#this is actually an old comic but i never had the motivation to finish

[knockknockwhosthereartistism]

I don’t think we talk enough about how Ford can see shrimp colors

[linkspooky]

The Death of Kenjaku

So I was planning to write this meta the week that Kenjaku died, but decided to delay until we got full confirmation of his death. Something I didn't believe in even after Kenjaku passed the merger onto Sukuna. However, watching this video about death in Jujutsu Kaisen inspired me to finish this post. Not because I disagree with anything the YouTuber is saying, but because they can speculate on the meaning of so many deaths in Jujutsu Kaisen but can't find the meaning in Kenjaku's sudden death. This has led me to speculate why Gege made the choice to kill Kenjaku in the way that he did. What meaning is there in Kenjaku's abrupt and unsatisfying death?

Who is Kenjaku?

The first step in understanding Kenjaku's death is of course understanding how he lived. We actually know incredibly little about Kenjaku's character by design. Despite the fact he's literally in Geto's body, he's not meant to have sympathetic or human motivations to his actions (though hold onto that "human motivation" in your head for a moment). No flashback sequence shows the audience why this guy is the way he is, no single event seems to have driven him to do what he did.

This is what we know about Kenjaku in brief. He is a sorcerer who is over a thousand years old who was around in Sukuna's day. He once had a friendship with Tengen, but found her original self boring and unambitious. He also contrasts heavily with Tengen, who lives outside of humanity, because he has lived among humanity for 1,000 years. One of those lifetimes was Noritoshi Kamo who violated a woman and conducted heinous experiments. He produced ten children in his one thousand years, the nine death painting siblings and Yuji Itadori. He considers the first children boring, because human and curse hybrids turned out too normal.

He also partially blames himself for how boring they are, because he can't create anything that will exceed his expectations, the only thing that can exceed his expectations is born in chaos. He spent a thousand years organizing the culling games, and wants to use the games to create a merger, because he thinks creating a merger between Tengen and Humanity will create something entirely new and interesting. He also believes the way towards the future lies in further optimizing cursed energy, not in breaking away from it the way Yuki Tsukumo tried to do and Maki has.

The only people whose word we have on Kenjaku's motivations are Kenjaku himself, and Tengen's word and Tengen themselves who claims to not know what goes on in the human heart.

From all of the above Kenjaku seems to be a shallow character who's motivations can be summed up as "because I can" and "I want to see what happens." This shallowness is intentional however, as Gege who once praised the minimalist storytelling of Nasu and Evangelion likes to pick and choose what crumbs of backstory he gives out for his characters. We've never gotten any exposition on the Gojo clan, but we have an entire chapter about Takaba's failed career as a stand-up comic. This isn't a judgement of good or bad writing, this is just how Gege writes as minimalist as possible. This is in line with how Gege writes the ancient sorcerers as well, they are all much more shallow driven by instinct or Freudian Id (I desire) rather than the higher reasoning of modern-day sorcerers. Takaba uses comedy as a means of communication and bridging the gaps between people, Higuruma's backstory is the critique of the modern day justice system. Ishigori apparently lived a satisfying life where he was succesful and had good women, but that wasn't enough so he wants to get into a fight with Yuta to satisfy his hunger and feel like he's eaten desert.

It sounds shallow when I summarize it in text, but in the context of the fight with Yuta, it's a challenge for Yuta who for the most part only cares about his loved ones and sees the world through his love goggles to be more selfish and fight for his own desires. It's also reflective of a more basic and instinctual kind of thinking, as opposed to the higher reasoning and logic that modern-day sorcerers apply.

I'm keeping most of this first part to text for this reason, like go back and read the fight with Ishigori and Yuta. If I summarize Ishigori's character reasoning out of context it sounds stupid, but read the fight and it works because it's ID (I Desire) vs. Yuta's superego in not only having to collect points to help rescue Tsumiki, find a way to protect all the innocent people in the Culling Games, and also collect enough points to take on Kenjaku himself so Gojo won't have to. Meanwhile Ishigori's just fighting to get some of that sweet desert, the shallow works in contrast to the more layered motivations of our heroes.

Kenjaku is a shallow archetype fighting to satisfy his baser impulses (in his case curiosity) in comparison to the main characters who are fighting for more complicated reasons and often people besides themselves.

The question then becomes what archetype is Kenjaku. In that case answering who Kenjaku is is quite simple.

Kenjaku is a clown.

It might be more accurate to say that Kenjaku embodies what's commonly known as the "trickster archetype" but I'mma go with clown.

The most obvious example of a clown villain is what most consider the joker to be, that is a silly little clown man who challenges the straight faced and grim batman and sews chaos where Batman attempts to establish law and order in Gotham and make the city into a better place.

From the book Batman and Psychology:

More than any other villains, the Joker and Two-face reflect Batman himself as funhouse distortions, converses of who and what he is. The laughing, jesting, brightly colored Joker contrasts with grim, dark Batman. The Joker is the Joker. No alter ego. The film's opening bank robbery shows him wearing a clown mask over clown makeup, Under the surface there's only more Joker. He gives no history except inconsistent lies. When he finally considers the impact of his demand Batman unmask, he retracts the threat and demands that Batman's identity remain undisclosed. He wants a batman who has no other self, a Dark Knight whose only deeper layer is further darkness.

Is there a better descriptor for Kenjaku then these words?

Kenjaku is Kenjaku. No alter ego. A clown mask over clown makeup., Under the surface there's only more Kenjaku.

In other words, what you see is what you get.

Kenjaku even mirrors Joker's opinion of Batman, he thinks people should be more like him, not the other way around. He's not the outlier, he's being true to humanity's basic impulses of curiousity and discovery.

A more apt comparison as a clown though would probably be Loki, one of the most classic examples of clowning in the shared mythology of humanity. The character who challenges the common wisdom of gods like Odin who suspended themselves from the world tree for eleven days in order to gain wisdom. Loki, who through his trickery manages to bring about the events of Ragnarok for no deeper reason than because he can. Everyone swore not to harm Balder and Loki goes to find something that can harm him because BET.

Mythological Loki doesn't need a deeper motivation because what he represents in the mythology is someone who challenges authority and brings about a change, because in Norse Mythology nothing lasts forever and no era is permanent. Jujutsu Kaisen is also a story about how things should not in fact stay the same and tradition is bad sometimes.

When Kenjaku finds Tengen's true body he's curled up in a tree root in the fetal position, and he killed what is basically the all-knowing, all-seeing supposedly immortal sorcerer that maintains the status quo of japan, it's not exactly subtle.

Kenjaku is a clown, and clown's gotta clown. We don't need any more explanation that, it's more about what he does for the story. However, what he represents, the deep intellectual curiosity, and also a drive to disrupt the status quo in an attempt to see something more interesting can also be analyzed more deeply because they are human emotions that motivate us as well. The same way that Mahito is an inhuman monster, but he's created and motivated by the fear of other humans, something all of us have. '

Before moving onto his death though, I wanna hammer in how Kenjaku really is just motivated by these two things, a desire to see something interesting, and intellectual curiosity by comparing him to other characters.

The Clown in Fiction

I've already compared Kenjaku to Loki and the Joker, but when it comes to someone who wants to disrupt the entire order of the world simply because they're bored we've got to go to the original girlboss.

So there are plenty of villains who go "I'm evil because I'm bored" but they usually tend to be pretty shallow, either shallowly written for the lulz evil characters who just exist for shock value or just kinda dull. No one has ever done it as good as Junko Enoshima and no one ever will again.

For those who need context DanganRonpa is a death game series where the main villain basically has caused the apocalypse, wiped out most of humanity, and then induces survivors in a bunker to kill each other in a death game, where if someone commits a succesful murder they can escape the bunker, but if they're caught in a trial they're executed. Also, if they're not convicted in the trial everyone else is killed, motivating the jury to find and execute the guilty murderer.

Junko Enoshima the main villain and orchestrator of this death game ended the world because despair. She wants to inflict despair on everyone because despair. Because hope sucks and despair is where it's at.

It sounds shallow and it is and Kodaka has said in interview he wrote Junko to be a villain character with zero redeeming character traits, and no sympathetic backstory to describe why she is the way she is, but there is still something motivating her.

If you go a bit deeper into the lore and read Dangan Ronpa Zero, there is an entire book which explains the lengths which Junko goes to feel normal human emotions. The thing is much like Kenjaku Junko is too smart for her own good, everything is predictable and therefore everything bores her. Once in an attempt to live normally, she literally lobotomizes herself, makes it so that she can't remember anything and has continual amnesia constantly forgetting what just happened to her, because that's the only way she can live without knowing everything that's going to happen and constantly predicting everyone's actions.

Junko has whatever her universe's version of the six-eyes is, but instead of lording it over other people like Gojo and basking in her superiority she wants to feel normal, and connected to the world. If she can't have that she tries to make the world as unpredictable place as possible so she can experience it the same way that everyone else does.

Hope is harmony. A just heart, moving toward the light. That is all. Despair is hope's polar opposite. It is messy and confusing. It swallows up love, hatred, and everything else. Because not knowing where you will end up is despair. Despair is even what you cannot predict. Only despair's unpredictability can save you from a boring future.

I'm still not describing it properly because I don't want to go into a Danganronpa essay in this post about Jujutsu Kaisen, but one example I always use is two characters from American Dragon Jake Long. They're a pair of twins who see the future, one always sees happy things, and one always sees sad things. The one who has happy visions is a goth who's very depressed and the one who sees disaster is an incredibly peppy girl.

Jake is so confused as to why the twin who always sees good visions is so depressed, and she basically tells him to imagine having every good thing, every small little surprise, every pleasure taken out of life.

Kara: When you only see good things, nothing's special anymore. All the pleasant surprises are taken out of life. Sara: But, when you only see bad stuff, even the smallest bit of good news makes you happy!

All of this to say what Junko feels isn't just boredom, or a desire to commit evil for evil's sake, but also a full on existential crisis where she's simply too smart so she doesn't feel any connection to other people or the world around her. In order to feel that connection, that connection that everyone else has, to feel like she is actually a participant in her life not an observer she's willing to go to extremes to make the world a more interesting place, to therefore make her own life feel satisfying.

Kenjaku vs. The World (Kenjaku Pilgrim's sad little life)

To connect all this back to Kenjaku imagine the profound existential despair of a person who's lived for a thousand years, and felt bored all that time. Sukuna is at least a hedonist, he gets his fun by getting into fights, humans might be bugs to him but they're tasty bugs.

Kenjaku goes to similiar motivations and has similiar extremes, he's uninvested in the world around him, he's lived a thousand years but has no attachment to the world, to life, to the people around him. I said that Junko wants to be a participant in life not an all seeing observer and that was purposeful language because to bring back an old post. I rambled on this post about Gojo that part of Gojo's problem is that he only experiences observer-to-object relationships or I to it.

Ich and Du, translated as I and Thou is a book by philosopher Martin Buber. His two main porositions is that we may address existence in two ways:

The attitude of the “I” towards “it” towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

The attitude of “I” towards “Thou” in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

In Buber's terms, those who only experience the first type of relationships are only observing the world around them not relating to them. Kenjaku doesn't relate to other human beings because they are objects, he only experiences subject -> object relationships and never subject -> subject.

