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indigosfindings · 6 hours ago

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updates having beaten the game

i also mentioned in my ttyd liveblog that that game's Big Interactive Set Pieces (like the punis and the glitz pit) drastically reduce in number after chapter 3, but spm keeps them through almost every chapter--the underchomp, the dorguys, etc appear pretty late in the game! tbh i get the sense that in terms of structure spm was designed a lot more holistically than ttyd was--hence the insane degree of foreshadowing

i know ive said this like twice already but i really really wish that more exploration stuff was unlocked by the acquisition of new pixls & characters. like, they consistently allow you to access things to complete their respective chapter, & they let you reach the next heart pillar, & that's basically it. it's particularly disappointing considering that it would take very little--toss a block cudge can break somewhere in chapter 3, or have a treasure room in flipside that you cant enter until you have carrie, or even put a peach-related thing in 7-1. then again, in the absence of badges & proper sidequests, what would the rewards even be? more catch cards???

the Chapter Padding/Imposed Backtracking continues to exist, & as i said about ttyd i think that it works best when theres a sufficiently charming framing (eg the overthere stair fruit thing) as opposed to when there's a more flimsy & perfunctory justification (like the hags essentially telling you "redo (part of) this level twice")--it's the difference between feeling like a genuine Quest vs like filling a clunky quota. the dimentio tag thing is like halfway between these two points

the underchomp is kind of fascinating. it's shockingly in-depth (there's interactions for every pixl???) for being essentially a one-off set piece that railroads you to victory

catch cards are mildly interesting but theyre the kind of collection task that's just too herculean to undertake--like, i can only do completionism up to a certain point, & if completing the list is going to rely on a LOT of chance-based rolls then i might as well just install genshin

women really are written in Some Kind Of Way (the hags, luvbi getting in verbal slapfights with tippi & peach, etc)

it would have been really easy to just make the 3d environments be the 2d environments With Extras, so im really glad that they pretty consistently make you lose access to 2d objects and/or add additional hazards

i have found it beneficial to the game experience to just actively Never use hp plus or power plus

"block meal" is so fucking funny

the overthere levels might be the ones where my attention wanders most--tbh ive never really cared for heaven, just like from an aesthetic standpoint

i will say though, the overthere has what might be my favourite background in the game (and that's saying something lol)...... the many, many parallax layers of interlocking circles function almost as an interactive study in adaptive composition

the bonechill fight is a bit of a letdown in contrast to the buildup

i said this before, but i really think all of the "doubled atk" effects ahouldve been +1 or +2 instead, or otherwise all the enemies & bosses shouldve had 1.5 or 2x the hp

the scene where luvbi "dies" was surprisingly heartfelt--her spat with grambi & jaydes produces a sense of emotional authenticity that really elevates the scene beyond the sum of its parts in a way that i dont think any mario game has even really attempted since. yesterday i watched it 2017 for the first time and throughout all the hollow, vapid dead-brother scenes i was struck by how comical that movie's failure to illustrate earnest grief & family dynamics was in comparison to a ~3 minute cutscene from super paper mario

on that note, i really like how after that heartfelt scene when grambi is like "please...... take care of the pure heart............" luigi is like "okeydokey." girl read the room

i LOOOOVVVEEE when dimentio is like "oh btw count, have you ever heard the name 'blumiere'~?" like he didnt gain anything from that it was just pure cattiness, im obsessed with him

i like how the subchapters of castle bleck are themed around their respective bosses--o'chunks's level is a gauntlet, mimi's level is full of tricks & traps, dimentio's level has puzzles & illusions, and bleck's level is like a final labyrinth

castle bleck is pretty similar to the palace of shadow insofar as theyre both largely linear gauntlets rather than "true" dungeons, yet for the most part i like castle bleck a lot better.... i think it's probably a mix of the platformer style being better suited to that kind of level design + the strength of the aesthetic

the final bosses are fun, especially super dimentio. the theme is great, and i LOVE the idea that luigi is like The Ultimate Darkness In Universe & that's just something we're not going to examine further or ever talk about again

between that and negative zone the nintendo wii really was just spoonfeeding luigi to matpat huh

the ending still makes me emotional as an adult! i cant rule out that nostalgia/carrying over the sentiments & attachments that i formed as a kid plays a large part in that, but i dont want to downplay the execution of the scene itself--it's sincere & evocative, it pays off a LOT of buildup, it plays to the attachments you form to the cast, and the music that plays in the wedding scene is gorgeous

nastasia is probably the saddest character. if only she couldve fixed him,,,

replaying super paper mario, sporadic thoughts post-chapter 2:

very easy so far--& although ttyd was also easy, spm's gameplay is sadly substantially less rich thab ttyd's was

having said that the game design in spm is! unrelentingly charming!! the use of platforming as a framework for a varied stream of stage styles (straightforward levels, dungeons, towns, the entire 2-3 Situation) is creative in a way that imo predicts the sort of things the mario maker community later ended up making. chapter 2's set pieces in particular are extremely quirky (the rooms with traps, the rubee thing, the mazelike basement, the merlee game show lmao)

few platformers have boss fights that feel like genuine Combat, so that's pretty cool

i will confess that as a First Dungeon, yold ruins doesnt have half the sauce of hooktail castle--it's much more linear in layout, with far less of that zelda-y "explore & comprehend the space" principle that made ttyd's dungeons hit

in a similar vein, it's kind of crazy how tippi has like a fraction of the personality that goombella had. it's a bit sad for the character doing the vast majority of the talking to just.... not really have any opinions on anything

the momentum of the chapters likewise means very few npcs ever get to stick out. like, even the "first town crotchety old mayor" character was a total one-and-done, one dialogue and you never have a reason to speak to him again (mostly just speaks to the game structure, which is as mentioned a bold enough exercise that i feel i cant really fault it for that)

bringing up a menu to use items In A Platforming Context is not at all natural to me, so im finding myself just not really using them

this game is a masterclass in visual design imo. the npcs & enemies & pixls being made of primitives that reconfigure themselves into different shapes really elevates the interplay of 2d & 3d, the backgrounds/environments are extremely aesthetically satisfying (the Mathmosphere in lineland, the optical illusion in the sky in gloam valley, all of castle bleck), & i love how the constant "digital/tech" motif (eg the "dragging selection boxes to flip/teleport", the trees & shrubs looking like something youd make in ms paint, etc) is an ingenious progression of paper mario's core aesthetic design

dimentio is so fun

the inter-chapter dialogue flashbacks are surprisingly earnest? for such a tongue-in-cheek game where almost every line of dialogue contains a joke of some kind, those exchanges feel humourless & sincere. that probably contributes to the Space the game occupies in all of our memories lol

i ADOOOORE nastasia

likewise it was really interesting how peach's "escape" sequence after chapter 1 was (while, again, still extremely sardonic) aesthetically & narratively framed with such a sense of Hopelessness. that's not to say like "woahh this mario game is 10x darker than you thought!!!!", more that it's just not a space the series commonly ventures into

the Ancients stuff is being leaned into extremely hard lol. ttyd mostly teases at that kind of "mysterious rpg lore" thing peripherally (the riddle tower inscriptions, grifty, etc) so it's interesting how spm puts it front & centre in contrast, without ever sacrificing the sense of mystique

this game really highlights how interesting the wiimote is as a controller--pressing the A button while holding it sideways (ie removing your left thumb from the direction input to press a button) is something that i cant think of any other controller doing, & it projects onto that button a really interesting sense of, like, Valence

it's the kind of game that seems to beg for one of thsoe posts like "things that ACTUALLY HAPPEN in _____"

#spm liveblog #indigoing #i would like to come back to this with more updates after the postgame #then again i said the same thing about ttyd and then Forgot. soooo

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biocrafthero · 10 hours ago

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Project Sekai - White Day AU Card Lore/Story Masterpost

In other words: I've become obsessed with a very niche part of this game for no discernible reason and have decided to make my gathered knowledge into a post...

NOTE: This post was written before the 2025 White Day event, so some parts may be missing information or incorrect. All information being referenced comes from the Sekaipedia fan wiki.

(I have decided to put this under a Read More because this is so ungodly lengthy that it has taken actual hours for me to write. I hit the image limit on browser, which is 30. If I didn't put this under a Read More I would've been killed with hammers.)

What is White Day AU?

White Day AU is based off of a series of cards that began releasing in 2022 with the White Day event titled "The Gentleman Thief's Thrilling White Day!?". While at first it may seem like a case of colopale putting the characters in a fun setting with cool outfits, it has become more and more apparent that, with the more White Day events that release, the more this universe is getting expanded upon.

I spent some time last month going over the cards that have released over the course of four separate events, pouring over details in the characters' outfits and the environments that surround them in the illustrations in an attempt to parse what kind of story colopale seems to be telling with these cards.

The events/gachas that all contain White Day AU cards are as follows:

The Gentleman Thief's Thrilling White Day!? - Knights of White

Never Give Up Cooking! - Imperial Soldiers

Relax Teatime - What Awaits at the End of War

The Power Of Regret - Noble Knights Fighting for Supremacy

While it may seem odd that a non-White Day event/gacha is here, it may be due to colopale making the decision to start releasing White Day AU lore outside of White Day events in order to ensure they can make at least one card for every major character (both OCs and vocaloids) before the game reaches the end of it's story.

The characters currently missing cards are...

Honami (Leo/need)

Shizuku (MORE MORE JUMP!)

Haruka (MORE MORE JUMP!)

An (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

Kohane (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

Ena (Nightcord at 25:00)

Rin (Virtual Singer)

Luka (Virtual Singer)

MEIKO (Virtual Singer)

It is difficult to guess who would be in which faction (more on that below) due to the fact that, regardless of unit or relationships, it is not uncommon for people to be split between factions even if logically they should've been paired together in the same faction.

White Day AU Lore

The setting of the White Day AU is most likely fantasy, due to the medieval aesthetics and fantastical elements like magic and dragons. Something interesting as well is that there seem to be factions--different groups each of the characters belong to--that may be hinting at a conflict between members of the cast.

There are multiple factions to be aware of:

The Knights of White

The Empire

An unnamed third faction

An unnamed fourth faction

I will go over each faction in this order. They can be distinguished from each other through multiple things such as the emblems they wear, the colored gemstones on their outfits, and the color palettes of their uniforms. These things all work in conjunction with one another to show who is allied with who.

The Knights of White

The Knights of White, which I will refer to as the Knights, is one of two primary factions in the White Day AU. Known characters who are currently part of the Knights are...

