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🎾 i watched challengers recently and i just had to draw them..

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In light of some of the many things happening across the world this year, I thought this Pride Month needed a special illustration.

Happy Pride Month, may we all stay safe, look after each other, and keep painting our rainbows, no matter what. 🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

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Martin Blackwood for the ask?

send me a character and i'll break their ass down! yes please :D sorry in advance this will be a lot of talk of s5 😭 AND ITS SO LONG SEND HELP. MARTIN WORDS UNDER THE CUT

How I feel about this character -

Oh God It Hurts. i already liked martin from the start of the show but s5 martin especially is soooo good. him being the closest thing we have to an everyman of the eyepocalypse and the thought in the back of his head of "i'm only safe because of john" is so good and catches my heart in such a way. the confusion and stress he feels that he seems to have varying levels of "should i be feeling this way" between wanting to assert his boundaries for once vs knowing he's in a privileged place (emotionally) compared to john and knowing john needs him.

it's a very personal kind of stressful to witness because his situation is a very scary one to me. having a partner with power over you who you physically cannot leave because of the safety they provide you, and you are their sole "reason" for living and pressing forward is kind of a nightmare scenario. that's very much the aromanticism in me but good lord. so s5 martin in particular touches on some personal fears of mine, i always liked him as a character but he's skyrocketed into "i'm a little mentally ill about you" territory lol.

but again, i liked him even before s5. fat swag. therapyfriend tendencies. mediocre poet. wonderful qualities for a character to have. i very specifically associate him with the buried which is one of my fear assignments i'll go down swinging for - that kind of crushing mundanity, the claustrophobia with other people, the fact the buried and the vast/lonely are kind of opposites only solidifies it to me. when your ties with the things that crush you are severed (his mom dying + losing tim and john in s3/4, all things he felt a lot of personal responsibility and pressure for) you're going to lose yourself in the emptiness that comes after it. you're gonna want to find comfort in how wide open the world suddenly feels. isolation will feel like a welcome change. but there's a balance of course.

i'm always really fond of characters whose selflessness kind of wraps back around to selfishness. that's why i love john so much but he's not the only one. martin being so desperate to not rock the boat in s2 that he shoots down tim's feelings, his general tendency towards the lonely in a very relatable feeling of trying to balance looking after yourself with unhealthy isolation/coldness, him encouraging john in s5 to kill people for a number of reasons but one i imagine being that it reinforces his place as John's Special Little Guy who is Safe.

yeah him not connecting the dots about domains is a little tupid but i think it's fair a lot hasn't properly Set In for him yet. wanting to be John's Special Little Guy in the sense that it grants him safety but not fully comprehending that means he carries as much privilege and responsibility as john does. not in the way of power obviously but he's also very much traveling the world and killing people with him. which i don't think is something anyone would want to face. tma when there's themes of trying to shirk the responsibility for your shitty actions onto something else. you're an interesting critter bro.

All the people I ship romantically with this character -

i was really prepared to not like johnmartin! it didn't grip me in fancontent and i found the setup for it in s3 kind of clunky. but i let jonny sims cook and boy did he cook. i'm very particular about it - martin's crush is obvious but i really don't think john catches feelings until extremely late into the game. i think even in late s4 his feelings for martin are less "explicitly romantic" and more "clinging to the last Thing From Before(tm) he has". but it's been an absolute delight in s5, i love couple fights and also the more lighthearted bits between them are enough to make you keep hoping it'll go well.

i also like martim but it's not something i think about too actively.

My non-romantic OTP for this character -

he has really fun dynamics with the other archive crewmembers in general tbh. i also really really love his dynamic with georgie and have wanted to do something with it, though that's less of a friendship and more two hamsters trying to bite eachother to death because they're too similar. i like the idea that they have the same people-pleasing tendencies but georgie's firm boundaries give martin the impression she's a cold coward while martin's lack of them give georgie the impression he doesn't have any self-respect. dude your narrative foil fucking bit me

My unpopular opinion about this character -

GUHHH OKAY I HAVE A LOT OF THEM. but i think one that a lot of my opinions circle back to is that like... i don't actually care if people think he's a pure cinnamon roll or whatever and i find the overcorrection of "NO he's actually a HUGE BITCH and a LIAR and he wants people to DIE and he's a SMUG ANIME GIRL EVIL GREMLIN and he's actually SO much more dangerous than john" much more annoying and ooc. people are so eager to subvert the pure cinnamon roll uwu bean infantilization that they just swing the other direction. especially because i find the woobification of john a much bigger problem and making martin look worse by comparison tends to feed into that.

i also wish there was more acknowledgement of jmart being unhealthy in ways that don't shirk it all onto martin. again this fandom's tendency to not want to blame john for things but i find a lot of john's behavior in s5 much more egregious, martin's shitty too in a number of ways, and i think they're ways that are more relatable to the average person (hitting your partner to get them out of mental spirals hits closer to home than using your partner as bait for a vampire hunter) so they're brought up more, and i think it's fair to talk about them but... well i'm biased as a guy with a pyrophobic partner but i am never forgiving john for 169 ever ever.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon. -

predictable but i wish we got more of martin and not!sasha, i think him being the only one by s3 who wasn't in the loop on that having happened is fucking GRIM and i love it. we see that haunts him a lot, i don't think it needs to be retread on personally because it's brought up pretty solidly the few times it is, but it's an aspect i do really like. it's both haunting and i think a perfect contributor to his "oh so no one cares what i think" complex in s3.

i do also wish like... ok. so my interpretation of martin's crush on john, and i think the read you're meant to get from it given when it starts being actively brought up in the story (late s3), is that it's a similar thread in his mind to his relationship with his mother, and wanting to help and fix someone who hates him for reasons not really in his control. that's my read on like, the psychology behind his feelings for john.

