#SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of thoughts as usual about sdmi and its portrayal of the cycle of abuse, and how pericles, cassidy, and ricky's foils and parallels to each other there are all both fascinating and deeply tragic.

in particular today i'm thinking about how ricky is an abusive mentor toward marcie, and tries to be abusive toward velma and fails because she has a support system and hasn't been worn down yet, and velma being an example and continuing to extend marcie support and a hand out of her situation is what gives marcie the courage to leave even when it's dangerous to do so, and how pericles spends the series--present day and past--systematically isolating ricky and dismantling his support system one by one, and how everything cassidy stood for was refusing to continue the cycle with everything she had, and how she felt so so guilty and violated and betrayed when ricky manipulated her into it anyway, and how she was willing to die to make it right, and how marcie standing up to him to great effect with her new support system leaves him utterly stunned, and how after that he starts trying to stand up for himself against his abusive mentor and break the cycle, and how he tries to take up cassidy's convictions as his weapon to do it with because cassidy was crushed under the wheels of the cycle but marcie proved it was possible to break,

and how he couldn't do that with his own abuser because pericles has spent his life building a steel cage around him, and tightening and tightening and tightening it without him even realizing it until it was too late, and how fucking devastated he is when it's finally demonstrated him that the door to the cage is closed for good,

and how when he is made complicit in his abuser reaching through the generations to make sure cassidy died for nothing, and that this little girl who gave him hope by defeating his attempt to continue the cycle couldn't escape him after all, it breaks him.

fucking kill me, man. god.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

one thing i love about ricky is that a good chunk of the time he's all awkward angles, and another (often overlapping) chunk of the time he's Delightful Rickyface, and then every now and then out of the blue you just get flashbanged by how hot he is

god damn

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

talking about sdmi meta out of context is wild because it's just 'sir blorbo bingus betrayed spoingo gungle and left them with internalized self-loathing and survivor's guilt, and then manipulated their old flame into being complicit in their murder to silence them. sir bingus did this in search of a cursed artifact to free the ancient evil god they serve and become its vessel, which their species is implied to have been created for. also this is scooby-doo and sir bingus is a talking parrot'

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

pericles is the opposite of ricky's emotional support animal. emotional attack animal

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

uwus your war criminal

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

can confirm. can confirm. he's the Worst and these are just layered over each other in my head constantly as i think about this show

@angorwhosebabyisthis introduced me to SDMI and therefore to professor pericles and i am making this post to say for the record that my feelings about him are the perfect storm of the jurgen leitner rant and the sneasler rant mashed up together

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

imagine.

babey pericles.

nugget.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

this rewatch of sdmi has been wild because once you start taking the talking animals and their place in the worldbuilding seriously it's just like oh wow this is some real final fantasy plot huh. what do you mean the resident discriminated-against beastfolk are not only descended from ancient otherworldly beings masquerading as gods, and not only driven insane even more effectively than non-beastfolk by a curse because of their heritage, and not only serve as apocalyptically powerful vessels for those otherworldly beings, but are easy to read as having been created specifically because they're more powerful vessels than normal animals, and then abandoned to their own devices (being enslaved) for thousands of years until the next time their creators pop into this reality and want a convenient corporeal form to snatch. which game in the series is this

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

been doing some speedy practice sketches lately to get various characters down a bit better, have a scribble of ricky at thirteen or so that turned out alright. he's babey your honor protect him

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[three-sentence fic that went over the limit; Ricky-centric, for the prompt 'future.']

---

You've got a bright future ahead of you, said his mother to his small self, stroking his hair with tired, gentle pride. He remembers that.

These kids will have no future, bright or otherwise, thanks to him. Oh, god, he wants to say forever, I'm so sorry. But he won't get forever, and neither will they.

Five minutes, though. He picks up the sword, testing its weight in his hands. He can give them that much.

