#insane hermit level

[laddertek]

Etho to Tango: "I'll sacrifice one of [my shards] if it'll get you running."

Bruh. Etho just spent 8 crowns to get another shard. He has five left. And he voluntarily wanted to give one to Tango so Tango can run. (Tango who has stacks of these in his inventory.)

[cosmic-espero]

Game Freak created Sword and Shield and has been shilling Leon as a champion and a trainer to anyone within earshot ever since, and I'm begging them to please stop trying to artificially remake Cynthia, he'll never be her, he'll never be famous

[markedbycelestials]

terminally online complaining in tags for this morning

[swampjawn]

Time to talk an unnecessary amount about floors!

Episode 6 of Dungeon Meshi was produced in collaboration with a smaller studio, Enishiya - and it went way harder than I expected, for being made up of two relatively simple and self contained stories focusing on one character each.

And you can really see how those extra resources meant the animators could give full focus to both halves of the episode. Let's take a look at one piece that stole the show.

The first half was handled primarily by episode director/storyboard artist Keita Nagahara and co-animation director Hirotoshi (or Hiroaki? [1]) Arai. It's actually kinda insane how much of this section can be attributed to these two.

But the real star of the show is the second half, Chilchuck vs the mimic, led by co-animation director Toya Ooshima in his first animation director role for TV anime!

And the biggest aspect that knocked my dang boots off was something that's very consistent with Ooshima's style: background animation!

By animating the backgrounds rather than using painted still images, Ooshima and the team of other similarly skilled animators are able to create these beautiful dynamic camera movements that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Like these cuts by Takeshi Maenami where the camera becomes an expressive part of the scene, zipping forward and backward, and tilting to emphasize the speed of this murderous hermit crab. (Maenami's style is also very recognizable here - snappy timing and quick camera movements)

Or this cut by the incredible Kaito Tomioka which cleverly combines a traditional background for the walls with a fully animated floor. The level of detail in these tiles is just completely insane, and used to great effect with this wide, diagonal angle, and the way the camera tentatively drifts forward before reversing direction, and the tiles blur out as it speeds up.

I don't think I'm the only one caught off guard by how much they full-assed this little side story, but it was a pleasant surprise!

I broke down the entire episode in this video here. A lot of research went into this one, and I think it's the best one of these videos I've made so far, so if you're at all interested in more of this type of analysis in video form, I would really appreciate it if you checked it out, or re-blogged this post! Thanks

[1] It's listed as Hirotoshi on Anime News Network, but Hiroaki on a key frame that Studio Trigger shared on Twitter, so I'm not sure which one is wrong.

[smileymoth]

Hermitcraft is like a medical malpractise central to me bc nobody has training in being a doctor (beside Gem maybe)

If you get injured/get ill your choices are: 1) chug 10 vials of health regen and hope it does something 2) die and hope you come back right 3) choose one of the other hermits to take care of you which could go in multiple different ways::

Docm can fix up your technical things and if you have any robot limbs or parts he will help you with those but otherwise I feel like he would make it worse. Like I know this guy has done self surgery. So if you're on good terms with him you could go to him and hope that you don't come out of surgery with a tracking chip planted in you or wires in your brain

Cub could probably help you. But you need to be prepared that he's going to do it in the most unconventional ways possible and theres a 1 in 4 probability it'll cause you 10 other problems that leave you dependent on him bc he needs to fix those as well now. Also be prepared for all your confidential information about your body to be shared with Scar. Somehow the most safe option in my opinion. but watch out

Gem.... With smaller problems I feel like she could help you, but you have to beg her for it because she will think you can just walk it off. Sometimes she's right, other times you'll end up at Cub's. She does know wound care. And it's proper wound care too. She'll want to duel you first tho before she helps you bc she think's it's fun and #payment

Grian can only help you if you're a hybrid, but barely. He knows more theory than practise. Do not go to him with your problems. He will make them worse somehow.

Skizzleman knows probably too much about wound care. Like all hermits have basic knowledge of immediate wound care but I feel like he would know the best. I feel like he's also a guy who has probably stitched himself up so he knows how to do sutures. He's surprisingly gentle despite him having large hands that possible couldn't do anything so delicate.

