#rambles is for incoherent stuff like this

[knowone08b]

Thinking about ffxv again. It’s about love. It’s about friendship. It’s about brotherhood. It’s the world’s worst road trip. It’s the world’s best road trip. It’s about platonic love. It’s about romantic love. It’s about daddy issues. It’s about little brother issues. It’s about driving. It’s about cooking. It about holding onto what you got. It’s about appreciating what you have. It’s about fishing. It’s about discovery; good and bad. It’s about Florence + The Machine being real in a final fantasy universe. It’s about love.

[chiricat]

ryomina demons are winning

[renshengs]

hmm i do think that danmei and dangai (censored danmei cdrama adaptations) being many non-chinese fandom people's first impression of chinese media has given them some misconceptions about mainstream chinese media, and it shows in a way that i find very frustrating when seeing discussions about cdramas on here. dangai dramas aside, even if government censorship didn't exist, the chances of your favorite cdrama gay ship becoming canon is about as high as the chances of any of those iconic homoerotic male friendships in a western TV show becoming canon. which is to say: extremely low.

what i think is that internationally huge danmei fandoms like mdzs and tgcf and drama adaptations like cql and shl have really fucked with people's conceptualization of danmei, in that they're using it as this reference point when analyzing relationships in all other forms of cn media, including cdramas and chinese games, which then manifests into people making very bold, very dubious claims about "queercoding" because 2 characters from a random cdrama reminds them of the one or two danmeis they'd encountered that shaped their entire perception of chinese media. basically it's this meme:

many people here need to understand that cdramas and chinese films are obviously mainstream forms of fictional media in china, just like how the mcu or the doctor who franchise is mainstream in the US and UK, or like shonen is mainstream in japan. not to burst your bubble of happy ignorance, but homoromantic relationships such as qingming/boya from the ying yang master are—for lack of a better term—fujobait. they are fujobait. bromances, because those sell well and everyone knows it. popular ships like bakudeku were not actually made canon in mha because shonen is mainstream, and in most industries geared toward maximizing capital, having full-on gay people front and center is considered a monetarily risky move. which sucks, of course, but china is absolutely no different. i promise you that if the govt removed their censorship laws for TV broadcasts, your favorite gay ship from mysterious lotus casebook or the blood of youth or fangs of fortune still wouldn't be canon. they might be allowed a bit more intimacy due to the lack of restrictive filtering, but they are not going to be sucking face for the same reason that gojo and geto from jjk didn't suck face.

danmei is still widely considered niche and risky in china, and if you haven't seen the recent news, authors are still getting arrested for writing it. assuming that chinese fiction, mainstream chinese fiction in particular, operate like dangais where the two guys with the most gay tension would be made explicitly canon were the censors to be lifted, is frankly pretty ridiculous. dangai dramas are adapted from danmeis, which are stories centered on a gay romance and narratively depend on the two guys falling in love. non-dangai dramas are very much... not that, hence why people shouldn't watch them expecting a censored danmei and then forcing assumptions of "my ship would be canon if only it weren't for censorship" on them.

it's very clear when someone who knows absolutely nothing about the actual situation with danmei and queer existence and mainstream TV censorship in china is trying to push their, if i put it crudely, "boss baby meme" perspective onto cmedia. fandom is all about poking at interactions between your favorite characters and giggling and speculating, but i think lots of fandom people (many of them safe in the pockets of their more progressive areas) view govt censorship as this big abstract dam that, if broken, would result in the canonization of all their favorite ships, which is not only an incredibly naive belief but also one that shows how much they view TV censorship as more of a personal inconvenience that's preventing their favorite ships from kissing on screen instead of the looming, deep-rooted issue depriving mainland chinese people of creative freedom it actually is. with cmedia fandoms there's a specific widely popularized "they're so gay omg how did censorship not notice" gag when there's any perceived homoromantic undertones in a story that's both rather insensitive and also ignorant, and many dangai and cdrama fandoms in particular (donghua fans too, link click shippers i'm looking directly at you) could really use some more education and sensitivity regarding this.

i've been in danmei & cdrama fandom spaces for years and post-pandemic this kind of nonsense has definitely gotten worse, especially when you compare shipping discussions here to shipping discussions in cn fandoms. here every 2 seconds someone makes an off-color censorship joke about tgcf donghua and over on douyin they are straight up commenting under the nezha sequel announcement post if there's going to be an oubing kissing scene. granted i obviously cannot see or know everything going on in cn fandom spaces because they are incomprehensibly enormous, but in all the spaces i've been in i've never seen a single censorship joke from anyone. why do people here absolutely insist on making them?

anyway. fandom be normal about chinese media challenge!