Buber also goes on to theorize that meaning in our lives comes from subject -> subject relationships we form with other people.

Kenjaku jokingly says that to be his friend you have to never bore him and be his equal, but there's no one considers his equal because he's the subject and everyone else are just objects.

He regrets he can't sit down and talk theories with Tsukumo Yuki because she's one of the few people who think like him.

Kenjaku is a paradox of an incredibly brilliant man who is also shallow as a puddle that you can stand in and not get your socks wet. However, he tragically can't really form a more complex identity because our identities are formed by our relationships to other people and Kenjaku doesn't relate to anybody.

That's basically the theme of the whole Choso and Kenjaku fight, Choso is a weird aborted fetus of a curse who still has a strong identity and is able to feel unconditional love for Yuji because of the connection of family and the ideas of brotherhood that binds the two. Kenjaku is a bad father who abandoned Choso because they were "boring" but also never really gave them a chance to grow up or be interesting, he just dismissed them offhand and moved on to the next weird science project.

However, his reason for dismissing Choso isn't Choso's fault but rather a case of Psychological projection. It's not Choso who is boring, but rather Kenjaku himself, he said so earlier.

"What I can create, does not exceed the bounds of my own potential. The answer is always flickering darkly in chaos."

Kenjaku cannot look within to find anything satisfying abput his life because there's nothing inside of him. He doesn't have a fully formed identiy he's just ID, and because he tramples all over other people to form his desires he also cannot ever form a full ego. Just like Sukuna and most of the ancient sorcerers he's a paradox of being all ego, and yet having an underdeveloped ego with shallow motivators.

Kenjaku cannot look within because he's a boring person, and he cannot look for other people to find worth in his life because they're just objects, so instead he looks into the void, he tries to change the world around him by spreading more chaos hoping that it will make something unpredictable happen in front of his eyes - and that will give him the meaning and investment in his life he's deprived himself of because he refuses to form relationships with other people.

It's the Gojo problem. It's the Kashimo problem. It's not the Sukuna problem, because Sukuna admits he doesn't care about and rejects things like love and meaning.

If Kenjaku makes the world around him a more interesting place, he will be able to live in it. It's the same as Gojo trying to raise people up to his level by creating stronger students.

So after going to great length to demonstrate how powerful and all-consuming Kenjaku's boredom is, and how cut off he is from his own humanity, here's the part where I sort of defend his death.

Wouldn't it be funny if the joke character killed the main villain?

Let's be honest it was Takaba's kill here, Yuta just camped and killstole. I think part of the problem with people not understanding the meaning behind Kenjaku's sudden and unexpected death is attributing the death to Yuta cutting his head off out of nowhere, and not Takaba's thematic victory over Kenjaku.

Takaba represents a blindspot for Kenjaku which is why the main characters use him as a weapon against him, and he also calls out in a fashion Kenjaku's hypocrisy. First and foremost, Kenjaku presents himself as an agent of change, but he actually has no interest in many of the modern sorcerers and holds a bias towards the heian era as the peak of sorcery. He even says that he's going to bring back the Heian Golden Age to Sukuna at the end of Shibuya arc.

Because that's what Chaos is Kenjaku, things being the same as they were 1,000 years ago. Kenjaku is an agent of change and chaos and somehow his definition of change is... resetting things back to the past because the sorcerers of the past were so much better than today.

Kenjaku goes out of his way to awaken hundreds of modern day sorcerers, and then dismisses literally off of them except for Hiromi because they don't have enough potential for him compared to ancient sorcerers. He essentially did the same with the Death Painting Bros, he went through all of the trouble to create them, then dismissed them as not having enough potential BEFORE THEY EVEN GOT THE CHANCE TO GROW UP.

Kenjaku has a habit of just going BORED NOW and leaving before he even gives things the time to impress him. He does the same with the Culling Game, he set up the death game to push sorcerers to fight each other and bring out their powers, but he never actually intended to watch the sorcerers evolve. He just wanted to slaughter everyone inside to start the merger.

He goes through a lot of potential to set up these situations and then abandons them before they have the chance to even evolve, because they do not have enough "potential" in his opinion, but like his opinion is often shown to be wrong. Takaba represents that blindspot because he was one of the modern sorcerers that Kenjaku underestimated and dismissed offhand as boring without giving him a chance to shine.

That is the joke that Takaba introduces himself with "Wouldn't it be funny if a random comic relief side character suddenly defeated the big bad?"

He's immediately pointing out a blindspot, because Kenjaku automatically believes himself to be an important character, he underestimates Takaba because he's a side character, one of the people Kenjaku has dismissed as boring and uninteresting (before they even had a chance to evolve into something else). Like that's the other thing Kenjaku wants things to evolve but he doesn't... let them. He abandoned Choso and the rest before they even grew up, they were literally fetuses and he threw them away. Kenjaku is the protagonist of reality, and Takaba is a side character, and therefore Takaba couldn't possibly harm him because Kenjaku and his boundless curiosity are the center of the world.

It's not just about subverting the audience's expectations to have the main villain die in such an anti-climactic way before the final act even starts, but it's pointing out how narrow Kenjaku's viewpoints really were all along. He wants everything to be surprised but he never lets anything surprise him, because either he gets bored right away, or he looks down on others before giving them the chance to evolve, or the third thing he just straight up has to control everything. He can't let the culling game evolve naturally he's going to slaughter all the players by hand so he can move onto the next part.

It's the contradiction between a schemer who needs to control everything and everyone to bring about his intended result and everything needs to be a part of his big plans, to someone who wants to be surprised by others and have things go off the rails. You can't have both of these things at once, Kenjaku cannot have things surprise him if he rigs everything to go his way with his overly elaborate schemes and his tight-fisted control of everyone in the story.

Like, in comparison to Kenjaku the joker just blows things up and sprays people with laughing gas. They're both playing the same game but the joker is having fun and Kenjaku isn't.

Kenjaku wants an unexpected future, but he doesn't care about any of the modern sorcerers and has a bias towards the heiean era that he considers the height and wants to reset things to bring back the heian era. He wants to be surprised but won't give up control.

Kenjaku's boast is that unlike Tengen he's spent a thousand years living on the ground instead of lording up on them from above like some deity, but is that true? Has Kenjaku lived? Has he engaged with the world? Formed relationships with people? Or does he just sit in the corner rubbing his hands together menacingly and scheming his schemes.

Takaba unironically gives Kenjaku what he wants, something he's never seen before in a thousand years, and it's from a place Kenjaku never expected. Some random guy, who he dismissed as one of the boring modern sorcerers with no potential like Higuruma.

Takaba not only exists in Kenjaku's blindspot, he almost immediately points out Kenjaku's second hypocrisy. If he's willing to resort to mass murder just to feel entertained, then if he found something else to entertain him there'd be no reason to get violent and scheme his schemes.

In other words Kenjaku hasn't really gone looking for other places to try to find what makes life worth living, or at least enertaining, he hasn't really tried any alternatives to finding joy in life because Jujutsu is all he cares about. Takaba says that if he found something else even more entertaining than the merger there'd be no need to go through with the merger, and he turns out to be right. Kenjaku could have found meaning and entertainment with the world someplace else, he was just too narrow minded and never looked anywhere else.

As I said from the beginning Kenjaku's existential crisis comes from his inability to relate to other people and viewing them all as objects, but in Kenjaku's mind of course he can't relate to others they're too boring, so therefore it's the world's fault, and the fault of others and not himself.

However, right away one of those boring people starts relating to Kenjaku.

I joked about how we know nothing about the Gojo clan but Takaba gets an entire backstory chapter about his failed comedy career, but this chapter is plot important because jokes are the way that Takaba relates to and forms relationships with other people. Takaba makes jokes to relate to others but has a fallout with a comedy partner and has never been able to form a lasting relationship with a comedic partner because comedy doesn't mean the same to them as it does to him - because to Takaba comedy is about forming relationships with people. Which is why he thinks he's failed if he's failed to make everyone in the audience laugh because he wants to make comedy that will make other people relate to him and understand him.

However, he almost gives up on comedy because he's afraid that he might fail on that endeavor. He gives up on striving to make everybody in the audience laugh, because of self-affirmation and a desire to protect himself. He didn't want to fail so he started distancing himself from the audience under the excuse "Well, I can't make everyone laugh so it's okay if not everyone understands me."

Takaba at some point gave up on trying to use comedy as a means of understanding and relating to others, because of his fear of failure and at that point he nearly lost - but he rallies himself by saying that he won't give up on making someone like Kenjaku laugh. If his comedy is about connecting to others, about understanding others and having others understand him then he can't just give up on Kenjaku and say it's Kenjaku's fault that Kenjaku can't relate to his sense of humor. He's got to try even harder to make Kenjaku laugh.

This is also pretty much the opposite of Kenjaku's point of view. For Kenjaku it's everyone else's fault for being so boring that's why he can't relate to them. Wheras, Takaba takes personal responsibility, he wasn't funny enough, he has to try harder, he's the one who's going to make Kenjaku laugh by improving himself. Takaba looks inward, and Kenjaku looks outwards because there's nothing inside Kenjaku.

This is a parallel to this.

The difference however, is that Sukuna did not betray his ideology. Sukuna lives for the kicks that battle provides him and wants to face strong opponents so he can eventually devoured them and be momentarily entertained.

Like Sukuna is not bored the way Kenjaku is. The world is his playground. He may refer to living as just killing time until you die, but he also says that there's an infinite variety of humans to entertain yourself with. The world is Sukuna's toybox and he's satisfied with just that. In fact he doesn't even care about the merger, until his frustration with Yuji makes him think a little deeper about himself.

Kenjaku is not the Sukuna in this scene, he's the Gojo. He believed he was above others, only to be reminded suddenly that he was just the same as everyone else and brought back down to humanity. I mean, they even die off panel the same anticlimactic way. Gojo's infinity meant nothing in the face of one surprise attack a world-cleaving slash Gojo didn't see coming. All of Kenjaku's backup plans meant nothing in the face of Yuta camping and kill-stealing.

Kenjaku didn't lose because Yuta's plan of camping and killstealing was simply too brilliant for him to prepare for however, we're given the exact reason kenjaku lost - because he was having too much fun with Takaba.

Which meant what Takaba said earlier was true, if Kenjaku found something funnier, something other than the merger that could make him laugh there'd be no need to go through with the merger to begin with.

Kenjaku loses because all along he could have related to people, formed meaningful relationships with others, looked for meaning in life outside of Jujutsu but just chose not to. Which is also a parallel to this.

Sukuna says that Kashimo and Gojo both lost because they were greedy. They already received love in a way, they had the love of everyone who regarded them as the strongest, they had people who earnestly wanted to challenge them and respected them - which Sukuna sees as a form of love, and yet they still wanted more.

They were the ones who put themselves up on that pedestal and decided to stand above all of humanity, they don't get to whine about being lonely on top of that.