[thecottageinthedark]

#a major reason why sdmi is so incredibly haunting and compelling to me#there is both a Good End and a Bad End#and the bad end is fucking *brutal*#the nibiru timeline is a doomed timeline; and the shadow of that hangs over the new Better(tm) one#it's bittersweet and hollow and unnerving and it's supposed to be#the Good Ending isn't that that pesky doomed timeline is out of the way; and now the heroes get to settle into their cushy new lives#the Good Ending is that they have hope to pick themselves up and find their own path to happiness#in spite of what they lost to get here; and having been set adrift without it#it is not often in a kid's cartoon that you get the chance to explore a true full Bad End narrative this way and god damn#just. god it fucks me up i love this show so much#SDMItag#fave

i can't lie to you i loveee bad endings sometimes. what if nothing worked out. what if the characters gave into their worst instincts. what if they became worse. what if there's truly no hope left. what will they do out of desperation? who will they become as their worst selves?

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

for the title of Worst Gryphon i submit to you: pericles. african grey and black-footed cat. how to make god abandon a timeline out of pure fear

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so recently i decided to roll the 'what will my human!pericles look like This Time' roulette again, only this time in color for once! it's always itched at me how his design looks like a totally different person before and after the timeskip, having been through the wringer aside, so i thought i'd take a shot at combining my interpretation of the two. (the creators pretty obviously took cues from his voice actor for his present-day design, and it's been fun to draw on that too while still keeping the design my own.)

i mostly like how it's turned out, as far into it as i managed to get before i had to take a break and my executive function stalled out; i kept putting off posting it, meaning to come back and finish it later, but i finally decided to go ah fuck it i'd rather it be out there unfinished than disappear into my sketch folder forever. or get fucked up by my trying to continue it while Not in the Groove, especially given how difficult the painting tools i've got available are to wrangle with. Sometimes You Just Gotta Call It

there's a lot of things i'm eyeing to hammer out more next time--i can never seem to figure out what the hell to do with his hair, for one; for another they did a great job at getting across 'babyface that has become aged/haggard' with his designs, and that balance can be difficult to nail when the art app i use really brings out the Everyone is Soft and Babyface in my artstyle. it's a real bastard, but i liked drawing him with this brush a lot and i'm looking forward to working it out more if i can.

the upshot of this is Lo, Cunty Grandpa Be Upon Ye

bonus flats, including an early-to-mid-twenties edit, as well as a couple speed doodles from the same page:

[thecottageinthedark]

#reblogs this here as well because it is relevant to the kind of fandom stuff i talk about on this blog#looking at pericles content basically anywhere but tumblr is Rough because it is inevitably flooded with#'lol he's scum and deserves [horrific human rights violations including lifetime forcibly institutionalized racism torture prison]'#he is legitimately fucking vile and *still does not deserve that because not a single person deserves that ever*#and like. i know some people probably aren't thinking it through in those terms if/when they say it#which is its own brand of shittiness to see around when i do; it reveals some really nasty political opinions even if they're unexamined#there's very much a spectrum between 'meant well and was genuinely unaware' and 'you should fucking well know better'#there's a difference between 'kind of uninformed/misinformed about trans issues' and 'science says unsupported trans kids kill themselves'#'fine by me 🤷‍♂️'#different people have different boundaries and tolerances for how much and which parts of that spectrum they can personally deal with#there are some things i'm chill with talking about in good faith; including things that matter to me Deeply#they can take an energy/emotional toll sometimes and i have to be careful of that#but it's not the kind of toll that will do me harm as long as i can tap out for a bit when i need to; and space out conversations about it#i've made lovely friends that way in the past; and sometimes have been given good food for thought about my own positions#other things i'm like 'if you come into it disagreeing with me on this you're welcome to read what i have to say about it'#'but please do not talk to me about it directly until and unless your opinion on this changes'