BUT. i wish we actually knew why martin likes john on, like, a practical level. i think we're just kind of meant to take into account that he Does. but i think some little bit about him finding john's theatrical Statement Voice(tm) dorky in a cute way or something small like that would be endearing and make it a liiiittle less "well he's in love because he's in love!" lol

OH. somehow i've gone this entire post without mentioning peter which is funny. but i very vaguely knew going in that peter and martin's dynamic was "peter makes martin read statements on a certain fear over and over". and i thought the direction was going to be that peter tries to make martin more Lonely(tm) by making him read statements that all hit really close to home for him and kinda wearing him down by making him read all this triggering shit. i thought this was gonna be the direction with the number stations extinction statement with the statementgiver's shitty dad lol

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do you guys think because of not!sasha's past victims she has an array of hyperspecific skills and the other archivists are just like "wow sasha when did you get forklift certified"

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everything can stop on a quarter

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After the coffin

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Did you get my 🐛?

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trhey are. good for my health

(transcript under the cut)

From MAG 162:

TIM (Jon impression) Well, given the incoherence of this statement, I find it hard to believe it ever occurred. [Sasha laughs.] TIM In fact, based on the evidence, I find it highly unlikely that Sasha ever even existed at all.

Also 162

MARTIN (put-upon Spooky Jon impression) What good are maps when the very Earth has… eh, blah blah blah. ARCHIVIST Well, yes.

From 167:

MARTIN You know, when you do the whole – (Spooky Jon impression) curse this flesh prison – (normal) thing, it –

From 108:

BASIRA Was he… woOoOo? MARTIN I mean, a bit, yeah.

From 117:

MARTIN “(Jon voice) Good lord, is Martin becoming some sort of spider person?”

From 39:

TIM Statement of Joe Spooky, regarding sinister happenings-

From 85:

ARCHIVIST “Face to face with your own mortality on the frozen peaks, staring death in the face and saying ‘Not today, dude.’”

From 88:

MARTIN She said she had (heavy air quotes) “full operational discretion”.

From 98:

MARTIN Jon’s (Elias voice) “too inconsistent” at the moment.

From 136:

ARCHIVIST I-I’m not swanning around – DAISY (OVERLAPPING) “Boo-hoo, I’m so alone and a monster.” ARCHIVIST I –

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Hermit a Day 27: Wels

Sparring with your pokemon as a little training? It's more likely than you'd think!

Also my Wels has a full armor design .. this is .. uhm .. his casual fit ....

<<Previous day ■ Next day (WIP)

@hermitadaymay

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you guys don’t even understand what GoodTimesWithScar means to me. Funniest character to ever exist. He’s the server’s sexy pool boy and marriage counselor and he’s bad at all of his jobs and you can never tell if it’s through intentional sabotage or genuine incompetence and then you see him build the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen and log out. He’s not a himbo because he’s a genius and master manipulator but he decided a long time ago that he cares more about having abs and giant tits than proving to anyone that he’s smart. He can cry on command and make you think he’s the most helpless creature on the planet and then turn around and fire an arrow from 200 blocks away and get a headshot and kill you. And then he turns around trips over his own feet and drowns in four inches of water. I’m literally obsessed with him

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If your Skullamy isn't at least a little freaky, youre doing it wrong

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the more things change the more they stay the same

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There’s two ends of the horror spectrum

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there's an unspoken subtext that colors all of jon and georgie's interactions, and it's how exactly their relationship played out when they were last in contact. jon thinks they left off on a sour note and speaks about her like they don't know each other, but georgie apparently only has nice things to tell melanie, a fact which surprises jon. they're immediately comfortable in each others' company when they meet up again and banter about mutual friends and georgie's weird tinder matches. she's the first person he thinks of when he needs somewhere to crash, and she is remarkably trusting about letting him turn up with just the clothes on his back to stay in her house unattended all day with no questions asked, but their trust in each other has hard limits.

if he's just chilling at her place, georgie is fine to let him explain in his own time, she dgaf, she'll lie to the police for him and barely think anything of it, but if he's compulsively obsessed with whatever thing landed him there then she is not having that at all. she assumes it's fully possible for him to leave it alone and that he's just not making the right choices about it. she says he was a good person but she's not so sure about the present. and even though georgie works in the paranormal scene and therefore presumably already believes in the supernatural, jon is steadfastly convinced that she'll think he's delusional if he tries to explain himself, and therefore keeps offering to just up and leave and get out of her hair every time she asks him to help her understand.

however their last relationship ended, it left georgie with plenty of affection for jon that he's perfectly willing to return when given the opportunity, but it also left him with the feeling that her compassion for him doesn't extend very far. it left georgie thinking that jon is fine and trustworthy as a person, but that he's given to acting irrationally and making choices that endanger himself and those around him. from how comfortable they are together, I don't think it was a case of slow relationship rot where they started to find each other unbearable, I think it was something fairly quick and discrete where they just pulled the plug and more-or-less stopped speaking. hmm.

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A late Valentine's day post of WTGirlfriends

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i sketched two things for the "Marble Swolenets" prompt given during the Hornetversary, but took me a few days to finish this one lmao

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making this on my phone with very little sleep or consideration, but i think the point stands