Zedaph knows some things. He knows how to do surgery. He just doesn't like doing them. He's deeply uninterested. Even though I would probably trust him more than Cub or Docm because he doesn't seem like a guy who would sabotage you on a medical level. I think he would reroute you to Cub instead without any malice.

If you have issues with your Code please go to Tango. He will probably help you fix those. He would really want to try to fix your medical problems with fiddling around with code but most of the time he starts whining and gets pathetic about it because he's scared he's gona hurt you

Only go to Cleo if you have ripped off a limb and it didn't reattach itself when you respawned. She knows how to stitch you up. She will do it without any anesthetics or painkillers so you'll have to go through with it since she wants to be sure that she connected the nerves right. If you go to her with anything else she will look at you like you're insane

[z0mbiew00d]

Life / Hermit collabs I wanna see that aren’t Life Series / HermitCraft

1. REPO WITH DIVORCE QUARTET

I can already imagine the absolute chaos as the four of them try to work together and beat the levels while also having access to weapons and items and mobs. It’d be so funny, I can already see Martyn knocking Cleo over with the cart and her yelling at him while Scott and Pearl giggle, or Scott smashing an item and all three gang up on him immediately. Martyns inability to shutup getting the huntsman to shoot Pearl and Scott and Cleo lose it. ALSO MAKE IT NOT PG PLEASE I NEED IT FOR MY SOUL. Please god if you can hear me 🙏🙏

2. ONE BLOCK SKYBLOCK WITH GRIAN, SCAR, JOEL AND JIMMY

I NEED 100 hours trio back and I think adding Jimmy would be pure mischief. Would be so much fun to watch the four of them try and progress in the world while also actively sabotaging each other because they cannot be trusted. Jimmy is banned from building, Scar isn’t trusted with valuables cause he keeps falling off, NOBODY trusts Grian, Joel is actively crashing out 24/7. Absolute hell, 10/10.

3. MARTYN TEACHES CLEO FORTNITE OG

This one is so insanely self indulgent but I love Fortnite so much and zombiewood is my favourite duo ever and Martyn used to play Fortnite lots and with og being back it’d be the perfect time for him to teach a lifer Fortnite, and I think Cleo is the most chaotic option. Also there’s a skin that looks super similar to her life series skin and it’d be perfect. Anyone would be fun though!

4. EMPIRES SEASON 3 OR SOMETHING CLOSE TO IT

I am going to continue to kick this dead horse I need this so bad BUT ADD CLEO, MARTYN, REN AND ALSO SEAPEEKAY. I love Cleo lore series so much (Pirates and WitchCraft come back to me 🙏) and Ren expressed interest in Empires season 2. Seapeekays also said he’d love to be in Empires SMP (and the life series. please add him to the life series. I’m begging.) and he’s so good at lore and always a super fun pov. Plus Martyn and his lore skills plus general chaos he brings to every server is peak.

5. HERMIT AMONG US BUT WITH MORE LIFERS

I LOVE the HermitCraft lobbies we’re getting in Among Us but I desperately need more with the lifers and also non-lifers too (cough Seapeekay & Aimsey cough). I’d love to see just more Among Us lobbies with loads of variants of people bevause it’s always so much fun.

HM. MORE SEAPEEKAY

That’s all, just more Seapeekay. Add him to build and seek, bring back base invaders with more lifers and hermits but include Seapeekay. Add Seapeekay to among us and repo lobbies. GIVE ME MORE SEAPEEKAY + LIFERS & HERMITS

[nerdpearls]

post that has been simmering since yesterday

i love. love love love the gamer's outreach events the hermits keep doing. not only do we get our yearly supply of shenanigans in one weekend, it's also for an amazing cause.

now, me on them sillies hanging out. all i can say is that the level of comfort and ease and just overall friendship between these guys is insane. especially because, for most of them, they met online. i feel it's a wonderful testament to the fact that online relationships can go well!! [i mean fuck they have stronger friendships than i do with the kid i met in 2nd grade]

ANYWAYB any hermits seeing this, thank you for another great year. and to all of you who donated: thank you!!!

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Adrien really only has 2 good endings at this point.

