Sooo, in the context that is Ellis being like, y'know, sad, his mom would obviously try to comfort him, and since I hc that he blames himself somewhat, she'd try to tell him it isn't his fault and such, however Ellis doesn't believe that, which is where the "lying" part comes in. For the last two parts, Tony's parents actively tried to change what Tony wrote stories about, aka kind of changing his whole shtick idk.

Good times are singing They sang, they sang Those times are echoing through me Through me

Another theme in my fic is that Ellis reminisces, A LOT. Like first few paragraphs he's like "I miss my friends bro what the fuck!!!!!!!!11"

What's the softest way to say You took away my friend, my buddy? What's the kindest way to say You took away my friend? What's the kindest way to say You took away my friend, my buddy? What's the kindest way to say The end?

In this little animatic idea in my head, this is the part where Ellis and Gregory reunite and Ellis comes to the realization he killed Tony, "The end?" represents them cutting ties with each other, because there's no way their relationship can be healthy anymore. OR IS THERE?? DUN DUN DUNNNNN....

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ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Boys Don't Cry - The Cure

I would say I'm sorry If I thought that it would change your mind But I know that this time I have said too much Been too unkind

After Tony gets really pissed with Ellis, Ellis didn't realize what was wrong until later, in which he'd want to apologize and change Tony's mind about not wanting him to work on any writing assignment with him anymore. However he had done too much damage he can't undo, and also Tony is dead but SHHHH SHHHH

I tried to laugh about it Cover it all up with lies I tried to laugh about it Hiding the tears in my eyes 'Cause boys don't cry Boys don't cry

Ellis, being the comedic type in my hc (and many other's I think), would use humor to cover up his feelings by using humor as a coping mechanism y'know? "Boys don't cry" was/still is quite the common mindset, assuming Ellis would believe in said mindset, he's given another reason to not cry. Sorry that's probably a reach HELP.

I would break down at your feet And beg forgiveness, plead with you But I know that it's too late And now there's nothing I can do

I'm pretty sure Ellis would do anything to get Tony back, your honor that was his BEST BUDDY. The last two lines are obvious because Tony is like, dead,,,,, anyways skipping the next section because I'd just repeat myself

I would tell you that I loved you If I thought that you would stay But I know that it's no use And you've already gone away

Ok actually I'm gonna be repeating myself regardless because something something Ellis doesn't want Tony to leave but it's too late and Tony leaves and then dies blahhhh

Misjudged your limits Pushed you too far Took you for granted Thought that you needed me more, more, more

In GGY, Tony brings up that Ellis is very immature and feels as if he is outgrowing him, Ellis changing up his story is what broke the camels back, which is where "misjudged your limits/pushed you too far/took you for granted" comes in, Ellis, thinking Tony thought of him as someone he couldn't lose, so it'd hurt when Tony seemed to drop him just like that (ok well to him it seems unexpected but y'know, Tony's "im not like other girls" inner monologues. (kidding))

Now I would do most anything To get you back by my side But I just keep on laughing Hiding the tears in my eyes 'Cause boys don't cry Boys don't cry Boys don't cry

For the first two lines, I immediately think of @kai-rio 's (sorry for the @ lmk if you want to be removed but also you're really normal about Ellis like me so) Ellis fic, you can read it right here, um, in the briefest summary I can give of the first part, Ellis goes "omg I need to find Tony !!!!! >_<" and like plans. to go to that. like he gets geared up /j. I'd make a joke about the ending but that'd be SPOILERS.... anyways refer to what I said before for the other lines.

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ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : I Can't Handle Change - Roar

Hangin' out where I don't belong is nothing new to me I get tired, and I get sick, and then I lose the strength to leave

If anyone reading this saw that. dumbass papa louie pals scene I made, I hc Ellis to be like!!! really alienated from everyone even if he comes off as an extrovert (im giving him every mental illness Ellis im sorry). Funny fact, in one of my ideas for the Ellis fic rework, I have a point that says "mention Ellis constantly feeling sick", not in the literal sense obviously, but it ties in with this lyric methinks.

