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real life cartoon character

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Zevran Arainai (Dragon Age)

"He’s everything to me. Goofy little assassin sent to kill you who fails and uses you to escape the assassin group he was raised in. He’s even bisexual"

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Visit Norway!

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Hiii, I was just wandering if you wouldn’t mind blabbing about the symbolism and stuff behind some of your design choices with the horse men that you might not have mentioned. Like with pestilence and death specifically I feel like there’s a lot of symbolism I’m picking up on without fully understanding. Like with Death’s sickle, both a homage to the classic scythe and a nod to the “reaping/harvesting” of souls. And with pestilence I feel like there’s something that I’m skirting around without grasping. The multiple legs strike me as a deliberate similarity to insects, and if I’m right I think that the rider is bound in a body bag type deal, similar to how disease and pestilence is so often both spread through the improper disposal of body’s, and how wide spread pestilence leads to mass graves filled with disease and the horrible anonymity that comes with being just one face in a pit of hundreds etc? All of this is, ofc, to say that I’ve adored your series of the horsemen so far and would go absolutely rabid for some insight on some of your design choices<3

My horsemen of the apocalypse! I will add the original commentary and some extras, less about the symbolism and more about what brought me to design them the way I did.

The symbolism is for you to chose, there is no wrong answer.

WAR

I can't bring myself to represent war with a cool knight. It's horror. War is a bound child crowned with shrapnel, tied to a wounded horse that is being pulled forward by unseen people.

I've read a handful of books regarding war. A lost quote said that it should be shown as horror, it should make generals vomit, it should make you sick. I haven't seen war but my family has.

It was the first horseman I've designed, and it was in my sketchbook for months (maybe over a year, maybe even more) before I had the courage to draw it. I was really scared about how people would react to a mutilated child.

Recommended reading: The Red Crown - Mikhail Bulgakov, a short story about a man coping with the loss of his brother in the war

FAMINE

Someone who lived thro a famine shared that their head was only occupied with thoughts of food. Famine consumes your mind. All animals were eaten. Neighbors gave their pets away cuz they couldn't do it themselves. People walked around town as if in a dazed dream, slowly

Recommended reading: The Last Witnesses - Svetlana Alexievitch, a collection of testimonials of people who were children when WW2 began. Some quotes below;

'''A cat! A cat!' Other children saw it and started chasing it. The educators were local habitants, looked at us as if we were insane. In Leningrad there were no living cats left...A living cat was a dream. Food for one month...We talked about it, but they didn't believe us.''

''During the first year of evacuation, we didn't notice nature, everything that was nature provoked in us only one desire - taste to see if it's edible. Only a year later I noticed the beauty of the Urals''

''I dreamt of catching a sparrow and eating it...''

''A candle burns and the shopgirl cuts the bread pieces. People follow her with their gaze. Her every movement...with burning eyes...crazed...and all that in silence.''

''People walked slowly through the city like shadows. Like in a dream...a deep dream...As in, you see it, but you think you're seeing a dream. Those sluggish movements...floating...As if a person walked on water and not on land.''

''In Leningrad there are a lot of monuments, but one is missing that should exist. They forgot about it. The monument to the dogs of the seige. Dear doggy, forgive me...''

I don't like talking about it. It made no sense to draw Famine with a horse.

PESTILENCE

Based on the notes of a doctor who said the most frightening thing about viral disease was how it didn’t frighten. People didn’t know or didn't care. They lived and spread until it was too late and they became another name on the record

The clothing being made out of shredding plastic is no coincidence; pollution is a form of pestilence too

Recommended reading: Notes from a Countryside Doctor - Mikhail Bulgakov. Roughly translated quote below;

''Ah, I verified that here syphilis was frightening precisely because it did not frighten. That was why I evoked that woman.* I remembered her with a kind of affectionate respect: because she had been afraid. But she was the only one!''

*Early in the chapter, doctor mentions a woman that appeared in the clinic with a letter from her soldier husband, where he wrote that he had syphilis and told her she should go to the doctor too.