Go to live as a hermit away from everyone except maybe Plagg somewhere in Southern France, never transforming again to avoid contacting anyone.

Decide that since he was never really sure about what to do with his life besides “love Marinette”, that he might as well go Cat Noir full time and go all Nightwing/Red Hood

Anything less than those is saying he’s fine with people taking away his agency for the greater good.

I vote hermit or really anything that gets him far, far away from everyone in his life. Dude needs some time to find himself. Maybe dye his hair and use his copious language skills to go live in another country for a few years?

Even then, I don't know if that's really a happy ending. Canon has created a situation where it feels like Adrien is going to end up scarred for life no matter what happens. I know the actual show will never go there, but Adrien should end up with massive trust issues that take years of therapy to move past if it's even possible to move past the levels of betrayal and manipulation canon has wrapped him in!

That path could have been mostly avoided if Gabriel and Nathalie were the only big fat liars and if Adrien had incredibly strong bonds with his friends to get him through the reveal of their lies. Kagami, Marinette, Nathalie, Felix, and possibly Amelie all being in on the lies is game over for his sanity. I'm curious if canon will ever let him find out because it's such a dumpster fire situation. I don't think there's a way to make this have a satisfying ending for Adrien unless you do something insane like resetting the timeline so none of it ever happened and he doesn't remember any of it.

That wouldn't really be a satisfying ending for the audience, but it is about the only way to give Adrien a "happy" ending that feels realistic. It might even be the only way to give Marinette a happy ending if canon keeps using her paranoia and other less savory traits as delaying tactics.

[rochenn]

please im starving do you have any good dooku fic recommendations

BOY DO I HAVE SOME FOR YOU!!

I Pray My Mind be Good to Me by @purple-ant | Dooku/Sifo-Dyas | M | in progress | 40k so far | Set before the Prequels. Sifo-Dyas isn't killed by Dooku, but maybe this is worse—Sidious uses Dooku to torture him. Fascinating concept and GREAT execution and oh, oughh, my HEART. Tagged as "angst with a happy ending" and "dubious happy ending" and "friends to enemies to fucked up lovers" and I am absolutely hooked and in dire need of catching up!

Forward Motion by flute25 / @legobiwan | Dooku & Rael Averross | G | oneshot | 8k | In the moment between life and death, Dooku meets his first Padawan. And when I tell you this hurt me on a deeper level I really do mean it. Beautiful retrospective and reckoning of a mostly awful life, and beautifully written, too. A wonderful study of Dooku's character if you'd like to read something that makes you feel sad and even vaguely hopeful <3

Padawan by Peppermint_Shamrock / @jedi-order-apologist | Dooku & Asajj Ventress | G | Drabble | Dude I just fucking love a 100 word fic that fucks me up completely. I'll let the fic's summary do the talking here: "Dooku misspeaks." And, man, he sure does. I am UNWELL about Dooku's and Asajj's dynamic and this drabble captures it perfectly!!

the sparks that went dark in my gut by Icarus_is_flying | Dooku & Asajj Ventress | T | oneshot | 2k | Doomed master-apprentice relationships that could have become something wholesome if a Certain Someone wasn't a complete cunt are my bread and butter. Asajj's frustration with Dooku and herself, and Dooku's ways of teaching her... I already said their dynamic is everything to me and this fic ALSO does it so so so very well. Read this if you want to get feelsy about this utter disaster duo!!

Three Days of Thawing by @prahacat | past Dooku/Obi-Wan | T | oneshot | 15k | It's not a rochen rec list if this fic isn't mentioned. Dooku is in exile after surviving the Clone Wars in this absolutely GORGEOUS character study. Delicious prose and one of my favorite Dooku voices of all time working in tandem as we follow him through his hermit life and slowly unravel the canon divergence that led him up to this point. Incredibly stimulating to read. Obi-Wan is great in this fic, too, and it makes you burn with curiosity about exactly what happened in the past! Stunning descriptions of nature and human nature alike. Every time I think about this fic I go insane. HUGE HUGE HUGE recommendation even if you don't really go there, trust me it's worth it!