Tsukasa (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Akito (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

Shiho (Leo/need)

Len (Virtual Singer)

Nene (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Emu (Wonderlands x Showtime)

The Knights are distinguished from the other members of the cast by the eight-pointed star as their faction's crest and uniforms that comprise almost entirely of white, blue, and gold.

The Empire

The Empire, which I also tend to refer to as the Imperials (even though grammatically that is incorrect it just sounds better LMAO) is the second primary faction in the White Day AU. Known characters who are part of the Empire are...

Toya (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

Rui (Wonderlands x Showtime)

KAITO (Virtual Singer)

Miku (Virtual Singer)

Saki (Leo/need)

Imperial outfits tend to comprise of the colors black, red, and gold. Their crest is of a dragon, likely in reference to the dragon in Toya's card. Their outfits also all include a red gemstone of some kind, a gemstone color that is exclusive to this faction.

It should be noted that Rui's Imperial outfit does not include a dragon crest and instead has the eight-pointed star of the Knights. Additionally, Toya's outfit has a rose on it, which you may have noticed is something that appears on the outfits of other characters from other factions. I will come back to these two points later.

From here, we get to the secondary factions of the AU.

Unnamed Third Faction

Third Faction is currently only comprised of two members:

Kanade (Nightcord at 25:00)

Mafuyu (Nightcord at 25:00)

Third Faction does not seem to have a set color palette (the colors that the two share are blue and gold), but they do have a unique emblem: the four-pointed star. While Mafuyu's emblem is visible in her illustration, Kanade's emblem is viewable on her 3D model. Additionally, despite the emblem having similarity to the Knight's emblem, both of them wear the same distinctive red gemstones that the Imperials wear on their outfits.

These details in conjunction lead me to believe that the role of Third is either as a middle-ground or mediating party between the Knights and Imperials.

Unnamed Fourth Faction

Fourth Faction currently only comprises of two members:

Minori (MORE MORE JUMP!)

Airi (MORE MORE JUMP!)

The faction's color palette likely comprises largely of blue/green, red, white, and gold. Their crest is of four lozenges with a circle in the center. Their colors and crest are distinct from all other factions, meaning they are likely working independently and without the influence of the other factions.

Unknown Alliances

Mizuki (Nightcord at 25:00)

Mizuki's outfit does not appear to hold any similarities to the other factions currently present, her palette consisting of white, blue, and silver. While it does hold similarities to the Knights, the outfit that comes with her card includes a heart-shaped emblem both on the outfit and accessory. However, this could mean nothing, as the outfits that Akito and Tsukasa have from this same set do not include Knights emblems on their accessories.

Ichika (Leo/need)

Ichika's current alliance also remains unclear. Her outfit's color palette consists of white, red, and gold, which does not resemble any of the other factions. Her crest is likely the piece of her outfit that resembles a fleur-de-lis with a gemstone in the center. There are some details from a different card (the upper-left corner of the background in Len's 4* from the "The Power Of Regret" event) that may support her being part of a full-fledged faction, but due to other characters lacking this emblem she is currently seen as independent.

There is the possibility that Ichika and Mizuki are actually part of the same faction, but this lacks concrete evidence. For the sake of the argument though, I will mention that not long ago when I was looking over the details of the cards, the crests on their outfits struck me as suspiciously similar in shape (supported by the banners in the upper-right in the background in Mizuki's card). Still, this theory is shaky at best.

And yes, I made sure to check that Mizuki's banners and Ichika's crest do not resemble the background of the "Knights of White" gacha.

White Day AU Story

This is where we start getting into the nitty-gritty of details in the AU, aside from just talking about the factions. That was an important precursor of information to everything else this post talks about.

Meaning of Roses

My suspicion is that the roses represent nobility. Characters with roses present on their outfits are as follows:

Tsukasa (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Akito (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

Mizuki (Nightcord at 25:00)

Shiho (Leo/need)

Len (Virtual Singer)

Toya (Vivid BAD SQUAD)

At first, it was my assumption that those who wear roses are--or were at one point--allied or part of the Knights. However, upon further inspection of the logo for the "Imperial Soldiers" gacha, roses are not exclusive to the Knights faction.

If roses were associated with the Knights, why would it not only be part of Toya's outfit but also included in the "Imperial Soldiers" gacha logo?

Looking at each of the characters who have been seen with the rose on their uniforms and comparing these characters to their canon counterparts from the base game of Project Sekai (aside from Len, sorry Len), these characters being nobility would check out considering their personal histories in canon.

The Royal Guard

This is where we start getting to the most story-filled cards that colopale as released so far.

This unit of characters, which I have personally been referring to as the royal guard, consist of the following:

Nene (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Emu (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Len (Virtual Singer)

Tsukasa (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Rui (Wonderlands x Showtime)

Notably, (almost) all of the characters here are from the canon unit Wonderlands x Showtime, which is likely due to the fact that the event they come from, "The Power Of Regret," is a Wonderlands x Showtime story event (specifically Nene focus). It is because of the fact we got all of Wonderlands x Showtime in this card drop we get the most story, since we have three returning characters.

The royal guard uniforms have the Knights emblem and color palette, clearly displaying the fact that they are a part of that faction. The most distinct parts of their uniforms are their crown-shaped belt buckles, the crown on the back of their gloves, and the shield with a crown engraved on it that they wear as a brooch. Their outfits even have gemstones that correspond with their character colors that we see in-game, which to me only emphasizes their status as high-ranking knights.

Earlier, I pointed out how Rui has the Knights emblem on his Imperial outfit, despite noticeably not being part of the Knights. This is likely because, at some point between these cards and the cards from the "Never Give Up Cooking!" event, Rui deserted from the Knights to join the Empire.

An assumption could be made that the cards are being released in chronological order, however I disagree. Rui would be more likely to defect from the Knights but still carry their emblem with him when he joins the Imperials, rather than holding a connection with the Knights before deserting from the Imperials to join the other side. It is unclear why he would leave the Knights, but I personally believe it may have something to do with the fact that in his 4* from "Never Give Up Cooking!" he is a magic user, while here in the "The Power Of Regret" cards he is not. In other words, I think he joined the Imperials so he could use magic.

This causes the other cards of characters who were part of the royal guard to have very interesting additional information. Tsukasa likely went up in ranking from royal guard to something else entirely, based off of how his 4* from "The Gentleman Thief's Thrilling White Day!?" event has him in a much more regal outfit.

While it is unclear what happened to Len, it should be noted that his 2* from "The Gentleman Thief's Thrilling White Day!?" event is named "Innocent Squire", so maybe something also transpired with his character to lead to his change in position.

There is some speculation among people I discuss these cards with about what exactly Nene and Emu are doing in their cards, but we highly suspect they are actually fighting each other. The tears in Nene's eyes and Emu's determined expression imply that there may be some kind of heartache occurring during whatever clash they're involved in, which would be most likely to happen if the two of them were in combat against one another. The backgrounds of their cards match up well enough to suggest that they are in the same space, as well.

It is unclear what exactly the two of them are fighting about, but it is of my own personal belief that the conflict between them has to do with Rui's desertion from the Knights. It is realistically the only thing I can think of that could possibly push these two into conflict with one another.

It can also be assumed that after Rui's desertion, the royal guard subsequently dissolved since they make no other appearances outside of this set of cards.

It is unclear what Tsukasa and Len are doing in their cards, but they also appear to be in the same location as one another.

Toya's Dragon

In a blog post by colopale, they refer to the dragon as his "aibou" (partner). While it may seem like they're drawing parallels between the dragon and Akito (considering the fact that Akito and Toya are partners in canon), I don't think that Akito is supposed to be the dragon considering the differing allegiances. I think the dragon is just Toya's friend :)

Separated Tenmas

Saki and Tsukasa seem to be on two entirely different sides of the war--the Empire and the Knights respectively. While it remains unclear as to why they're on opposing sides, maybe something happened between them that caused this divide...

Leo/need in Conflict?!

Other than the fact that Saki is a member of the Imperial Army, I'm very curious about what's happening in Shiho and Ichika's cards. Based off of the backgrounds, and while it doesn't look like it at first, they appear to be in the same location. You can see in the background of Ichika's card, on the other side of the courtyard, you can see a set of windows that are the same shape as the windows light is being cast through in Shiho's card. Assuming the courtyard is symmetrical, you can reasonably guess they're in the same hall. Additionally, the pillars appear to be similar at the very least. If they're fighting, I wonder what its about?

Details about the outfit names...

I want to take a moment to talk about outfit names for each of the characters since I couldn't find anywhere else to talk about this. I will be dividing these by the event/gacha they were released in.

The Gentleman Thief's Thrilling White Day!? - Knights of White:

Tsukasa - Chivalrous Chevalier

Akito - Noble Paladin

Mizuki - Optatio Eques

None of these are exactly notable aside from the name of Mizuki's outfit. The name translates from Latin to "Knight's Choice" (machine translation), which adds some information to her character that, while I have trouble parsing due to the lack of information about her whole deal in this AU, I still find interesting.

Also note that the world "chevalier" just means "knight" in French.

Never Give Up Cooking! - Imperial Soldiers:

Toya - Chevalier Noir

Rui - Mad Sorcerer

KAITO - Wandering Gunner

KAITO's outfit name is intriguing to me and leads me to believe he may be more of a mercenary type of character rather than someone who is absolutely loyal to the Empire.

Relax Teatime - What Awaits at the End of War:

Kanade - Fleeting Light Knight Attire

Ichika - Illuminated Courtyard Knight Attire

Mafuyu - Abyss Knight Attire

There's not much of note here, but I am of the personal belief that Kanade and Mafuyu are matching.

The Power Of Regret - Noble Knights Fighting for Supremacy:

Nene - Fier Chevalier

Emu - Sourire Chevalier

Len - Hability Chevalier

Two of the names here are French. Nene's translates to "Proud knight" and Emu's to "Smile Knight" (both machine translated). Len's name means "Able Knight" (could also be read as "Skillful Knight"), the word "habile" just being an obsolete form of the word "able."

My personal thoughts...

