#why do i only post late?

[d-does-art]

Ace with the Straw Hats!

I'm slowly making my way through them all.

[aroaceleovaldez]

I was reading a post about CoTG and I realized: Rick has seemingly started to write every character pairing with the exact same dynamic, and he's not good at writing that dynamic and it doesn't make sense for 90% of the characters he writes it for.

It's that very specific dynamic of one half of the pair who is almost aggressive to the other party - "teasing" them constantly/insulting them, affectionately punching/judo flipping/maiming/etc, seemingly almost always exasperated with the other - and said other party usually just accepts this treatment or blanketly views it fondly, and may generally be framed as more incompetent than their partner and a little bit of a doormat (particularly relating to being insulted/teased/etc by their partner).

We start seeing this dynamic in HoO with Percy and Annabeth, as a sort of semi-inconsistent twist on their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic from the first series. Then the dynamic pattern develops further with Leo and Calypso. Then Magnus and Alex. Then Nico and Will, particularly in TSATS. And now in CoTG, it's Percy and Annabeth again but even more in this direction.

I know people have talked about Nico and Will's relationship over the series rapidly being shoehorned into Percabeth Two™, and it's extremely apparent in TSATS that Rick's doing it on purpose (including directly quoting Percabeth scenes but minorly tweaking them to be Solangelo). But recognizing it as an overarching trend in Rick's later books honestly reminds me a lot of how Rick started trying to apply the "Percy Formula" so-to-speak to nearly every protagonist in HoO (and then try to replicate similar character archetypes with Magnus and Apollo's narrations - moreso Magnus in being jaded and sarcastic, very much trying to be first series Percy. He only sounds unique because Rick failed at making him Percy 2. Apollo is more akin to later-series Percy characterization of being goofy and incompetent. Apollo [and Zeus] even got retconned to give Apollo a more similar backstory to Percy's). Rick seems to have decided that he thinks the audience wants this specific dynamic but 10 times over, except he's not good at writing it the first time because it's a bastardization of the time he did a different thing okay.

And Rick also seems aware of that too! Because he retconned Calypso and Leo at the end of TOA, probably because he realized how absolutely awful it was reading when they were written with that dynamic of Calypso just functionally hating Leo and constantly being aggressive towards him! The only time Rick's actually made the dynamic even semi-successful was with Magnus and Alex, because it actually fits within their characters, their dynamics with each other, and their environment. Alex beheading Magnus on the regular works out fine because there are no repercussions to that in Valhalla, Magnus will be fine, so it does genuinely come off as humorous. And Alex has been effectively established to be abrasive at times but have her genuine feelings shine through regularly, and that meshes well with Magnus' jaded-and-aloof-but-quietly-very-empathetic character. And Magnus has been established to, yes, not be great at combat, particularly compared to Alex. They are the only time that flavor of dynamic in that form was effective and cohesive.

Percabeth is no longer rivals-to-friends-to-lovers badasses on equal levels with shaky pasts who finally found some form of permanence with one another. Now it's super smart doting and affectionately aggressive girlfriend and her silly goofy 50%-of-the-time incompetent boyfriend who she judo flips/pushes off cliffs/etc - but affectionately~! Solangelo is trying to riff off of the early series "Poseidon & Athena are enemies" dynamic that Percabeth had but with Apollo & Hades being "opposites" but learning to accept each other, except it ends up with Will just coming off as a huge asshole and Nico being retconned to a complete doormat about it - when prior to that those characterizations would be completely contrary to their established characters (even just from TOA!). Calypso in HoO gets retconned from her PJO characterization to being snooty and aggressive, and Leo's false persona gets merged into his just normal personality except he just also becomes a doormat but more goofy than Nico with occasional haha-dark/depression-humor! Which Nico also got. Which was also a bastardized Percy trait that got redistributed.

It's exhausting. Rick write more than one relationship dynamic you can do it I promise

[bananonbinary]

a thing i've noticed with autistic people, that i don't see talked about too often, is the idea that there MUST be a Correct way to act. that if only you could find the most perfect sequence of words, someone would understand your point of view completely and you'd unlock the good ending where everyone agreed with you forever.

i'm not sure if this is from the rsd, or just a trauma response to being constantly told that we are NOT acting correctly and everyone else IS, or some facet of the black-and-white thinking thing, but it's a constant struggle to remind myself that no, some people just aren't you and will never ever be you, and will probably do things you find unconscionable, and that sucks.

[midnightclover]

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (ATLUS, 2003)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

EDYN TIDESTRIDER, CHALLENGER OF THE UNDERSEA, RIVAL OF THE DEEP. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR BROTHER WAS CHOSEN TO BE A WEAPON OF THE GODS? HOW WILL YOU UNDO WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO HIM?

