eyesfromhell

[eyesfromhell]

If I was gonna write an evil genocide guy with a cartoonishly evil sounding name I wouldn't not name him Bezalel Smotrich. By the way the literal meaning of Bezalel is "in the shadow of god". If I wanted to be really on the nose.

[eyesfromhell]

In 2020, right after Covid kicked off in earnest, I wrote a snippet for a creative writing class. It was set in that zombie setting I'm always tinkering with, and it was about a bunch of zombies who've figured out how to hunt on the interstate by throwing themselves in front of cars and then swarming the drivers when they get out to help- the effect of which is a grimly pragmatic, comically anti-pedestrian turn in American driving culture. About an hour after submitting this story I got a heartfelt and sincere note back from the TA about how if current events were getting to me there were a lot of campus resources available, to which I replied cheerfully, no, I'm fine, pandemic had nothing to do with this I just really like stories about killing and dying and violence and so on. Not in those words, I can read the room, I know when I'm in a kettle with the burner on. Ultimately one of several examples of how that space (I think largely expecting attempts at lit fic) was just really not acclimated to my baseline proclivities as a writer

[eyesfromhell]

Tuco Salamanca: Thinker 5, vague precog/dangersense for big problems and conspiracies against him and his family, but blind against the immediate, improvised attacks (season 2 episode 2 "Grilled" 19m 10s). Trigger likely involved a feeling of inevitable doom that was tragically fulfilled despite his efforts to stop it.

Walter White/Heisenberg: after decades of trying to solve a problem with a tangential chemistry flavour, capped with getting a cancer that requires chemotherapy, Walter does get the chemical-based Tinker 6 power that he dreamed of. However, as the actual problem he was trying to solve was a contradiction between cultural individualism/toxically masculine self sufficiency vs being repeatedly put in positions of pity and community reliance, his power forces him to rely on others in order to get results. In order to enter a tinker fugue state he's forced to surrender to the help of another pair of hands- hands that seemingly always end up clumsier and stupider than he'd like. This reliance on another collaborator and the intensified frustrations with both himself and his lab partner after every tinkering session has lead some to argue he should have a 0 or -1 master rating.

Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill: Lightning Blaster 4-7 as previously established by other researchers. Very possibly a cauldron cape as he has little enough shard influence to avoid using his powers completely.

[eyesfromhell]

[eyesfromhell]

Close enough welcome back Cherish from Parahumans

[eyesfromhell]

I had a friend who was seriously injured from walking behind one of those

he also told me he did war crimes in Gaza so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[eyesfromhell]

Worm would be 70% better if we got a whole interlude about parahuman taxes.

[eyesfromhell]

This is for the Valentine's Day event on Cauldron. My gift recipient was Distraktion. His prompt: Thomas Calvert's power actually works against him when it comes to dating...

[eyesfromhell]

have you ever been told you look like a celebrity?

yes (who? 👀)

no

[eyesfromhell]

*after watching Bullet Train* I think Lisa is more of a Diesel. I mean her whole schtick (other than collecting information) is causing trouble

while we're talking about character appearance headcanons

[eyesfromhell]

Emma moments before taunting Taylor for crying after her mom died:

this drawing made me realize Tattletale mirrors Emma and Taylor-as-a-bully was there from day 2 when she condoned Tattletale's antics. (I am that drawing of a story's point going over a reader's head)

Having an extremely specific problem after trying a traditional pencil crayon look for an older Tattletale portrait. Somehow, during the slow work from grubby sketch to rendering, she became way too hot. And said traditional art style means I can’t change this with regular digital tools, I have to redraw sections of her face entirely.

That I did with optical colour mixing using hatching and a limited palette.

Do I roll with hot Tattletale or do I suffer?

[eyesfromhell]

realizing that armsmaster's trigger was definitely a situation where he was overwhelmed with a bunch of different issues and unable to triage. granting him the ability to actually have a solution for every problem means that he doesn't have an excuse *not* to.

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[eyesfromhell]

Just found out citrine is a gem.

thought she had yellow powers so decided to be citrus themed and I mean, an Ambassador can't wear oranges so she's citrus themed only in color

(on further googling 'citrine' means citrus-colored, and the gem is called that because it is citrus colored)

[eyesfromhell]

Let's do this one last time.

My name is Victoria Dallon. I was bitten by a radioactive policeman.

[eyesfromhell]

So In the original X-Men comic where Magneto appeared, before any kind of civil rights metaphor was a glimmer in anyone's eye, he was doing a fairly unnuanced "Bow-before-me" routine, seizing control of nuclear missiles because he was a supervillain and that's what you do. In the original Ultimate X-Men by Mark Millar they reproduced that basic dynamic in the first six-issue arc (although not with nuclear missiles, but something equally high-collateral and terroristic.) He had much more of an express ideology there- a very simplistic 2edgy4me blanket misanthropy about humans, tinged with malthusian ecoterrorist vibes- in a way that harkened back to the cartoonish completely unsympathetic and unnuanced silver-age faire while also gesturing in the direction of a guy with enough of a party line to build a global cult following around. This was deliberately incompatible with an eventual claremontian face-turn but it was something.

Anyway I think a lot of people want Magneto to be a hero or at least an anti-hero these days (understandable, he has a very cool helmet) and so for a while I've been thinking about how and if you could hybridize all these beats. I think it's doable. I think you could build a version of Magneto where him stealing a bunch of nuclear missiles from the government is framed as basically morally neutral at worst, honestly kind of a lateral move, where it's more about not letting toddlers touch the hot stove. Magneto who's magneto less out of identitarian mutant supremacy and more in a way where he's exhausted with the human condition and fully convinced that the only way the children are going to stop stealing each other's lunch money is if someone with the requisite power (I.E. him) makes them stop. (In a way that functionally wraps back around to mutant supremacy, but that's not the explicit party line). A guy who'd intervene in the same way Daredevil or Spider-Man would if he saw someone getting mugged or threatened, who then immediately turns around and bloodlessly steals an entire bank vault to fund his asteroid house, because he's not about to take a moral lecture on the sanctity of property from fucking Goldman-Sachs. A guy who's pissed at Xavier at least in part because if he had globe-spanning psychic powers the world certainly wouldn't still look like this. Do you see my vision.

[eyesfromhell]

"Don't let the Thinker talk?" Wow. What happened to free speech? I guess the Government is making opinions illegal now! I was just gonna say the exact words to make you kill yourself, don't get so triggered. Heh. Triggered. You're probably a Cauldron cape anyway, would explain your lack of repect for our Constitution.