I just know the AkiToya divorce is insane. Couldn't be as dramatic as whatever L/n and WxS are going through right now tho tbh... At least it looks like KanaMafu and MMJ are having fun times in yuri land

Also in the next White Day AU card drop if Ena isn't part of the Knights faction I'm gonna--[remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health]--I'm gonna surpass RAD WEEKEND

Why does KAITO have a gun btw???? Maybe its magic idk

#rambles #project sekai #this is my most normal post of all time #my writing #<- BECAUSE IT MIGHT AS WELL BE.#i need to sleep now I stayed up for actual hours putting this together

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beneathsilverstars · 5 months ago

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i know i was just complaining about stylizing loop's body but i figured that out and moved on and it turns out the head is so much harder 😭 i'm very happy with canon loop head and post-bodycraft loop head but the in-between phase is kicking my ASS and i can't just half-ass it bc figuring out the in-between head is the ENTIRE POINT of this WHOLE PROJECT....

i think part of the problem might be that unlike with the body, i do have an extremely clear idea of what is happening with the head physically and how it would look irl, it's just. a very difficult thing to draw. so i keep rejecting ideas that look good bc they're not my actual headcanon, but then also rejecting attempts to faithfully depict the headcanon bc they don't look good. head in my hands

#i set the tablet down for the night on a sketch that looks good but #most of my other sketches have also looked good :/ then i line them and it's not right at all #sigh #it might be easier if i changed how i draw the canon head but. j don't want to i like it....#maybe just worry less abt being an in-between phase and more do something entirely unique?#and then theoretically there's phases between all three points #like using pink to blend yellow and purple instead of blending directly....#that's so much going on though 😭#idk hopefully that last sketch i did will work 😭😭#this has been a fun process tho #i don't usually iterate this much with anything except clothes #so it's cool to hammer away at a hard problem #and push myself to stylize in different ways #without feeling like i've ruined an entire illustration if the experiment fails #and i've figured out some cool techniques that might be fun to use in other places to give illustrations a particular vibe!#i'm just so invested in getting this head right tho that i'm like AHHHHHHH #😤😤😤#silverstarschat #ugh on third thought maybe the canon head rly is my issue #it looks cool but it's not rly faithfully depicting my headcanon is it #so ofc any attempt to draw smth sorta like it won't match my headcanons either #OH I JUSF HAD AN IDEA #FUCK #I WANNA TRY IT SO BAD BUT I ALREADY TOOK MY CONTACTS OUT #AHHH I GOTTA faLL ASLEEP SO I CAN WAKE UP AND DRAW IT!!!!#ooohhhhh this is gonna be so good #crossing my goddamn fingers it works out #!!!!!!!

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liddimothie · 20 days ago

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Hello

I've got a story for you

Back in May, I wanted to show my appreciation to the trans artist community and practice expressions at the same time by doing an expressions sheet with all the big name trans artists.

I ended up burning out and falling short on this endeavor, but it wasn't entirely in vain, since I had completed 16 of the artists I wanted to complete.

Recently, I refitted the images for the sake of something I'm setting up, but having all the artists in an easier to comprehend format got me pondering.

I ponder no longer.

I know a few of you have had significant design changes since May, and I want to amend that at some point, but I hope this will still be a boon in this time where things seem bleak.

The artists illustrated, in no particular order:

@ayviedoesthings @assumptionprime @prettiestplatypus @koalaphoenix @azulcrescent @brooke2valley @darkmagenugget @kaylasartwork @nyxisart @bubbleverseart @deadeyedfae @welldrawnfish @felixfeliccis @tresenellaart @alienbycomics @komorebigold

Also as a bonus, the expressions template I had used, by @magicalpouchofmagic:

#liddimothie #trans artist #queer artist #small artist #lgbtq #furry #transfem #transblr #transgender #queer

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thehmn · 7 months ago

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I’m pretty sure I’ve made a post about this before but I think I need some gifs to illustrate my point.

I’m something of a dog nerd. I don’t know a lot about breeds but I love diving into dog language and it’s a common misconception that a dog wagging its tail means it’s happy. That could not be further from the truth. A wagging tail just means it’s excited and that could mean happy, scared, curious or angry. A wagging tail is the dog asking you to pay attention to it. A dog that’s trying to hide never wags its tail.

First off, happy. A wagging tail combined with soft loose body language is a happy welcoming dog.

Stiff body means the dog is on guard and you should only approach with caution. It’s trying to determine if you’re a danger so if you approach you should avoid making eye contact and talk in a friendly high pithed voice. If the dog’s body remains stiff leave it be. If it lowers its head and starts wagging its tail more slowly and loosely that means it’s softening up to you.

Basically if it goes from acting like the dog on the right to the dog on the left you’re in the clear.

For understandable reasons I have trouble finding a gif of a truly scared dog but closed stiff body language with no snarling but a wagging tail means fear and you should only approach with caution because fear can quickly turn to anger.

If a dog looks away or try to avoid making eye contact it’s terrified and if it suddenly turns to look at you you’re probably in trouble.

And of course anger. We all know what that looks like but most people are so focused on the snarling teeth they don’t see the wagging tail. If you do don’t try to rationalize it. Listen to your fear. It’s not playing roughly. It’s fucking angry and you should absolutely not approach.

Btw, I don’t want to get into all the tiny micro expressions that dogs make but if you see a dog making this face it’s not smiling. It’s terrified. If it’s not accompanied by soft wiggly motions it’s a very very scared dog that is trying to appease you and though it’s not always the case it’s most likely a dog that’s used to getting hit or beaten.

These are broad guidelines but you should always approach a dog you don’t know with caution. They are individuals who doesn’t always follow set rules for how to behave but if you keep this in the back of your mind you’re far more prepared for interacting with dogs than just “tail wag means happy”.

#humontalks #dog language #body language #long post

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valeriehalla · 9 days ago

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

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

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

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

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

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

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

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

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

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

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

You should never, ever, ever do this.

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

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

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

2. Picking a font.

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

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

3. Adjusting the line-height

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Paragraph spacing...

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

I did this for a few reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The tragedy of justification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

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

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

#text #typography #advice...?#not a professional by any means by the way

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see-arcane · 8 months ago

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Our good friend Jonathan Harker is getting ready to leave for his business trip, Mina Murray is picking out a new journal, Lucy Westenra is charming a gaggle of smitten suitors, Abraham van Helsing is wrapping up his lectures, and Castle Dracula is prepping the guest room for a very long stay.

Which must mean that Dracula Season is here again!

‘Dracula Season’ being a catchall term for the voracious reading, memeing, writing, illustrating, analyzing, and general fun-having that’s ensued since Matt Kirkland’s project, Dracula Daily, caught on with us back in 2022. The Substack had already been running before then, but it sparked a conflagration as time went on and readers old and new to Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the actual novel, not Coppola’s fanfiction—devoured it in a way that scratched an itch none of us knew we had. Stoker wrote the book in epistolary fashion, clumping sections together as needed for the pacing without perfect adherence to chronological order. Matt went ahead and put all the events in order and proceeded to set up a lovely chain of emails that delivered entries on those correlating dates.

This style of organization and pacing turned out to not only make the virtual book club that much easier to engage with, but left space in-between to stew on the story and relate with the characters themselves. Every day of waiting in the book feels weightier when you have to pace and sweat and worry in tandem with poor Jonathan trapped in the castle or Lucy wasting away or Mina running out the clock before she loses the fight for her own humanity. And while we sat with the story or the lulls between Dracula Seasons, some of us found ourselves craving more of that ghastly gothic horror goodness to the point that we figured:

“Well. Why don’t I make something?”

And then we did! Tons of creative works have been churned out in the wake of Dracula Daily’s high. I figured that while we’ve still got a bit of time to wait for May 3rd, we should check out all this new stuff in the meantime. (Plus a handful of neat stuff that just clicks with the Dracula itch overall.)

So, in the interest of Dracula Season pregaming, let’s take a look at…

FICTION

Blood of My Blood – A recent addition to the Dracula Bad Ending AU pile, and definitely one of the most harrowing and addictive group-produced narratives I’ve ever come across, Blood of My Blood is the dramatically gothic currently-WIP work of @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush’s devious design. Give or take a heap of other fascinated folks (hello!) adding ideas to put more Horror into the Horrors that our cast has to face. The premise:

The Transylvanian climax went fatally sour and the Harkers were forced to shelter with Dracula himself, including their half-vampire son, Quincey. Cut to two decades later, and Quincey finds himself out in modern London, smitten with Lu, adopted daughter of Arthur and Jack, and diving into certain bloodstained old documents that detail the real history of how his parents came to live in the castle. Said revelations coming not a moment too soon, as a storm is coming for him straight from the Carpathians…

Dracula Daily Sketch Collection – An array of illustrations that captures every entry beat by beat, the Dracula Daily Sketch Collection by Georgia Cook, alias @georgiacooked was dished out over the course of the last Dracula Season. Some of the most fun character designs out there.

Fanfiction Spotlight: BlueCatWriter – With a whopping 99 works devoted to the novel Dracula (so far, the number may have gone up since I blinked), @bluecatwriter is one of the most prolific and talented fanfiction scribblers out there. Romances, nightmares, and overlaps between the two seem to crop up the most, give or take a crossover. Seems fitting that those blue paw prints have contributed to BoMB too.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk – An ongoing comic in which all your favorite characters from the Classics section get together and tackle some perils ranging from the mundane to the monstrous. Started by the amazing @mayhemchicken and posted on @lxgentlefolkcomic, this series is a love letter to beloved Victorian era lit, with a spotlight on the two couples leading the League. Namely, the Harkers, ala Dracula, and the Nortons, ala Sherlock Holmes,’ “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Mina and Irene are the driving investigative and steering forces here, and still deeply in love with their likewise-infatuated husbands, just like in their canons! What a concept! Alan.

Without spoiling the full character list, just know there are going to be a ton of familiar faces roaming around before you finish reading the first arc. Said arc having conveniently wrapped up just a few days ago! Give the comic and its bonus silliness a look if you’re in the mood for a new comfort-adventure epic.

Re: Dracula – Probably the most well-known and incredible thing to come out of the initial Dracula Daily wave. This podcast is a full audio drama that follows the same format as the Substack, with episodes coming out in time with the entries themselves. And it has an unfairly cool soundtrack. They have a Tumblr with @re-dracula, a site and a Patreon to check out before the series kicks up again on May 3rd. (Also, keep an eye out for their next work, an audio drama in the same style with Carmilla.)