[cauls-antique-pepperbox-pistol]

It seems Caul has seen the Miss Peregrine‘s movie. So I made this

[mc-tummy-blur]

I’ve been so busy with other stuff but I really want to get back to drawing WHF art so I went and cleaned up a wip. Not sure how I feel with some of the angles but I just needed to get this out of my system

Based off of this clip

Click for better quality

Check my pinned post to see links on how you can help the people in Palestine

[deoidesign]

quick traditional piece for fun ^^

[shamera]

this expresses about 1.5435432% of how much i've been enjoying this series lately, and touches even less on its amazingness, but what can you do.

if you have the time and energy to spare, please go read My S-Class Hunters / The S-Classes That I Raised!!!

[slavhew]

gods' night out

lines + source pic under cut

[katabay]

L'APPEL DU VIDE

okay so. jack! jack. what a collection of guys. the overlap between jack and the beanstalk and jack the giant killer, though. that sure is something! sometimes king arthur is there, which always takes me by surprise.

this. specifically. is an idea I've been kicking around. jack and the beanstalk is not a story I've ever enjoyed, as a kid it was probably my least favorite to read. as an adult, I was INTENSELY fascinated by reading j.g. ballard's the drowned giant. I think about it frequently, and somewhere during a re read of it, I ended up revisiting jack.

combining different versions of jack into one character is not a new concept, but it IS a fun one! the version I've been assembling together plays less with the fun elements of a jack story (and adjacent folklore stories), and focuses more on the potential for tragic elements with the addition of the usual grim and jagged narrative edges that I personally enjoy.

jack with the backstory of the devil and the three golden hairs, only jack doesn't find love, he's TIRED, all he wants to do is go home, but there isn't a home to go back to. what is the point of being born lucky if this is what it gets you? jack the giant killer, only he doesn't want to kill giants, jack who saw a body of a giant when he was a small child and cannot bring himself to do as a king commands. jack, who climbs up the beanstalk and stops halfway to look down. etc.

to go back to the drowned giant real quick, both to set the tone about jack seeing the body of a giant as a youth, and also because I've been haunted and obsessed with this excerpt of it ever since I read it:

J. G. Ballard, The Drowned Giant

anyway! this was originally like, a two illustration concept to get out of my system. however. I'm halfway through outlining a narrative. so. maybe it will also be several illustrations and also comic.

[frascospecimen]

furries are fucking awesome man reblog this post if you think furries are awesome

[hayaku14]

gymnast kaito x sharpshooter shinichi meet-cute in the olympics au

[feroluce]

Boothill doesn't pull his hair back very often. Dan Heng can count the times he's seen him do it on one hand. The man's right eye is gone completely but his left is a cybernetic, and it means Boothill can "see" whether his hair is in his face or not, so there's simply never much need for it.

So it surprises him when Boothill asks if he can put his hair up for him Xianzhou-style.

"Do you even own a hairpin?"

"Ya got chopsticks around here, don't ya?"

Which is how they end up awkwardly sat on the floor of the archives, Boothill sitting criss-cross and Dan Heng knelt behind him to make up for the differences in their height. Boothill doesn't say why he wants this done, but Dan Heng can guess: long life species are rarely allowed to leave the Xianzhou ships. It's not as rare as running into an actual, real-life Galaxy Ranger, but it's still pretty uncommon. Boothill is just trying to indulge his curiosity about little cultural things like this while he's able. Dan Heng can never say no to that kind of curiosity.

When his own hair was long, he never put it up. But there are memories, just little bits of things that nip at Dan Heng's ankles in the night when he's alone in the dark. And he remembers something like this, something similar. Dan Feng's hands with a hairpin, long hair grayed with age flowing in rivers between his fingers, quick and easy practiced motions revealing ears and nape and soot from the forge.

Boothill hands him a chopstick when he asks for it, because Dan Heng finds he needs both hands to keep his hair in place. He's not quick enough the first time, and the bun unravels, and the second attempt is better but it's messy and held so loosely that he goes at it for a third.

Boothill doesn't comment on it. Instead he just sits there and admires the picture of it that Dan Heng shows him on his phone, chatters a bit about what he knows of Xianzhou culture, how he'd met a Foxian woman not too long before Penacony with elaborate decorations done up in her hair and he'd wondered how anyone could even do that. A hairpin maybe would have been easier, but really the chopsticks probably fit him better, pretty little things like that don't suit me, anyhow.

Dan Heng catches like. Half of it. He's too busy staring at his hands.

Dan Feng had been good at doing other people's hair for them. He'd had a lot of practice. Dan Heng had seen it. But in the molting rebirth, his body had reset. The simple knowledge could be inherited. The experience could not.

That skill, that muscle memory, belongs to Dan Feng, and to Dan Feng only.

There is no mourning, no sense of loss with this realization, just relief. An extra confirmation of something he had already known.

But Dan Heng looks up at Boothill, who is running his curious fingers over the back of his own head, and he thinks about how there are some things he can have just for himself, too.

[sqwdkllr]

Doing commissions will have you finding out so many fun details about a character from a media you know nothing of and then finding them very endearing but still not understand the media very well

It’s one of the most underrated parts of commissions - finding out why a person loves a character

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.