cedric-strange

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So long story short, someone asked for a size comparison and I ended up spending a long-ass time and two sittings making my own Tenna for just this… 💀

Worth it though. He looks so smooth.

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Beholden, my new brainchild. They usher in my Toby Fox Trash Era.

Degaussre (( “de-gozer” )) is a degaussing coil for CRTs that Toriel bought to help with maintaining Tenna. They’re basically his massage therapist. They might be close to the big man himself, but outside of Tenna’s studio their illusions of being a particularly illustrious individual are shattered. For you see, their “home” is shoved behind the TV with the dust and dirt.

They’re, uh…*very* invested in helping others. Especially Tenna. They might have a guilt-driven savior complex, shhh.

Next I wanna make a pair of criminally-inclined craft scissors whose favorite thing in the world is unauthorized haircuts. And they shall be called “Snips”.

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This was supposed to be a “quick” warm-up…

Then I got ideas.

Ha ha, funny TV man go brrrrrr…

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New babygurl.

Local daytime radio host at his limit trying to hold things together by painting rainbows over it; is not succeeding.

Ray Delaney is usually the head honcho on the radio channel when Darcy’s away from the mic. In general the channel is referred to as “Olmsted Overcast”, but I’m thinking Ray likes to call his segment something different.

He’s trying his best but the more he tries the more lost he becomes. The abyss is beckoning, guys.

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It begins…

…I’m about to be absolutely insufferable.

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So…I FULLY missed the mark on the FE3H style here. Sssshoot.

I’ve been slowly making progress on a vaguely corvid // magpie-themed, Joan of Arc-adjacent general in the Knights of Seiros who happens to be Seteth’s secret spouse.

This is Calais! Or the beginning of them, anyway.

Calais is in a similar boat to Jeralt, but uh…obviously never became disillusioned enough to jump ship.

But they are only marginally older than him, and kind of doubled down on trying to hold things together after Jeralt evaporated. Rhea was distraught, and Calais felt a responsibility to shoulder much of that burden for having been granted the blood of Saint Seiros. They had to show their gratitude…and their worth. It wasn’t just duty to them, it was an emotional bond they wanted to keep alive. The only group of people worthy of being called their ‘family’.

So…Calais doesn’t really care about pronouns. They just kind of accept that most people will settle at just calling them “she” despite their obviously masculine presentation. If they were asked, they would say that they > he > she would be the order of preference, but they generally don’t care what they’re called because they’ve had enough time to become extremely secure in their own identity. They have made peace with the fact that there are limits to human understanding (( and sometimes empathy )), so they don’t really give a whole lot of thought or energy to it anymore. It’s kind of a Sailor Uranus situation.

But yeah! My dear Mother of Magpies is coming along pretty nicely. If not a bit slowly.

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I don’t think there has ever been, nor ever will be, a character that makes me feel worse about “growing out of” TV than Mr. “Ant” Tenna.

I’M SORRY, the amount of PS2 escapism I engaged in as a traumatized adolescent ensured that I now have a geriatric spine. I can’t do that shit in front of the TV anymore…and the abolition of Saturday morning cartoon blocks ensured I’d never again, give a single fuck.

Perhaps to fire my nostalgia neurons, I could figure out how to run my own custom programming block on a tasty little CRT TV…I miss them so. I might even turn the programming block into a radio channel at night…

I’ve been on a fast track to creating personalized comfort recently, I swear…

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May or may not now be working on a couple of cosplays because my new haircut last month accidentally was perfect for one variant.

This is my life for the rest of 2025.

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So I’ve been thinking about something.

Most people are able to get invested in at least one morally dubious character, yeah?

And some people will see which morally dubious character(s) you’ve “adopted” and be like “that’s gross and we can’t be friends”.

It’s really kind of on an individual basis where that line is drawn, though.

Aside from some pretty immovable, loose definers of basic human decency, that’s a pretty interesting mire to decide to wade into.

Where I stand there, mostly, is that unless the character has committed a cardinal sin against humanity that’s inherently tied to their personal beliefs in a very specific way, nobody has any business telling anyone they’re bad and wrong for liking X character.

< Spoilers will be discussed in this post, so brace for that. >

However.

I am personally most interested in the type of morally dubious character where you have a hard time knowing where to stand on the issues they present.

Among the first examples I can think of are Viktor from “Arcane” and Edelgard from “Fire Emblem: Three Houses”.

And those two have something intrinsically in common.

