#there's no real conclusion to this

[nabexis]

Been doing some studies of Viktor and made some observations about his character design that I really like, especially when compared to Jayce. It's a bit long and rambly (and I'm too tired to check if it's coherent) so it's under a cut.

Viktor's design is very A-symmetrical, a visual signal that he's from Zaun. He literally carries the design of Zaun's Asymmetrical design philosophy in his facial features, making him automatically an outsider from the symmetrical design philosophies of Piltover's attempted perfection.

A huge theme with Piltover is that they strive for perfection, while Jayce, the poster boy for Piltover has mostly symmetrical features, he's not *entirely* symmetrical (the scar on his eyebrow, his lips, his hair) but his imperfections, his looks, are downplayed in the Man of Progress imagery. His mouth is closed to hide his tooth gap, he's in 3/4 view so his eyebrow doesn't show that there's not a scar on the other side, Even his hair is slicked directly back (Jayce gets close to this in S1 A2-3 - S2A1 but in S1A1 and S2A2-3 his hair is much less symmectrical looking. The poster of him doesn't even show the way his hair lays on his head correctly.

Jayce, once he starts going through it in the canyon, stops being as symmectrical. He's scratched up, gets scars, and his hair becomes unkempt completely, even when he cleans up a bit during the final two episodes where he's seemingly had a shower and some kind of sleep, his hair is no longer perfect or symmetrical. His design embraces the asymmetry, a visual mark of Viktor's influence on him.

Jayce, as he's wandered into Viktor's commune, his outfit has become completely asymmetrical. This is where Future!Viktor's influence is strongest.

Similarly, Viktor's hair grows longer and slightly more symmetrical-looking when he becomes the Herald in the commune. While his nose doesn't get unbroken, his lips are slightly thinner, making their asymmetry less noticeable. The mole under his right eye disappears into the hexcore's corruption, losing some of that asymmetry. A result of Jayce's actions.

Then near the finale, Viktor loses almost all his Asymmetry when he becomes the Machine Herald. His puppets still show asymmetry, but they're gilded and porcelain feature are far more reminiscent of Piltover than of Zaun, and his own face splits perfectly down the middle, making him lose one of the most promenantly asymmetrical features on his face, his nose. He's transformed into the opposing design philosophy.

Similarly, Jayce's final costume plays with asymmetry more than almost all of his previous outfits (excluding the one he wears in the commune), with his paldron on one shoulder, a sleeve that's shorter on one side, and his hammer being the most asymmetrical part of his design.

IDK where I'm going with this, mostly just observations that Jayce and Viktor's visual language have influenced the other person. Something Something Zaun and Piltover's influences over the characters and where they came from, and how that influence from the other place shows on the character's designs later in the series. Viktor brings the Elitism/Perfection dichotomy from Piltover, Jayce crawls up to Future!Viktor from Zaun, living Viktor's narrative in a literal sense, which, in turn, remade him in a Zaun way over his Piltover origins.

[heyclickadee]

Because I have a tendency to get stuck in art blocks and s t r u g g l e badly with composition, and because I think The Bad Batch is a beautifully shot show, I’ve started doing rough grayscale studies of bad batch to unpack how line and value can be used to direct a viewer’s eye to where people want the audience to look. (I’m doing it with other movies and shows, but I do really like TBB, so….) That way, if I’m sitting in a period where I can’t draw, then maybe I can at least learn something. It’s not fan art, it’s just trying to break the composition down and make it make sense to me, but I think it’s interesting so I figured I’d throw them all here.

So! Potentially very boring things under the cut:

The thing that started this off was getting sent a gifset of the scene in “The Return” where Wrecker gives Crosshair his armor back. It’s a great scene, and one of the things that allows for the show to pull that moment off is the way that most everything in many of the shots is designed to draw the viewer’s attention to Crosshair’s face so that we’re paying attention to his reaction. For example:

It’s not a very high contrast shot, but if we block out the basics, most of the lines in the scene are directing us towards Crosshair. Both Wrecker and Omega make movements towards him in this shot, and then this movement is sort of carried over to Crosshair via the various lines in the background/Wrecker’s arm/even the crate. Additionally, our eyes tend to be drawn towards points of highest contract, which, in this shot, include the lamps in the far background against the pillars (forming a line from Wrecker to Crosshair) and the light hitting Crosshair’s face against the much darker background. Between all of this most people in the audience are going to end up automatically looking right at Crosshair who is, of course, the main person we’re supposed to paying attention to here.