I can't handle change I can't handle change

Ellis is left grieving the loss of his friend, a change, like the lyric says, he can't handle/accept

Nothing I do is ever good Nothing I do is ever good enough Nothing I do is ever good Nothing I do is ever good Nothing I do is ever good enough Nothing I do is ever good

Did I mention I'm giving him every mental illness ever (/j) well that also includes an inferiority complex, really ties in with the feeling alienated from everyone thing, yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Leave me alone Leave me alone (I wanna go home now) Leave me alone Leave me alone (I wanna go home now)

Guys would you be shocked if I said that I interpret this as Ellis wanting to be left alone??!????!???!?! "I wanna go home now" makes me think of this scene in my fic where Ellis remembers Tony's funeral (you can't spell funeral without fun btw! /j) and wanting to leave like 30 minutes in because he felt so overwhelmed

I can't help but repeat myself I know it's not your fault Still lately, I begin to shake For no reason at all For no reason at all For no reason at all For no reason at all For no reason at all

This would be Ellis to Greg, as Tony's death technically wasn't his fault, but he has to repeat it in his head like a mantra because Greg and GGY shared the same face and it's hard to separate the two from one another. Shaking for seemingly no reason is a symptom of anxiety, and if you checked Ellis's art fight page that I really need to revamp, it's stated he has that so!!! yay!!!!!!!!!!

G-g-g-grellis… VOMITS IN MOUTH. /j (and shipping in the GGY community in general ig)

I think I’m like the only person who ships this now,,,,, Ummmm I just wanna say I don’t really take this shipping thing too seriously because they’re just middle school kids and they’re bound to be silly/awkward. Obviously they do have potential to be really angsty like “oh my god you killed my best friend why do I still love you? Is it because I’m still in love with the person you pretended to be?” Or something idk it’s dumb I like to focus on the sillier things like passing notes in class, trash talking teachers they don’t like, and sharing snacks with each other or whatever.

Absolutely unrelated but can we NOT use the term "yaoi" to describe the relationship between two middle schoolers like, i'm sorry that's just hella weird. Sorry if this is flipline addictspilled flipline addictsmaxxing /inside joke but it's like saying "middle school boy yaoi" like is that NOT weird to you? Also I've seen some really iffy ship art and whenever I come across it I just think to myself: "bro aren't they like twelve???" And I’ve seen no one acknowledge it in the tags of the art, and I’ve brought it up to a friend who is an outsider to the GGY community and they thought the same thing too. Look. Maybe I’m just aroace and believe that romance shouldn’t all be about kissing and shit but someone here has got to agree right 😕

Anyways back to Grellis!!! When I first saw them, I thought their alternative ship name, “Grel”, was “Gel”, and I thought that was the funnier shit ever. You might be asking why I ship them and it’s because like, they’re seen interacting with each other for most of the story, and I don’t have to rely on post-canon “what-ifs” to get their relationship to work.

Ummm for their dynamic I already said they're just silly middle schoolers so. go my grellis related pics

also they play roblox together and watch the mlp eq movies but at the same time they head bang to death metal. Uhh I'm not gonna write about how I think these songs are so them(tm) but two songs I associate with them are Romantic Lover by Eyedress, and Door by iDKHOW. Also my friend @rippcharddrive drew them for an art fight attack and it was the best day of my life

now one might be asking, "why the fuck is NuMarcus from Papa Louie there" well!!!