Their Achilles’ Heel, their fatal flaw, is the way their stubborn conviction in their beliefs and the path it sets them on eventually renders them completely unreceptive towards any other approach to achieving their goals. That, regardless of their original noble intentions, they couldn’t weather the darkness they endured in a way that didn’t lead them to a completely detrimental, warped execution of their wishes for a better tomorrow.

I have a personal bias towards Viktor so I tend to give him a lot more leeway than he probably ultimately deserves, regardless of the nuance of his situation. I see a lot of myself in him, so my immediate instinct is to see his redeeming qualities and think “X traits don’t always lead to X result.” But in Viktor’s case, it quite literally does.

Unless I’m mistaken, in every timeline he has a hand in developing Hextech, that is a path he never fails to walk. The kind of obsessive dedication he lends towards problem-solving, especially from the most promising (( albeit dangerous )) angles always seems to lead him to realizing he should have quit while he was ahead - and it’s always a bit “too little, too late”.

Human curiosity is another double-edged sword I love to mull over, but that’s for another time.

Now, Edelgard. Very much of the same can be said for Edelgard.

SPOILER WARNING:

She suffered greatly at what she perceives to be, the Hands of the Church of Seiros.

I can only speculate that connection was made because of the emphasis the Church and society at large place on the presence and power of crests. Something that seems to be dwindling. Again, I can only speculate, but my best guess is that those who originally unnaturally inherited those Nabatean Crests have become so far removed from the current gene pool that the potency of any potentially inherited ill-begotten power has severely waned.

HOWEVER.

The fact that she directs her ire at the social structure enforced by the Church towards the Church itself as a priority is…questionable at best. The Church of Seiros is far from perfect, and one could argue it can’t even rightly claim to be benevolent. But the way she ended up allowing that pain, intentionally or not, to compromise her values that, at their core, are far from malicious…it’s quite adept at giving pause. I still haven’t decided how I feel about her approach this many years later.

I could expound upon this topic by bringing up my personal favorite, Seteth, and his hesitation to let go of the current system because he truly sees it as the least harmful option for Fodlan after the genocide of his people…but again. A subject for another day, perhaps.

There is something intoxicating about this sort of character archetype.

Personally, I think it’s because they manage to be the closest to encapsulating the entire spectrum of humanity and all we’re capable of.

But I don’t think I’ll ever tire of returning to pondering this sort of thing.

And to an extent, I don’t think I ever should stop thinking about this subject. Being aware of the diversity of spirit that can arise from simplybeing human is something I value, and I think it can give myself and many others some good tools for confronting life’s pitfalls.

The spectrum of humanity and all we are capable of is a subject that will forever fascinate me.

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This freak is all that’s been on my mind recently.

Professor Darcy Hawthorne, He // They.

“Small town” radio host who takes fucking around and finding out very seriously.

I’ve got some more about him here.

I guess…this is my new special interest…

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Another painted portrait of Miraig.

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A design for Miraig planned for a project called “Deathbed Dreaming”.

They would appear in this at an earlier point in the story.

Hope you like their magical Doctor Octopus Chaos Hands.

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My slow mental collapse is reaching its climax because I kind of want some really bad things to happen to the apple-fruit company to vindicate my lost sanity.

I guess on top of everything else I gotta actually save shit with a real background now because FOR SOME FUCKING REASON iOS don’t believe in that transparent-background horse-hockey.

Anyway here’s my new buddy, Desmond. Desmond is dead and I killed him. My dormant brain willed it to be so in the dream that created him, and I’m not gonna argue with that decision because it doesn’t like back-talk.

So…Desmond is a very devoted cleric who practiced weaving a protective ritual day in and day out on the monastery grounds. Even his martyrdom couldn’t keep him from protecting the place. His grave is in a corner of the yard he paced, shaded by a modest young tree and bearing Lillies-of-the-Valley…although his cloak brandished Hyacinth imagery. He still casts the very ritual he was struck down for practicing on occasion, since his dedication and affinities with certain cosmic elements changed him into a sort of guardian spirit.

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Okay hear me out.

I am for sure, a Viktor Apologist.

But you wanna know what else I am?

…A Sevika Supremacist.

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If I had a nickel for every biblically-adjacent mechanical savior I attached myself to in fiction, I’d have two nickels. This is the first. KOS-MOS was a light of hope in the darkest time of my life and I couldn’t be here without the inspiration she gave me. I gave her Precious Opal and Hepatica. If you know, you know.

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Cameo portrait of Seteth from “Fire Emblem: Three Houses”. He’s so precious to me. I chose Peruvian Opal and Easter Lily for him.

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Cameo portrait of Neeko with Ethiopian Opal and Passion Flower. I was playing her a lot in LoL at the time, ha ha.