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I DIDN'T KNOW THIS WAS FUCKING HAPPENING

WHAT THE FUCK IS VOLUME 10 ACTUALLY HAPPENING???

WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS

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you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their hands. for example, if it’s a skeleton hand then they’re dead

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500-pound stained glass crab sculpture by the late Jackie Leatherbury Douglass and her husband John Frederick Douglass, on display in Baltimore's airport

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Anyway the reason I can't stop thinking about Daring and Brooke as friends is because of how intricately their lives are woven into reflections and the servitude of others. Daring as. A prince charming is built for self-sacrifice in the name of one other person and Brooke as a narrator exists to only talk about other people she has little to no interaction with. Outside the context of the stories they're shunted out of, who are they as people? They both adore the world they're in and the people in it and will do anything for those they care about, even if it breaks the rules, and just desperately want to see a bright future for all. They're existentially lonely on unimaginable scales and both deal with it differently, but have their identities assured by those around them. Imagine what would happen if you put them together? The girl behind a mirror, forever to shine a spotlight on everyone else but her, and the guy who never stops holding one, for the fear of his own irrelevancy means he has to shine this light or nobody else will. Imagine what would happen if you took the loyalest people around, those who Need others to witness them in order to exist, and made them friends. Wouldn't they take comfort in someone so like them but so different? Wouldn't Daring so easily adopt her as another sister? Wouldn't she jump at the chance to write her own story too? Besides Brooke can canonically exist behind mirrors anyway who's to say Daring couldn't have met her while trapped right? Anyway so for my au where they go on an adventure together they-

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hold on brb i'm making comparisons between apple white and amalthea/the unicorn from the last unicorn rn because I have nothing better to do with my time.

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ALSO HOW LONG HAS SHE BEEN SITTING IN THAT CHAIR WITH THE GOLD FLAKING AWAY AND SLOWLY WATCHING AS HER SKIN ROTS UNDERNEATH LIKE

so i'm going to go fucking insane because for a while this aspect of malenia's character design has been bothering me and making me think I'm seeing things and going fucking crazy.

the aspect in question is malenia's left arm:

when i first saw malenia's arm my first thought was oh okay they're probably just bandages or some sort of wraps.

but then you look a bit closer and like

idk about you (because i might be losing it) but it seems like the mesh of whatever the fuck that is very clearly melded with her skin in a way/it looks like it's going into and then emerging out of her skin (which is HORRIFYING to think of I won't lie).

and once again i thought i was going crazy and seeing things because surely these were just meant to be wraps or bandages like the ones we see in the scene of her fighting radahn right?

and then the thought of the needle came to my mind. along with something malenia says in her cutscene before we fight her.

"my flesh was dull gold"

huh. now isn't that interesting.

this would imply that in order to stall the rot from consuming his sister, miquella made a plan to sew unalloyed gold into malenia's skin using his needle in a last-ditch attempt to save her arm.

(granted it's funnier to imagine he just sticks it in her arm and goes okay great all done! and that's probably the canon way it went but)

the thought of the sheer pain malenia must've gone through during this process, to be honest, and the thought of the guilt miquella must've felt at having to force his sister to endure even more agony just to help her is just sad.

and all of it is done just in an attempt to salvage what they can of her and hope that more can't be taken.

like idk man it is just. haunting me ig??? to think about the fact that this woman, for all her strength and pride and tenacity and sheer determination, is literally slowly, painfully but surely, ROTTING away and her brother, who cares for her and loves her so much, can do nothing else but prolong her pain and misery in an attempt to keep her together to the best of his ability.

he has to take a fucking needle and STITCH her back together, he has to sew unalloyed gold into her flesh to keep her from falling apart because he is so desperate to help her. but he is just. he is never enough. his efforts are never enough and his sister continues to be in pain, and continues to rot despite how he tries and plans and invents. and despite his failed efforts and attempts and plans, she still loves him. she still chooses to follow him. to believe in him and his cause and his promises. no matter what happens to her.

edit: btw when looking at malenia pre-bloom and pre-losing her needle it looks like there's a proper layer/cover/whatever it is around her arm up till her knuckles making it seem like an actual covering or layer on top of her skin and what not, but when we fight her post-bloom and post-losing needle it appears like some of the layers have either flaked or fallen away and that reveals that it's actually meshed with/into her skin, which is an interesting note that she has multiple layers of unalloyed gold caked onto her skin on top of it being sewn into her.