NUTIMM (And Papa Louie in general)

Now you might remember when I said that I hc Ellis to be born on April 5th and use he/she pronouns and that we'll come back to that later. The reason is Papa Louie, okay well, NuTimm (Timm x NuMarcus) specifically, but Papa Louie in general. But before we get into it, I edited Ellis in the Flipline Style once ^_^

Ok so really short origin story of NuTimm is that it started off as a joke and two of my friends role played them breaking up, but Niall (rippcharddrive) started getting attached to it. Sooner or later he added them to his tomodachi life island and on March 31st 2024, they got together!!! and got married in under and hour of doing so!!! Now, how does this relate to Ellis? well on April 3rd, Timm got knocked up bro /JJJ

Niall didn't know what to name the baby so I jokingly suggested the name Ellis and everyone else liked it so the baby was going to be named Ellis!!

And on April 5th (I think you can understand why that's his birthday now), she was born!!! And everyone in du2 thought she was ugly </3

To make a long story short they ended up having like 7 more kids I think I forgot, and many more grandkids. Then one day I decided to get Tomodachi Life myself (with the help of Niall), made my own island and added fnaf Ellis and NuTimm Ellis to it, long story short they fell in love and eventually got married and became the gayest straight couple (/j). NuMarcus, wanting to give Ellis a head start in parenting, made 2 NuBaby's, each of which have incredibly long and stupid names because Ellis wanted to piss him off.

BUT THEN... THE PLOT THICKENS. On Nialls island, Gregory and NuTimm Ellis fell in love and also got married, thus forming the most confusing love triangle of all time. IM RUNNING OUT OF IMAGES BUT here is when I started using he/she for Ellis

ok guys pretend i have a really good transition to the next and probably last section

Headcanons (shocked face emoji)

I've mentioned multiple of my Ellis hcs in the song portion but I haven't really made an entire list of them so!! Here we go guys!!! We're at the homestretch!!!

- ummm neurodivergent (AuDHD), I interpret him bouncing his heels in that one scene in GGY as his stimming thanks, he also quotes memes as a vocal stim pray for him /jjj - types with a lot of emoticons and exclamation marks - laughs at the dumbest crap ever, you could show him the "she strogan me off till i beef" video and he'd cry laughing - somehow knows every unblocked games website - Picks at his. acne all the time - Knows the" most obscure ass media, he'll go up to Tony and Greg and be like: "Have you guys heard of Zigglyblorfblorf??" and they'll be like "???? WHAT????" - Wanted to become a youtuber when he was way younger because he thought it would be easy and it would make him look cool and awesome (his parents did NOT approve). Speaking of parents I made. fan designs. for them. SEE GUYS I AM SO NORMAL!!! THEY TOTALLY DONT HAVE THEIR OWN LORE OR ANYTHING!!! and totally can't be their own standalone characters1!!!

- Ellis is quite fond of dancing actually ^_^ boogieing and jiving is something he likes - Cuts the fat off his steak before eating it, he HATES the texture - Very emotional/sensitive :// - he sort of kind of lets his full personality show around Tony and Greg which kinda makes the whole “Tony feels like he’s outgrowing Ellis and thinking he’s immature” worse maybe because idk. Differences. - 5'4-5'6 ft tall idk idk - he probably dies ngl /j

- love-hate relationship with slasher films

- on one hand he’s like “hahahah people dying XD I’m so different!!” And genuinely just being squeamish.

Conclusion

um so. i'm glad you've read this far. thanks for reading about my insane thoughts about Ellis GGY uhhh TLDR:

[bbybluemochi]

bbybluemochi's F.A.Q. ✧･ﾟ

Hi! Arun here! I thought that instead of answering your submissions one by one I’d gather all the frequently asked questions and answer them in a single post (this is a mix of art/OC/commissions related q's)!

Please note that I do read all your messages and I’m so grateful for every one of them!!!! I keep all your words really close to my heart, thank you for liking my art and loving my Ocs as much as I do, it means the world to me <3

What’s the name of your OCs?

They’re called Cotton (the blonde one) and Puppy (the dark haired one). The original idea for them was to make some silly wolf/bunny OCs (that’s why Cotton is called like that, it was supposed to be a joke about her tail…) but somewhere along the way they took over and became something completely different!

