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!!!blushing YC below text!!

Hm? Why yes this is E-Soul without his mask. When did he get so buff and macho? It’s his workout regime of killing love interests, crying about his dead love interest, and pure fucking spite. He’s still cute though!! Blushing Yang Cheng below:

And although version

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AU WHERE NOTHING BAD HAPPENS AND THEY ARE HERO AND MANAGER (wip)

Older shang chao gets a pony tail bc i like pony tails

xia is going to be here to,sicne thsi is a 2 part drawing but i didnt get to her yet

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I don't actually remember what a polaroid looks like but I'm too scared to look it up now

My sister saw how Yang Cheng was sleeping and immediately made the loudest snore in the world

Don't mind how weirdly made the background is i just did it all with vibes

Sketch

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I do the opposite of gatekeeping, I’m not going to shut up until you like this thing as much as I do

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Nice layouts. ↻ && ♡ to use unl. @porcelanitaa.

I tried my best to make okay looking layouts considering the character has little media from what I saw in the wiki but uhh yeah I hope it looks okay even tho it's not rlly angelcore,, I js don't do too well w aesthetics 😭 cr : @lovestis for helping w/ the transparents.

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DEMO (prologue / 11th of January 2025) || An IF based on & inspired by the show "Arcane". Time Fall is a drama interactive fiction story with steampunk & cyberpunk elements, set in the dual state-cities of Delphora and Draeken, also known as The Spire and The Depths. It's meant to follow complicated relationships, complicated choices, and complicated consequences. It is written with an 18+ audience in mind due to heavy themes and topics such as death, use of drugs and alcohol, swearing, violence, (optional & skippable) explicit sexual content etc.

Time does not wait for anyone, even for the one that controls it.

After the bloody aftermath of Draeken's rebellion against Delphora, you're left an orphan. Your mother lies dead beneath a pile of bodies, crushed under the boots of the Time Watchers, and your older brother, Mylo, is nowhere to be found. Bruised and scared, you're taken in by Marek, your mother's friend, together with a few other strays he managed to catch hiding in the shadows of the night.

As Marek tends to your wounds and wipes away your tears, the Council of the Eternals, forever holed up in their lavish upper city, is falling apart. They are in complete mayhem and disarray as, unbeknownst to you, one of the five time shards that keep the heart of the city—the Clocktower��working in tune with time's balance has been stolen.

Oddly enough, that lost shard looks suspiciously similar to the strange shiny stone your mother gave you and your brother right before the doomed uprising. With it gone, the flow of time grows slippery and erratic, as the Clocktower starts to decay without its missing piece.

Life in the undercity of Draeken, also known as The Depths, is brutal enough. But when an ill-fated encounter leaves you forever altered—your blood itself changed—you’ll soon realize that time is strange, and the thin fabric of reality a fickle thing. Even more so when it’s something you can no longer just witness ... but may be forced to control.

༒︎ Fully customizable MC including: pronouns, gender, physical appearance, personality, sexuality etc.

༒︎ Choose 1 out of 5 occupations for your MC: underground pit fighter, street artist, black market medic, inventor, or dingy bar singer.

༒︎ Romance 1 out of 4 love interests, all of which are gender-selectable. Engage in hookups with other side characters.

༒︎ Find your brother, or let him find you.

༒︎ Go through an unimaginable physiology-changing experiment and manage to keep your sanity, or become completely unrecognizable to those closest to you.

༒︎ Betray the people you care about or protect them at all costs.

༒︎ Explore the dual state-cities of Delphora and Draeken on a steampunk/cyberpunk background.

༒︎ Become the hero everyone wants you to be, a new world order dictator, or God :D

Maddox / Maxine (M/F) - Rough around the edges and with a body built for combat, M's very demeanour and appearance reflects years of hard living together with you in Draeken. Taken in by Marek after the failed uprising, M had grown overbearingly protective of you on the very first night of sharing a bed with each other as kids. Now, all grown up, M fights in Marek's underground fighting pit to earn their keep, but with every bloodied knuckle, their anger grows—anger at the scraps their people are handed by Delphora’s elite. M is ready to make a change. Are you?