Lastly, I will be recommending some accounts for your browsing pleasure: anything by @charmwasjess (AO3), lots of great Dooku fics to choose from in a great variety of flavors!! Especially great if you enjoy Dooku/Sifo-Dyas. Same goes for @bolithesenate (AO3). So many fics I go 👀👀👀 at but don't have the time to get around to.

Enjoy!!

[gamerbot-22]

HI. I SAW YR REQUESTS ARE OPEN AND I DESPERATELY NEED CHUBBY READER X KNIVES.

I always thought Kni would be fascinated with a chubby human. they are soft and squishy and kind even when he’s mean to them and thats not something he associates with humans often so ywah.!

if you cant tell I love this guy.

YEAAAAA FUCK YEAH I LIKE WHERE YOUR HEAD’S AT—[checks ur bio]—QUEEN. Oh man, I love doing requests so much, y’all come to me with the fuckin’ sickest ideas. Also thank you for handing me a Nai GIF on a silver plater that’s v helpful of you ✨

Millions Knives/Nai x Sweet Chubby Reader

TW/CWs: Nai is Nai (both /pos and /neg), romance is implied but tbh this could all be read as platonic, written with TriStamp Nai in mind but feel free to slot your favorite version in here if you so choose, the words fat and chubby are used neutrally and interchangeably to describe the reader, Nai has feelings he refuses to unpack, barely proofread but I appreciate spellchecks.

A/N: I was a little stuck on how I wanted to do this but God, once I found that groove it was insane. Like… the physical softness mixing with the emotional softness of the reader? That’s some fun stuff to explore to me, so I really hope you like it!

Likes and Reblogs are always appreciated, Requests are open, and it’s all under the cut!

The dividers in this post were made by @/adornedwithlight ☆

SO let’s get into it, yeah? I’ve seen crews on the SEEDS ship in both versions of the anime and everyone there is fit as hell so like??? Honestly with his hermit lifestyle, I’d say there’s a non-zero chance of you being one of if not the first fat person he’s ever met personally.

I don’t think it changes much of his perception of you at first—humans are humans, regardless of shape—but there is something interesting about how you just... take it? When he talks shit about humanity? Like he calls humanity a parasite, a disease, and instead of shrinking or averting your gaze from him for the rest of the day you ask him if he’s hungry. Him. Hungry. What??

He’s not shy about his confusion. After a couple notable instances of this he straight up just asks why you’re so unbothered by it when every other human he has to deal with has some kind of sore spot about it. Maybe humans didn’t treat you well either, so you agree with him. He understands. Maybe you want to see what happens with a Plant in charge. He thinks you’re insane, and tells you so, but doesn’t otherwise hurt you (not while you’re still useful and… interesting.) Maybe you just think he still deserves to be listened to despite it all. Isn’t it a basic need to be listened to? That reminds him of some people he’d rather not think about. He probably ignores you for a while after that.

But you can’t even let him ignore you! You still come to him, unlike anything he’d ever seen with your soft hands and body, offering warm words and attention despite his clear (surface-level) distaste for whatever it is you have to say.

You know lonely when you see it, and you’re persistent. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object until one day, when he’s feeling especially raw he just breaks. He doesn’t shatter completely, but there’s cracks in his facade when he lets you wrap your arms around his shoulders and give him a squeeze, assuring him that he doesn’t have to return the embrace if he doesn’t want to. And he doesn’t, for the record, he just wants to… sit in it. Your body keeps heat better than his ever could—it’s the one drawback of being a Plant at times—and you’re soft, both around his neck and in his ears as you just stand there, breathing. He can feel your heartbeat and you’re not even a little frightened, even after seeing first hand the kind of terror he puts in the hearts of your fellow humans.

He can’t remember the last time someone hugged him. Probably not since her. It makes him bitter, but at the same time he dares not push you away. Not yet, at least. You’re a human, and to him you’re either insane or stupid to think he’ll spare you at the end of this, but�� you’re still useful for now. He’ll keep you and your soft body within arm’s reach, letting you wrap around him so he could feel the warmth of another body. You can stay until he’s certain he can be rid of you.

Whenever that might be.

[ekebolou]

There are (at least) two layers to humanities research.

[There probably should be at least two to scientific research in the same vein, but I don't want to talk out my ass about stuff I don't do - so, humanities it is!]