[flicklikesstuff]

ISTG IF THIS DOESN’T PLAY A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN EP 10

There’s absolutely perfect potential for Eternal Sugar or her minions to take advantage of this. A street kid who has seen the ugly difficult side of life?

They bribe him to give up escaping. To forget what he saw with Hollyberry being entrapped because it’s way better to just live in the paradise without the fight for survival he’s gotten accustomed to at a young age. They tell him he’ll see similar wreckage and hardships if leave out there and not stay.

(Bonus pts if they mention that his feelings for a *cough cough* certain cookie will mostly likely not work in the real world)

Or even worse, mention Hollyberry’s failings to be there for her family and kingdom. How it’s much easier to just give up on her when she had frustrated him and plagued his poor poor heart with unhappiness.

How she doesn’t listen nor take him too seriously. To submit to sloth and not worry about her anymore because it’s making him unhappy and all that.

Cue inspirational cookie speech of how Hollyberry did make him happy because of the passion she holds for the kingdom.

And that she never gave up on him when he had his rough moments with her as a kid. So neither will he when Holly’s at her roughest either.

[meghanthedreamcrusher]

Not sure why I feel so damn compelled to write about this but anyway

I'm what you'd call a casual Deltarune fan. I played chapters 1+2 when they released and didn't play them again until chapters 3+4 dropped cause I forgot most of what happened

And I haven't been plugged in to any of the discourse around the game till the last few days really. But it's quickly come to my attention that there's apparently a not insignificant portion of fans who are determined to say Kris' gender is ambiguous/up to player interpretation

Which I find very confusing because they're one of the most obviously enby characters I've seen in a game

You could make the argument of it being ambiguous in chapter 1 cause it just doesn't really come up, but I figured out about halfway through my first play of chapter 2, and I was just like "oh that's cool" and moved on

But with the new chapters I feel like them being enby is actually getting more important, it's yet another way they can be their own person separate from us. It's a core aspect of the character and we have no say in it, which I'm pretty sure is the whole point of the damn game! That they're taking every trope related to being an empty vessel for the player and not only subverting it, but crushing it into dust like the glorious menace they are!

Anyway tl:dr I guess; Kris is an enby icon and I look forward to seeing more of them!

[luthordamnvers]

I still think I need to watch the entire show again, but I'm gonna try and collect some very scattered thoughts because the ~discourse is appalling, tbh.

Idk who needs to hear this, but every single marvel project has been about the widening of the marvel cinematic universe. And it's fucking insane, that people are reducing this show as "just a way to get Wiccan" when it was so much more, especially for a show that wasn't even supposed to exist. It was a show spearheaded by a showrunner who initially pitched it because she loved Agatha, and Kathryn's portrayal of Agatha. One that happens to be a woman, btw (one that happens to had been at the forefront of both Captain Marvel [Uncredited] and been responsible for the first past of Black Widow [Story by, credits]).

Don't get me wrong, the MCU certainly has misogynistic undertones, the fact that we had to wait to have a woman led movie, or a movie director, as long as we did is a travesty. That without even going into the intersectionality that we are still missing in the wider MCU. And one that's inherent in the comic book world, if we are being honest. But guess what, THIS is the type of show that changes that narrative.

The fact that wandavision is still regarded the best Marvel-Disney+ show. So good that got an spin off focused on "a nanny". Show that delivered on a show being about her, and yet not the entire story, with outstanding narrative, direction and storytelling. And some swats of fandom are diminishing it left and right. The dudebros because it was about a woman, about a middle-aged woman, about a queer middle-aged woman. And others in the fandom because it wasn't as queer as they wanted, or focused on what they wanted.