DEATH

Recommended reading: Voices of Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievitch. The Death of Ivan Ilitch - Lev Tolstoi

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

Death is the only horseman that doesn’t need to mount their horse; they will reach everyone eventually. Who is the saddle for then? Open ended question because this one you have to figure out personally

Many people pointed out how the horse is a Clydesdale. Good eyes! I purposefully asked a friend to guide me towards what type of horses are the sturdiest and most-friendly looking. I drew the horse grazing. It's not injured, it doesn't gallop. It's grazing peacefully because life moves on.

This is the only design that had a painting serve as a base - The Reaper, by Alexey Venetsianov. Not much or nothing at all is written about, I saw it in a book. It is a literal reaper but it haunted me, as if it's portraying more than a person.

The choice to make it a woman was due to a book about a crematory (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty) that connected women to death because everyone born is bound to die.

Ahhh, I don't want to give it all away. It's fun to figure things out. About them all. From the enviroment, to the movement, to the horses themselves. Many people even mentioned details that I did not notice and didn't add purposefully that were so inspired and amazing. I truly mean that the interpretations of the public enrich the works even more than my own words. And it's an honor to share that work with everyone.

Thank you anon!

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contrary to popular belief i think calvin's adhd is, funnily enough, medicated. he takes extended release ritalin every morning alongside his chocolate frosted sugar bombs. this is because he appreciates being more easily able to focus on his various Schemes, Projects, and Machinations while more effectively ignoring schoolwork

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I love the concept of Tooks. "Everybody in the Shire is very very businesslike and respectable and has no use for adventures except for this one entire family of mad lads who also run the municipal government"

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A final signal. Gaza is completely cut off from the world—no internet, no connection—and Israel is blocking every attempt to reconnect, targeting anyone who tries. Now Iran is being bombed and the region stands on the brink of explosion while we remain trapped in deadly silence. If this message reaches you, it may be our last chance. Help us secure a safe home and education for our children❤️‍🩹 Don’t let Gaza disappear in silence.

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Dalish aravels

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Matt Rhodes: "Veilguard. Living World - Mage College (2015). Living world illustrations were a way to explore the relationships between different groups and classes in a region. Early on I thought the idea of the Mage's College sounded fun to explore. Here you can see young students, exasperated Templar baby-sitters, professors, and the merchants that keep them all well supplied. The whole mage college idea was cut just before I finished the line work, so I moved on instead of coloring it." [source]

Art by Matt Rhodes.

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couldn’t have said it better myself.

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I know they were planning it since forever and it was already heavily implied in DAI but I dislike the whole reveal about the blight and how elves came to exist.

So you're telling me there's this whole specie of people who... Technically "shouldn't" exist? Whose literal existence is the reason why the Blight exist? That's the whole thing?

Alright, elves came from spirit, I don't mind, cool I guess. But them making bodies for themselves and hurting the Titans in the process is what started the war between them, ultimately escalating into the Titans being made tranquil by Solas and Mythal, resulting in their dreams becoming the Blight.

Not to mention all the implication in the Chant of Light.

It's just so fucked up to me, and like, not in a good way/interesting way, more like in a "why would they write it that way".

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please put in the tags how many siblings you have and whether you’re a competitive person or not it’s for science

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spencer reid + hands

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Fuck it, I didn't want to make a post on this but it's bugging the hell out of me so let's exorcize the thought.

Lilo and Stitch is an extremely good children's movie. I've been working at a daycare for over five years now, and out of all the children's movies I've shown to an auidence of twenty or so school-age kids (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 12), the only movie that's held their attention as well as Lilo and Stitch is The Emperor's New Groove, and the only one that's held it better is An American Tail. Of those three, Lilo and Stitch has won the vote of "what movie we will watch" the most. It not only entertains kids, but emotionally captivates them from start to finish, because it very thoroughly understands how to engage children on their level. It's a smart, tightly written children's movie.

The feat of story-telling genius it pulls of lies in its ability to reach both where children's imaginations want to go and where their lived real-world experiences lie - most children's movies focus on one or the other, but Lilo and Stitch dives deep into both. On the imagination side, there's Stitch's whole plotline of being a little alien monster being chased by other weirdo aliens onto earth because they want to stop him from running amok and causing havoc (which, of course, happens anyway in fun cartoony comedy/action spectacle). On the real-world side, you have Lilo's plotline of being a troubled little girl who has an abundance of very real problems that, like an actual child, she struggles to comprehend and deal with, as well as the many adults in her life that care about her to some degree but all struggle to fully understand her. Kids want to be Stitch and run amok and cause cartoony havoc. Kids, even the least-troubled kids, relate to Lilo, because all of them have been in a similar situation as her at least once in their lives.