The Soldier and the Solicitor – Another treat from @ibrithir-was-here, this one involves a bit of time travel trouble. Quincey Harker has stumbled out of World War I and into the same dark forest where his father once fled for his life…then runs into the man himself, on that same night. Jonathan Harker, young and starved and lost, who has no choice but to trust this stranger while the Weird Sisters are at his heels…despite said stranger having no shadow. It’s a tasty emotional trek, already complete on Tumblr, but now it’s turning into a Webtoon. While Ibrithir is juggling a number of other stories, she’ll be redrawing spruced up versions of the comic and adding a few new scenes as things unfold.

Substack Stack – You know what’s better than one emailed-out public domain book club? A mountain of them. Just. So, so many of them. You’ll see that a lot of these are finished, but some are still ticking along. Either way, they’re all great picks if you’re craving some more old school lit to fill the void between undead emails.

Frankenstein Weekly – Frankenstein

Jekyll and Hyde Weekly – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Voyage of the Nautilus – Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Letters from Watson – Sherlock Holmes

The Invisible Mail – The Invisible Man

Letters from Bunny – E.W. Hornung’s short stories of the eponymous Bunny and Raffles

Letters Regarding Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster short stories, including the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves

…

……

………

…The Beetle Weekly – The Beetle (NOTE: Do Not Read This.)

The Vampyres – A novella I finally wrenched through the gears of self-publication as of March this year. Starring a petite but powerful paranormal cast, The Vampyres, centers on an unscrupulous undead fellow who finds that the revenants of the world are being mowed down by an entity known only as ‘Quinn Morse.’ Between trying to save his neck and figure out where the shadowy bastard came from, the Vampyre in question crosses paths with a new paramour and handy human shield in the form of a grieving Good Samaritan. He’s even polite enough to invite the Vampyre into his home while he’s in dire straits! Surely this will end well. All the info is available here and a little author site is over here.

What Manner of Man – This is the one made for everyone who started out hoping there’d be a real love story with our good friend Jonathan Harker and the Count when he was at his most charismatic. Where that sea of wonders dried up into a mire of horror, What Manner of Man by @stjohnstarling keeps things firmly on the romantic tracks. This Substack stars the letter-writing priest Father Victor E. Ardelian as he finds himself meeting with one enigmatic Lord Alistair Vane. It isn’t long before interest turns into intrigue and intrigue into undead intimacies.

The entire novel has been completed—along with multiple epilogues in the author’s Patreon, allowing readers to choose for themselves just how the uncanny romance plays out in the end—and the Substack now has a number of other gothic goodies piling up in the meantime.

NONFICTION

Dracula Daily: A Unique Reading Experience: This one comes courtesy of @realwomenofgaming. It’s a short and sweet piece that amounts to a fun snapshot of the entire Dracula Daily ride. A cozy couple-minute read.

‘Dracula Daily’ is the One Substack You Need a Subscription To: Features my favorite Matt Kirkland interview. @mattkirkland, if you’re still floating around on here, thank you for dispatching our vampire newsletter again this year.

Dracula Daily is Tumblr’s hottest new book club: Alright, the ‘new’ part is worn out by now, but this one is still a delightful article to swing back around to. Two years on, this Polygon piece is a time capsule of those early months when people outside our bookworm bubble realized we were all happily receiving letters from our favorite classic gothic horror blorbos.

“How Mina Murray Became Dracula’s Girlfriend” – Princess Weekes, if you ever read this, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am sending oceans of love and millions of rewatches to your video essay. If you haven’t seen it yet, “How Mina Murray Became Dracula’s Girlfriend” is one of the most refreshing and well-made breakdowns of both the title subject and numerous other issues that have proliferated in the public view of Dracula’s cast and plot as adaptations endlessly warp or outright bastardize the actual novel. An incredibly cathartic watch.

Literary play gone viral: delight, intertextuality, and challenges to normative interpretations through the digital serialization of Dracula: A mouthful of a title for an even more elaborate article about the Dracula Daily phenomenon. This one is a full-on study that analyzes just what happened within the big bloodsucker book club surge and how its ‘wandering reading practices’ enriched the experience for participants.

“The Undying Undead: An analysis of the Dracula Daily community for a theory of online community formation and interaction” – We have a thesis on here! Look at that! @sirangelothebestest’s MA thesis used our vampiric book club as the bones for a massive brick of an academic piece that definitely deserves a look.

…And I think I’ll go ahead and cap things here.

This isn’t everything I got recommended, but if I had squashed all of it in here, I think folks’ eyes would start to fall out of their head. I hope you can find something cool to comb through here. Or, if there’s something great I overlooked, tack it onto the list! We’ve got just two weeks to go until we’re off with Mr. Harker. Let’s enjoy our respite before those castle doors close behind us.

#time for Dracula Season pre-gaming :3 #thank you to everyone who sent in their suggestions!#dracula #dracula daily #re: dracula

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art · 1 year ago

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Creator Spotlight: @jdebbiel

Deb JJ Lee is a non-binary Korean artist based in Brooklyn, NY. They have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, NPR, Google, Radiolab, and more. Their award-winning graphic memoir, IN LIMBO, about mental illness and difficult relationships with trauma, released in March 2023 from First Second.

Below is our interview with Deb!

Have you ever had an art block? If so, how did you overcome it?

That implies I am over my art block, but I’m still in it! I think about Kiki’s Delivery Service a lot and how she had to stop doing a thing, and that you can’t really force it, and you have to let it come back to you. It’s a pretty humbling moment, realizing there is more to life than just drawing. I’ve been trying to consume other content like reading or watching movies—anything that is not drawing-related—and to trust that it will come back to me. I think not being afraid to do the small pieces before committing to the big pieces is helpful. Because big pieces are what I am known for, I dig myself into a deeper hole, thinking that each piece has to be bigger than the last one. So yeah! Relaxing and doing the small things before overcommitting to a big piece is the best way to go about it for me.

Which 3 famous artists (dead or alive) would you invite to your dinner party?

I feel like these are all artists that I have second-degree connections with! Jillian Tamaki, Victo Ngai, and Tillie Walden would be my picks!

What are your file name conventions?

…What file name conventions? I mean, I don’t have specific file name conventions, but I actually have a public Google Drive archive! But I usually put “djjl_whatever-the-title-is_final,” and I would always know it’s the final and legit version.

What is a recent creative project that you are proud of?

I did an illustration for the whiskey brand Johnnie Walker. It’s so wild because I only had four days to finish it, and it usually takes me a week and a half if I rush. And honestly, it’s probably one of my best pieces from this year, which is funny. It was for the Mid-Autumn festival, so I made it as Korean as possible.

How has technology changed the way you approach your work?

I only use my iPad to draw everything now, and if I want to pretend that I have a steady workstation, I’ll use my Cintiq. I still am not as comfortable on the Cintiq as I am on Procreate, but it’s still pretty solid and nice. That’s the good part about technology. The bad part about technology is how AI art has been messing things up for me. I’m currently in a lawsuit about AI art as a class rep. Some of my stuff got turned into AI art late last year, so I have to give a deposition at some point.

What is a convention experience that has stuck with you?

Honestly, they’re all good! I feel like Lightbox Expo has been really nice because it’s truly been a convention for artists. I feel like that’s where most of my audience is, and they’re all around because their purpose is to be better at art. That’s where a lot of original artists do well because they’re getting art they’re inspired by, not so much fanart. I like the Lightbox Expo because it encompasses the pure love of art very well.

Top tips on setting up an Artist Alley booth?

Use a Y axis, not just your X axis! Take advantage of it! Branding is also something to think about. It is definitely something I’m getting better at. Having an assistant is also very important. I’ve also heard that 8.5x11 to 12x18 inches is usually a good size for prints, but I also provide postcard-sized prints because sometimes people don’t want to commit to a larger size.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

You know this is so funny. I’ve been following @alicexz for over a decade on Tumblr and other platforms. I’ve followed her work since high school, and we’ve only recently become peers. I found her, and we met for the first time in real life, and she recognized me. And then I found all my drawings from when I was in my Alice phase, back in high school, and I was like, “Yo, this is when I was trying to be you so badly!” and she was cracking up and was like “Wow, this is so good!” It was such a sweet moment. I wanted to take a picture of her holding my drawing up. It’s really nice because now we’re peers.

Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing, Deb! Be sure to check out their Tumblr blog over at @jdebbiel.

#creator spotlight #artists on tumblr #deb jj lee #jdebbiel

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saphronethaleph · 7 months ago

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Literary Illusions

“It’s ironic,” Palpatine said, shaking his head. “He could save others from death, but not himself.”

Anakin frowned.

“And this is something the Jedi wouldn’t have told me?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Palpatine replied. “Is it a story you’ve heard?”

“Well, yes,” Anakin said. “Just now, from you. But not before then… and that surprises me, Chancellor.”

Palpatine shrugged. “I think you’ll find, Anakin, that the Jedi have not been telling you everything.”

“Maybe not, but… honestly, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing they’d tell me,” Anakin said.

Palpatine frowned.

“...what?” he asked.

“You know,” Anakin said. “Some Sith Lord works out how to bring people back to life from the dead, but his apprentice kills him and doesn’t bring him back to life because the Sith are inherently self destructive. If the two of them had worked together and been able to trust one another, they’d have been immortal.”

He shrugged. “It’s a good illustration of the inherently self destructive nature of the Dark Side, and it’s the dichotomy of how the Dark Side leads you to seek power in order to achieve goals that you then discard as irrelevant, because they’re not directly related to gaining power… hold on a second.”

Palpatine was a little distracted by trying to avoid mentally kicking himself, so it took him somewhat more than a second to notice what Anakin was doing.

“...Anakin?” he said. “Are you getting your comlink out?”

“Yeah,” Anakin replied. “Going to text Obi-Wan, ask him what he thinks of the story. Maybe there’s some kind of detail I missed which makes it less of a good illustration of the different worldviews and mindsets of the Jedi and the Sith.”

The Knight shrugged, his thumbs tapping away at his comlink. “He probably knows it, he knows all of the old stories.”

Palpatine blinked several times.

“...don’t,” he said, then very discreetly scrambled for a reason why. “It’s the middle of a performance. We don’t want to interrupt them.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s on silent,” Anakin replied, with a shrug. “Or vibrate. Did I put it on vibrate… hang on, Chancellor, I’ll make sure it’s on silent…”

He turned the comlink over, then a loud bwing sounded.

“Oh, right, I forgot to set it to do not disturb mode,” Anakin said. “Hang on… uh… yeah, there we go, I forgot I added all these custom modes. I’ve been missing a lot of sleep lately.”

“Perhaps-” Palpatine began, but Anakin spoke over him.