To add my interpretation to Sukuna's speech, what he's outlining is a general conflict in Jujutsu Kaisen, you can choose to be all ego to put personal development above everything else but it comes at the cost of not being able to form relationships. Maki's as powerful as Toji now, but the sister she always wanted to protect is dead and basically committed suicide. Meanwhile Noritoshi Kamo didn't participate in the final battle, but he reconnected with his mother and half-brother.

There are plenty of characters who die and suffer in jujutsu kaisen because they chose to value other people above themselves, because Jujutsu Kaisen rewards selfishness and punishes selflessness / having an underdeveloped sense of self.

I'll pick Mechamaru as my biggest example, he lived to protect Miwa, and not only does he die an unsatisfying death, he also breaks her heart.

However, at least Mechamaru experienced love. His desire to protect Miwa is granted, because Miwa is also out of the final conflict. Mechamaru is one of the most miserable characters in the manga, and yet he experienced love in his life for someone else that made his brief life meaningful. The characters who choose love, and other people over strength tend to get stepped on, but they at least had that love in their life to begin with.

It's a having your cake and eating it too situation. Kashimo chose strength over love, and he got to be so strong he was unbeatable and lived to old age, but not only is he unfulfilled but he whines about being unable to relate to the people around him - you're the one who chose to step on everyone like bugs.

Characters in Jujutsu Kaisen don't just experience death when they try to be selfless however, like yeah there's a disproportionate amont of selfless minor characters who die, but like Yuji is the most selfless character in the manga and he's continually punished for it and yet he's the one referred to as a person with an unbreakable will.

Rather instead of Jujutsu Kiasen preferring the selfish side on the scale of selfishness / selflessness, the kind of messy, deaths that get handed out to people like Mechamaru happen when you betray the ideals you were living for. Whether they were selfish or selfless.

It goes back to Toji's internal monologue. You lose when you lose sight of yourself - like there's some deaths that don't fit the mould but for the most part, Gojo, Kashimo, Toji's and then Kenjaku's deaths all follow this pattern. By coincidence they also all take place offscreen for the most part (I suppose we see Yuta cut off Kenjaku's head but it's quick and unsatisfying compared to all the rest).

Kenjaku died because he betrayed what he was living for and he temporarily lost sight of himself. As I said Kenjaku's airtight principles were that everyone was boring and people weren't worth relating too so the only way to find enertainment in life is to cause chaos - but he found himself relating to some nobody he wrote off as a minor character Takaba and having fun with him. Which meant the belief he was false, he could have tried relating to other people all along he just didn't.

He warped his sense of self to reaffirm his identity. Takaba almost did that too, he tried to blame other people for not finding him funny to protect himself, but he moved past that and redoubled his efforts to make Kenjaku laugh.

There's also the added layer of irony that Kenjaku's sudden death brings about, the person who spent a thousand years trying to make the merger happen doesn't get to see it.

However, here's my assertion on why Kenjaku's death before the merger always had to happen.

Because, even if Kenjaku had seen the merger he still would have been bored.

Literally everything about Kenjaku's character and previous actions shows that even if he made his big scheme come true, he would have gone "meh" and moved onto the next scheme because that's how he always reacts.

He got bored of the death painting siblings, he presumably got bored of Yuji, he got bored of all the ancient sorcerers and new sorcerers he made for the culling game, he worked with the disaster curses and got bored of them and dismissed them as inferior primitive curses, he goes out of the way to engineer these chaotic situations and then never feels any satisfaction from them so why would the Merger be any different?

Not only did Kenjaku die before he saw the merger, he was basically doomed to never see the merger, because it would not have fixed whatever is wrong inside of him.

Because it's not the world that's boring, it's Kenjaku himself.

He gets a brief glimpse of what he could have done in life, that he could have tried to forge connections with the people around him and related to them on a personal level - and then he dies the way he lived, in a kind of boring and unsatisfying way.

It's the narrative punishing him in a way, the same way it punished Gojo, and Kashimo, by not letting him see the big explosion after he went to all the trouble rigging the bombs. It's punishing him for the same reason too - by deviating from his true self and showing what he thought were his reasons were shallow all along. Gojo could have always related to people he just chose to stand on his pedestal alone, and Kenjaku could have always found the world to be more enertaining he was the one dismissing other people as boring without giving them a chance to grow.

Takaba confronted his beliefs and then stayed true to his ideology of making everyone, 100% of the people in the crowd laugh. Kenjaku didn't confront his beliefs, he strayed from them because he didn't have the strength of character to evaluate himself the way Takaba did.

Hence, he's finished off by one of those boring people who used their power in a way he never expected. The main villain is defeated by the comic relief character and it's hilarious.

[gillanfryingpan]

For The Forgotten Ones is completed, I haven’t read the final chapter yet because I wanted to finish this first

Buddy thank you so much for this wonderful story, I know I keep saying it but it genuinely changed my life. I hadn’t been in the Undertale fandom since about 2017, it was my first fandom experience so it was very special to me, but I left it far behind. at the start of this year I stumbled upon Calcium-cat’s comic based on the first chapter, and I found my way to this fic and read I think seven chapters in one night LOL. I had to stop because it was so late, but afterwards I sat in the dark of my room and just, felt. this fic felt like the peak of the old Undertale fandom, it was almost overwhelming (in the best way). all these emotions and this energy that I hadn’t felt in years all came rushing back it was like magic. like rediscovering the meaning of life. I know that sounds ridiculous and cheesy but Undertale genuinely made me who I am, it was my first fandom, drew my first fanart and wrote my first fan fiction and went to my first con and made friends and discovered this whole community that made me feel like me. and this story is interwoven with all of that. it feels like Home.

because of this fic I gained the motivation to create SO MUCH art, my skills have developed so much and I genuinely love my art now when I didn’t really before. I’ve found my style bc of you :) I’ve also gained an actual following now that continues to grow which is a dream come true since I first joined the internet. and I’ve made so many wonderful friends, I’ve got a group that came together bc of this fic and they’re all such wonderful people that I may never have met otherwise.

I’ve still got so many screenshots and ideas to draw for this fic so I’ll be appreciating it for a long time still, but this is a thank you, a gift and an appreciation for all that you’ve done. you consistently uploaded a sizeable chapter EVERY WEEK which is INSANE, your dedication is so inspiring. you created a beautiful world and characterized all these popular characters so well, especially when mischaracterizations have become the fandom canon atp (looks at Swap Sans,,,) you did so much. you created a family we all adored, we laughed and cried and prayed and joked and created this wonderful community within a wonderful community just to appreciate your words. truly effing masterful. I love For The Forgotten Ones, I will print it out into a book someday soon, to put it on my shelf where I can see it always. Thank you thank you thank you I’ve said so many words and still I feel I have not expressed the depths of my feelings

oh well

I gotta post this sometime lol

ok bye :) 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

(and to anyone else who reads this, this art is also going to be my dtiys event but I’ll make a separate post for that !!!! it’ll be going on until the end of November)

For The Forgotten Ones by Im_Sorry_Buddy

Ink!Sans and Aster by @comyet

Nightmare!Sans and Dream!Sans by @jokublog

Geno!Sans and Error!Sans by @loverofpiggies

Killer!Sans by @rahafwabas

Cross!Sans by @jakei95

Blue/Swap!Sans by p0pcornpr1nce

Dust/Murder!Sans and Phantom!Papyrus by @ask-dusttale

Horror!Sans by @horrortalecomic (Sour-Apple-Studios)

[artistic-misf1t]

YEAH SO UH ACTUALLY

SHOULDVE BEEN SAID THIS BUUTTT

Better late than never?

while the death of Ratau will ALWAYS be the route my Lamb will take because-…i am not a ratau fan. i am a fox kisser and i stand by that-

IVE COMPLETELY LOST MOTIVATION FOR THE RAT TRAP COMIC AAAAAND IM REDESIGNING MY LAMB SO UH! OOPSIE 😭

And as compensation for my lack of content and food for the few foxlamb ppl and or fellow ratau dislikers who were awaiting the next part- , have some of the scenes i had finished the linart for + something i made a while back <3

old crusty comic ahead!

I was cringe but i was free and SO so motivated

And thats all about that !

[zahri-melitor]

You have been assigned a four issue mini comic [<100 pages]. It can be about whatever you want. The only restriction is that it has to be about a minor support character [IE character friends, character parents, reoccuring minor villains, reoccuring civilians]. Which character do you choose, and what story would you want to tell in a four issue mini?

For transparency, I'm asking this question to a bunch of people because I want to see all the ideas everyone has. See what everyone would do.

You know what I'd really love? Writing a Lady Shiva mini. I am stretching the definition of 'reoccurring minor villain' but she's never actually had a proper mini in her own right and she's very VERY rarely had viewpoint. I'd want to pick and choose from her various established backstories, and tone down as many of the League of Assassins connections as possible. I think I'd frame it as four pivotal fights (because that's the language of Shiva)

Fight 1: Sandra and David Cain (the 'sort out the backstory' issue/the apprentice) hitting the following:-

Carolyn and Sandra's childhood in Detroit as Chinese-American diaspora, including trips back to China to the family village there for additional martial arts training.

Carolyn encounters Ben Turner and David Cain, both of whom are training under Richard Dragon, with none of this LOA-linked

David Cain murdering Carolyn to motivate Sandra who he sees as a stronger fighter

Recanonise the Batgirl 2000 Cass origin

Sandra giving Cass to David

Fight 2: Lady Shiva and Richard Dragon (the 'birth of Lady Shiva' and her quest to match herself against the best fighters on the planet/the journeywoman)

This would revolve around Shiva's quest to seek training from various sensei.

References to Dinah and Shiva's shared mentor

Shiva and her encounters with Vic Sage and the first signs of her fondness for cases in which she sees the potential for greater violence, just as David Cain saw in her

Maybe recanonise the Paper Monkey stuff? Either way, have her win accolade and acclaim by facing off against the greatest fighters, killing many of them, and gaining her place in the hierarchy

Lots of wandering swordsman journey

Finishing point has this fight ending with Shiva not killing Richard because she can now best him and has found herself alone at the top as the 'best fighter in the world' - but she sees the power he still has above her - his ability to mentor and create the competition she seeks

Fight 3: Lady Shiva and Dinah Lance (Shiva the mentor, training those she most respects the potential in/the master)

I picked Dinah to frame this one for two reasons: she's my fave AND I wanted a fight with a woman for the second set.

We hit backstory with Shiva actively encountering Dinah, Tim, Connor, Cass. 'Her' heroes who she becomes attached to and to pushing them to be better competition for her.

This is the only bit where I might lean towards League of Assassins in terms of probably Nyssa and/or Talia approaching her to ask her to help train their troops, but Shiva finds it dull.

"Go to sleep Westley I might kill you in the morning" attitude emerging as she finds herself weirdly attached to the people she's pushing.

I would love to include a pay off for her fight with Helena Bertinelli in BOPv2 that was put on 'hold' in this fight with Dinah.

Fight 4: Lady Shiva and Cassandra Cain (The inheritance and future issue)

This would be framed around a NEW encounter between Shiva and Cass rather than one of their old ones

Leans into Shiva's death wish and viewing she's already passed on her inheritance, and that she's now defeatable

I would also want to see Sin Lance and Bethany Thorne appear in this issue (also Tim)

Looking at all four of these characters and how they have the potential to surpass and surprise her.