— Possible (romance) routes: Best Friends to Lovers / Best Friends to FWB to Lovers / Best Friends to Lovers to Enemies / Best Friends to Enemies

Riven / Raven (M/F) - A street-smart wildcard loyal only to the highest bidder, R lives by a simple rule: survive and have a good time while doing it. So they smuggle goods and sell information to whoever pays the most. R is not above double-crossing anyone, and they don’t pretend to be. Always charming, confident, and looking at you like they want to take your pants off any second, you’ll have to find out if R is worthy of your trust, or if they’re truly incapable of not betraying those they care about.

— Possible (romance) routes: FWB to Lovers / FWB to Friends / Lovers to Enemies / FWB to Enemies

Seraphim / Seraphina Vaughn (M/F) - The strangest person you have met down in The Depths, and that’s saying something. S is sweet, about as intimidating as a puppy, with a wide and bright smile and … clothes that sometimes seem to be too well tailored to their frame with golden silky linings that make them stand out in ways they’re trying to hide. They’re a people pleaser at heart, but S’s thinly veiled ambition and naivety about the streets of Draeken makes you wonder about their intentions. They seem to be attached to you from the moment you meet. Can you figure out the catch, or will your trust come back to bite you?

— Possible (romance) routes : Friends to Lovers / Lovers to Enemies / Friends to Enemies

Cassian / Calypso Kazimier (M/F) - C’s deep sense of superiority and disdain for The Depths is reflected clearly on their sharp and cold face, their commanding presence demanding respect and authority with every move. As the most influential member of the Order of the Eternals, C makes it their very purpose to ensure that no one can challenge their rule, and that any threat to their control is dealt with swiftly and without mercy. What happens when that threat might be you? C is untouchable, they will make sure to squash you with their own hands. Unless …

— Possible (romance) routes : Corruption Arc / Enemies to Lovers / Enemies to Lovers to Enemies

DISCLAIMER: this is a project in early progress, meaning that there are things that might be subject to change later on.

LINKS: cog forum || ROs physical descriptions || other project || neon dividers credits

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Me, fourteen and making OCs: okay she can’t be a Mary Sue! I can’t make her too cool or everyone will think she’s unbelievable and hate her :((

Me, thirty-two and making OCs: Every person I think is hot in this video game is into this OC and also she gets to be a Special Princess. I’ll commission a propaganda portrait of her as an imperial saint.

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tbhx you fumbled the throuple of the century. think about your behaviour.

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I can't believe they Gwen Stacy'd him.

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@blueangelstone

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TBHX Body Horror Analysis/Ramble

CW: Spoilers for To Be Hero X up to Episode 5. Discussion of body horror, ableism, loss of autonomy, loss of consent, mental illness, trauma, canonical suicide, systemic injustice, vaguely medical horror and similar themes.

I just wanna say, as a lover of body horror, To Be Hero X does body horror RIGHT.

Often what's labelled "body horror" is just ableism, pointing at a physical or mental condition ppl have and saying "oh wow this is horrific, how could anyone live like this?? I'd kms honestly". Which is fucked up, incorrect, and NOT BODY HORROR.

What TBHX hits on is body horror is fundamentally autonomy horror. Changes enacted upon you without your consent. Your physical vessel being made into both prison and hostage. Knowing that you are undergoing metamorphosis, altered irreversably, at the behest of an Other without any way to prevent it. Even your ability to consent being altered. It's alienation. Derealization. Entrapment.

Think about the cyberpunk genre! What the best of cyberpunk get right is that being a cyborg, using prosthetics and aids, or altering yourself isn't the horror.

The horror is when your arm runs on a monthly prescription; the medicine you need to live is made scarce and expensive to keep you compliant; you're lied to about what those meds DO; or you're manipulated by a corporate entity into agreeing to treatment/contracts that are deliberately unclear because the system has made you so desperate to survive. (The horror is ca– [zapped]).

The horror is when your body isn't your own and never will be.

And that fits PERFECTLY with how TBHX's creators have made the show's superpowered society analogous to idol culture. The heroes are altered in real time by the beliefs of fans they rely upon for financial and domestic security. Whether through trust or fear.

(Fear being another kind of trust. Trust that you will hurt me. Trust that you are evil and unsafe and wrong. I can't speak on Chinese culture but Wreck talking like a jilted lover feels so much like subtextual homosexuality during the Hays Code).

And those alterations happen in horrifically literal ways. If all your fans believe you stand tall in the face of adversity, you will never be able to sit again unless that belief is broken.

And Lin Ling (who is totally Little Plum in episode 5 kuro FIGHT ME) is excellent at marketing. He knows from the beginning the importance of propaganda in a hero's career when their powers come from the beliefs of their supporters. But it is such a fundamental part of their society (ep 1 is 41 YEARS after the Commission's founding) that he understands the propaganda and still believes in it.