“Huh,” he said. “He says he’s never heard of it either. Wants to know where I heard about it, it looks like he’s really interested… or maybe he’s trying to tell me about a death stick vendor, he’s terrible with multiglyphs and he thinks he’s good at them.”

Anakin glanced at the Chancellor, hoping for some solidarity, then visibly noticed that the Chancellor was several decades older than him and abandoned that.

“Is there a book I can get the whole story from?” he asked, instead. “Obi-Wan is better at nuances, like I say.”

“That is not the point,” Palpatine said, trying not to get visibly angry. “The point is that there is a way to save your loved ones!”

“Maybe there used to be, but not any more,” Anakin shrugged. “Like you said, this was a Sith thing and the Sith are all dead. Well, unless General Grievous is a Sith who knows how to heal people, but I doubt it given how much he got hurt, and I’m not sure Dooku knew it either… hey, if this story needs to be publicized more then maybe we could have them do a play of that instead?”

Palpatine blinked several times, as he tried to keep up with a Jedi with possible undiagnosed ADHD and found himself discovering a lack of talent for podracing.

“What?” he asked.

“You know, a play,” Anakin explained. “Dramatic betrayals, lost loved ones, it would probably do numbers. It’d be better than this, anyway.”

He waved his hand at the ongoing performance of Squid Lake.

“...what is wrong with Squid Lake?” Palpatine said, before reflecting that that had really been a stupid question for him to ask and that he should have asked a much better one.

“Well, uh,” Anakin began, looking a bit abashed. “Actually now I say it out loud this might be really culturally insensitive of me, but to me this play might as well be eighty minutes of people boasting about having enough water to swim in.”

“It’s a ballet,” Palpatine told him, now completely having lost control of the conversation.

“It’s just a less scary version of Sarlacc Pit,” Anakin went on. “Someone tried to drown me in a lake once, because they thought I couldn’t swim, but floating on sand is much harder, you barely have to do anything to escape a lake. You just float.”

Very belatedly, Anakin caught sight of Palpatine’s look of total befuddlement, and shrugged.

“Watto was a lot of things,” he said. “But he had culture.”

Palpatine’s hands twitched, as he very seriously considered the idea of abandoning literal centuries of Sith planning and decades of personal political advancement in favour of stabbing Anakin somewhere it would hurt.

It was extraordinarily tempting.

“...hold on,” Anakin said, slowly. “I guess… the thing I’d like most at the moment is for… and that means… this is literally one of those times when I could fall to the Dark Side because of it, like Darth Plagueis.”

He bestowed a grateful smile on Palpatine. “Thanks, Chancellor! I need to make a call, I guess the ballet won’t mind.”

Palpatine was so thrown by the swerve that he couldn’t think of a way to stop Anakin in the few seconds he had.

“Love?” Anakin said, into his commlink. “I… think we need to come clean, because otherwise I’ll fall to the Dark Side.”

Palpatine’s eye twitched.

#star wars #palpatine #anakin skywalker #Is sleep deprived #Too dumb to trick #revenge of the sith

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ckret2 · 15 days ago

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In honor of the fact that this week we're back to present day, I present you a lovingly rendered illustration in which absolutely nothing of interest is happening.

Welcome back to that fic about human Bill Cipher being the Mystery Shack's prisoner, but like, it's a kinda chill prisoner situation now, chapter 79 (we updated the numbering). Nothing happens this chapter! They return from fishing, a goat bothers Bill, fish are deboned, Bill and Dipper experience a moment of common ground and hate it, Mabel misunderstands mermaid reproduction, Bill lies to Stan about Chinese philosophy, and Ford and Bill discuss the mysterious lack of pockets in women's pants.

I'm deliberately picking the most mundane parts of this chapter but seriously not a bunch happens this week. We're easing back into things after the roller coaster that was the Axolotl arc... and more importantly, we're setting up for next chapter.

####

When they'd parked at the shack, the Ramirezes got out of the truck with no trouble; but as soon as Bill stepped foot on the ground, Gompers was butting into his leg and bleating.

"Hey, what—?"

Gompers shoved his nose into Bill's palm and licked his fingers.

He jerked his fingers out of range. "Whoa, hairy. A little personal space. I had one snack for you, that's it."

Gompers stared at him reproachfully.

Well, if he wanted more, the nutrition pill Bill fed him before the fishing trip must not have had any ill effects. The pills passed the poison test; Ford hadn't been trying to pull the old "wrap a drug in cheese to sneak it down the throat of a dog or recalcitrant psych ward patient" trick.

Either that, or the pills were laced with something a goat wouldn't readily notice. Or Ford had only poisoned a couple and was willing to wait for Bill to do himself in at some random point in the future.

Bill decided to add the nutrition pills to his emergency supplies anyway. There might be a day when he'd need that food badly enough to risk it.

"Do I look like your private chef?" He pushed Gompers's nose aside. "Get outta here."

Gompers bleated petulantly and sulked his way toward the forest.

"Bill!" Mabel shouted at him from over the roof of Stan's car. "Why didn't you tell me you have a birthmark!"

"A—? What, you mean this?" He gestured in a line from his left shoulder to his right hip, following the path of the fatal wound that had cracked his soul in half. "Nobody told me I was supposed to!" Right, she hadn't had a chance to see the mark until the fishing boat got back, and then they were all distracted by the circling threat of taxpayer-funded eagles. She'd better not get fixated on his rebirthmark. Just talking about it made the cracked edges of his death wound itch beneath his shirt.

"It's cool! It looks like the Milky Way!"

Bill considered that. "Huh! Whaddaya know! I guess it kinda does." Just the thought that the crack in his soul was full of stars made it itch less. He smiled.

"I guess it's something you have in common with Dipper."

He stopped smiling. He caught Dipper's eye, they mutually grimaced, and Dipper tugged his hat down lower over his forehead and hurried indoors.

Bill said, "If you start calling me 'Milky,' I'll—" Well, he couldn't threaten to kill her, she'd never believe that. "I'll uncap all your markers and leave them in the sun."

"What! I wasn't going to, jeez."

As Bill caught up with Mabel—waiting for him out on the porch after the other adults had filed in—he distracted her from his heinous threat by poking her in the arm and saying, "Hey, I saw you make the catch of the day! Nice work, Shooting Star."

Her face lit up. "Yeah, look!" As they walked inside, she pulled out all her photos and shuffled through them until she found the one showing off her catch. "Isn't he amazing? He'd make beautiful baby mermaids."

Bill had just received a fleeting glimpse into a fantastical world inside Mabel's mind where mermaid reproduction was much more fascinating than it was in reality. He decided it would be a crime to correct her. "Boy, you're telling me."

He was trying to figure out how to casually work the suggestion that the golden trout was sacred to the Masons into the conversation when Mabel gave him a mischievous grin and said, "And I saw yooou talking to Wendy's friends. About yourself."

Bill's heart leaped into his throat. "You what? No you didn't. What?"

"Yeah you diiid! Telling them all about how you met the 'triangle guy'?" Mabel gave him the biggest most obvious wink in the history of unsubtle subtle looks.

"How...?"

"Oh yeah, didn't I mention?" Mabel said casually, examining her nails. "I'm psychic now."

Bill gaped at her as he mentally ran through all the possible timelines he knew of where Mabel gained psychic powers and tried to figure out which one they'd veered into. Had she gotten a wish out of the golden trout after all—?

She burst out laughing. "You bought it!" She stuffed the photos away, dropped onto the sofa, and pulled out her phone. "No, I'm in a group chat with Tambry. She's my meme dealer."

"Oh." Well, now he felt stupid. He knew about that meme chat. He griped, "You're playing dirty."

In response to this dire accusation, Mabel blew a raspberry. She held her phone up to Bill. "Look!" He sat by her to look.

Tambry had sent a message that read "u & ur bro looked sooooo cool out there (lol not)" accompanied by the video she'd taken of Mabel and Dipper trying to arm wrestle Bigflipper. Faintly in the background of the audio, Bill could hear Nate and Robbie talking: "Hey Robbie, think I could beat him?" "Pfff, no," then Tambry's much clearer voice, "Bet Wendy could."

And then his own voice, obviously talking twice as loud as the teens even though he was farther from the mic than Tambry: "Buuut anyway, yeah, I might've talked to the triangle guy a couple, several times."

Mabel's snicker drowned out Nate's response.

Bill shoved her head. "Hey, they're the ones that started talking about me! They were dying to talk about me!"

"Sure, Bill." Mabel elbowed him. "Hey, want me to see if I can get them to invite you to hang out?"

"Hmm! Is Tambry the kind of teen that isn't too proud to take advice from a 13-year-old?" Not that he didn't like the offer, but Bill could hardly accept Mabel's help if it would lower his coolness in the eyes of his budding worshipers.

"Oh yeah, she's fine! She commissioned matching gothy friendship bracelets for her and Robbie."

Then Tambry would probably go along with it. "Great. You're officially my agent now."

"Yesss!"

The harder question was whether Ford would go with it. "Buuut let's hold off on arranging anything. I don't think my reputation would ever recover if they invite me out and I have to tell them I can't come out to play because I'm still grounded." He supposed if the teens ever met up at night, he could sneak out; but eventually somebody in the shack would desperately need to talk to him at 3 a.m., and once they knew he had a way to escape unaided he'd have no choice but to bail on the town and move in with his cultists before the Pines could lock him up again. His cult would be far more accommodating hosts—but that would set his progress back significantly. Besides, the self-professed Cipherwives were desperately clingy in a way that was only sexy for the first week or two before it started to get grating. He'd prefer to deal with them in short bursts.

"Right," Mabel groaned. "If you don't get out soon, it'll mess up all my plans!"

"Oh, yeah?" He was pleasantly surprised to hear she was up to some sort of mischief that needed his unique capabilities. "What kind of plans?"

"No kind until you're free." She frowned, chin in her hands. "How do we get them to okay you going outside more...?"

Bill could feel the muscles in one cheek work as his mouth twisted into a rueful half smile. "If I think of anything, you'll be the first to know."

####

"Heya, St—"

"Stay outta the kitchen," Stan snapped.

Bill froze with one foot through the doorway. "Whoa, you're really ramping up my food restrictions."

"No! I'm using a knife, I don't want you near it." He waved the knife demonstratively. He was currently deboning the fish they'd caught at the lake.

"Aww, so thoughtful of you! But you don't need to worry about me, I know how to handle myself around a knife."