And let's be honest, I'm amazed the show was as unapologetically and canonically queer as it was. Thanks to the efforts of Jac, Kathryn and the team behind it.

Agatha is based on a character that's been around for 50 years, and has being nothing but a nanny/governess for superpowered kids because she happens to be a witch, until relatively recently. Even when we had had part of her back story for decades, she was never that important, and she isn't even evil. Dare I say, she hasn't been that relevant until her run with the Scarlet Witch, and Kathryn Hanh's interpretation of her.

Agatha All Along, is not only an spin off of Wandavision, but also part 2 of the whole story. OF COURSE, Billy would be a very important part of her story, something that was touched upon in WV, but was also part of her (and I'm using this word very loosely) redemption arc.

She shared a kinship with Billy in WV, because he was magick. She wanted to understand how he worked, because she knew what Wanda did, and she wanted Wanda's powers. The fact that she could identify Billy immediately, even when she hoped it was Nicky, was important, but people were to busy whining about Billy having an episode. One episode that was also relevant to the ending of the show. And the full arc of the saga's mythology.

Is the show perfect? Not at all. Did I enjoy the heck out of it and can appreciate what it actually did? Absolutely yes. Can I appreciate how GOOD it was at storytelling? Hell yes.

It was a show absolutely centered in women. Good women, bad women, women of color, old women, younger women. The one man was a queer, three-year old in the body of a 16 year old. And mind you, this character has been making queer history, since his very recent creation (2005). This show is unapologetically queer, we had a huge ass Trans flag that said Protect trans kid in huge black letters being very prominent in the shots. It's HUGE, and not even by marvel/disney standards. The show had nothing to do with coming out, or acceptance, or people dealing with phobia. It was about queer people existing and being queer. Hell, you could make a case that they were saying "being a witch" is an allegory of being queer.

Every single member of the coven could be queer. They hinted at it with Jen, at the very least.

Let's talk about the rest of the coven. Who for me were the absolute highlight of the show.

Alice, generational trauma, the protection witch. The most tragic to me. She saw her curse, as a lie. As something her mother made to neglect her. And yet she couldn't keep a job, she resented her mother, and she had to be reminded of her every moment because her mom was a famous Rockstar. She goes to the road, she comes to terms with her mom's love for her, how her mom's version of the ballad was a protection spell, as much as Alice hated it, and she manages to defeat her curse. She protects her coven. Only to immediately die. Her dialogue with Death was devastating:

Alice: That's it? That's all the... That's all the time I get? Death: If I had a nickel... Alice: This can't be the end. It has to be the beginning. I finally broke the curse. I mean, I can really do something with my life now. Death: You're a Protection Witch. Alice: Yeah. Death: You died protecting someone. You ready? Alice: No.

Heart wrenching, unjust, and beautiful.

Lilia, who was plagued by the gift/curse of seeing her and others destiny. Ignoring it for over half her life, staying stagnant, because she was reeling from the fact that she saw the death of her family, her entire coven, she told them and it changed nothing. She was chased out of villages because she could see the tragedies coming. Who refused to be with a coven, love a coven because the heartbreak of losing her first was too much. Who decided that cheap tricks, was better than seeing the tragedies coming, and refused her gifts. She hated the appropriation of her culture, but when the time came, she accepted it, and moved on. She goes to the road, and finds her coven. "I needed you, my coven." And she died, going back to the start, because she'd rather relieve it all again, the good, the bad and the ugly, that keep neglenting herself. "I loved being a witch".

That without going into the absolute masterpiece that was episode 7. Pulling a non-linear story, as solidly as they did, is certainly not easy. And they did it, beautifully.