This isn’t actually a full frame. I sort of grabbed a screenshot over the interwebs for this one, but The Bad Batch actually has a very wide aspect ratio. From what I understand it’s shot and aired in a CinemaScope ratio (2:39:1 or 2:35:1, though TBB is 2:39:1). It’s basically super ultra widescreen, an aspect ratio used when a filmmaker wants to make something feel more epic or cinematic, and as far as I know it’s the same aspect ratio used for the original trilogy before any cropping happened. (For reference, The Clone Wars was also shot in a CinemaScope ratio, 2:35:1, but was cropped to 16:9 for airing on Cartoon Network, and Rebels was shot and aired in 1:78/more or less 16:9.) So an uncropped screenshot of TBB would look more like this:

This is from “The Outpost.” It’s actually a fairly dark shot with Crosshair faced away from the camera and the value of his figure blending right into the rest of the foreground, which actually comes communicate a sense of someone who isn’t trying to draw attention to themselves (to me, anyway), but our eyes are drawn to Crosshair anyway by every major line in the shot as well as the highest point of contrast converging right over Crosshair’s shoulder. That, and the line of his rifle/shoulder and the support pole forming a big, well, cross-hair right in that same spot. Otherwise, he would blend right into the foreground and be easier to miss.

Unlike Hunter in this shot from “Plan 99”

Where basically you’ve got the exact same thing happening, every line in the shot converges on Hunter’s location, but instead of using just high contrast to draw our attention, we’ve got a fairly middle-gray scene with our eyes being drawn to the focal point by having one bright spotlight.

The orange cross mark I’ve drawn here is just to mark the center of the frame, which I wanted to point out since, at least as far as I’ve noticed, TBB has a tendency to save center and slightly off-center shots for really specific moments. I’d have to check on that and what the pattern is, though, since a few of the remaining shots in this post are center shot. (Filmmakers area generally taught shoot in thirds or, alternatively, on a phi grid or other away from center set of focal points, though you do get some center shot movies and shows. I think Raiders of the Lost Arc has a lot of center shots.)

In fact, a pretty good example of shooting in thirds (or on a phi grid—I laid it out and I think it fits the phi grid slightly better) is this shot from “Faster”

Where you’ve got Tech and Tay-0 placed on slightly close thirds on either side of the frame. If we’re just looking at line and value, with this shot we actually get this sort of interesting back and forth between where our eye is being drawn. A lot of the lines in the shot are directing us to look at Tech, but then you’ve got one of the lines going through, and the sweep of Tech’s arm and datapad pointing towards, Tay-0, whose face and body are outlined with a much higher contrast in value. And then we have that one very bold arc connecting the two. The result of this is that our eyes sort of bounce back and forth between these two characters as they get into their conversation.

Most of these shots have had just one or two (at most three) characters, and there are many scenes of TBB with everyone where our gaze is sort of directed to the group collectively, but sometimes you’ll have group scene where our attention is directed more towards one individual than others, like with this shot from “Battle Scars”

Once again, you’ve got most of the lines in the shot converging towards Rex as well as Rex’s person serving as the point of highest contrast while everyone else sort of melds into the background in terms of value. He’s also the first (and maybe only) figure who breaks fully above objects in the background to be shot directly against the sky. Line and value aren’t the only things directing the audience’s gaze towards Rex in this shot—there’s actually a lot of desaturation happening as we move from Rex, to the other characters, to the far background that helps as well, buuuuut this is a grayscale breakdown so that unfortunately doesn’t show up...here. (This is a center shot scene if we’re going horizontally, but Rex’s head, which is really the focal point, is right around the top third of the frame; it’s not exactly a low angle shot, but we are still looking up at him.)

Anyway, the reason any of this is important is because when you’re shooting with an incredibly wide aspect ratio like this, there’s a LOT of information being conveyed with every frame. You can fit a lot of stuff on screen at once. And while people generally going to rewatch and pay attention to background details (if nothing else, TBB is a goldmine for those background details), you do want to draw your audience’s attention to the most important parts of the frame—especially when an individual shot typically lasts only a few seconds. Or less. Like with this:

So this shot from "Faster" is up for less than a second before the camera turns to follow the speeders and then changes to another shot, and I had a devil of a time even getting screengrab of it. (Mostly because I was trying to grab it on my phone, but that's not really the point.) In less than a second the people making this have to communicate where Tech's speeder is, what's happening, what we're even looking at, while the objects in the scene are all moving incredibly fast. .

So, to communicate that, you've got multiple speeders moving in the shot, but only one (Tech's) standing out in terms of value against a fairly dark ceiling, as well as a combination of some real direct one-point linear perspective and the more or less arrow shape of the ramp pointing directly at the point Tech's speeder is going to be when it reaches the peak of its crest over the ramp. That way we're already looking at where Tech is going to be before he gets there and end up following his speeder as he zooms by.