#and i am fucking Dreading the day some dickhead reads my posts about why the pericles + prison thing is Fucked#having been confronted in detail with *exactly* all that entails; and goes LOL THIS MF THINKS HE DOESN'T DESERVE JAIL#ACTUALLY ALL ABUSERS DESERVE TO ROT IN PRISON FOREVER AND I HOPE HE GETS TORTURED EVEN MORE ❤️#at the very least i can still just insta-block any assholes like that; and when possible i pretty religiously block anyone i think might#but yeah human rights are for Bad People too; and i don't want to see or engage with people saying otherwise; much less argue about it#any more than i want to be argued with about why a depiction of hitting one's child isn't a depiction of child abuse#or a depiction of someone being sexually assaulted is not a depiction of sexual assault.#hope someone successfully has that conversation with you it ain't gonna be me#i should probably make like. an actual list of boundaries for my pinned re: what subjects i will and won't Discuss with people here#and again this reblog is specific to my experiences in fandom but it applies much more broadly and importantly to irl#the salt files#abuse mention cw#SA mention cw#SDMItag

Me Giving a Pressed Conference: our advocacy for the disabled must include the addict, the imperfect victim, those we despise; the right to autonomy and life cannot devolve into a popularity contest

Reporter I Hate (Not Sexual Tension): Does that include all the attendees of the Bored Ape NFT event who went blind

Me: *Blood streaming from my nostrils and eyes* david, it includes everyone

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: starvation/food insecurity, fantasy racism, psychiatric abuse, ableism, and Upsetting Pictures.]

-

one thing that fucks me up immensely about pericles before and after the asylum is how fucking skinny he is.

like. as much as obviously the two designs are Very Inconsistent in general which annoys me, look at him pre-timeskip. look at how he's shaped.

his head and face are way smoother and rounder, both in front and back, and the space between his cheekbones and his eyebrow ridge is filled in; his body is rounder in general and his belly is noticeably between his thighs when he's standing up; he has kind of a chubby butt; his chin and neck are softer and wider around, which you can really see with the width of the scarf compared to his shoulders and the angle where it meets his head. it comes up in front of his face more because there's not as much of an angle with his chin to hold it down.

now. compare all those things to this.

christ.

and like, you could argue some of these design differences are tiny things to zero in on in a show that's as loose with its models as sdmi is. but present-day pericles' design is pretty obviously supposed to be unsettling because he's physically built to be a Cute Roumb Little Mascot Creature--so much so that the framework has managed to stick around a little in spite of everything--and has become gaunt and haggard anyway. and you could also argue that the body type changes are just thanks to aging twenty years (and i don't doubt that's contributed).

except. he spent those twenty years in an asylum where the other inmates we see look like this.

christ.

(fun little fact that @thecottageinthedark pointed out also: remember how he literally got caught at one point because he couldn't stop eating sunflower seeds, even during a heist? a high-fat, high-calorie snack for birds? you know, exactly the kind of thing a starving person who finally has proper access to food would be wolfing down?)

(yeah.)

did i mention that this happened in a (fantasy) racially segregated prison, which is technically an asylum so the inmates can be kept there indefinitely, because in an actual prison you're required to have a sentence? did i mention that none of the human characters we see in human prison look any less healthy during or afterward, and on top of that are allowed to move around and socialize? did i mention the absolutely horrific treatment of the asylum inmates is implied to be despite the fact that the (physically abusive!) guard is playing up how dangerous and malicious they are? (you know. except for pericles 🙃)

did i mention the man who got pericles imprisoned--who he had not only done nothing to beforehand, but had helped--says he was there to 'live out the rest of his miserable parrot life in a cage, where he belonged,' and not only do none of the characters we're supposed to side with have anything to say about that, but the audience is clearly supposed to agree with him too?

(did i mention said man--who was in on the crime, singular, that pericles went to prison for!--spends those twenty years living a life of luxury in power while abusing the child he kidnapped as a baby and held hostage his entire life, and when we see him in prison he is not only chilling out and helping the authorities but reading a newspaper?)

did i mention the part where by the time we meet pericles he hasn't spoken in years?

like. man the 'ooooo scary evil abused asylum crazies' trope is bad enough, even when they pretend to lampshade it for a minute before playing it straight; i don't know how they added in All That and made him emaciated and expected no one to find it heartbreaking or even sympathetic. i don't care how bad he was before the asylum (and dear god was he ever), that is horrifying and no one deserves it. god damn.