This is part of why it takes so long to train humanities researchers. Honestly, it's such a massive return on the extremely cheap investment to train humanities scholars, it's insane. But that's a point for another day.

The first layer is what you spend basically the entirety of schooling (I suppose I should say in European/Western-influenced education systems) up until college/university-level education doing. That is learning to read things written for you to read.

Granted a fair amount of this time is spent on just the 'learning to read' part, but by at least teenage years you ought to be on to the 'understanding things written for you to read' part. A huge amount of this is learning to suss out fiction and non-fiction; learning to interpret imagery, metaphor, allusion - all that good stuff that happens in both fiction and non-fiction because language be like that; learning how to take apart and [VERY VITAL] put together language to achieve A Purpose whether that be to Understand or to Convey Understanding (and perhaps even just EVOKE).

It's not easy. That's why it takes a long time. A lot of it is Boring and Hard unless you're lucky and it's Your Thing so it's not Boring and Hard. On the words-reading website it's probably good to acknowledge that yeah, it's Boring and Hard when it's not Your Thing and you've still got to deal with it all the time, as opposed to like, advanced math, which you can kind of avoid, I guess (but don't! Advanced Math is actually Cool and Everywhere, too).

It is critical to understand that this first layer is a skill, in need of honing in its own right, and worth training everyone in. It should be obvious but very frequently is not that even when a thing is written specifically for you to read, there's a lot going on under the hood.

When you get to college/university level education (should you choose to, and you don't need to if you don't want to), this is going to be more or less lumped under secondary source research.

Maybe this is language more specific to history than other disciplines, but in general you might see 'literature review' or 'state of field' or 'preliminary research' (in history, it's often 'historiography') - but it's all broadly secondary source work.

Aha! Isn't that a tell - that they're called secondary sources?

It should be.

Your average popular historical product that does any research at all - podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks, popular history books, documentaries, newspaper articles or special interest magazines, etc - is doing this kind of research. Secondary Source Research. It's reading stuff written for you to read.

It's very, very important.

It's about half of what all that time, labour, blood, sweat, and tears that go into a humanities degree is about. It's why it takes forever and your friends drop off the face of the earth and become book hermits that cry when a restaurant menu is too descriptive (and also because they make no money - they should make more money, but that's another issue).

But it's only half. The function that this half serves, however, is making the other half possible. Laying the groundwork. If it were, say, fifty to eighty years ago, I would confidently say that the purpose of that layer of the research was to read, as much as is possible, everything written on a given subject of study so that the researcher was able to properly process the next half of the research. Used to be that even included bodies of work in a few other languages. These days, that's simply not possible for most subjects. There's too much been written specifically for you to read. You still ought to have at least two other languages under your belt, but you're not always reading scholarship extensively in more than one. There's too much to read in one language, and that goes for a whole lot of languages.

So nowadays, you're typically reading a selection of really influential secondary sources (stuff written for you to read) and a decent swath of the 'modern' conversation (within the last twenty-five years or so), and a deep selection of whatever your very deliberately outlined specific subject of study is. It's still a lot. It's necessary.

Because the second layer of research is reading stuff that was not written for you to read. Maybe it was written for some audience to read - a letter to a friend is for a friend, a circular for a society is for society members, a broadsheet is for whoever happened to be walking by that wall at that given time - but that audience is not you. It was written for them. You're somebody else, living somewhere else, and some-when else. Not for you.

Some of it isn't for anybody to read. Or wasn't meant to say anything in particular. Or wasn't even deliberately created in the first place. It's just there. A ledger. A calling card. A particular winding or color of thread. A broken bit of pipe. A thousand trade beads. The thumb-shaped worn spot on a rock or blackened stone of a wall by a stairway. The kind of paper of a torn note.

This second layer of research is why people who say they have 'done their own research' are very often not worth taking seriously. It's a trick of the word 'research', that it really means several things at once, one of which is very different from the other, despite appearing to be superficially the same. It can be hard not to take it personally, when you're excited and have done a lot of work and put your whole heart in learning about a thing to have that effort derided as 'not real research'.