"Uh-huh, that's what I'm afraid of."

Bill sighed loudly, leaned in the doorway, and crossed his ankles.

He watched Stan work for a couple of minutes. "Wow. You're so slow at this."

"Shut up," Stan said, squinting as he tried to pick the ribs out of his current fish.

"I'm falling asleep watching you."

"I'd like to see you do better!"

"I could do better! I could debone a guy in seconds."

"Ha."

"No knife. Just my bare hands."

"Ha!"

"Zhuang Zi wrote about the technique." Loftily, Bill added, "That's a Chinese philosopher, by the way, since I know you don't know. See the trick is you've got to slide your fingernails into the gaps between the meat and the bone—"

Stan smacked down the half-deboned fish, gestured at it, and said, "All right. Then let's see you do it." He stared expectantly at Bill.

Bill stared back.

Stan kept on staring. He spread his hands. Well?

Bill said, "All right, get over here."

"Why?"

"So I can debone you, genius."

Stan paused, debating whether he was willing to call Bill's bluff and risk the possibility that he did know some kind of deboning magic; then he marched up to Bill, crossed his arms, and said, "All right. Do your worst."

Bill eyed him warily. "Fine. Hold on." He stuck the tip of his thumb between his teeth.

"What—what are you doing?"

Between gritted teeth, Bill said, "What do you think, Goofus? Getting a fingernail I can slide between your meat and bones." He pulled out his thumb to give it an irritated look. "Wow, this one's stuck on tight." Back to biting.

"Forget it." Knowing Bill, he really would bite off his own thumbnail just to prove a point.

"Too scared to risk it, coward?"

"No, I just need my bones today." Stan returned to the fish and resumed deboning. "Whaddaya want, anyway. Trying to get in the fridge?"

"No, I'm here about the fish." Bill pointed at the pile of discarded bits growing by Stan's elbow. "If you're not using the heads and spines, I want them."

Stan looked at him suspiciously. "What for?"

"Funsies."

"What?"

"Fun," Bill said, "sies."

"That's not a word."

"Fine. Secret esoteric demon purposes."

"Why would I let you take them for demon purposes!"

Maybe that hadn't been the best excuse he could have pulled out. He decided to double down on it. "Oh, so suddenly this household is prejudiced against demons?"

Stan could sense a looming stupid argument. He decided he wanted nothing to do with it. "Are you gonna use them to stink up the place?"

"Not deliberately."

"Are they for some... curse or hex or something?"

"Nope!"

"Are you gonna injure or kill anyone."

"I feel like I'm letting you down, Stanley! Tell you what, give me three minutes and I'm sure I can think of a way to murder you with a fish head."

"Just take the dumb things."

"So generous of you." Bill swooped in to scoop up the heads and spines (while Stan held the filet knife well out of Bill's reach) and, rather than ask Stan to open one of the cabinets for him, grabbed a couple of dirty bowls from the sink and a bottle of dish soap so he could scrub them himself. "Enjoy your fish mutilation! I know I will!"

He washed the bowls in the bathroom and half filled one with water—as much as it infuriated him, it really wasconvenient to be able to access the main bathroom without having to ask—and returned to his room. He tugged the console table from the wall to beside his sofa, set the bowls on it, and started picking the meat Stan had missed off the spines. (He wished he could still debone a man in seconds.)

He'd hardly cleaned a few ribs when he saw Ford ducking into the room a few minutes in the future. He sighed. Really? What did Ford want. Bill kept working as he awaited the arrival, but now he was irritated about it.

Footsteps trudged up the stairs; and Ford pulled open the curtain. "Bill—" Ford yanked shut the curtain. "Why! Aren't you wearing a top!"

"To make sure you never forget to knock before barging into my room again!" Bill pulled his t-shirt back on and called sweetly, "Come in."

Ford peeked through the curtain to make sure Bill had replaced his shirt and hadn't done something like remove his bikini bottom. Bill pretended he wasn't paying attention to Ford's reaction. He kept picking off meat as he said, "I'm still better dressed than you, at least." (Ford had pulled on the coat he'd retrieved from Bigflipper without washing it, and was wearing the one brown boot he'd fished out of the lake with one black boot.) "You smell like five different gallons of stink in a two ounce cologne bottle."

"Don't act like you care." Ford apparently concluded it was safe to re-enter. His face was bright red and twice as stern-looking as it had been the first time. Hilarious how humans' capillaries did that. His eyes caught on the bowl of fish bits, and he asked warily, "What do you have those for?"

Bill picked up one of the fish heads, made direct eye contact with Ford, popped out one of its eyeballs, and ate it.

"Oh." If Bill didn't know better, he would have thought Ford looked disappointed. (What, because he couldn't yell at Bill about using magic in the shack?)

"If that's all you wanted to know..." Bill gestured toward the stairs.

"No, actually. Just—got distracted."

"By what?" Bill batted his eyelashes. "Saw something you liked?"

Witheringly, Ford said, "You know I didn't." (Bill barked a laughed. Yeah, he did know.) "No, I uh..." He grimaced. "I needed to... ask for—information."

The smirk faded from Bill's face. "Oh. Did you." He returned his attention to picking flesh from fish bones. "Well, isn't that a shame! Because I'm not holding office hours. The professor's retired."

"It could affect you, too."

Bill rolled his eye spectacularly. "Fine." He flicked a needle-thin rib bone toward Ford. "State your case."

"Those government agents who were at the beach," Ford said. "The same ones that were here last summer. What do they want? Where are they from?"

Oh, them. No surprise that the humans were worried, though. Bill himself didn't know what could possibly have brought the eagles to town unless it was Trembley (which didn't seem likely to take them to the lake) or the portal (which Bill did not want them to meddle with).

Truth be told, seeing them made Bill nervous, too. "All right," he said. "I can tell you something about them."

"What?"

"You're wrong: they don't affect me too!" Bill waved cheerily at Ford. "Byyye! Leave." Truth be told be damned, who wanted to tell the truth?

"Oh, come on, you have to give me something," Ford said. "That's what you do. You—you taunt! Drop hints!"

"And look where that got me!" He gestured theatrically at his surroundings. "Stuck in a sack of meat on Earth's ugliest couch! When's the last time that giving you my knowledge benefitted me?"

Coldly, Ford said, "I believe it was when you conned me into building your portal so you could invade my universe."

"Yeah, see?" Bill said. "It's been over thirty years since I got anything in return for teaching you! Everything I've told you since then has been used against me."

Ford took in a deep breath, held it for a moment as he thought, and let a long, frustrated sigh out his nostrils. Humans breathed so expressively. "The last time you didn't share what you knew, you almost got us all killed by an invisible axolotl."

Bill fixed Ford with a sharp look. "Oh! So if I don't tell you what you want to know, you're planning to drag me on another forced march!"

Ford winced. Oh good, his conscience had finally kicked in. "No. I'm not."

"Great! Because I've decided if you ever do that again, I'd rather die and take my chances with the afterlife. And then we both get to find out whether I get my real form back."

"Noted."

"Got any better offers?"

Ford thought. He rummaged around in his pockets. "I haaave... Bigflipper's wallet?"

"Ooh." Bill eyed it. "Real leather?"

Ford flipped it open. "There's a stamp that says 'Vera Pelle'."

"Oooh, Italian leather," Bill said. "You speak Italian with a bad Latin accent, by the way."

"I didn't ask. Is this good enough?"

"Wallet with its contents?"

"Just the wallet, for starters." He flipped through the wallet's contents as he said, "We discuss the rest for more information." He saw something he apparently liked, made a little impressed noise, and took one of Bigflipper's cards to slip into his pocket.

Bill was loath to give Ford anything. But now that they were hopefully past the point where Ford felt like he had the moral high ground if he refused Bill's terms by dropping him in an ice cold bath tub, it might be to Bill's benefit if he could finally train Ford to expect favors for favors. "I can give you their department's name."

"If I have their name, is that enough information to find out anything useful about them?"

Probably not! "That's your problem, not mine."

Ford shut the wallet. "Either increase your offer or no deal."

Oh, the little snot thought he got to negotiate? "Eh." Bill shrugged. "What do I need a wallet for anyway? It's not like women's clothing has pockets to keep it in."

Ford sighed in frustration. "Do you even know who they are?"

"Do I know who they are?! Do you know who you're talking to? I've taken control of their secretary while she was getting her appendix out! I... Oh! Nope, you're not tricking me into that!" Bill waved Ford away. "Get out of here. I'm not giving you anything."

"Fine. Sorry I asked." Ford pushed through the curtain and left.

And was back a moment later. Bill stared at him expectantly.

Tentatively, Ford asked, "Does women's clothing really not have pockets?"

"They're either tiny or decorative."

"Really? Why?"

"So Big Fashion can sell 'em purses."

"Huh." Ford considered that as he let the curtain fall shut again.

There went Bill again, showing off how much he knew. "Hey—you owe me two bucks for that pearl of wisdom!" Well, he'd just refuse to tell Ford anything next time until he'd paid for the pocket thing.

He turned back to his fish bones. Now that Ford was gone and he wouldn't be interrupted for a while, he could actually get to work.

He cracked open the four fish skulls and carefully scraped their brains into the empty bowl; and then took the first of the spines he'd cleaned off, cracked open the vertebrae along the neural canal, and scraped the spinal cord into the bowl as well. He got to work cleaning the next spine off enough to retrieve its spinal cord.

In his true, proper, triangular form, when he was a being of pure energy unencumbered by mortal flesh and bone, he could invade and control anything with neurons. (Potentially, anyway. If someone else was already using those neurons, Bill had to get their soul out of the way before he could fully take over—but that didn't apply to four dead fish.) He'd had a little book made some centuries ago, in fact, that operated on the same principle: a book whose pages were made out of pulped and pureed human brains, so that Bill could remotely control the pages, see through them, and change their very contents. It was a masterpiece of necromantic magic; a human body disassembled and rebuilt—brain, spine, skin, eyes, blood, teeth—into an awful awesome tome; a miraculous product of interdimensional enchantments and alchemical science; and far and away the coolest coffee table book Bill had ever owned.

It had also been less than worthless. What a waste of perfectly good pulped brains. If he'd used them to print postcards to solicit mail-in political donations they wouldn't have been half as useless. He wasn't even sure what dimension the dumb book had ended up in.

