gnarlyknuckles

[gnarlyknuckles]

I think you can tell a lot about how rigorous and committed someone's belief in a human right is by how quickly they are able to name people who they think could or should have that right taken away.

[gnarlyknuckles]

I too would like to turn into a worm on occasion please.

What's your opinion on a character's disability staying even when they're shapeshifting? I accidentally gave one of my physically disabled characters shapeshifting powers (he was a shapeshifter before I made him disabled,) and I know getting rid of disability through shapeshifting is bad, so I was thinking I'd have him retain his disability in different forms. Like, if he's turned into a cat, he still has his blindness, old broken bones, and chronic pain, he's just now a cat with those things. Would it be erasure to include things like turning into a worm, which has no painful bones or spinal cord, to make his chronic pain bearable while he waits for pain medication to kick in? Being a worm is obviously not a viable long-term solution, he does not like being it, and it's only a temporary measure to sort of fix one very specific problem (very bad pain day but ibuprofen taking what feels like years to kick in,) but should I scrap that?

Hello gorgeous asker!

Anon I'm absolutely in love with every part of this ask. Perfect, amazing, please don't scrap any part of this. Turning into a worm as a temporary chronic pain relief is my new favorite thing and is very relatable. The character still retaining his disabilities when shapeshifting; even more perfect. Beautiful, excellent, keep writing anon, this sounds so delightful.

~ Mod Virus 🌸

[gnarlyknuckles]

ID: Full body portrait of Cassius, Jasmine, Adrian, Astrid, Harry, Phoebe, and Terence from lonibal’s fanfic The Evans Boy. The portrait imitates a polaroid photo, with handwritten notes at the bottom that read “6th Year Slytherins. Yule Ball, 1994.” The friends are standing in a pine forest speckled with hanging orange lights.

Harry and Astrid stand in the foreground. Harry looks directly at the camera, with a thoughtful expression and his hands gently clasped. He is in rich black robes with silver embellishments. The robes have a high collar and elegant draping cape sleeves. He has on his signature black ear studs and black nail polish, and one side of his chin-length hair is pulled back by a small hair clip shaped like lilies of the valley.

Astrid flanks him on the left, looking straight at him, with a confident stance and her hands on her hips. She is wearing dark pink robes with a motif of jagged teeth as a nod to her favorite quidditch team, the Wigtown Wanderers. She’s also wearing a long maroon cape with pointed shoulders, fingerless gloves, fishnet stockings, and combat boots. Her hair is in her signature buzz cut and she has a bold slash of red across her eyes like a rockstar.

In the background on the left are Cassius, Jasmine, and Adrian. Cassius is in stiff, professional looking blue robes. He surveys the rest of the group with his hands behind his back. Jasmine looks at the camera calmly, dressed in a pink and orange gradient princess dress with a voluminous skirt. Adrian grins next to her in green robes and fluffed-up hair.

In the background on the right are Phoebe and Terence. Phoebe looks up and away dreamily. She’s in a light purple sheath dress with sparkling gold zig zags. Terence is in light green robes with grey accents and a bodice reminiscent of a butterfly’s wings. He looks aside with a thoughtful frown. End ID

The Evans Boy

Ch. 150 "Lily of the Valley"

By: lonibal

There's something (dress robes) idk what (definitely dress robes) about the Yule ball that makes me want to draw (characters in dress robes)

Maybe it's because I don't have to draw legs 🤔

[gnarlyknuckles]

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

[gnarlyknuckles]

It's nice wish fulfillment to see a character be taken care of. I think Zuko is often shoehorned into the role of a care-recipient because he's a fan favorite and has a tragic backstory. And Sokka is, canonically, quite a caregiver. But Sokka has a tragic backstory too. His mom was murdered, his dad is absent, his first girlfriend turned into the moon. Who takes care of Sokka? Anyway, shameless plug, I wrote a fic about this.

paradoxically i think zukka has actually done a lot of damage to queer sokka headcanons. like in some ways of course a popular gay pairing with him allowed people to see his bisexuality but also pairing a outwardly more upbeat brown guy with an emo asian guy has led to so much racial stereotyping that now fanon queer sokka is a masc himbo when in canon the queer implications of his character come from him being a cross-dressing insecure little nerd

[gnarlyknuckles]

[ID: Sokka and Zuko stare at each other inside a tent. Zuko is lying down with Earth Kingdom sleeping clothes while Sokka braces himself above him with Water Tribe sleeping clothes. Around them you can see a candle, two swords, a few small bags, and a book titled “Botanical Manual.” End ID]

The detail of the handprint burn on Zuko's hip makes me want to scream.

Sokka, the plan guy, realizing that he too is capable of some catastrophic, Zuli-level strategic moves…

Based on that scene of @lovelyelbowleech’s War Games.

[gnarlyknuckles]

“--I am Mushi,” the old man is saying, his hand on the shoulder of the glowering boy at his side, “and this is my nephew, Li--” 

and it’s just a name, it shouldn't mean anything to Jet anymore; he abandoned the name his parents had bequeathed him the night his village burned to the ground, and he's never been called anything but the brittle, black rock he'd named himself after since then. 

He should turn away and follow Longshot and Bee, he knows he should--but the sound of that name halts him in his tracks.