This one WOULD end with Shiva in a position where she's pushing Cass to kill her as she's now the tired one and Cass once again denying it to her

[gamebunny-advance]

Let's Just Rip Off This Band-Aid (Kliff Doll Repaint)

I still haven't finished adding the fringe to his scarf, but at this point, I don't think y'all will actually care that much. It's a personal project anyway, so I'll just finish it on my own time. Right now, I want to be released from the shackles of this project.

Once again, my poor camera and lack of editing do him no favors (he's got a real bad case of jaundice in that first pic. I PROMISE he's not that yellow-orange IRL ;o;), but he is (mostly) done.

Well, he was (mostly) done like a week ago, but just yesterday I decided to redo a few things to try and "fix" what was really bothering me about him, so I really made recursive progress. That said, I do like him more now than I did a week ago, so I'm not mad about it.

A little backstory: Alongside Kun3h0, I've been working on him for the past month, so I've been pretty occupied with this project for a while. Now, I do wonder to myself why exactly I thought making this would be a good idea. All I can really say is that my impulsive tendencies drive me to do things against my better judgement.

But, I will still give y'all my documentation and thoughts on the process + more pictures.

(I'll talk a little more about it later, but for those of you that aren't going to go through the long-ass readmore, the Neon J. mask is a reference to an old comic I drew.)

(It's so old, I was still writing everything by hand~)

So, the "real" answer to "why" I made this is really as simple as "because I could." As I said in the Kun3h0 post, I've been wanting to repaint dolls for a long time, years even, so in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking of ways I could finally start one.

Well, recently I just finally put together the ideas and motivation I needed to start. And of course, that was with Kliff.

I don't remember *exactly* how I stumbled across everything, but I do recall looking at doll clothes online and stumbling across this trench coat (pictured with the other clothes for this project).

(I took this pic mostly because I thought I was going to take pics of every major step of the process, but that didn't end up happening).

I thought it was pretty darn close to Kliff's coat, and I got the horrible idea that, "I could def make a Kliff doll to go with this coat as long as I can repaint it."

I feel like usually people would think the other way around, but that is basically the truth of this project: I didn't find clothes to fit the doll, I made the doll to fit into the clothes. Because for me, customizing the doll wasn't really the intimidating part: it's making the clothes. I don't know how to use a sewing machine, and currently lack the patience to learn (and due to some personal trauma that I don't really want to get into), but I can hand-sew, so starting any project that involves it requires me to be willing to set aside a lot of energy for me to do it, which I don't often have.

But, if I could find ways to cut down on the sewing, then I'd be more willing to start. And somehow, I was able to find just about everything I would need for a potential Kliff doll without having to sew anything. In the end, I only sewed together one thing, and it's the one thing that isn't actually finished: the scarf.

So, I blame the trench coat for the entirety of this project: if I'd never seen it, I would have never made a Kliff doll. In fact, I got the clothes before I even had the doll.

Since I was brainstorming this project, one of the most important parts is of course the base doll, which was tricky. Male doll repaints are fairly uncommon, especially of older men, so there weren't a lot of resources or places to get inspiration for this project.

From what I found, most male (fashion) dolls were very youthful, and the ones that weren't usually took heavy modifications to achieve, which was out of the question. Kliff was supposed to be an "easy" project, so on top of not wanting to sew any clothes for him, I also didn't want to have to alter the doll that much to make it look like him. This was a lot to ask for without putting in any personal work, but in a way, this goal was supposed to keep me from actually starting this project: really this whole thing was supposed to just live in my head as a fantasy as most things do, but then I just stumbled into the right set of things, so I couldn't stop myself from going through with it.

The doll I landed on was a BTS Mattel doll. Now I've said before that I know basically nothing about BTS, and that is still true, but that's beside the point. In my research for finding a suitable doll to work with, I found out that a popular base were these BTS dolls. At first, I wasn't into it because I was still running into the "youthful face" problem that I was with other brands: most of them had pillowy lips and nice soft faces, but I did eventually find one that I thought was close enough: J-Hope.

(It's not the worst match up.)

I don't have pics of my doll before I started working on him, but it was pretty close to the stock photo. He has much thinner lips than the others, and a taller, more angular head shape that I thought would work best for Kliff. I did worry a bit that the nose wasn't "strong" enough to really be Kliff (and IMO, it wasn't XP), but it was the closest I found yet, so I decided to bite the bullet and get one, and if I had one, that meant I needed to start gathering everything I would need for this project.

So, no backing out now.

Now, actually acquiring this doll was a whole other song and dance, but here's the part that's important for how the process went:

Due to a miscommunication with the seller I eventually got him from, there was a delay with shipping, so I didn't actually get him until weeks after "officially" starting this project. In the meantime, the clothes and things for Kun3h0 (who I started as an impulse project within the impulse project) had already been gathered.

The original plan was that I was going to work on and subsequently post about Kliff first since he was a comparatively simpler project. All the things I was avoiding for Kliff: sewing clothes and making modifications to the doll, were all going to be incorporated into Kun3h0, so she was theorhetically going to take longer and be posted later, thus telling a small story of "starting simple, ending complex." But since I didn't have his doll, but didn't want to delay working on Kun3h0 just to wait on him, I started on her and repainting his clothes anyway.

So, I don't have any pics of the doll or his clothes from when I was working on them, unlike the sparse ones I had for Kun3h0, I only have pics from after he was finished.

But I'll still tell y'all what I can to at least preserve the story.

For starters, repainting this coat was probably the most time-consuming part of this process.

I really thought that it would take one or two days maximum to turn this coat bright yellow, but I think it actually took over a week. And I really should have known; the coat was a medium tone, and I know that yellow takes a while to build up on anything that isn't light. I lost count at some point, but I swear that thing has over 20 coats of paint on it. Mind you, the first 10 or so coats were watered down with the textile medium, which also contributed to how long it was taking for the coat to take color, but at some point I just got so frustrated that I stopped mixing in the medium and painting directly onto the coat to get the color to layer faster. This is a huge no-no for painting acrylics onto fabric, lest the paint crack from creasing the fabric, but I just couldn't be bothered anymore. I needed this thing to be dandelion yellow NOW or I was gonna lose it.

There were consequences for taking that shortcut, such as the paint cracking in high motion areas and the coat getting stiff, but it's not terrible. In the end, I accepted the trade-offs or else I might still be painting the coat. Perhaps one day I'll reverse engineer the pattern for the coat and make him a new one, but I wouldn't count on it. In retrospect, I wonder if I would have had an easier time if I had thought to bleach the coat first?

As you might notice, I contoured/shaded part of the coat in orange. That's something that I actually *just* added yesterday and added another couple of hours to the work time. It was just bothering me that the doll was essentially a giant slab of yellow, and was part of the reason I didn't like it very much. But I got inspired by this repaint to try contouring the coat to give it more depth.

(I also used this person's videos to modify the hands. He has one deidcated to just reshaping the BTS hands.)

In the end, I'm pretty happy with the results.

The rest of the clothes weren't as difficult to deal with.

The pants took the paint a lot better, likely due to being dark paint on a light surface. Since I used less paint, it's not as stiff as the coat and still go on very easily. Though, they are VERY high waisted, and I'm not sure if that's normal XP

The shoes are also painted (and slightly modified), though I had to paint them twice because the first time, the paint got stretched off when I tried to put them on the doll's feet: the shoes were just *slightly* too small for the feet of the doll, so they really get stretched to fit his feet, and his heels don't actually go in all the way XP.

He's still capable of standing on his own, but I try not to remove the shoes, so I can avoid having them crack again.

In my "initial clothes" pic, I put down a different shirt than the one he's wearing. The original plan was to repaint the shirt black, but my work space is very limited, so I couldn't really repaint three pieces of clothes at once without significantly risking that I would stain other things. In the end, after getting scarred by how long it was taking for the coat to take color, I decided to just give him one of the black shirts that came with the coat. This does make him somewhat inaccurate since the current shirt has flowers/plants on it, but I'm gonna say that they make up for the lack of flowers on his scarf. Maybe someday I'll make him a new shirt from an old sock or something, but for now, I don't think it's a bad look.

Other clothing of note is the scarf, but since it's not technically finished I didn't take any close pics of it. It's actually made of an old headband of mine that I just cut and painted to look like his scarf.

Originally, I had actually glued on ribbon to it for the stripes, which took a couple days for the drying, but because I couldn't flatten out the scarf to easily glue the ribbon, it turned into a mess and bulked it out too much: since the scale of the doll is already small, I really needed to keep the fabrics thin. This was especially important for the scarf since it was going to wrap around his neck: if it were any thicker, it was going to practically eat up his face, which it still does, just less so.

Speaking of face...

When I finally got the doll in the mail, I started working on him right away, so I don't have any "before" pics of the doll.

After I did the usual "wiping off the face and pulling out his hair," I started with repainting the entire body and head.

Despite Kliff being ambigously "WHITE 🫵," Kliff isn't as pale as the original doll. I'd say even the stock picture I posted above has more warmth than the actual doll did. So, I got the base to be "coral" all over, dusted him in light orange chalk pastels for contouring, and most of his details are outlined in shades of burgandy. I didn't take any nude pics of this doll, but he is countoured all over his body and you can rest easy knowing I gave him some nips XP. But maybe someday I'll show y'all doll!Kliff's washboard abs XP.

TBH, I did want to detail some tattoos and some body hair too, but I just didn't trust myself to do either of those well with the tools I have (my brushes aren't thin enough, and my hand not steady enough for those kind of intricate details). Maybe someday I'll at least get his tattoos in (and after I've actually designed them XP), but we'll see. I don't plan on having the doll in short sleeved clothes very often, so details like that are the least of my concerns.

TBH, I was pretty proud of how the face paint originally went on. I really took my time to make sure it went down flat. It really was beautifully smooth~

But disaster struck.

I had painted the head while it was still separated from the body, and when it finally came time to reunite them, the paint on the head cracked and peeled when I shoved it back on. And, foolish fool that I am, instead of accepting my losses and starting over from a perfectly clean head, I just peeled the lose ends and repainted the exposed parts, which of course made the paint uneven. I somewhat justified this with the idea that most of it would be covered by other details, but in retrospect, I really should have just started over properly.

But, after that ordeal was over with, it was time to actually work on the face.

I can't clearly remember if I worked on Kun3h0 or Kliff's face first. I think I worked on them simultaneously because it took me a LONG time to actually get the courage to work on Kun3h0's face.

I thought I did a decent job on Kun3h0 since I really only had the 1 eye to repaint (the hidden eye is painted, but it's basically just a void with no details), and it was a bigger "canvas", so it was easier to paint. Besides having 2 eyes that I would need to make nearly identical, they were also a lot smaller, so it took a lot longer to paint them in a way that satisfied me (and since it's not easy to "redo" acrylic paint, his eyes lost a lot of smoothness too).

Again, I don't have any "before" pics, so it won't be easy for me to convey my troubles about it, but I do want to say that I think Kliff with a closed mouth is very cursed.