Is there a webcomic for your OCs?

Not currently! I don’t have the time or the skills (for now) but I’d love to give it a try in the future! 

I was wondering if you mind people using your OC art as character art/inspiration for DnD?Just games with friends that are for fun, nothing for commercial.

Go ahead! I find that really flattering.

Just out of curiosity, are any of your OCs bisexual?

Both Cotton and Puppy are lesbians. That’s what I feel comfortable drawing since I’m a lesbian myself. If I ever do draw a bisexual OC I’ll make sure to mention it! <3

I think you said Cotton was a dominatrix in a previous ask, but is Puppy on the opposite side of the spectrum or is she just glad to be there whichever way?

Puppy is very much a sub. They both switch (Puppy as a service top and bottom and Cotton as a top and power bottom), but the dom/sub dynamic never changes. Also I wanted to mention that these dynamics do not transcend outside of the bedroom that much, there’s more to them than their kinks but I do love to draw them deep in their submissive/dominant headspaces. 

Are one of the lesbian fairytale characters trans?

I didn’t design either of them with that in mind, but I’m super OK with people headcanoning them as trans!

May I use your art as a header/icon?

Of course! Remember to credit me tho~

Do you allow people to use your art freely?

I don’t allow reposts of my work (not that it matters that much, since almost all my art has been already reposted a million times ))): but I’d really appreciate it if you just shared my posts instead of reposting my art). As for phone backgrounds/wallpapers or stuff like that, yeah!

Do you have an instagram account or other social media, I would love to follow you there.

My main platform is twitter (same @), I post all my drawings there and I’m usually more active over there. Tumblr is kind of like an archive. I really like the community here but I find it easier to reply/interact with people on twitter! As for instagram, I do have an old art account (same @, again) but I haven’t posted in so long. I may start posting there soon if a certain rich guy decides to keep destroying the bird app tho. 

I’ve always thought about this… how do you think it’d look if the aesthetics/styles [of your OCs] were reversed?

I’ll have to explore that in a future drawing, I haven’t thought much about it! 

Do you write fics for your characters or has anyone else written fics about them?

Not yet! A couple of my friends have offered, tho! I usually like to stick to drawing because that’s what I do best, I don’t wanna subject anyone to my writing (it’s not very good,,,,). When I share some of my Ocs stories, I think it will be in comic format. 

What's the story behind your OCs? 

There are several, actually!! I like to put my OCs in different universes. As for now, there’s the Fairytale AU, the modern setting AU (this is the original one), and now the Werewolf/Vampire AU. I also did a drawing of them as spiderwoman and black cat but I don’t think that AU is gonna make a comeback for a while. I’m also planning a scifi AU but I’m not sure I’d be able to pull off that aesthetic with my current art style so I’m still working on it. 

The Fairytale AU is the one I’m working on most of the time. I wanna release a small artbook with their story + illustrations. That was my main goal for 2023 but life got in the way, so maybe,,, 2024??? *crosses fingers* 

Is your shop down? It’s saying that it’s not available.

I open my shop for 1-2 weeks every now and then, that’s why it’s closed most of the time! My plan is to open the store again in september, if i manage to finish all the merch in time! I’ll announce it on my twitter and tumblr account when I do. 

Would you ever share a tutorial on how you make your art?

Yes, of course! I’m not very good at explaining my drawing process but If it helps anyone I’d love to! Just let me know what part of the drawing process you’d like me to focus on, because If i try to make a full illustration tutorial it’s gonna be too long/difficult to follow. 

May I ask what brush do you use for your lineart?

I use a different brush almost every time I start an illustration, I’m not very consistent when it comes to that (I think it’s mainly because I haven’t found the perfect brush yet!). But let me know what illustration you’re curious about and I’ll try to remember which one I used!

Do you come up with poses off the top of your head or do you use some type of reference? I always struggle with them.