It isn't, though. Not in that thorough-going meaning of both layers. It's one layer. A very intensive and difficult layer, but not both. To be an expert - to have expertise - is to do both. You can think of it like doing a practical skill versus reading about it. You can read a lot about how sailing ships work, you might even be a skilled model builder, whose experience can contribute to our understanding of ship construction, but you're not a ship-builder or a sailor. You don't have to be those things, it's not like you have nothing to contribute to those things, but you're not those things.

Likewise, until you do primary source research - read things not written for you to read - you're an expert in what people have said about a thing, not about the thing itself. It's very easy to be misled when confronted with a thing not written for you to read, when all you've done is read what people have said, which is why you don't go from doing all your secondary source research straight into publishing books. There's a long (fuckin' loooooooong) period of a kind of 'apprenticeship', where you join the conversation and get a lot of feedback (and fuck some of that feedback, what assholes are out there! but some is great) before you put something out there on your subject officially for someone else to read.

Hell, it's super easy to do all that and still be shit at actually interpreting the primary sources. Or you could be presenting something entirely new and different, and so everyone treats you like a crank until some more stuff comes forward, in years, decades not unusually being the timeline required. Sometimes it's hard to tell which way the needle will jump, which is why its so important for authoritatively written work to be as transparent as possible with the wheres and hows and whys of its logic and argument.

(Which is another big thing you'll notice - something based on secondary source research will often have minimal or no evidence of where it got its information. Citations. Citations are real important for the credibility of an interpretation. you should be able to find exactly the sources the argument relies upon just in case you want to make your own evaluation.)

But transparency is not clarity. Ideally, clarity is there, but if it feels like something is incredibly dense and hard to read and its supposed to be an authoritative source written for you to read - well, it has to be transparent, not necessarily clear (oh, language! How wonderful you are).

So that's how it stacks up. That's why when you get to those college/university-level courses, they seem to be asking you for entirely different outputs - they are! They're trying to get you to practice different skills. That's why you'll see an uncomfortable look on an academic's face sometimes, or a 'fun fact' being passed around encouragingly online will get a rock thrown its window from time to time (I fuckin' hope it does, anyway). That's why a "special interest" isn't the same as "expertise," despite how fun it can be to talk about our encyclopedic infodumping foibles. That's why "the SECRET that THEY never wanted to know," "a HIDDEN HISTORY," "the UNCOVERED/RECOVERED/UNEARTHED/UNSILENCEDetc story," are better signs of marketing than reality, rigor, or even truth (they are the "EXPERTS hate PERSON for THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK" of non-fiction marketing).

It's not because people hate fun (though some them do, the spoilsports), but because "research" and "research" aren't the same, and blurring the line between them is really, profoundly unhelpful. The idea that we can continue to have our fun pop-history posts and takes without the fun pop-history books is a minor scale of delusion compared to the idea that we can continue to have fun pop-history books without understanding the need to continue to training, fostering, and supporting the immense amount of work that goes into producing regular ol' (boring, hard) expertise. The new stuff comes from the person that looks at the ledger of a plantation and sees people in the numbers, and understands what those numbers are trying to do - and that's not obvious, or easy to work with.

So, I guess, I just wanted to point out that there's at least two layers (two layers, at least) - and I think understanding that can help make sense of things. Or at least I hope so.

[falconpal]

In November of last year, after I finished watching the Life Series from Grian’s POV, I really enjoyed it and so that pushed me onto moving onto Hermitcraft. I watched all Grian’s seasons of Hermitcraft and caught up completely to Season 10 in January of this year, and then started watching from a playlist that had every Hermits uploads in it.

I am loving it. So much so that the urge to draw has consumed me, even though in the past I’ve had no want to draw anything humanoid. I’m actually consistently drawing for the first time in ages. It’s insane. I’m insane.

I really enjoy xBCrafted’s content. He has a more relaxed vibe to his videos and they’re also typically longer than the average Hermit’s (but not Doc’s level most of the time). Also really enjoy Beef for the same reason.

I’m not usually active on here in terms of posting but I need to talk about Hermitcraft with people more, haha.