:I

He just looks like he's itching to say something heinous and that is no different for the doll.

It was so difficult for me both match his expression on a face that wasn't *completely* his and still look like him. Although I chose this doll because he most resembled Kliff, he was never gonna be a perfect likeness of him, but despite knowing this, it still bothered me that the face was still just very "young" looking.

Granted, I don't think the original Kliff looks *that* old either (if I didn't know any better, I would assume he was in his 30s, not his 50s, especially compared to other characters around the same age), but still not as *smooth* as the doll is (even with my paint mishaps).

If you can believe it, the face actually used be worse. I don't have pics of it, but like the coat, I actually repainted his face yesterday to again try and fix what was making me dislike it before. I think the problem is that I didn't outline the eyes as much as the final one (like, I don't think I lined his undereye at all), so he was lacking depth. The mouth was also a little more off. Instead of being like "<--->" it was more like "|-|"

(A rough illustration of what I'm trying to describe.)

So, while it's still not perfect, I do like him more today than I did a week ago.

I think the only things left to talk about are his accessories, starting with his wig:

I'm not actually a big fan of the color. When I started this project, I wanted to try and make him as accurate as possible, and the original Kliff design has a very "cherry jolly rancher" hair color.

However, how I draw him and how he appears in Encore Edition gives his hair a more red-orange tone which isn't as intense. In the end, I opted for accuracy towards his first design since that's the one I was technically most familiar with and wanted to replicate, but in retrospect, I should have realized that I was never gonna be able to seperate my personal quirks from this personal project, so I should have gone with a color that was more accurate to how I interpret him. (I dunno if I would have gone as far as to give him triangular eyes, but one of my biggest takeaways from this project has been that I should have just allowed this to be "my take" on the character instead of trying to be "accurate," meeting in the middle, and satisfying neither condition.)

I don't think I really got across how much I HATED brushing out yarn for the wigs when I posted Kun3h0. It was just such a tedidus process, from brushing it out, to straightening it, to gluing it down. It was such a mess. I'm still finding loose wisps of yarn hair floating around my home since I made them.

Since I had more than had my fill from making Kun3h0's wig, I once again started taking shortcuts when it came to Kliff: I really should have made more wefts for him. I figured since his hair was (compartively) shorter, that I wouldn't need to make as many, but in the end his wig turned out both too thin and too thick.

Since his hair is so messy, I didn't follow any kind of guide for his hair like I did Kun3h0. I basically just glued around the perimeter of the cap, horizontally on the inside, and made sure it would fold over in the front.

Part of the problem is that I made the wefts too thick: instead of just gluing down what could actually touch the surface of the work area, I wound up gluing layers on top of each other, so the wefts would be like a mm thick when they should have been less than half of that. So, I barely got enough coverage for the scalp, and the parts that I did get down are very thick. I think it makes his head look bigger than it should which kinda adds to the uncanniness of him.

I did try to style it as close to canon as possible, but there are some things that just aren't (easily) possible in certain mediums, and Kliff's wild hair is one of them.

In retrospect, I probably should have just sculpted his hair with clay or something: it probably would have been more accurate, but I don't have much confidence in my sculpting ability, and again, I didn't want to modify the doll that much, so I stuck with the yarn.

I might suck it up and try and make him a new wig, I still have a LOT of red yarn left over, so maybe I can make him some new styles too. But the tedium of going through with it makes it very unlikely that I'll follow through~

(The wig from other angles.)

Since the beard is made from the same yarn, I'll lightly talk about that. There aren't too many resources about bearded dolls, but I've seen people root it, glue it, and even just paint it if they weren't supposed to be thick. In the end I used this repaint for reference (suggestive content warning) and glued it on.

The scarf covers most of it, but I think it turned out okay. I need to add just a *little* more to his left cheek, but otherwise I feel like I was successful.

Next, it's usually hidden due to all the crap that's on his head, but I did give him an earring.

I didn't think about it until way too late in the process, and I tried to poke a hole through his ear so he could actually wear it. However, when I tried to do so, I almost ruined his head paint a second time. Saying, "fuck that," I decided to just glue it on.

If I had been more brave with modifying this doll, I might have just resculpted his ears entirely, because, being based on a real life human being, the doll's ears don't flare out that much, so they're easily covered by other things.

His glasses are just a piece of painted plastic that hold to his face using some plastic cord. They fit well while his wig is off, but putting them on with everything else is a goddamn nightmare.

Since his ears are so small, and his hair is so short, there's nothing for the glasses to "grab" onto without the cord, but the cord is too short to fit around the wig once it's on, but I can't make the cord longer to sit over the wig, because the glasses need to go over the headband, and it's a pain in the ass trying to layer everything like that.

So, I have to put the glasses in place first, TAPE the cord to his scalp so they don't move, put on the wig, then put on the headband. It's really such a hassle, but I don't think I can truly convey the annoyance of having to do it all without showing you. So, unless I absolutely have to, I'm never taking any of those things off him again.

I think the last things are the headband, mask, and tablet.

The headband is just a spare scrunchy that I have. I don't have one in the *exact* same color as the real one, so I went with the closest one I had, which was this teal color.

I didn't feel comfortable repainting one since it's essentially an elastic band, I don't think the paint, even with the textitle medium, would be able to hold up to all the stretching I have to do to even get it on his head.

If I happen to find a white one somewhere in my stash, then I might try dyeing it using water and acrylic paints to see if I can get it green, but for now, I think this works. A little thick, but it works.

The tablet is just a piece of foam painted with paint markers and the mask is a piece of cardboard. I wasn't planning on really recreating any scenes with this doll, but since I remembered that comic, and thought it would be easy enough to make, I went ahead and made it as an in-joke to myself.

Honestly, I think it's the most charming piece of the entire ensemble. Plus, he can wear it without me having undo/redo any of his other head accessories, so it's easy to make him wear it whenever.

My final comments about the doll itself are that he's fucking huge. I should have taken a pic of him next to Kun3h0, but he is too tall to even fit on my display shelf without sitting.

(Please ignore any mess you might see in the reflection. This is just one of the only flat pieces of furniture he can stand on without me standing on something to take a pic.)

Despite my interests, I don't actually collect dolls (I'm more into figures and plushies), so I wasn't expecting him to be so big. In fact, Kun3h0, who would be considered a small to medium doll in collector's spaces, was also bigger than I thought she'd be, so you can imagine my surprise when I got my hands on him.

So... I don't really know where I can put him. He obviously can't live in front of my TV, but beyond being too big for my shelf, he also doesn't fit in with any of my other collectibles. And I'll be honest, the contrast of him "clearly not belonging" among my more "kawaii" items was a motivator in starting this project, I live for the gap moe after all, but in practice he really just sticks out like a sore thumb. (This is also why his first pics are in a slightly different location without many props. I just couldn't put together anything from my collection or find a spot among my things to take a good thematic pic with. The magazines/CDs he's with are from my dad's collection.)

I do have space at higher elevations in my room, but it's kinda off putting to have him staring down my room, looking like he's plotting something (my space is too small to ignore it). So I dunno what I'm gonna do with him. I did have plans to make him some... cuter outfits so he wouldn't stick out as much, but that requires sewing, and I'm kinda worn out from this project.

In conclusion, despite my troubles with this project, I'm not entirely displeased with the results. At the very least, it was an experience, and one that I might even be willing to do a third time 👀...?

But for now, I'd like to rest and maybe go back to drawing again. I feel like I haven't drawn anything "real" for a while now. We're inching closer and closer to the next follower milestone (4 digit number BA-BY!), so I'd like to at least get back to being good enough to sketch some stuff for y'all soon~

[coralpolyp]

I'm not dead!

Hey look here's a redraw of the really terrible bit of digital art I did for last year's Mar13 day as proof! Apparently I didn't even finish the first one on time! Yikes!

I'm well aware that it's been a minute or two since I last posted anything on here or on AO3 - to be more precise, it's been since Splatoon 1 died and I wrote that 8000 word depressing thing - I don't know why 8000 words always seems to be my sweet spot, but it's good to know that I have one. That being said, and with Side Order: Dark Side Mix currently MIA, I thought it'd be a good idea to to have what it is that I'm doing right now on-record in some capacity, for the one or two people who were wondering.

The next few weeks are exam season, so I don't think it's going to be smooth sailing per se, but Dark Side Mix will be completed. After running into a snag with the opening act - namely with the fact that it sucks - I started reworking the entire fic from top to bottom under a new name...and then I lost motivation to do that because perfectionism set in, and I haven't really touched it in a little while.

In the time that I've been away from it, I feel like I've become increasingly aware of how that perfectionism negatively effects me and my work - namely the fact that very little of it actually exists. I mean, sure, people seem to like the stuff that does exist, but there isn't much, and a lot of things are unfinished - usually because I placed too much value on the potential of "the idea", and spent so long labouring over the start of it that by the 10,000 word mark I had realised the flaws of the idea and lost interest in it.

I can't help thinking that's a bit lame. Every other writer has 100s and thousands of words of terrible amateur works they can go back to and laugh at, before they created the masterpieces they're known for now, and my story is that I just kinda show up every once in a while.

I think there's a real beauty to that - creating for the sake of creation, with no fucks given. Maybe this isn't the finest example, but I finally started listening to My Dad Wrote a Porno recently and...I mean... the sheer lack of fucks given is well and truly a gift that keeps on giving. Same goes for Philosophy of the World. Or SMG4 back in like 2014. Or old Eddsworld stuff. There's just a certain carefree joy (or existential dread in the case of the Shaggs) to it all that you never get anywhere else. It's like the difference between a 30 second gesture drawing and 6 hours of carefully-deliberated-over anatomy.

All that is to say - Dark Side Mix is a fundamentally flawed story. It is not high art, it never will be. I should probably just get it out there in it's entirety for the world to see in the time I have available to write, and then move on to the next "brilliant-idea"-that's-actually-just-ok. Nobody likes an "idea guy" - what good is it to spend one's entire life going around saying "I never finished this story, but it was great in my head, and the bit that you can actually read was alright too,"? Creativity should be about getting in there, making a mess, and having fun - let fanfiction be fanfiction, with that being addressed to nobody but myself, because nobody else needed to hear it.

Oh, also, another reason for my absence besides creative block and exams - I'm getting into comics! That, and practising my art fundamentals a whole bunch - I don't think my drawabox is particularly interesting to look at, so I haven't exactly been posting it. I've decided that I want to try giving an idea I had for what would've been another depressing Squid Sister 8000-worder the comic treatment, although you shouldn't expect to see that anytime soon, considering how long it's gonna take, and the fact that I would want to release something like that in no more than two parts.

[thevindicativevordan]

Batman: Caped Crusader S1 Review

Normally not a guy I write a whole lot about, but I finished watching S1 last night and decided I would share my thoughts.