Jennifer, who was magick-bound for over a century, to the point that she doubted her knowledge and herself. And yet she made a name for herself, she was a successful entrepreneur (she cheated a little, but you know capitalism is the true villain here). A black woman who was outstanding at her craft, healing and being a midwife, to the point that she became an inconvenience to the fragile, egomaniacal, white men in the medical field. Where they sought out a way to stop her indefinitely. And yet she kept going, and survived. Even at the end of the road. She looked at the person who bound her, and said: "I deny your power over me. You hold nothing." And she unbounded herself, and got out. Not because of Billy or even Agatha but in spite of her. Jennifer survived, just like she has been doing for however many centuries, and she flew towards the sunset. Because 'She's the path ahead'. The growth she had, from being selfish the first few episodes, because that's how she survived, to screaming for Lilia when she decided to stay behind. Jennifer clawed her way out of the road, the bound. And she deserved it.

As for Billy... he's so much like her mother. He accidentally created the road, because he's equally, if not more, unaware of his powers as Wanda. Wanda at least thought she got powers from Hydra's experimentation. Billy isn't even supposed to exist. Billy who was "10 years old" but, realistically like 2 weeks old. Who got thrown into the body of this guy, who he doesn't know, and who doesn't even knows himself, because he doesn't remembers, with powers he doesn't quite understands and then he starts piercing moments of his life together, because he feels this massive hole in his being. And finds his answers on Agatha. He truly believes the road is real, that can take him to someone who while not have the answers, might feel the same way as him. Who was his other half, he doesn't remembers it, but he feels it.

His magick, is like Wanda's, Chaos magick, it manifests without his real knowledge or intention, but by his feelings. He created the road, with all the knowledge he thought he had, the road follows the rules Agatha and Nicky created when they made the ballad. Even if he doesn't know it.

Is the show about Billy? Not necessarily. Billy is important to Agatha, because Billy is Agatha's son now. Not by blood, not even by magic, but by choice. As much as she denies it, her "calculated risk", had something to do in the way she saw Billy, and how she wanted to protect him, in a way she couldn't protect Nicky.

And finally, Agatha. Agatha who built a reputation of killing all her covens. Starting with her mother's. Because her mother sentenced her to death, because she was born evil. And she took that and ran with it. She connived, and betrayed, but she survived, something she's extremely proud of. Do I wish we had seen more of her past? 100%. I wanted to know how she got the Darkhold, how she actually met Rio, how they fell in love. Does not really knowing diminish her storyline? Not at all. Because what we got was really nuanced, and it's going down the hill with people focusing only in the romantic relationship aspect. If anything, I think this is being reductive of Agatha, not Billy. The fact that she needs the love interest for people to focus on her, regardless if that love interest is a man or a woman.

But even then, what did people think it would happen? Agatha Harkness had a romantic relationship with Death itself. It was never going to be a romance, it was always a tragedy. Death who took her son away, Death who gave her time with her son, but never specify how much time. Who then followed her around, torturing her with its presence, and we know Agatha is resentful and can hold a grudge.

Death who kindly stopped for her.

Rio knew Agatha would always resent her, even when she gave Nicky more time, because at the end of the day, she would always had to take him away. As much as it was a kindness to let him be born, to take him while he and Agatha were asleep. She had to take him anyways, and Agatha would never forgive her.

Agatha letting the witchfolk think that she exchanged her son for the Darkhold, or made a deal with Mephisto, and saying it was because "the truth was much worse" had nothing to do with *our* perception of worse. But hers. A powerful witch who couldn't save her son, a woman who couldn't keep her son alive. A witch who let her lover take her son away. Using her son to lure more witches. Then using the song, that her son lovingly created for themselves, to lure even more witches to their doom, just for her to be more powerful and keep living (and potentially still looking relatively young). A song that was special to them, corrupted, because she wanted more power and killing witches, something she knew Nicky didn't like. Witchfolk thinking Agatha got the Darkhold trading her son, was better than what she thought of herself.

She saw Nicky in Billy, how he didn't like killing witches (as accidentally as Billy did), how he mourned, how he somehow still believed in Agatha, even with his barbs at her.

She sacrificed herself, not necessarily because of Billy. But because of Nicky, her boy she couldn't save. And yet here is another boy she loved, not the same but very similarly, one she could save.

Billy didn't manipulate her, (and even if he were to, Agatha would probably be proud of him for that) he's been consistent in wanting to understand Agatha. He's curious. Hell, he didn't even need to come back for Agatha, he had gotten out (wherever out was for him) but he came back, because he cared about Agatha. And if some people can't see that, because he happens to be a he... well, no matter what had happened in the show, those people wouldn't see it any other way.