It depends on what I’m drawing! Some of my drawings are reinterpretations of paintings (I’m obsessed with pre-raphaelite painters and arthurian legend paintings in general), so in those cases I try to adapt the poses to my art style. Even If I’m trying to recreate an already existing painting I end up changing the poses/proportions a lot along the way to fit my personal taste/art style. 

Other times, I just sketch from imagination (this is more entertaining, I think, since looking at references can make the drawing process a bit tedious). If I find it hard to draw a certain pose/part of the body I will look up references on printerest, no shame in using pictures! If I still can’t find the pose I need I’ll just take a picture of myself (this is like, a last resort for me. I’m too lazy for this). 

My personal advice would be to use references for the pose and then tweaking the pose and trying to make it more personal 

I love the way the armor was designed and rendered! Can you share some tips on designing armor? 

Drawing armor is something I still struggle with most of the time. I think I’ve learned a lot in the past year (please don’t look at my armor drawings from 2022,,,,, sigh) but I still struggle to draw certain poses/angles. My advice is: don’t hesitate to draw non-functional armor!!! There’s always gonna be someone like “actually, that armour makes no sense :)” well !!!! it looks cool as hell so who caresssss !!!!! 

I think it’s more important for you to get comfortable drawing armor before you start beating yourself up for not drawing accurate ones. It takes a lot of practice (I’m still learning!!!), especially if you’re trying to draw historically accurate ones, so start by having fun, and then work your way up from there.

Most of the tips I can think about are really hard to explain without a visual example, so let me know if that’d be a tutorial you would be interested in and I’ll try to make one (I’m cringing a little just saying this bc I swear, my armor skills are so bad compared to some amazing artists out there………..).

Do you allow cosplays your OCs?

YES…. YES PLEASE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IM BEGGING YOUUU ILL LOVE YOU FOREVER !!!!!! *rattles my cage* 

Do you allow fanart of your OCs?

Again,,, PLEASEEEEEEEEE !!! Just tag me so I don’t miss it and remember to give me credits if you do !!!!!!!!!!! :D

I was wondering if you use procreate , clip studio, or similar apps?

A mix of both. I used to draw on procreate only until I got a tablet and now I’m a clip studio user (csp sponsor me please), and now that’s all I use. I’m so used to drawing on PC now that I don’t think I’d be able to go back to procreate, but I still like that app a lot! All my drawings (even the ones I do on csp) always get retouched on procreate because I like some of the effects (*dreamy sigh* chromatic aberration filter,,, love u). 

I wanted to know if the marks Cotton has on her waist are tattoos or like a scar? 

Those are tats! Puppy is a tattoo artist ~~~ (I’m actually not sure if i’ll keep the waist tats on Cotton or if I’ll end up redesigning them,,,)

I was wondering if you take commissions?

Not right now. I also don’t have any plans of opening commissions any time soon! When I do, I’ll post a google forms on twitter and here on tumblr with the prices and type of comms I do. But there’s nothing scheduled. 

Even tho I'm not doing commissions atm, I’m currently looking for illustration jobs (specially book covers), so don’t hesitate to email me at bbybluemochi@gmail.com

That's all for now, thank you for reading!! I think I covered most of the questions, I'll make another q&a post in the future! Bye~~

[choicesfandomappreciation]

It’s spread kindness week! And who would I be if I didn’t leave a bit of pink & glitter for everyone to enjoy 🩷 ✨

I haven’t been active a lot. I’ve been dealing with the passing of my beloved dad. Which is still hard to grasp for me. It‘ll be 4 months on 11/29/24 and to know he touched so many lives of people who’ve known him in person and those who didn’t means a lot to me. But honestly? I’m glad and thankful to have been able to spend as much time with him as I could. Especially when it was time for him to go, you all came together with prayers, kind words and support, something I’ll never be able to repay or forget. So thank you for that! I hope you know how much this means to me 🥰