Let's be honest, he conceptualized all of Moon's commercials. He had a fixation for her and a direct hand in advertising that could literally alter her body and mind. I'm not saying he's a bad dude, obvs. He ends up using his skills and professional knowledge to free her once he understands that she's unwilling. Trapped and having her consent stripped from her. What I'm saying is that TBHX's horror isn't just how people are physically altered by outsider perception. It's also about how completely that power system and its abuses have been normalized. It's not a flaw in the design, it IS the design.

It's horrific not just that you have no say, but that you'll yearn for it. Ask for it. Want it until you understand it's fucking horrifying, and at that point you can't even escape it. Not truly and not ever, ever the same as you once were.

The horror of the Original Nice (and of idols and wartime posterboys) is that his existence became propaganda for the very career that made him fucking kill himself. The only way he could reject his tormentors was to, as his final act, reject the ability they gave him. To fall from grace when he'd been given the ability to fly.

And even that was taken away. His one last "fuck you" was covered up because the ideal of perfection is not allowed to die. There's so many lucrative careers banking on it. His body was too valuable, his image too profitable, his likeness too marketable. So his manager forced it on a no-name marketer.

Lin Ling is VERY poignant body horror for me because his unconscious psyche changes even while he has conscious awareness & cognitive control. His very mental makeup is rewritten to fit into Nice's corpse. His OCD, whether suddenly developed or a worsening pre-existing condition, crops up in such subtle ways Moon has to point it out to him. And isn't that so very much like the mental illnesses developed in a longterm traumatic situation?

It went pretty quickly and a lot of the focus was on him bonding with Moon, but they were fucking trapped in an apartment ALONE. FOR MONTHS. Denied any outside comforts or contact in order to fucking pressure them into signing even more of their autonomy away. They're prisoners in that condo. In their bodies. In their relationship and their abilities. I remember lockdown, people were clawing at their walls at the 2 week mark. And lockdown was for a good reason.

I'm rambling but the physical confinement, being made to volundie and put on an act for thousands, and being heavily controlled and gaslit by management creates a ripe environment for mental illness. I imagine he'll develop PTSD if he ever actually reaches the Post part of the diagnosis (rip ep4 ending). But the mental illness superpower analogue is BRAIN. BODY. HORROR. Not that Lin Ling has OCD, but that it's a normalized part of the career he was manipulated into. That others knew it would happen, how it worked out for the last guy, and morphed Lin Ling into Nice anyways.

That he was forced to volundie after witnessing OG Nice kill himself and yet believes in the system so much to think that it's worth it. That he wants it. Body horror is autonomy horror. Body horror is consent horror.

And Lin Ling's final form is so beautifully metaphorical. Perfect. That streak of white? CHEF'S KISS WITH TONGUE You can escape, but not unchanged. You are free, but you're not the same you anymore.

You died a long time ago. Nice died a long time ago— but no he didn't... that suicide was of some Nice fan. That splattered corpse was Lin Ling. There was an article on it and everything (it only got 1 view).

Lin Ling doesn't belong to himself anymore. He has no identity outside of the one he announced on camera. Lin Ling isn't a man's name anymore, it's a hero's title. He sold himself to a system to protect a girl running from that system so desperately she landed on a deserted island.

If Lin Ling isn't dead and Lin Ling isn't alive... what is he?

Property.

(BODY HORROR DONE FUCKING RIGHT. HIS FANS DIDN'T WANT HIM TO GO SO HE COULDN'T. I might rant more later. I MUST)

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AT THE SAME DAMN TIME YOUR HONOUR🗣️

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no comment

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Okay yeah he’s pretty cute LOL

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I still think the most devastating enshittification I've ever seen has been picrew. One of the few dress-up game websites left that's not flash-based and it's become DRENCHED in ads. You can't open the home screen without being blasted by at least three or four ads. You can't open two picrews in a row without watching a video ad first. When you have a picrew open the ads cover up the different options and sometimes even stack on each other so you have to hit like 2 or 3 different x buttons to get it to go away, only for more to appear seconds later. Evil world

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um... just a normal drawing of cove in a suit

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are there any active olba discord servers out there. they can be tiny. i must yap. i have been contained about this game for the better part of the last five years and i really want to talk abt it with other people!!