Agatha becoming a ghost, and immediately seeking Billy, because she loves him, and she likes the way he sees her, not good or innocent, but knowledgeable, and with the potential to do good. And she sees Nicky in him, and his potential too.

There is so much more analysis, and I might share more thoughts later, but for now, this is it. I still wanted more, Agatha's story with the Darkhold, the Salem seven, more of the coven, yet not necessarily for the show or the episodes to be longer, but I would love to see if they expand on this, on another spinoff.

[ducktracy]

i've been in a very "nostalgic for SpongeBob" mood lately and that's warranted a lot of reflecting on Baby Me being a Sponge fanatic and thinking of what she'd think of now. and i have to say that one of my favorite parts of doing what i do--and also the most stupidly niche--is that one of my first online hyperfixations i recall having was SpongeBob production music. i remember animating magical girl transformations in Flipnote to SPONGEBOB MUSIC. i remember feeling so smart researching all the songs and getting to hear them without any dialogue on top. very gratifying to 11 year old me. i was and am still very fixated on production music, and so i always get very excited when seeing uploads of these songs and spotting a screenshot of a scene i worked on among them. one of my favorite aspects of watching episodes premiere is seeing what music they added on top of scenes i touched. it's just neat how many facets my thankfulness for Doing What I'm Doing gets to reach. i'm never not thinking of how grateful i am to be doing what i'm doing

[townofcrosshollow]

Yo! I'm planning on running a game of Apocalypse World in a custom weird west setting on Fridays. Here's the pitch:

Three decades ago, in April of 1979, the entire Western half of North America was destroyed in the blink of an eye by forces beyond our comprehension. But when the affected governments sent patrols into the rotted hellscape, they found a silver lining- the residue left behind, which had seeped into the groundwater, formed crystals deep below the earth, and mutated life as it moved up the food chain, was also incredibly useful. Resettlement was subsidized, and the new frontier was repopulated. Miners brave the acidic atmosphere in the caves to extract valuable crystals, cowboys herd mutant cows at ranches that render their milk into gasoline, and peacekeeping soldiers clash with local lawmen as they both try to handle the gangs of outlaws running the new West. It's been quite a while since the dreams of that new frontier drew in the masses, and you've just arrived in the state of New Colorado. Maybe you're trying to escape the law. Maybe you're hoping to make a fortune prospecting. Or maybe you've got a score to settle. One thing's for sure- there's something rotten here, and it ain't just the blighted hellscape. Gangs peddling illegal moonshine, money-hungry mining companies, strange small town cults, and corrupt lawmen- just the sort of adventure you'd expect from a new Wild West.

If you're interested in that, I've got a form you can fill out here to sign up! (If you're a mutual, DM me if you want 👀)

[ganondoodle]

i might have talked about it before but i kinda wanna rant a lil how nonsensical both the "getting of the time reversal" and "giving zelda the mastersword" things are

bc ... to get the time reversal powers you touch a ... ghost of the enigma stone that used to be there .. and i GUESS it was the one zelda has now but used to be raurus and since its now linked to her we get .... link being astral projected into ghosty dimension similar to the other sages and we get zeldas sage power, but .. how does that even work, zelda, having supposedly long lost her soul to being a dragon is somehow still able to do the whole sage thing of taking you to fogland mclight dimension, just doesnt tell you the same stuff the other sages do word for word (thank GOD)

but how did that even manifest? even ignoring her soul being GONE how can she make that oath or whatever while shes not awake and just floating there, what business does the ghost engima stone have there and why dont the others have something similar to where they were once stored (in the forgotten temple backrooms tm bc we cant have the sonau NOT touch a thing in this world all of the sudden-)

is it bc they were like ... released of their holder from the old sages since they had long died and those go back to being big floaty stones (for whatever reason .. shouldnt have sonias stone done the same when gan took it then??)- also zeldas ability being put into the hand ability wheel while we gotta chase down the damn sages any time you want to use one of their abilities is so unfair .. you could have made the sages usable .. but no ..