Still. He kinda missed his cool, useless coffee table book. And even though a book of neurons couldn't do anything for him now, if he ever got back his possession powers (when, he reminded himself—when, when, when, not "if," when), it might be useful to have a book designed for that purpose already prepared. Maybe gifted to his cultists, so he could keep in contact with them?

And it would be really satisfying to turn one of Ford's own precious journals into another of Bill's puppets.

Once he'd retrieved all the spinal cords, he poured a little water at a time from the other bowl, mashing the brains and cords and mixing them into a thinner and thinner slurry. He had to make enough of this stuff to let him spread it across every page in Journal 4, but he wasn't sure how much he could dilute the neurons before there wouldn't be enough per page to let Bill control them. Usually he could just check by slipping right into the neurons and seeing if he had enough there to work with, but that wasn't exactly an option right now.

There'd be more brains later. For now, he'd just do what he could.

As he retrieved Journal 4 from its hiding spot, he mused to himself that things really were starting to turn around. A month ago, if he'd tried to drive Ford out of the room by doing something as simple as taking a layer of fabric off his torso, he had no doubt that Ford not only would have refused to leave, but might even have found some way to punish Bill for daring to try to weaponize his own body and the humans' taboos around it. But no—he'd immediately backed out of the room, and hadn't even tried to spout any tedious nonsense about not being able to trust Bill with as basic a privilege as privacy in his own room. Bill hadn't expected Ford not to argue.

Good news: it meant that the Pines were starting to subconsciously treat him like a person instead of like an animal, if they were now including him in their nudity taboo.

Bad news: it meant they were seeing him as human.

Well—take any silver linings you can find and ignore the clouds. The more they saw him as a human, the less they'd try to prevent him from escaping his human body.

Bill popped another fish eye in his mouth, glanced toward the future to make sure nobody would come by for a while, and started painting brains onto Journal 4's pages.

####

Thanks for reading, looking forward to hearing y'all's comments! Next chapter is the start of the arc y'all have been waiting for since like April last year: Bill Cipher seduces a government agent.

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #grunkle ford #ford pines #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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dramadramallama · 3 months ago

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So. The Time of Fever. The story is pretty simple, but it was elevated by some choice cinematography and music... sooooo let me take two seconds to gush about the two kissing scenes.

Both scenes are shot to convey something very specific (how special the characters are to each other) and although not much is said, a lot is implied. I don't know how intentional it was, but they also end up almost a perfect "reverse" of each other.

The bare bones of the two scenes are as follows:

Kissing Scene 1: infirmary (public setting, neutral white, Dong-hee takes care of Ho-tae's wound)

tension, uncertainty/confusion, complicated feelings (shaky cam, tense dialogue)

something sets it in motion ("hyung")

music starts

slow and steady - dreamlike atmosphere (tension released)

outside interruption, music stops - back to reality, tension back up

Kissing Scene 2: bedroom/house (private setting, heavy color-coded, ends in pain for both of them)

comforting, easy-going, chill vibe (steady cam, silent book reading)

something sets it in motion (hand feeding)

no music

shakiness, quick movements - raw, not romanticized (tension goes way up)

minimal music - self-interruption - got a lil too real, tension goes down

If you watch them back to back it's even more obvious, I love iiiiiit. The contrast of it all!! YES. Sorry for my ugly GIFs, I just wanna illustrate my points lol

In the first scene, Dong-hee and Ho-tae let down their guard and enter a bubble of peacefulness, before it bursts. The scene starts off with quick, nervous dialogue, no music. The shots go from tight to even tighter, and the camera shakes a lot, reflecting the ambient tension.

The music, gentle and hopeful, starts as soon as both of them "fold". Ho-tae agrees to use the hyung honorific for the first time since ep1, and Dong-hee gently goes in for the kiss. The scene is drenched in white, the camera movements slow, to the point it's hard to notice whether they themselves are moving slowly or if there's a subtle slow-mo effect applied. It's unhurried, like they have all the time in the world.

The music swells into something very airy and dreamy as soon as their lips touch; the camera steadies, the shakiness fades—the surroundings too. Even when the camera pulls back a little, the framing is minimal—you can't even distinguish where they are anymore (in a school infirmary, behind a curtain, against a window). The only thing in focus is their faces, the rest is slightly blurry or washed out. It's not just visually that things fade out, there's also barely any background noise: no ruffle of their clothes, no school chatter, no bird chirping. it's just them, floating on a cloud, the heaviness of the moment gone, the initial anxiety soothed.

The moment, the music, the kiss—everything is interrupted abruptly by an outside element: the school bell. The bubble pops, like a dream they both wake up from—signaling the end of recess, back to harsh reality. Their eyes open, they freeze, and just like that, the camera shakes are immediately back.

The scene unfolds smoothly and clearly: it takes the characters from a moment of tension, to sweet release, steadiness, and calmness—it starts from something complicated and changes to something pure and easy, like a knot being unraveled—and then snaps them back to reality.

The contrast with the second kissing scene, happening in the same episode (!) is nothing but art tbh. Like I said, it looks like the reverse of that first scene, but it unfolds the same way. This time, it starts off quiet and gets thick with tension.

First, they're at home, not in a public space. It's not day-time. They're lying down. The private, safe atmosphere of the scene is reinforced by the warm colors. It's late autumn, it's getting cold. They set up a space-heater (it casts a reddish brown hue over them), place a comfy (red) carpet on the floor to keep the heat in and to laze around on. The camera is steady, the framing comfortable, no shakiness.

They're still facing each other, one is on his back, looking up to his book, the other one is on his stomach, looking down as his own. Everything conveys a cosy, relaxed but intimate vibe, without any agitation. Ho-tae is snacking absentmindedly on some seasonal fruit (clementine/mandarin). There's no talking. There's also absolutely no music. You hear everything, from the distant creaking of the house, to the pages rubbing together, to the crickets outside.

Then, comes what sets the scene into motion: Ho-tae feeds Dong-hee some fruit. Dong-hee takes it into his mouth easily. The mood switches. A lot of close-ups, and the camera movements become shakier, more chaotic: tension goes from 0 to 100. Where there was a lightness, softness to that first kissing scene, it's pretty much the complete opposite here. It's more intense, but there's a sort of ache, an urgency to it that was completely absent in the first scene. The breathing gets heavier, louder, no music to cut through the reality of it. It's been a while since I've seen such an erotic scene, without it being explicit.

When it does come, the music kicks in very slowly, just a few low notes of piano, not enough to cover the noises (the kisses, the breathing), the initial warmth of the scene becomes almost stifling. And just a few seconds later, everything abruptly stops once again, but this time, Dong-hee himself is the one putting an end to it. The camera very slowly tones down the shakiness, back to steady.

In this scene, the characters' comfort and peace crumble, the kiss doesn't appease, it lights a fire. Gets them inflamed and exposed. Takes them from innocence and easiness to desire and hurt, from sanity to fever. The hazy, nice moment catches fire and burns up too fast. Like Ho-tae's fingers twisting knots into Dong-hee's sweater, the feelings gets tangled up, and both end up getting hurt.

The first kissing scene was the beginnings of some clarity, they both let go of what holds them down, while that second scene is charged with angst, it weighs heavily on them. The parallel was just so good I needed to get this out.

#the time of fever #the time of fever meta #kdrama commentary

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asunflowerana · 4 months ago

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brownie bonding — Nanami Kento

summary: kento makes most of his quality time with his baby daughter.

warnings: pure fluff, dad!nanami, cooking.

wc: 800.

A warming melody of jazz echoes on the portable radio in the kitchen, filling the bonding moment perfectly. Nanami is just finishishing tying a cook’s apron around his waist, feeling a bit awkward to wear such a flowery print, but it was a request from his baby daughter. There’s no way he would refuse her.

“You look pretty, daddy!” His sunshine compliments him, sitting in the high chair at the counter with her head covered by her tiny cook’s hat. She isn’t a kid that plays around: if she’s going to cook, she’ll wear the proper clothes for it.

Six years old, acting that way already. Imagine when she’s sixteen.

He can’t help but send her a fondly smile. One of the good things about having a kid is that you will always receive an honest answer from them. His little girl it’s saying he looks pretty, so maybe flower prints actually suit him.

He moves his focus to the counter, checking the ingredients on display: sugar, butter, wheat flour, powdered chocolate, milk, eggs, chocolate chips. The mixer is set, the oven is heating up, and they have everything they need to start the day’s recipe:

Brownies

You’re on your way home from a business trip today, and they both came up with the idea of surprising you with some brownies. In addition to welcoming you home with a delicious gift, Kento also takes this opportunity to spend more quality time with his daughter. She’s growing up so fast that he’s been feeling guilty for missing some moments of her life because of work. He wants to make sure that as long as he has time, he’ll make the most of it alongside her.

“Alright sweetheart, what’s the first step?” He claps his hands, giving her the task of leading and guiding them through the recipe. She bows to read the children’s cookbook she got for her birthday last year, and points her little index to the first illustrated step.

“We need to mix eggs with sugar.” She says, cautiously taking the mixer’s bowl and placing it in front of them. “Can I put them in, daddy?”

“You can, but you need to be careful with the eggs. Break this way.” He demonstrates to her, tapping the tip of the fork against the eggshell until it breaks a small part. He then opens it halfway, and pours the yolk and whites into the bowl. “Your turn now.”

Eri picks up another egg, and tries to imitate exactly what her father did, but ends up hitting the shell too hard, causing the egg to break right on the table and smear the wood with white and yolk. The dirt definitely doesn’t please her father, but he isn’t going to make a big deal of it. These things happen, even to adults, and he doesn’t want to make his daughter feel guilty about something like that. So when she looks at him with those fearful little eyes waiting for a scold, he starts to chuckle at the situation, making her visibly relax as the moment passes by.

They continue with the recipe, now with Nanami directly helping her put the ingredients into the bowl, and his heart warmed to see his daughter having fun cooking, her mini apron’s all dirty from chocolate. “Now we have to add the flour.” He takes the bag from the counter, and gives it to her. “Think you can do it, sweeheart?”

She nods eagerly, and starts pouring flour into the meter. A small amount of flour escapes, but she manages most part of the process, placing the measured flour into the bowl. “I did it!” She announces as soon as she’s done, a huge one missing tooth grin on her face.

Nanami smiles at his daughter’s delight, caressing the top of her head. “Yes sweetheart, you did it.” He presses the ‘on’ button on the mixer, and it starts to churn all the mixture into the bowl. The two watch together the mixture incorporate and become a smooth brown dough, which soon after was put on a platter to bake in the oven.