EDIT EDIT: THE FACT THAT IN THE SECOND IMAGE IT LOOKS LIKE PIECES OF FLESH HAVE LITERALLY BEEN GOUGED OUT FROM HER HAND LIKE??? it's better seen (the missing flesh <3) when you get a good look at her eyesockets but like. holy shit man.

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There's a book that we had in our house growing up that I was obsessed with as a kid. It was just called "PAKISTAN: PAINTINGS BY LIN YONG AND SU HUA" and it was an art book of 100+ paintings/sketches by two Chinese artists who travelled thru Pakistan in 1978 and 1981, a sort of travelogue of their trip, and to little-kid me, it was some of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I have no idea why we had that book, but I would stare at it for hours, and it made me wish I could draw/paint/do whatever it was that these artists had managed to do.

Anyway, we've moved house a bunch of times and I lost track of the book and haven't seen it for probably two decades now. But I think about it now and again, and had struggled to find it over the years, but I finally, finally got my hands on a copy of my own and i want to cry haha

I was afraid that maybe the art isn't as good as I remembered, being just a kid and all, but I cracked it open and nope, it hits me just the way it used to. Maybe even more now. It's so fucking pretty. Have some random pages:

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Animated a panel from Batgirl (2024) #5

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season 2 of atla is so good because you’ll watch an episode and it’ll be like -

A plot: aang learns to stand his ground in order to begin earth bending

B plot: zuko screams at god to strike him down with lightning

C plot: sokka is stuck in a hole

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what is even happening?! 😭

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can i offer you some bookverse gelphie in these trying pre-for good times

(ID in alt text)

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nanny talking to elphaba and saying this like oh they were CLOCKED. by everyone apparently

‘everyone knew you were gay’

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HEY WHEN APPLE WHITE WENT INTO BRIAR’S STORY AND BRIAR SAVED HER SHE SHOULDVE KISSED HER TO WAKE HER UP

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rewatching dragon games and i gotta say genuinely so impressed with the way apple's VA delivers the "your mom broke out of mirror prison and literally WALKED across broken glass just to be with you!" line because it is SO hurtful I love it so much.

i just love the way she DELIVERS the line so perfectly; the way apple's voice is so high-pitched, frantic and breathy, you can tell how desperate she is, how desperately she's grasping at straws right now and you can tell just how much pressure she's under. and on top of all of that, to add insult to injury, I LOVE how you can hear how she MEANS what she says, how she's emphasizing that the evil queen went through all that just to be with raven, how can raven not see that and acknowledge it and appreciate it?

addition: i love how raven's animated and also amazing job on her VA's part too because it manages to get across how frustrated and angry and irritated raven is with her mother because she KNOWS her mother. raven knows her mother is up to no good, and she knows she's causing nothing but problems and I LOVE how you can tell raven's thinking 'just when things were starting to go right, just when people stopped being scared of me and started to like me, you had to show up and ruin everything for me just like you ruin everything else".

and ik apple's LOSING it right now because whoops she's the one who freed the evil queen and all haha (also I mean this is literally the scene where raven finds out and confronts her about it, but-) but I love the BITTERNESS and envy you can feel radiating off of her; of how the evil queen is so powerful and capable, just like raven, and how she did all of this, she broke out of a seemingly unbreakable prison and quite literally walked across broken glass to BE with her daughter, and yes, she's THE evil queen, but she's promised to put things right and fix things and all, and why can't raven see any of that, why can't raven just please see that and please stop questioning everything and see that her mother is here.

i am getting this across very poorly <3 but I love the layers to this conversation and how both of their voice actress's get those layers across but I just particularly LOVE the 'walking across broken glass line' because it's so haunting to me just how UPSET apple looks.

apple white my deeply traumatized and complex character I love you SM it's insane