its a relatively small complaint compared to the rest but it still bothers me bc it just ... feels so contrived, like it feels to be so clearly just some loose string to get you that power

the same with the weird ass time bubble to get the mastersword back in time to zelda just so she can have a flimsy reason to do what she does (we wouldnt want the character this series is named after be an actual CHARACTER instead of a pretty prize at the end now would we??) and its jsut so .......... why not have her grab the broken master sword as shes falling into the past (SOMEHOW) or it falling down with her bc really link shouldnt maybe not be able to hold it anymore- wait he reaches for her with that hurt hand .. so he did drop it .. and it somehow got back to him instead of being put into the past WITH zelda right then and there?? why??

(also ..rauru just teleporting him to the sky island ... wasnt that arm the last bits of raurus physical body? was his ghost just chilling up there the whole time- ... can ghosts in totk control and teleport their physical, dead limbs to whereever their ghost is? why can a ghost even be so far apart from the rest of his remains .... or was that spiraling energy stuff just him slowly turning into a ghost there ... but my point about ghosts controlling their dead limbs still stands- WAIT he ALSO has to be able to ... SEE somehow bc he grabbed link before he fell too .... the way he talks when you find him chilling on the island tho is like hes seeing it all for the first time too .. so .. he wasnt a ghost yet and still knew where to go .. even tho the place is somehwere totally different to where it used to be and if he became a ghost right there why couldnt you see him when he grabbed link... if the hand that grabbed link wasnt actual the one that fell off gan why does it look like it then? bc gan hand was long and thin with long ass class and raurus actual ghost hands are barely different from typical human ones- .. i think im having more thoughts about this point thant nintendo had over the entirety of making the game .... also fuck rauru for doing the fake out "oooh noooo im fading awayyy" thing just so he doesnt have to answer any of your thousand questions i guess, only to return at the end going, "actually, i want my arm back and yours was fine anyway lol, and here sonia is here too for some reason! also check this out! zelda is back and you didnt have to do shit, isnt that cool?")

the weird time bubble makes me so angry when i remmeber it exists bc it just .. makes NO sense?? what even is it?? if it was a foreshadowing to zelda learning to use her new time powers and you find more over time in the game where she manifests mroe and more until she manages to return on her own like it was kinda teased with sonia tellign her shell find a way to use her new powers to go back since she (SOMEHOW) also got herself here and that point going nowhere like so many other points (hows it going impah, foudn a way to get zelda back yet? dont bother, turns out the solution was 'beat the bad guy' and it all solved itself) OK fine, that works

BUT ITS NOT a foreshadowing of anything, the time bubble thing is just THERE and it drives me nuts, it really only adds to this whole game feeling so weirdly held together by loose strings and it just gets worse the more you think

[kijosakka]

Assistant Noah AU: How would Alejandro react to learning that Assistant Noah was originally a contestant in Season 1, but Noah tricked his team into voting him off super early... But Chris somehow found out, and Noah became Chris Mclean's Assistant as a punishment... How would Alejandro feel about learning this? 😅

assuming the timeline here, and that initially the circumstances of noah’s elimination is the usual ‘i was promised a 5-star resort, i didn’t get one, i’m going to get one’ and assistant noah’s usual Spite i think there is something interesting to be found there:

alejandro is the villain of world tour; the antagonist. with it comes a drive to win, so it’d be easy to say while he may respect it, he would look down on a play to just, get yourself out of the game. that being said, that reaction is more in-line with someone like heather, and alejandro is an opportunistic villain — i can see him respecting such a play, and admiring it in some way.

^ adding onto this, while i'm not sure this is too inline with what we're given in canon, alejandros motivations seem to be less about fame or money (seeing as his father is a diplomat) and more about proving a point specifically to his brother.

and, while not refined in the slightest, there is a degree of skill involved in nuking a single social situation so hard you get yourself voted out near-unanimously. and alejandro, different from someone like say heather, understands using the game to a different ends than what's being promised by it, ergo; respect and admiration.