Cutting right to the chase I found this mediocre. Trapped in the shadow of it's elder brother it fails at living up to being a spiritual successor, or charting it's own path. Changes made feel like token efforts done simply for changes sake, but with the exception of Harley, frequently feel like downgrades from what BTAS did. Rapid fire thoughts:

Pilot was easily the worst episode even though I was won over on Ricci's Penguin on account of her great performance

Clayface episode was good, no surprise considering Rucka wrote it, and struck me as a preview for what Reeves may have planned for his Batman sequel given the rumors Clayface will appear in that

Dug the Catwoman episode, but it’s hurt by how they basically did Golden Age Catwoman in BTAS. Nothing new here, Selina is a wealthy heiress like in BTAS who has a one sided romantic interest in Batman. Sure her BTAS incarnation was an animal rights activist but the foundation is the same. Given Brubaker's involvement I wish they had gone with her Post Crisis origin of being poor and stealing to survive. Least she loses her money by the end, maybe they’ll go in a different direction with her. Good idea to do the mandatory origin here, least it keeps the clichés all in one episode. I did love the Catmobile!

Firebug was eh, don’t get what the point was in changing him other than to keep in line with the Golden Age aesthetic.

Harley Episode was good! Wasn’t sure how a Jokerless Harley would work but they did actually manage to keep her sympathetic nature, and make her feel like a legit threat. Her victims were scumbag billionaires which made me sympathize with her motives if not her methods. Knew moments before they did it that they were going to homage Harley's "death" in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, having Babs and Harley together was too tempting a target to pass up.

That was Papa Midnite in the Gentleman Ghost episode right? Cool deep cut, people were clamoring for Batman to show up in MAWS but Superman would be a better fit for this show than Batman would be for MAWS honestly. Reusing Fleschier Lois' design for one of the Gotham reporters got a chuckle out of me. Didn’t expect them to go with actual ghosts, that at least is a marked change from BTAS where everything had a “realistic” explanation.

Episode 7 had an… interesting moral. Didn’t expect anyone to make an episode in the year of our Lord 2024 about how the bleeding heart liberal (Babs) who opposes the system is wrong and the principled conservative who sees things in black and white (Gordon) is right. Especially not one with Rucka on the writing team.

Episode 8 was fine, since they included all the Robins except Tim I’m curious if Tim will end up being the one who becomes Robin (if anyone ever does). Otherwise I don’t get why Timm was not able to use Nocturne back during BTAS if this is what he wanted to do with her, she’s an energy vampire like Parasite. No blood. Maybe his old design was too horny for the censors? This Nocturna is clearly Wednesday Adams

Onomatopoeia doesn't work, his gimmick simply doesn't translate well outside of comics

Take on Two-Face here is inferior to BTAS. He’s not as interesting or sympathetic, I feel indifferent to him. They made him corrupt but didn’t do anything interesting with it, frankly it feels like a missed opportunity that they copied the DCAU approach where Harvey was friends with Bruce but never worked with Batman. Because this Harvey was corrupt, the friendship between Bruce and Harvey feels fake (and presumably given how cold this Bruce is, it was). Way to go would’ve been to either flip the reason Harvey gets scarred, and have some relative of an innocent he put away be the one to scar him, or have his corruption be a result of his and Batman’s failure to achieve meaningful results, with Harvey giving into despair before finding his courage again in the worst possible way. For that reason I didn’t find his death to be moving or emotionally impactful at all.

Arkham Asylum actually looking nice was a design choice I approved of. Makes sense that people would be assigned there or that it wouldn’t immediately be written off as an Asylum from Hell.

Why does Timm or whoever keeps pushing for him, love Rupert Thorne? Thorne is a boring bad guy, a generic mobster that Batman should crush with ease.

When it comes to Batman himself I enjoyed his characterization, and the performance of Hamish Linklater.

They leaned into this Batman being a sociopath, his unsettling declaration to Alfred as a child that he was going to make the criminals pay, and ordering Alfred to help him was chilling. Every time Alfred tried to give him advice or protect him, this Batman reacted with either cold dismissal or outright anger. Made for a good difference from both the DCAU, where the two would trade quips and clearly had a warm relationship, and the mainline where it's been outright canonized that Bruce viewed Alfred as his second father.

Too bad it looks like they’re already moving towards a more traditional take on the relationship for S2. Would've enjoyed seeing this Batman remain cold and sociopathic and having to go up against the Joker

Enjoyed seeing how uncomfortable Batman was with talking to other people, he sucked at "comforting" Babs after Harley appeared to die. Even though he has the compassion DCAU Batman had, he's somehow worse at expressing it.

Linklater did a great job differentiating the two personalities vocally. Loved when Bruce was confronting Harvey in Arkham in the finale, and when Harvey slipped into his "Two-Face" voice, Bruce used his "Batman" voice in response. Lot of Conroy in Linklater's performance which is no knock against him.

Since everyone is going to compare the two

Both are similar in a lot of ways: TCC puts a lot of focus on the supporting cast in the GCPD as does MAWS with the Daily Planet.

Lois and Babs basically serve as the deuteragonists of their respective shows.

Both include references to the wider DCU and poach villains from other heroes Rogues Galleries.

Both genderbend a villain and racebend a bunch of other characters.

Both do some dramatic changes to the villains in general, and the villains are generally the weakest part of the shows.

Both even take a lot from the DCAU, although TCC is more indebted to the DCAU than MAWS is.

Of the two though, I think MAWS is far superior. It’s got a stronger take on it’s lead, it’s got a stronger worldbuilding foundation, and the changes it makes feel like they have a purpose that feeds into the story of Krypton whereas TCC changes feels like token efforts to differentiate it from BTAS. Of the two TCC definitely got a bigger budget, especially in the fight scenes, but surprisingly there was some shoddy CGI there like what we see at times in MAWS.

I’m curious to find out which of the two ends up having the bigger impact on their respective characters. My hunch is MAWS will be more influential going forward, particularly on the Daily Planet crew.

Side note but it's ironic how everyone was doomposting about MAWS being a "Lois Lane show" when of the two it's CC who frequently ends up feeling like a GCPD show guest starring Batman. MAWS steadfastly puts Superman at the center of everything, whereas here the Gordons (Babs and Jim) feel more central to the show

Give it a C, it's a fine enough way to kill an afternoon if you're a Batman fan, but with all the Batman content out there I can't recommend it that highly. Next season we’ve got the Joker judging by the post season tease, which is probably going to be a fairly straightforward adaption of The Man Who Laughs given Brubaker is the head writer. If we get a Golden Age “serious” Joker that at least would spice things up. Hearing a Joker with a deep voice startled me I must admit.

[peachiecure]

A reflection on Project: Dimension (logo made by my friend Petal I’m so sorry your work is never actually getting used)

Hello everyone. I’m here to talk about a project that is now defunct. This will be a reflection/info post on what I have personally done for it. Project: Dimension (PD for short) WAS a group project between me and 3 other members, combining our precure fanseries together to form a crossover story with new and familiar characters. It was originally considered a Project SFA spinoff for some reason (looking back at it now, it is MUCH more precure than SFA so I don’t think this really stands anymore), and it was going to be told in comic format. To sum up the plot… Phantom, the god of death, summons the other villains to form a group to take down the precure for their own personal reasons. The precure join together to try to take them down… but a certain turn of events happens. Chaos ensures.

During the project’s beginnings on the platform we were using, the team created teasers, making it interactive with hidden clues so people could dig in and discover what the project is about. We ended up stopping the teasers when we found out only one person was actually trying to find the clues rather than a group of people��� I’m so sorry Nitro😭😭 Please take care of yourself. I drew many things for these, some are pictured.

The majority of my work was art, of course, I did have a say in aspects of the story considering that the main character it was focusing on was indeed still my own, Larissa Frausto. Others that were from my projects included Pixelena (Larissa’s precure team’s crazy mascot alpaca), Princess Sweetheart and Dimentio. Yeah, the character choice from my stuff is honestly really funny looking back at it. Like how did Sweetheart and Dimentio get here?? I guess it doesn’t matter now. The main villain, Phantom, was also my own from a RP which was then adapted for PD, and let me tell you I HATE HIM. Like not even in a “oh he’s a good villain because everyone loves to hate him” way NO HE’S LIKE GENUINELY SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN MADE. His whole premise is built on a harmful stereotype, and I’m only acknowledging such things now because I have grown since then. Please do not let the teenagers cook sometimes because this… yeah please don’t make a yandere type character and PLEASE don’t make them a GOD. Please. Learn from my mistakes. On my knees BEGGING. Sadly, the whole project REVOLVES around this dynamic between Larissa and Phantom as the plot progresses and I think I don’t need to say where this was gonna go, so I’m just not gonna. It was beyond saving and thus the plug being pulled was for the best. I will enjoy the memories of the team working together, but canning the project was the right decision in the end. It does suck that I put in years of work for it to not go anywhere, but it is what it is.

The final thing I will talk about is Raguel’s old lore for PD. Well… all that I know of it anyways. Raguel in PD is still the god of life, but Phantom, then called Azazel, was like his little brother figure for many many years. Raguel deeply cared for him, even if Azazel was a bit… stoic and didn’t seem to understand emotions. Raguel also had a precure team of his own that he viewed as his daughters. But one day, something was going to happen and Azazel was going to like??— go against him or something… (I DONT ACTUALLY KNOW WE NEVER FINISHED) which then would have resulted in Raguel stabbing out his eye and Azazel killing Raguel’s whole magical girl team. Yeah. Then Azazel gets sealed away by Raguel for 700+ years and when he’s finally freed again, he’s the way you see him now as Phantom who has this BURNING hatred towards him and the precure which was his whole motivation. The prologue pages start when he’s finally freed from the seal… so yeah. I realize this project is a total departure from my usual bubbly stuff.

In the end, PD wasn’t going to affect any of my main project’s lore because it quite literally was going to be revealed at the end that none of it was canon and just someone’s fanfic. PD’s aspects that I liked are being used in other projects. Raguel has been moved to my new persona project, the comic format has been moved to tell SFA’s story now, and Phantom will stay 6 feet under!!! Everyone cheered!!! I want that twink obliterated. Anyways, I feel that I finally have closure on this and can move on so um… thank you for reading me ramble about this. I feel better. NOW TIME TO DRAFT THE NEXT SFA PAGES WITH BLUMIERE AND TIMPANI— (I am dragged away)

I think it is important to me to acknowledge this project and the work I’ve done for it, even if I don’t agree with content included in it now. As humans, we change and grow, and I’ve learned so much since the time this was originally made. Below are the prologue pages that I finished, the final bit of work I did. Thank you for your support.

[djsherriff-responses]

warning captain laserhawk spoilers and topics of grooming and incest

I was sketching out a possible funny comic (idk if I’ll finish, motivation zig zags) regarding that one scene of Jade and Pey’J , where Jade argues wirh Pey’J about it , as a “hahaha omg wasn’t that really messed up?” But than I thought:

“wow, if this show wasn’t cramming so much into 6 episodes and Jade wasn’t fridged, this would be an incredibly interesting but horrific plot thread to follow through”

We know from the official Eden site that Pey’J knew Jade since infancy and the show makes it a point he promised on her parents’ grave to protect her , which makes his confession in having romantic feelings for her all the more disgusting

I never played BGE, and I really wanna like him since I read he is a better (not into incest with kids he raised as his own) character in game , but I was actually kinda glad he died because I kept thinking of all the weird implications his love confession has, such as what were (or are depending on if he and Jade come back in season 2) the writers planning with that?