So I’d like to mention some people that I call friends 🌸 (don’t worry this won’t be the only post I make 🥰)

@aallotarenunelma I am beyond happy we’ve grown close and that we’re able to talk and exchange messages. It’s as if we’ve know each other for years and I’m so so happy we’re friends. Your constant support and kind words, help me through the toughest of my days. Our chats about our characters & stories and the way we hype each other up means the world to me. Puno mi znaći što si uz mene, nemogu ti opisati koliko mi znaći, hvala još jednom puno na svemu 🩷 Grlim te 🩷

@cariantha Cariii! It’s hard to find words and describe how much our friendship means to me. Not only do you make me laugh with all your stories, but you’re a true friend. I remember when you first joined tumblr, I was so happy to see a new person join our little family fandom. And then I saw all your stories and I fell in love with your writing and Sawyer & Ethan. It brings me a lot of joy to know you’re here. Your reblogs and your gif game is on point girl! Thank you for being there for me, for making me laugh and simply for being my friend. Love you to the moon and back 🩷

@mysticalgalaxysstuff I know you’re rarely on tumblr M but I do miss you and our talks. I hope you see this message and you’ll feel hugged 🩷 Your outpouring of love and friendship is and will always be appreciated 🩷

@secretaryunpaid You were one of the first people I’ve met on tumblr and we instantly connected. I hope you know how much our friendship means to me. Keep on shining! 🌺🩷🌸🥰

@thosehallowedhalls Caro!!!! You’re back. Which means I can tag you again, and you’ll see this message 😍 I am so so happy we became friends and shared messages. Your stories, your characters and you as a person make this fandom even brighter so thank you for all your kind words and burst of positivity it means the world to me 🩷🌸

@aria-ashryver Ariii! First of all. What a light and luminous presence you are despite everything that you’re going through. You find time and space for all of us. Whether it’s a kind message or a kind word, please know it’s more than appreciated. And don’t even get me started on your stories they’re amazing 🩷 Keep on glowing 🩷

@dutifullynuttywitch Léa! You’re one of the nicest and kindest people I’ve ever met! From the time you joined I just wanted us to be friends and we became friends 😍 (how awesome is that?) Thank you for being you! Kind, compassionate, nice and a damn good writer 🥰 And all in all an amazing person, never let anyone tell you different 🩷

@quixoticdreamer16 Your constant enthusiasm and support really are amazing. You’ve been so kind to me and everyone else. You take the time to reblog and leave a comment under my stories and for that I’m truly grateful. Thank you for being my friend and thank you for being you 🩷🩷

@jerzwriter Els 🩷 Where to start?! You were one of the first friends I made on tumblr. I saw your stories & your writing style and was really impressed. I was like damn she’s good! The joy and laughter I experience when I read your stories helped me through many dark days in my life and for that I want to thank you. Thank you for being supportive, thank you for being my friend, thank you for being real when I needed it and thank you for just being you! Never change because that’s what makes you unique 🩷

@the-pale-goddess Hilde! I had to mention you my dear friend. Even though you’re barely on tumblr these days that doesn’t mean I don’t miss you and obsess over Tiffany & Ethan and your stories. You’re such a talented writer. You’re a beautiful and amazing person inside and out. You’ve been so supportive of me, my stories and my characters it’s truly amazing thank you for that! I hope we’ll see more of you on tumblr. Sending a lot of hugs your way 🩷🩷

Again thank you to everyone who’s ever touched my heart it means the world to me 🩷🩷

💛

[physalian]

On Tragic Backstories (or, giving your character “one bad night”)

There’s a video essay out there by music nerd, Sideways, about how superhero theme music works, and most of the video is about how and why the original Superman theme song sounds the way it does. He then compares it to Batman’s theme song (the Danny Eflman one) and says that Batman’s theme breaks all the established rules of American superheroes.