[me-beef]

@strangeravatar made a great point

i was gonna focus on the spike-hotboxing-celestia aspect but i got distracted somewhere along the way and i think i forgot what joke i was trying to make

but dont you think its interesting how many guards of the exact same color/body type she's managed to accrue?? i do

ooohh you want to go look at our stickers so bad

[lastoneout]

the whole guilt-tripping language in posts about important topics paired with how I'm still getting bitches in my notes talking about why it's actually good to tell "bad" people to kill themselves continues to prove to me that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of social justice or activism outside of assuming the worst of and then viciously attacking strangers on the internet

[platoapproved]

Wherever your miserable life takes you, whoever you find to endure time with, whatever pale proxy of me... I'll be with him. Just wanted you to know that.

[mohntilyet]

i have to be so real. sometimes you have to outright not give a shit what the author thinks. i’m not saying to disregard how a character is portrayed and give into fanon characterisations but sometimes i will see fans be like “(head writer) omggg do you think this character is a good person?” “how would this character react if xyz happened?” as though that’s not a question you can and have to answer for yourself.! any character can contain multitudes and if you keep limiting your perception of them solely on word of god its not fun for the writer or even yourself anymore. THINK FOR YOURSELF. INVENT NEW WAYS TO FUCK YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTERS OVER

[reasonsforhope]

People ask me sometimes how I'm so confident that we can beat climate change.

There are a lot of reasons, but here's a major one: it would take a really, really long time for Earth to genuinely become uninhabitable for humans.

Humans have, throughout history, carved out a living for themselves in some of the most harsh, uninhabitable corners of the world. The Arctic Circle. The Sahara. The peaks of the Himalayas. The densest, most tropical regions of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. etc. etc.

Frankly, if there had been a land bridge to Antarctica, I'm pretty sure we would have been living there for thousands of years, too. And in fact, there are humans living in Antarctica now, albeit not permanently.

And now, we're not even facing down apocalypse, anymore. Here's a 2022 quote from the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, a leader on climate change and the furthest thing from a climate optimist:

"The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse. Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”" -David Wallace-Wells for the New York Times, October 26, 2022

If we can adapt to some of the harshest climates on the planet - if we could adapt to them thousands of years ago, without any hint of modern technology - then I have every faith that we can adjust to the world that is coming.

What matters now is how fast we can change, because there is a wide, wide gap between "climate apocalypse" and "no harm done." We've already passed no harm done; the climate disasters are here, and they've been here. People have died from climate disasters already, especially in the Global South, and that will keep happening.

But as long as we stay alive - as long as we keep each other alive - we will have centuries to fix the effects of climate change, as much as we possibly can.

And looking at how far we've come in the past two decades alone - in the past five years alone - I genuinely think it is inevitable that we will overcome climate change.

So, we're going to survive climate change, as a species.

What matters now is making sure that every possible individual human survives climate change as well.

What matters now is cutting emissions and reinventing the world as quickly as we possibly can.

What matters now is saving every life and livelihood and way of life that we possibly can.

[chiliger]

It’s a sign of affection.

[charlietheepicwriter7]

Jason Todd, the Red Hood, breaking into Titan's Tower: ...What'd ya got there? Tim Drake, holding a de-aged Danny on his hip, four days awake: Coffee.

[amphibianaday]

day 1421

[thisbreadisnotgucci]

Poolverine Headcannons that No One Asked For:

• They are both desperately touch-starved and thus are practically glued to one another

• People assume Logan is annoyed at Wade constantly talking and never shutting up but Logan likes listening to him speak and genuinely enjoys hearing his voice

• Logan makes biscuits (like a cat) when he’s nervous

• Logan purrs (like a cat) when he’s happy/cuddling with Wade

[accidential-ichtyologist]

The Palladium Heist

[equill]

He didn’t, but someone else did.

(Road to Ninja AU inside an AU.)

Comic 2: Forgiveness on both sides

White Tulips

Extra: Breaking & Entering (it’s for a good reason)

[domoz-writes]

One of those AUs where Madara traps Tobirama in the eternal tsukuyomi and goes into his dream to observe and/or torment him only to be baffled when Tobirama's dream involves Hikaku being a successful second hokage and Tobirama can spend all the time doing experiments that he wants and isn't forced to deal with politics at all

[isketaankaulimella]

I laughed when Sherlock fans were like "There HAS to be a secret REAL ending, it just CAN'T end like this!!" with wild conspiracy theories and all

But now, I unfortunately get it...

[rosequart]

it's curious how "toshiro doesn't really know falin, he just likes the idea of her" seems to be the popular perception of their relationship when they were both in laios' party for like two years. meanwhile senshi is immediately granted Found Family status after being in the party for less than a month

like hey maybe some of you might be projecting a lot of weird stuff onto this guy for having the gall to crush on a coworker he's known for a while. but what do i know