Like, the writers knew we didn’t have much time with these characters and so knew there wasn’t much time to see the depth of the relationship Jade has with Pey’J, so why make their last conversation Pey’J outting himself as someone attracted to his own niece?

I seen most people say it was a joke, which is just an odd thing to do when that moment could’ve easily been used to share more of Jade and Pey’J’s history and familiar bond with each other, thus make Jade’s death far more impactful than just “god I can’t believe that was their last conversation”. You could’ve still made that moment funny and awkward without incest!

A possibility (one which I’m dreading could happen if they come back in season 2) is that they genuinely wanted to have Pey’J and Jade together romantically , which is just …. Yikes, really yikes. Obviously as of writing this post we don’t know the writers’ intentions or the purpose of that scene in the larger narrative (if it even has one). I know that Alex is old enough to be Dolph’s dad but we can agree actual incest in the story of Laserhawk would be pushing it, right? (Or at least get characters with personalities and dynamic where that sort of situation would make sense!)

TBH I feel like that moment could’ve actually worked (or at least offer some interesting story stuff), if Pey’J was the one who died in episode two instead of Jade

(This part is more hopeful thinking what be the writers’ intentions than anything, tbh feel free to use this part as fanfic inspiration)

Think about it, Jade’s bio says she’s got a natural talent at reading people and makes it a career to haunt down the scum of Eden (like Pagan Min)

Which would make it all the more incredibly horrifying for her to learn her uncle was attracted to her

If Pey’J was the one died after telling her he found her attractive, Jade’s entire world and perspective of her life would be shattered, and she’d basically be left to pick up the pieces. All the sweet childhood memories she had with Pey’J would be tainted now, she’d question so much of her self and be haunted by the possibility Pey’J may be a groomer

and than…..wait….

Do Dolph and Bullfrog know about the incest?!

Like Sarah knows because she definitely overheard that conversation

Did Pey’J ever bring up he got a boner over his niece to his fellow ghosts before he died? Did Sarah tell Dolph and Bullfrog? Did the two get weird vibes from the sweet home Alabama pig man?

God , what were the writers thinking adding incest to this show?!

[tispygnostalgia]

I JUST READ THE MOST JAW DROPPING HOMESTUCK DIRKJAKE FANFIC ON AO3!!! And I’m here to rant about it cause i need somewhere to rant!!!!!

OKAY FIRST!!!! The fic is called ‘Wondrous Adventures of Harley, English, and Strider’ by ‘spectralPhobia’

ITS A FIC FROM 2016 AND ITS ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING THINGS IVE EVER READ!!!???

I believe their tumblr is s-opal!!! :33

THIS RANT WILL HAVE SPOILERS BTW!!!!!

Okay to start off the whole plot was absolutely amazing and brilliant and beautiful!!!! As a fellow writer I can see how much time and effort was put into it!!! I cried a few times and screamed and cringed!!!! There were so many plot twists!!! Not to mention the art was beautiful!?????

The ships were very cute!!! Dirkjake Janeroxy Karkat and Terezi and my lovely’s Rosemary!!!

The plot twist about where space was trapped shocked me to my core!!?!! And hope was so silly along with light and eventually time at the end, the way they up and left made me burst out laughing!!! Though Hopes execution did make me sad :(((

The slow progression of Dirkjake and them coming to understand eachother slowly hurt me!!!!

Old Jake from the other timeline made me so angry though I was rolling my eyes almost every time he talked!!!??

Eridan was so silly I definitely wish we got more of him I for sure thought Erisol would be included because of how close they were and the talk about them in the future! But they weren’t tagged so I should have expected it not to happen!!!!

I didn’t understand how Horuss was Equius brother but also his like great grandchild? Unless I miss read something…BUT THIS WAS SO BEAUTIFUL!!! The posessions being of the characters who have the aspect in the comic was so cool!!!! I was cheering for either Eridan or Jake to be possessed cause I luv both of them and want to see them in pain cause im high on the love of angst!!!!!!! ;3

I pulled one all-nighter and stayed up till 4am to finished reading this and it did not disappoint!!!! I’m so happy I found this!!!?!

The epilogue actually made me cry cause I had spent so much time reading this and it’s so beautiful and cute I’m gonna crash out!!!!

Becs death I will never get over!!?!) Dirkjake marriage was what I needed tough!!!! But jades just like me seeing no point in marriage and loving science!!!!! And though Gamtav wasn’t canon in the fic they were so cute I swear!!!!!!!

As a person writing her first long and big thought out homestuck fanfic this gave me a lot of motivation!!!!

But anyways end of rant!!!!! I loved this so much!!!! Please give it a read!!!!

[blueberry-lemon]

hardcore burnout

This came up randomly in a conversation with a friend and I realize now it's probably safe to talk about it publicly.

I had never really known what "burnout" felt like until 2019 when it happened to me. Unfortunately, there's not really a clean, happy ending because I'm still not sure I've actually recovered from it by this point.

I was doing a combination of 7th Beat Games work [where I currently work] while also trying to do freelance at the same time and the freelance was what did me in.

For years I had been doing commissions and freelance work for various Youtubers. Depending on the Youtuber, it was sometimes really fun and fulfilling! Other times it was drudgery.

The final straw was that I animated, like, a 9-minute Fortnite cartoon for this guy. Really crunched on the deadline, really rushed it. I think at some point he deleted it off his channel for underperforming or something, and he never sent me the final version, so I don't even have the cartoon.

After this, I was completely burnt out. On animating, on drawing, on everything.

I couldn't stand to draw anymore. Couldn't hold the pen, couldn't sit in front of my computer and make anything. I've barely animated since. It just completely drained all of the fun for me. All I wanted to do was lay around, and not think about art anymore. Trying to draw felt like a mental version of nausea, like trying to force a fork full of food into my mouth.

The love that I had for art from before 2019 never really came back in full force. It's still really hard for me to draw, or animate, or focus. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has bought our games at 7BG as it has allowed me to continue this career. I haven't been able to figure out how to reignite the spark or get my old motivation back in the years since. Not sure if I'll have to try to "pivot career path" at some point, or go back to school or something.

I've tried drawing a series of autobio comics discussing my experience with burnout as a hope of warning other artists on social media about what it is like but...y'know...burnt out on drawing before I finished them. Lol.

To be clear, not really bitter about that specific Youtuber, it was just bound to happen because I was being careless. From what I've heard through the grapevine about him, his company kind of fell to shambles in the years since due to mismanagement. Lots of start-and-stop projects that never took off. I guess we have that in common now.

[vampireacademysims]

Well, I guess it's time to address the situation... or the lack of situation lol This is gonna be long, be warned. There's a TL;RD at the end if you wanna skip the wall of text. To start, thank you to the two anons who took the time to read the comic and prod me about it and the new people who started following this tumblr in spite of the Hiatus warning. Altho this place has been collecting dust for more than a year now, I'm still around, updating my side reblogs tumblr, so it's not like I dropped from the face of the earth.

The truth is, at this moment in time, I've feel out of love with making this comic. It was always a lot of work due to me being a perfectionist. I never used any extra rendering apps, all you've seen here is raw sims images and a lot of work on Photoshop, so much so it gave me a muscle contracture on my right shoulder (because I did all my work in bed with my laptop/drawing tablet in my lap. I never said I was a smart person lol) that still flares up from time to time because I learned nothing. Then the VA fandom was already quite small by the time I started doing this in 2015 and I never really advertised this in the fandom anyway. I always got the impression most of the fandom didn't like the OG comics as it was and most of the people that followed the comic were sims 2 fans because, well, it's made with the sims and the images were pretty (forever holding in my heart the people you said this &lt;;3) The recent "Vampire Academy" TV series (it was just in names, honestly) was the final nail in the coffin of my motivation. After information had leaked I was already disappointed in it, but after actually watching it, yeah no. Only plus to it was the surprise to see it was partially filmed in my country, in places where I have been myself. And lastly, and probably most importantly, I struggle with motivation a lot. It happens to us all, I am sure. It's no secret that I hated to panel, if I'd start all over again I'd just post the big images like many of you telling stories are doing now, it'd be less of a stress for me, but alas, I can't change formats now. And I said many times I was doing it mostly for myself, because I did love the comics based on the books, but doing it for yourself only gets you so far until you get bored. And I got bored. I'm actually surprised my hyper-focus on it lasted for as long as it did. I haven't been to Photoshop for editing - I used to make photomanipulations and other kinds of editing - for way over a year, so it's not only the comic that stopped.

I still have 7 pages to end chapter 6 in various degrees of editing, Veninorchid and Esotheria-sims have seen them, so they exist lol I will eventually finish editing them - it's mostly a Romitri flashback - and post them. But after that, I will have to decide how to proceed. Spending less time editing would help, but lowering the quality of my pages, the only thing people like about it, really doesn't sit well with me, because yeah, perfectionist.

So at the very least the remaining pages will be posted in early 2024, I might go back to it slowly, a little bit everyday so I don't burn out or put stress on my shoulder. But after that, it's up in the air. It's not like I've been staring at the walls during this time, I had other things taking my goldfish-like attention. I got interested in home bookbinding, which made me dig out old unfinished stories I once started and I've been trying to finish them and later try to bind them, because why the fuck not lol And on my reblogs tumblr I had this set of pictures about a Regency little story that people really loved and I'd like to add to it, but then again, all the editing it'd need *cries* I feel tugged in so many directions I fear I'll end up doing nothing lol

So the TL;DR is, I got bored with the comic because it was too much work and resulted in physical pain, I lacked the motivation and other things got my attention meanwhile. Chapter 6 will be be finished eventually, but after that it's up in the air. Cross my fingers that I get my mojo back while editing those pages. Still, a thank you to all of followed and are still following, sorry these were not the good news you wanted to read just because I made a post. You support up until now was what kept me going in the past, I can't thank you all enough.

[mdazzle151]

Content creation and the things I miss

Being on an indefinite hiatus has really made me think a lot about what I did and didn’t enjoy about content creation as a whole, and it’s been pretty eye opening.

Obviously, there’s parts of it that I miss. The community, namely. But there’s other things too. I miss streaming- it was always really fun to be live and able to chat directly with my audience in real time while we draw together.

The redesign videos were really fun to make as well! I still have ideas of what I want the future redesigns to be for the “phantasi revamp”. I think I want the twins to be sea monsters! I’ve had a general idea of what I think they would look like in my head for a long time, but I never got around to doing it before I left.

I’m never sure if it’s self-centred or not- (recently I’ve been leaning towards not self-centred)- but I watch my videos a lot too. I put a lot of work and love into all of them, especially the later ones, and it’s fun to look back on them. Not to toot my own horn, but I think they’re pretty entertaining! 

There’s parts of editing that I miss- it was always a long process, but I can honestly say I enjoyed every part of it. Sometimes it was just hard to find the motivation to finish.

I still get comments every now and then on videos, and I read them all. Some of them are really sweet-actually a good majority of them are really sweet! One person wished me a happy birthday in March and it just about made me cry /pos

I’ve been enjoying interacting on Tumblr, and I still want to take things slow, but the more the days pass, the more tempted I am to start streaming again.