Where the likes of Superman are heavy on the horns and brass, the “sound of America”, Batman’s theme is warped, jaded, and dangerous, almost as if it was Superman’s theme, if Supe’s theme had “one bad night”.

I mentioned in another post about giving characters agency in their backstories helps a lot in showing the audience who they really are when they’re put in a corner.

Baby Bats didn’t have much of a choice the night his parents got murdered, though he blames himself plenty.

What I mean, though, is situations where your character is unambiguously the person at fault for where they are today, as either the hero or the villain.

So I’m gonna spoil myself here and talk about my deuteragonist in Eternal Night: Dorian.

I’ve already said that he’s based on another OC of mine (about to make his debut in Little Red Dot on AO3!) but in many ways they are very different. They come from different social classes, different family makeups, different motives for why they do what they do, and different relationships with the protagonist and their love interests.

If you ever read both, you’ll see what traits they share.

Dorian’s backstory takes a while to deliver in ENNS, more than half the book. He drops hints here and there, like his actual age, that he’s not of noble birth, and a little bit about his family from when he was mortal.

Other characters also spill a little through their own biases sprinkled through the chapters so by the time Dorian has the chance to monologue his backstory to Elias, the protagonist, it’s an exposition dump you should be hungry for as the reader.

Personally, I think expository monologues are something I’m amazing at, so I won’t spoil the full experience.

What’s important for this post is that Dorian’s backstory is defined by three choices he had to make:

Why he left home

Why he became a vampire

Why he joined the ‘good guy’ coven

Dorian didn’t have much of a choice for leaving home—vampires were not going to take no for an answer—but he had control over who those vampires were abducting. He made sure they only took him. Who he is as a person and what he stands for is concentrated in that one choice: He is a self-sacrificial character who will do anything to save those he loves.

Why he turned defines another aspect of his character: He has unwavering conviction in his beliefs and will do anything to see them through, even if that means he doesn’t survive the process.

And why did he join the good guys? He represents that ‘vampire’ isn’t synonymous with ‘monster’. Or, in other words, “It’s not what you are, it’s what you do that defines you” and at his core, he is kindness.

Dorian’s backstory would have been a lot different if I’d written him as somebody kidnapped in the dead of night, turned by force, and run from his old coven for being too noble.

Still tragic, absolutely, and I’m not hating on characters who are tragic in their passivity and inability to take action in their lives. Not every character can save themselves, or damn themselves.

I love writing characters who did not expect to have to live with the consequences of their actions and Dorian, and his foundational character, pretty much say those exact words in both their books.

Good consequences or bad, one single choice either from necessity, selfishness, desire, impatience, or the best of intentions, can have a cascading effect on a story that tends to read as more realistic than everything going according to plan.

If I’d written Dorian’s backstory as “I surrendered to this evil coven already plotting how I’d take my revenge and become the vampire I am today, and it all worked flawlessly” I don’t think it would make him as sympathetic.

Not to say I hate plotters, either, he’s just not a plotter. Another character in that same book, Gregori, did pretty much exactly that for his own backstory.

But “I surrendered to this coven and had no idea what I signed up for, then saw an opportunity and jumped on it and could not take that choice back” is fitting of who he is as a person. He was someone too soft and simple for this political world he found himself in, who had to adapt or die.

You can cover a lot of ground, particularly in dreaded “exposition monologues” without throwing it into your audience’s faces that you’re “telling” a bunch of information. I didn’t need Dorian to say “these are the three tentpole traits of my character”.

But I do think that if you give characters that kind of agency, you’re giving them the chance to prove who they are when no one’s looking. For Dorian, who had no guarantee his plan would work or that he’d survive its execution, who he was when no one was looking is a man who’d give his all to keep a promise.

—

If you’d like to check out Dorian’s story, check out Eternal Night of the Northern Sky below.

And if you’d like to see the foundational characters that were the basis of my entire writing journey, check out Little Red Dot.