[artbyblastweave]

So, the thing about Ward's worldbuilding is, it's bad on purpose. This is something I didn't catch until a relisten of the earlier parts, but the disconnect between the actual literal apocalypse that occurred two years prior and the shockingly advanced levels of infrastructure and technology is very deliberate. The entire thing is slapdash and farcical. You have people out the door of a shitty concrete hovel lining up for bad coffee. You have cars built out of random scavenged parts, "dumpsters" that Victoria can't manhandle because they're made of clumsily-welded-together scrap metal. Victoria can't reliably navigate at night because power to the city below is intermittent (and her mother Carol happens to live in one of the parts that does have consistent power; that's unexamined, make of it what you will.) The mall cluster shitshow goes down in a "mall" that, IIRC, is called out later as having been basically a dead end economically, a doomed grasp at a sense of normalcy. The patrol block uses recycled PRT gear, Dot's interlude involves the machine army jumping a bunch of bog-standard apocalypse scavengers. What you're looking at isn't a new society built up shockingly quickly; you're looking at the previously-well-supplied-and-externally-supported outpost of the recently destroyed society, and after two years they're finally chewing through the last of the head start they got. The societal equivalent of Wile. E. Coyote hanging in the air above the cliff, or of the seemingly-untouched duelist seconds away from sliding in half. Unfortunately, due to choices made about the timeframe and focus of the story, the Coyote sprouts wings. The duelist whips out a staple gun. Or to come at this from another angle- in The Walking Dead, a comic I really like, I can sort of organize the arc of the apocalypse into three-ish big chunks. For the first eight or nine months in universe, about 48 issues, things are obviously bad, right, quite a few people have died, but there's a sense among Rick and company that they might be able to ride it out, that things are on the upswing. They've got crops going, they have new births, maybe help from the government proper isn't coming the way they thought it might towards the start, but things are looking up! Then, of course, the Great Fuckening of Volume Eight occurs, and you enter the middle phase of the comic, where they're down to like a third of their group, they're food-insecure, they're constantly on the move, they're under attack from rapists and cannibals who've descended into habitual atrocity because they're totally without hope. Children are having mental breaks and killing children, the first friendly guy Rick met in the whole comic is now an insane hermit feeding dead bodies to his undead son, on and on and on and on and on. Bad times, but a comparatively short middle in the grand scheme of things. Then they find Alexandria, and the back half of the comic is spent basically on an upward trajectory with some zig-zags, there are still periodic existential threats but they're clearly past the nadir.

Ward feels like it starts midway through that first part, the you-don't-know-how-much-worse-this-can-get part, with the emphasis on the social tensions, the encroaching winter, but then it just...doesn't get much worse. I mean they have a rough three months, but then they sort of speedrun right to the hopeful future ending as soon as the titans are dealt with. There were parts that I suspect were supposed to be the dark-night-of-the-soul I'm alluding to but they didn't land as such. I feel as though the superhero genre stuff kind of subordinated the apocalypse stuff, made it less visible by virtue of whose POV we were following, and sometimes I feel that as a remedy to this, Ward should have taken place over the course of years, and it should have Just Kept Getting Worse. For example Breakthrough should have had to kill and eat Rain to survive the winter

[liauditore]

ADVANCEMENT UNLOCKED: Participate in Hermit a Day May 2024!

I tried putting them to scale best as I could while still keeping them all relatively in frame (bdubs is standing on a slab). Sorry for the awkward crop the full png was too powerful for tumblr and I didn't want to separate gem and pearl.

Shout out to @hermitadaymay (asked to tag) for hosting and the really awesome tags I got to experience and what felt like increasing concern for me or perhaps a need to study me like a animal in a lab expressed through them. (collected some of my favourites below)

(no but genuinely very insane of you to do personalized tags on so many pieces during this event AND read some of my long ranty tags too. I think I may have had a light heart attack when I learnt you were one person running this thing and even if you weren't this level of care is so above and beyond what you had to do -- also very funny and fun please continue studying me at your leisure it's very awesome)

I don't know about everyone else but i frequently scrolled down the hermit a day blog mainly for the art (and seeing everyone's designs and styles!!) but I loved just reading your tags too lol. Always fun when there's a little back and forth. Was really proud of myself when I begun to recognize specific artists' styles who I hadn't encountered before, felt like I was earning video game points I have no idea why.