(maybe even moreso since it is a very isolating move -- at least when he plays charmer villain he's hoping to get a good chunk of cash from it. all noah was hoping for was a luxury summer and he didn't even get that.)

not to mention it speaks to more character beyond the action itself -- a character i do think alejandro would, at the very least, be intrigued by. building off the previous assistant noah ask, i'd imagine alejandro would use it as a point of teasing, assuming it to be a kind of sore spot for noah.

which he isn't entirely wrong about -- since it wasn't so much a choice and more of a 'do this or else' i can see noah here being leagues more salty about his job and the circumstances thereof and looking back not-so-fondly on how he even landed it in the first place.

anyway in conclusion: it makes alejandro stumble harder into being a smitten loser and noah remains Bitter

[lover-of-skellies]

You ever text someone, and their entire texting style makes your whole body cringe?

[cornmazehater]

someone needs to take jenna and fli as a whole away from me this game is feeding the autism demons

every song I recognize in game is another song I need to listen to in it's entirety and then need to weave it into Jenna's backstory

also I keep getting jumpscared by bosses. I have never been so back

[sixtysixproblems]

no amount of canon or lack of fanon is going to stop me from being convinced bly & ponds were besties. i'll be sitting alone in my pit of delusion about this until the day i die

i see it as attatched-at-the-hip-since-kamino type close. i mean, you'd have to be in order to survive being around fox, cody, & wolffe's nonsense 24/7 (along with bonus little bro rex, who while i love, is on rare occaisions also a menace). ponds is the protective, responsible ori'vod with a soft spot for bly in particular, but also cant help but be a bit of an asshole older brother...aka he 100% teased bly about aayla incessently lmao. bly meanwhile is the quiet, kind middle child who is deep down tired of everyone's bs but conflict avoidant, in contrast ponds's extroverted & exasperated personality. they both open up to eachother and are comfortable around eachother in a way they can't be with anything else. ponds is a steadying influence for bly and talks him down from overthinking, and can get him to come out of his shell better than anyone else. bly in turn is one of the very rare people ponds is actually transparent about his emotions with, and bly can get him to take a step back and not bite off more than he can chew.

and then the war starts. they're both on geonosis, they both survive somehow, but the hours waiting where they didn't know if the other made it is (up to that point) the worst of their life. there's worse in store.

and now ponds's reasurrances that everything will turn out alright seem even less airtight then on kamino, and even bly can't even drag an honest awnser out of ponds about how he's doing half the time. they're seperated for long periods of time, and when the rare days they reunite they're both too exausted or busy for much catching up. it's hard enough to stay alive in a war, much less stay in contact.

but they try to remember to send eachother stupid memes, try to find something to talk about that isn't the all encompassing topic of the war, try to make the most of the late nights at 79s, try try try anyways. ponds frequently and with admirable commitment tries to convince bly to "do something about that general of yours". bly meanwhile finds out ponds gets called mom by his troops and gets a kick out of it, and also teases him about his matching haircut with his general-- or lack thereof. they'll make it work, somehow.

and then, ponds dies.

[tamymew]

found the energy to actually make one (1) ref yippeeeeee

+ stuff i drew like,,, almost a month ago

[technicalknockout]

my past has come to haunt me (old art on my feed)

[cloudyydraws]

Your art is so gorgeous!! I love the painted style, it looks like it would be right at home in a fancy frame hanging up on the wall. How many hours typically go into one of your finished pieces?

ahhh omg thank you so much anon!!!!! ⸜(*ˊᗜˋ*)⸝

Typically, a single subject piece with no background can range anywhere from 3-10+ hrs depending on how much rendering i feel like doing!

The Bloomfes Kanade piece took around ~8ish hours in total (granted i started the upperbody when it got leaked and finished it up the day after the full card came out)

The An + Kohane WTWG took ~8hrs as well, but here's a slight comparison in rendering for abt 1~1.5hrs worth of work in the middle of the process if you're interested:

I also change up my workflow sometimes, like anhane (not including the bg) was all on 1 layer on this one w/ a barely passable sketch + i just started slapping colors together with kanade's on 1 layer

But smaller things like my 2 ocs took around 3hrs since I wanted to keep it simple ! It only took a little longer than I expected since I was using it to test out some brushes