Li, climb down from that tree, it’s dinner time...Here, Li, you rock the baby for a bit while I chop the firewood...The firebenders are coming, run, Li!--

and it’s not his name anymore, but Jet still instinctively turns towards that familiar sound, as if Li is still a person hidden inside him somewhere, buried alive under layers of charred wood and ash.

[gnarlyknuckles]

YES. So many times, the argument non-disabled people give is that we're still “valuable” intellectually or socially. But I’m not. I’m not some magical savant with great wisdom to impart. I don’t strike inspiration into the hearts of healthy people with my “positive attitude.” I’m just some guy. And a crotchety, bitter one at that, thanks to Chronic Pain™ and brain fog.

So when people say I’m "not a burden," it stresses me the heck out. Because it tells me they’re keeping score. They expect something back. And I have nothing to give back other than maybe stroking their ego by telling them how nice they are for deigning to give me the time of day.

Am I obligated to be grateful to people who help me?

idc anymore i think we should be a burden to each other

[gnarlyknuckles]

[ID: A digital colored comic page with two panels. The first one is much taller and the second one. It features a sole igloo in the middle of a snowy landscape with its top half destroyed and burnt. There’s a tall pillar of black smoke coming out of it. Three burning missiles are flying through the smoke. 

In the background there are blue sky and mountains.

In the second panel, there’s a portrait of Sokka with a tired expression. He’s wearing a blue parka with a fur collar. End ID]

Love the detail of black flakes of ash drifting down like snow in both panels.

recurring nightmares

[gnarlyknuckles]

Preview: It’s one of the things Sokka likes most about Jet. He’s slimy. Manipulative. Sokka is too. You have to be, as a nonbender. Especially a poor one. Sokka is all too familiar with pretending to be grateful toward people he despises. The Dai Li paid his college tuition, after all.

Featuring blind Jet and rheumatoid arthritis Sokka in a modern AU with bending. It's about love, loneliness, authoritarian government, the showmanship of the charity industry, the terror of navigating the world as a physically weak person, and the ways in which we change ourselves for others. 6,617 words total.

[gnarlyknuckles]

The following isn’t a criticism of OP, because yes this tactic is effective, and I use it quite a lot. 

But I’m tired.

How do you convince money-motivated people when change is expensive?

I spend a lot of time at my job trying to convince people that basic human decency is important because it’ll increase customers. "If your company respects trans people, then trans people will buy from you!" But the truth is, most companies’ main customer base is cis people. The end result is often that trans inclusivity just becomes virtue signaling. A company will pretend to care about trans people, usually in marketing or some diversity training event posted on LinkedIn, so that they can look benevolent in the eyes of their cis audience. Never mind actual trans people.

I see this not just with trans inclusivity, but also other minority groups.

It is especially egregious in my experience with disability. Because disabled people are infantilized or treated as sources of inspiration and not “real people,” companies plunk them into ads as decoration. But God forbid you actually make your digital content compatible with screen reader software for a real blind person. One absurd example I saw recently was a company that wanted to do an ad with a Deaf character, but they “didn’t have the budget” for closed captions.

The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes, inclusivity is hard. Sometimes, inclusivity costs money, time, and effort. We must do it anyways. Humans are entitled to inclusion, even if inclusion is "bothersome" or “economically impractical” to those already in power.

Do companies care about morals? No. Which is why I don’t really see inclusivity changing much unless laws force companies to change.

I noticed today that the deadname of a client was clearly visible in their client file because it was their legal name, and flagged it for IT. I specifically flagged it as "Hey, if someone sees this and calls our client the wrong name, we'll lose them as a client." IT emailed me back immediately, and it's now invisible except on their contract with us, which the majority of us don't have direct access to, as opposed to their client file.

The reason I flagged it framing it as a loss is that what matters to most companies is money. If you can flag a bigoted practice as something that will lose customers, clients, or get them a lawsuit, that is significantly more likely to get taken care of quickly than trying to appeal to their better nature. I could have flagged it as "Hey, this is going to make our client really upset if they hear it.", which was my actual motivation for flagging it, but if I had, then it probably would have been taken care of in a few days or even weeks, not hours.

Always hit them with the profit argument for quick and decisive action.

[gnarlyknuckles]

Yesterday the 12th of May was Fibromyalgia awareness day. I'm a little late uploading it, but spreading awareness is being done nonetheless. Lots of love for my chronic pain people!! <3

[gnarlyknuckles]

ID: Four oil pastels. 

Panel 1: Wide shot of the Fire Nation throne room. A crowd of people mill about, dressed in shades of red, green, and blue. A raised platform with a throne in the middle sits empty and waiting. Bright white sunlight shines down into the room from the left.

Panel 2: Drawn from the perspective of someone standing above the crowd, looking down. Close up of a man in the crowd, dressed in blue and white furs with a bone choker. Sokka. He’s talking intently with another person in furs and a woman in green. He’s outlined in silver sunlight.

Panel 3: Sokka looks up. Makes eye contact.

Panel 4: Drawn from Sokka’s perspective, looking up. Zuko stands in a sunbeam atop the raised platform. He’s dressed in regal red and gold robes and wears a large golden headdress decorated with emblems of the sun and moon. He’s looking back at Sokka with a calm, calculated expression. End ID

"You've changed"