Part of me is disappointed in that felling, but I’m trying to be easy on myself for that. There’s no way I could’ve known how I would feel now, seven months later. Five if you’re counting from December.

The deal I made with myself was that I would stay “offline” for a minimum of six months- and ideally would be gone for two years so I could focus on my studies.

But honestly, if I’m missing content creation this much only six-ish months in, I’m wondering if I’m going to make it to that two year milestone. Maybe I won’t, maybe I will, but I need to remind myself that healing happens at different speeds. Maybe I thought I needed a longer time to heal and I just didn’t. Maybe I’m not ready to go back yet. I’m still figuring it out, I’m trying to take it slow.

Exploring my comfort on Tumblr has been interesting to say the least! It’s been fun, and I haven’t had anxiety around it. I’m really happy. I haven’t been focussing on the numbers or amount of interaction. I’ve just been having fun sharing my thoughts and drawings, which is what I want out of content creation.

When I left seven months ago, it was because of bad mental health and connecting self-worth to what I’m able to create. I still struggle with self-worth, but I think I’ve successfully separated it from my creativity- and in doing so, I’ve realized that I love Contant creation because of the creativity- not the possibility for opportunity.

I’ve noticed a pattern in every aspect of content creation that I have longed for in my time away. Everything I’ve had an itch to do has had to do with sharing creativity and passion for the art of creation. Where I used to think about play buttons and numbers and conventions- I now think about all the little details that I love about making videos and comics and stories.

Script writing, editing, recording voice overs, implementing comedy, delivering a message, exploring my artistic boundaries, over analyzing my old work, teaching others what I taught myself… there’s so much that I enjoy about it, and it makes my heart blossom knowing that THESE are the parts of being a CC that I miss, not the analytics and competition.

I’ve said for years that I see it as a hobby- a creative outlet for me and my community, and I truly believe that! But I’d be a liar if I said it was always this way. There were definitely times where I was focussing way too much on the career aspect of it, even though I haven’t wanted that to be my career for years now.

This break has really been good for me and my mental health- and it’s been really good for me to reconnect with what I actually enjoy about what I did.

I know that I’ll always struggle with mental health in some capacity- this isn’t something that you can just miracle away, after all. It’s going to be something that I struggle with for a lifetime, and even though that’s a hard pill to swallow, I’m slowly accepting it. I won’t ever be 100% okay, and that’s okay. what’s important to me is that I keep my heart happy and find joy in life- remember what I love and why I love it.

I get a little burst of excitement in my stomach when I think about returning too much. I’m not sure when it will happen, and I’m still not going to say it will happen (I have no idea what the future holds), but for now I can say wholeheartedly that I do hope I will return soon, wether soon means next month or next year.

Have a little excerpt from one of my journal entries, as a treat :) I think it explains my feelings pretty well.

“I still think about my past online, but not nearly as much as I used to. It’s just part of my history and that’s okay. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone. And that feels really nice.” - March 19 2024

(Maybe it’s a little ironic since I did just explain myself in great detail- but I think it’s important to note that I wrote this all because I wanted to, not because I felt like I needed to.)

Merci beaucoup, tout le monde. Bonne journée et à bientôt.

[bloodgulchblog]

googling suggests that Brian Reed was the lead writer for Halo 4... what specifically about the story of H4 makes him the villain? It's been a year or so since I've played h4 so the details beyond the broad strokes have been forgotten.

that said i will agree he's the villain for halo 5 that story is Not Great TM

(i just like hearing your opinions on stuff and am totally not trying to mine ideas for what might be changed in a post halo-3 rewrite because i do love the covenant civil war aspects of 4. or the implications that there has to have been one because conflict drives narratives)

Thanks.

Full disclosure, I really don't know what was going on behind the scenes on Halo 4 or 5 and the most I can do is offer rampant speculation, usually based on my biases and very little evidence.

My impressions are these:

Halo has always always had trouble on story, mostly around having strong leadership and a definite idea of where everything is going. There are too many stakeholders with ideas and teams have struggled to get to unified ideas and then to have enough time to implement what they finalize. This was true during Bungie days and definitely feels like it's been true during 343. (I'm more confident on what I say about 1-3 because I actually have a book with a lot of old interview details that speaks to that.)

They'll build up a lot of interesting stuff around the games, even though my opinions on the quality of that stuff vary widely. I had problems with Halo 4, but the stuff that was coming out around 4 where you had multiple stories interweaving touching each others' threads... that was interesting! That was neat! And they got Greg Bear to write three whole novels for us!!! Fuck Karen Traviss, but like... dude!!!!

...And then the campaign was just. What we got. Don't get me wrong, there are things in Halo 4's campaign that are cool and interesting, but like... there will always remain a part of me that is still pissed that they killed Cortana.

Full stop.

I accept new Halo lore as it comes to me and try to do my best to take my lumps and integrate even things that I don't like, but I am still mad that they killed Cortana in the first place and have never really stopped being that.

....Anyway. I'm getting sidetracked.

Aside from CE, which was intended to be self-contained and thus is pretty straightforward and ends with a clear conclusion, Halo game plots have never really been necessarily good. That is just the nature of the beast. Halo 2 ends on a massive cliffhanger because they literally could not finish putting the whole story they wanted to in that game. Halo 3 is a mess because everyone was so violently burned out from Halo 2 that the leadership problem was even worse.

[Suspicious silence re: Reach goes here because I still can't motivate myself to replay Reach]

Halo 4 falls very flat for me with some things that were good and mostly other things that I had to make my peace with and come to be okay with. I will grouse about things, but we've Halo cycled our way around to a lot of people (including me) acknowledging that not everything about Halo 4 was horrible.

(I guess my big things that piss me off about it are: Cortana, as discussed, wasting the Didact, and the weird fucking pivot on Catherine Halsey's character.)

Anyway, Brian Reed. My comment there was kind of a flippant attempt to respond to something I wasn't sure how to feel about, but here's what I got:

Reed wasn't actually the lead writer on 4, that was Christopher Schlerf. I don't know much about either of these people! But after Schlerf left, Reed was the lead writer on 5 and did a lot of work on the comics (that I still haven't read because blah blah blah my usual excuses.)

It's hard for me to pick out what exactly I think his fingerprints are in different parts of Halo, because I don't know the guy or his work particularly well. I'm better at identifying what I think (no guarantees I'm right) was Staten back in early Halo because I've seen enough solo work from him to kind of know what I think he liked, and I've seen enough of Frank O'Connor talking about stuff in interviews to (rightly or wrongly) blame a couple specific Chief things I hate on him, but I don't have that with Reed.

However, I have read Reed's short story in the Fractures anthology. Opinions may vary on this, nobody's gotta agree with me, but I really had to pause with myself after reading Rossbach's World because... it was thoughtful?

So looking at Reed, who had to take over for another lead writer and try to come up with a following act for Halo 4... I still hate Halo 5. A lot. But like, I get it. Of course it feels like a weird pivot hail Mary to find something to focus on, because it was.

I think it was stupid and I hated it, but I do have some sympathy for the pressure on the person who ended up taking the fall for it. Anything where you are working for a highly opinionated nerd audience with tons of pressure is going to be very difficult.

I feel like they should've borne out the Forerunner story threads instead of pivoting to the Created, and maybe gotten to those ideas after the plate was clear. I also think Cortana deserved to live. (If you want to see what inspired some of my thoughts about that, you should look into Bungie's previous series: Marathon. But it has been too long since I personally dug around in Marathon for me to be terribly helpful about it anymore.)

...But I also think that Reed is just a dude who had a job and produced a story I really don't like. I've heard he's been pretty much harassed off the face of the internet? And like... nothing is worth that, man.

People with more insight and background details about what was going on actively might have more information than I do and better reasons to hate him, but I was really really checked out of Halo for the better part of a decade and I'm honestly pretty soft when it comes down to it.

[marvel-ousmondays]

Thor

So, cards on the table, Thor was never a favorite of mine.

In terms of the "Chrises", Hemsworth isn't the one I find the most attractive. And a big part of the marketing appeal around Thor in this first film IS about his masculine attractiveness. So when I watched it the first time, I remember thinking "meh, okay" about the movie.

I did enjoy Natalie Portman's character of Jane, LOVED both Sif and Darcy, and Heimdall? C'mon man. No one is cooler than Idris Elba's Heimdall.

So how about this viewing?

This round I was really taken with the cinematography. I don't think I fully appreciated the majesty of Asgard in the first one (or the skill it took to create it), nor the Bifrost, or even Jotunheim. Say what you want about Kenneth Branagh but his films have a beauty to them. (How much of that credit belongs to the editors is up for grabs as obviously post-production is crazy for films like this.) If you are considering a re-watch, I'd strongly encourage you to really look at the environments created for Asgard and Jotunheim- they're gorgeous and unique.

I appreciated Thor's breakdown scene when he can't lift Mjolnir more than I did the first time, probably due to Thor's struggle with worthiness and general depression in Endgame.

I will say in general, I think I appreciated Hemsworth's acting more this round. He has to be this kind of old-timey knight figure among normal people and he has held to that well throughout his whole Avengers tenure. I imagine that is harder than it seems at times.

Despite having finished Loki Season 2 recently, Tom Hiddleston's performance in this first movie doesn't wow me. It's fine, good even, but doesn't stand out to the level one might expect, at least for me. Avengers is coming soon though and there our boy villain shines. I will say I think the problem here is the plot is actually a bit TOO convoluted. The writers couldn't quite decide, or so it appears, what to do with Loki. His anger at his father's deception would be logical but he seems to have turned all that on Thor in a way that didn't fully jive for me. I think there could have been a bit more to show his desire for a throne prior to the reveal OR a bit more of Thor being a bit of a jerk to him. Either would help me understand his motivations more clearly.

Portman, Kat Dennings (Darcy), and Heimdall all stand. I was more interested in Erik Selvig this round and love/hate the fact he was an original character for MCU. (He has since been added to the Marvel comic book universe as well). Coulson was his badass self as always and I had forgotten about Hawkeye's small but important part.

Probably the hardest part for ME with this movie is that the Jotuns were mostly painted as just bad. In some ways Loki is treated as proof that isn't true (never understood why he wasn't blue except when he was holding that casket thing- supposedly Odin magic/illusion I guess?) but then turns. Odin pays lip service to the idea that they can't just attack a whole race for the actions of a few, but we don't SEE any positive or even neutral examples of Jotun. I know people will say that some groups are supposed to be bad, but I think that goes against a core principle of Marvel. No group of beings that we are supposed to see as PEOPLE can be inherently all bad. Now if they had made them monsters, that's different- monsters can be bad or at least, indifferent. But monsters don't have coherent conversations with you either.

I guess I would have liked to see a few Jotun trading or conversing or a Jotun mother with a child or such. Anything of that nature would have "humanized" them more.

Overall, Thor was more beautiful to look at this time around (because I appreciated it more) and overall I'd say more enjoyable, but still not probably in my top 10 of all the movies. Maybe I'll make that list when I finished. Tomorrow- Captain America, with my favorite Chris.

Note for me:

Directed by: Kenneth Branagh