Since the brownie would take about forty minutes to bake, Nanami thought it would be a good time to give his sunshine a bath and get her ready before the sweet is done.

But his daughter has other plans in mind.

“Daddy, you have flour on your face.” She points in the direction, making him run his hand over his whole cheek. “No, missed.”

“Where’s it?” he asked, leaning his face close to let her clean it for him.

She puts one of her flour-covered hands to his nose, laughing when she sees the art she’s made on her father’s skin. “There.”

His first reaction is deadpan, not believing he fell for a six-year-old child’s trick. But he’s definitely not a quitter: as soon as she gets occupied laughing at his face, he places his hands on her sides and holds her, giving her a mischievous smile. “So this is how you want to play, huh? Very well, young lady… You shall be defeated.” He starts tickling her body, making her squirm and laugh even more. He releases her eventually, and the two soon start a big flour fight around the room, running and throwing flour everywhere.

Not only they’ll give you a brownie tray, but also a pretty messy kitchen to deal with afterwards. But you can’t deny that it’s worth the price.

#nanami as dad is too precious pls #w.jjk #jjk x reader #jjk #jujustu kaisen #jujustsu kaisen x reader #nanami x reader #nanami kento #nanami kento x reader #jjk nanami #nanami fluff #nanami x you #nanami x y/n #kento x reader #kento x you #jjk x you #jjk fanfic #nanami dad #domestic fluff

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writingquestionsanswered · 8 months ago

Note

Someone mentioned that main characters can get overdeveloped. I'm familiar with characters being underdeveloped, but how do you tell if they are overdeveloped?

5 Signs Your Character is Overdeveloped

#1 - You spend time illustrating personality traits that aren't important to the story. Your character's personality traits should have some bearing on how they move through the story. Don't take the time to illustrate your character's stubbornness if being stubborn won't have some impact on the story.

#2 - You excessively describe their physical appearance and what they're wearing. While it's a good idea to give the reader a sense of what the character looks like and to describe what they're wearing when it shows something important about the character, world, or situation, the reader doesn't need an in-depth physical description--or even reminders--every time the character appears on the page.

#3 - You spend a lot of time illustrating their interactions and relationships with minor characters even though they have no bearing on the story. We like our characters to feel real and three-dimensional, which means giving the reader a sense of who they are, what their normal life is like, and who is important to them. However, we don't want to spend a lot of time on characters/relationships that don't really do anything for the story. For example, it's nice that your character has a good relationship with their elderly neighbor, but if the relationship isn't necessary to show us who the character is, set up or execute a plot point, or fulfill a thematic/symbolic role, it probably shouldn't be there.

#4 - Your character is a "jack of all trades." It's great for your character to have hobbies, skills, and experience in various things, but we don't want our characters to look like a walking, talking, padded resume. For the most part, any hobby, skill, or experience highlighted should play an important role in the story. If being proficient at roller skating doesn't tell us something about the character we can't learn another way, allow for the setup or execution of a plot point, or fulfill a thematic/symbolic role, it's probably not important to highlight that hobby, skill, or experience--or any other that doesn't contribute to the story.

#5 - You spend a lot of time on unnecessary backstory - Backstory plays an important role in helping us to understand who the character is, how they got to where they are in life, what things led up to their internal conflict and emotional wound/s, etc. However, we don't want to spend time on things that aren't ultimately important to the story in some way. For example, there's no point in flashing back to your character's week at surfing camp if nothing happened that week that is important to who they are or anything else that happens in the story.

A good rule of thumb for really any detail in a story is to ask yourself, "What is lost if I remove this detail?" If the answer is "nothing," you can probably go ahead and remove it. :)

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librarygarten · 29 days ago

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I would not be able to shut up about Zelda lore. I'd be mentioning the Links the Chain hasn't met yet, or how Ganondorf's hair keeps getting longer with each iteration, and especially the timeline! I'd be turning to Legend and Four and saying that according to Nintendo, they're a bunch of Links conflated together (Four Swords before Time and Adventures after Twilight what???) and then turning to Warriors to say that his game isn't canon to the timeline. SEND HELP

Literally same. I swear I would be the most annoying person ever. I'd be telling them about all the fan theories, giving them all an existential crisis. (Because IMAGINE if Wind found out some people don't think he has the hero's spirit. Or if Sky found out some people think Demise's curse is the reason every other Link had to deal with Ganon.) This was going to be a short little blurb but... yeah you get a whole two pages. This is what you get for feeding my hyper fixation, anon.

“You know about all our adventures and the impact my actions specifically had on the timeline.” Time’s face was unreadable. His usually serious demeanor had a much colder edge to it. And it was directed at you.

You take a breath. He had been a bit stand-offish when you had joined the group. He had been upset when you spoke about how the chain’s adventures were games in your universe. You suspected he began outright avoiding you after that. You had thought there had been an unspoken but mutual understanding that his games were something not to be spoken of. Nothing could prepare you for this conversation, especially with the rest of the chain within earshot. Still, he had spoken to you. Directly to you. Which was progress, even if the subject matter was… this.

“Yeah.” You try to seem nonchalant. Your voice crack ruins the effect somewhat.

“Explain, then. Knowing how we,” Time motions to the rest of the group, “all fit together might help us face the creature we’ve been fighting.”

“Oh, that might get a bit complicated. Some of the games y’all appear in aren’t canon.” You smile nervously. “And some of you guys seem to be multiple games combined? Like, you have two games, and that makes sense because Majora’s Mask was meant to be a sequel to Ocarina of Time. But, for example, in the official timeline The Minish Cap and Four Swords take place before the timeline split, while Four Swords Adventures happens after it, even though all three games seem to be Four’s adventures.”

“Wait, what?” Four perked up at the mention of his name. “How does that make sense? I used the Four Sword about a year or so after my time with the Picori. How can those two games have things between them?”

“Hoooo boy.” You pressed your lips together, trying to summon the restraint necessary to give a tactful answer. You looked at Time, then Four, then at the rest of the chain, whose attention was focused solely on you. Screw it. They asked.

“The company that created the games, Nintendo, published a book with an official timeline in it. The timeline begins with Skyward Sword, after which Sky and his Zelda kind of found what will eventually become Hyrule and *ahem* start the royal family.” You ramble on, choosing not to comment on the way Sky chokes on his own spit. “Then, the Minish Cap happens. And according to Nintendo, the next game, Four Swords, has a completely different Link. After Four Swords, the events of Ocarina of Time happen, where a TON of time travel shenanigans happen.”

Time coughs. You keep talking.

“During Ocarina of Time, Time defeated Ganondorf as a teenager. His Zelda then sent him back in time to prevent Ganondorf from ever getting the Triforce in the first place, but this didn’t erase the other timeline. Thus, there are two timelines: Time’s original that he was removed from and the new one where Ganondorf was never really an issue.”

You get out a stick, drawing lines in the dirt to illustrate your point.

“Now, in the timeline that Time left, Ganondorf eventually came back. That’s what set’s up the events of Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass. Also in this timeline is a game called Spirit Tracks. The Link from that game isn’t here, but Wind’s Zelda’s granddaughter is that Link’s Zelda.”

“WAIT WHAT?” Wind shouted, temporarily snapping you out of your rant. Oh shoot. How long have you been rambling? You turned your attention to Wind.

“What’s up, sailor?” You point at him with the stick in your hand, as if you were a school teacher lecturing on a subject and not a gamer with way too much free time.

“Tetra had KIDS?” Wind scrunches his face up, as if disgusted by the thought of his best friend reproducing.

“Yes, that is how grandchildren work.” You tap your stick against the end of the line you had drawn. “Anyway, that’s about it for that timeline. As far as I know, Wind stabbing Ganondorf in the face actually killed the guy for once.”

“Wait, WIND is the one who actually finished off Ganon?” Legend pipes up.

“Why do you sound so surprised!?” Wind fires back indignantly.

“MOVING ON!” You shout, redirecting the group's attention back to you. “In the timeline Time went back to and fixed, he has another game, Majora’s Mask. He then settles down and has a kid, who has a kid, etc. etc., then we get Twilight and his game, Twilight Princess. Time is kind of a dickwad in that game, but we don’t have time to unpack that.”

“Hold on.” Time puts up a hand, trying to stop you from continuing. He looks… extremely worried. Twilight looks as if he just swallowed a frog.

“Nope, moving on!” You use your stick to quickly lower Time’s arm. “Twilight actually also killed Ganondorf, but the bastard went and got resurrected. Vaati also shows up again randomly, and that’s how Four Swords Adventures happens.”

“What about me and Legend?” Hyrule raises his hand politely.

“Ah, you guys are from a timeline where Time died in his final fight with Ganondorf.”

“I’M SORRY WHAT?” Twilight and Time shout at almost the same time.

“Yep. That’s what started the Sealing War. Time’s Zelda and the sages sealed Ganondorf away. Then we have Legend’s games, which have two different orders, both of which were published by Nintendo. It either goes A Link to the Past, Oracle of Seasons/Ages, then Link's Awakening, or Link’s Awakening, then Oracle of Seasons/Ages.”

“Why the different order? Doesn’t ‘Nintendo’ know?” Legend smirks, as if he had won against this strange other-worldly company that had reduced him to a child’s game.

“Well, they published the first version, but because Link’s Awakening was the last game for you, fans thought you died at sea.” You explain. Legend’s smirk disappears as the color drains from his face.

“Anyway, according to Nintendo, the next game is A Link Between Worlds, which is a different Link. After that, it’s Hyrule’s games: The Legend of Zelda and The Legend of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. Then that’s it for the downfall timeline.”

“What about me?” Wild sheepishly points to himself.

“Nobody knows. Nintendo says they’re after Four Swords Adventures OR Spirit Tracks. Personally, I think after FSA makes more sense, but we DEFINITELY shouldn’t get into theory territory right now.”

“I’m guessing my game is the same? No clear timeline placement because of all the different timelines mixing together?” Warriors rolls his eyes as he says it, as if annoyed he doesn’t have an official timeline placement.

“No, actually. Your entire game was more fanservice than anything. Nintendo doesn’t even consider it canon.”

“WHAT?”

^ Y/N explaining the timeline to the chain be like

#linked universe #linked universe x reader #linked universe + reader #linked universe x isekai!reader #lu legend #lu x reader #lu sky #lu time #lu chain #lu wind #lu warriors #lu twilight #lu four #lu hyrule #lu wild

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