Amazing event. I'm gonna go try to fix my sleep schedule now o7

[wiskiemonk]

Read the tahs on that post and i argue the oppisite is true. Tsukky in any scene we've seen her in has shown the romantic experience and maturity of a highschooler. Getting too nervous to give Gin & Shinpachi a valentine? Getting flustered from light teasing? Something tells me she and gin would be equally troubled if for different reasons. She's clearly spent more time in the shadows assassinating and recruiting for her hyakka army than getting to know people on a deep emotional level, Hinowa aside.

Not that i ship her with Gin. Tae and Gin, maybe, but the man is clearly happiest without romance and living life with his two adopted kids. Maybe when Kagura leaves for college, lol.

[adding the second message here too for continuity's sake!]

Yeah no I absolutely agree that Tsukuyo's actual romantic experience is roughly on par with Shinpachi's, and that's part of the problem...she's obviously attracted to Gintoki but instead of just shoving him against a wall and having it done with, she's constructed some kind of enormous elaborate Saw trap in her mind where she's simultaneously idealised him as some ideal romantic partner but is constantly derailed by the actual reality of him. Which is why when she's drunk and her inhibitions are down, she's much more straightforward about him (much to his terror, because he does not want to be wanted, hence the arm's length weathergirl fantasy)...girl wants to fuck and who can blame her?

They've got the same problem in different flavours. Tsukuyo has grown up in a microcosm of sex for sale and romance either as something forbidden and destructive, or else a means of squeezing more money out of a client. She's never had 'friends' so much as she's had colleagues and subordinates. Her formative relationship with a man was a destructive mentor-student dynamic with a sprinkling of pseudo daddy issues. Then Gintoki comes along with his habit of accidentally spouting the most heroic, heartfelt knight-on-a-white-horse shit you've ever heard, also he's really hot, so you can't blame her for constantly forgetting that he's also a lazy half-assed loser slob with the romantic acumen of a water flea. Her life would be so much easier if she could just hop on that dick and get it over with but she's unable to be normal about any of it because it's never been normal in her life (she's "given up her life as a woman" and all that, which is insane, but anyway!)

Meanwhile Gintoki is the traumatised corpse-eating war orphan extraordinaire who has endured so much loss in his life that he'd have ended up a) a hermit b) dead or c) both had he not accidentally acquired 2 kids + a dog + a new mam and been thrown into that loser single dad life, because for all he tries to reject closeness he's just the kind of guy who cares too much for people. So even though he's mentally running away from anything that looks too much like something he could lose, he's paradoxically inviting it into his life over and over because he can't stop bleeding for people he's known for 15 minutes minimum, and as you rightly point out he DOES have that emotional sensitivity (mostly accidental/instinctive) which shines through when he forgets he's supposed to be cloaking it in layers of drunk obnoxious dick-n-balls-joke stupidity.

tl;dr tsukuyo manufactures an aura of maturity to distract from the absence of it, while gintoki manufactures an aura of distance to distract from the presence, and the disconnect between what they fundamentally are and what they fundamentally need from another person is why they'd probably never work out. they should still fuck though.

[raisinchallah]

its very weird that idk some kind of process occurred between being 18 and being 23 and i dont really know what but i am definitely less active crisis level mentally ill but idk nobody would say dropping out from society and turning into a hermit made you more able to handle the world but did it finally work for me ? who knows mysteries of this earth i think im really handling school surprisingly well considering id have near catastrophic meltdowns upon even approaching a school as a child but its also not really like this has translated into being able to actually live a real life like i still just dont have enough energy to do work/school and like take basic care of myself or have a social life these are just incompatible needs but im not you know insane in the same way or maybe im like less actively pathologized like i dont know if i can truly account for the ways the response to being a mentally ill teenager fucked me up its sort of incalculable like you know would things have gotten that bad if people werent constantly threatening to institutionalize me if i was too crazy but also viewing me as sort of making things up if i wasnt outwardly performing a specific type of behavior but then also pathologizing any and all reactions from me etc like thats a self perpetuating mental illness machine now im free to joke about wanting to kill myself and nobody wants to lock me up about it <3