Balancing these two very different stories, with very different tones and scopes to their respective conflicts, is a hard writing task, but Lilo and Stitch manages to do it in a way that seems effortless with one very powerful trick. The two plots are direct mirrors to each other, complete with the characters involved in each having foils in the respective plot. To break it down:

Stitch, the wild and destructive alien gremlin who everyone has labeled as a crime against existence, is Lilo, the troubled young girl who's viewed as a "problem child" by all the adults in her life. In both plotlines, Stitch and Lilo are facing the threat of being "taken away" from the life they know because they act out, and in both plotlines, we see that this is an unfathomably cruel thing to do to them and will not actually solve the problems they have.

Dr. Jumbaa, the mad scientist who made Stitch because making monsters is what mad scientists do, and who had no intentions of ever being nurturing or parental to anything or anyone in his life, is Nani, Lilo's older sister whose parents died when she was young and now is forced to act as a parental substitute despite not being mentally or emotionally prepared for that responsibility yet. Both Dr. Jumbaa and Nani are trying to get their respective wild children in line with what society wants them to be, and both are struggling hard with it because they in turn have a lot of growing to do before they can actually accomplish that.

Pleakley, the nebbish alien bureaucrat who ends up being assigned to help Dr. Jumbaa despite being mostly uninvolved in creating the whole Stitch situation, is David, the nice but mostly ineffectual guy who's crushing on Nani and wants to help her but doesn't really have much he can provide except emotional support. Ultimately Pleakley and David prove that said emotional support is a lot more helpful than it seems on the surface, as they give Jumbaa and Nani respectively a lot of the pushes they need to become better in their parental roles.

The Grand Councilwoman, who runs the society of aliens that is trying to banish Stitch forever for his crime of existing, is Cobra Bubbles, the Child Protective Services agent who is in charge of deciding whether or not Lilo needs to be taken away from her home forever for, ostensibly, her own good. Both are well-intentioned and stern, with a desire to follow the rules of society and do what procedure says is the most humane thing to do in this situation, but both lack the understanding of Stitch/Lilo's situation to actually help until the end of the movie.

Finally, we have Captain Gantu, the enforcer of the Galactic Council who is a mean, aggressive, sadistic brute but is viewed as a "good guy" by society because he plays by its rules (well, when he knows can't get away with breaking them, anyway), who is the counterpart of Myrtle, the mean, aggressive, sadistic schoolyard bully who is viewed as a "good kid" by other adults because she plays by the rules they established (well, when she knows she can't get away with breaking them, anyway). Both Gantu and Myrtle are, in truth, much nastier in temperament than Stitch and Lilo, but are better at hiding it in front of others and so get away with it, and often make Stitch and Lilo look worse in the eyes of others by provoking them to violence and then playing the victim about it - in fact, both even have the same line, "Does this look infected to you?", which they say after goading their respective wild-child victims into biting them.

The symmetry of these two plotlines allows them to actually feed into each other and build each other up instead of fighting each other for screentime. The fantastical nature of Stitch's plot adds whimsy to the far more realistic problems that Lilo faces so they don't get too heavy for the children in the audience, while the very real struggles of Lilo in her plotline bleed over into Stitch's plot and make both very emotionally poignant. When both plotlines hit their shared climax, they reach children on a emotional level few other movies can match - the terror of Lilo being taken away from her family, and the emotional complexity of that problem (Cobra Bubbles pointing to Lilo's ruined house and shouting at Nani, "IS THIS WHAT LILO NEEDS?" is so starkly real and heart-breaking), is matched and echoed in the visual splendor and mania of the spectacular no-way-this-is-going-to-work chase scene where Stitch, Nani, Jumbaa, and Pleakley all team up to rescue Lilo from Gantu.

The arcs of the characters all more or less line up. Nani confronts her own failures to be a guardian and parent to Lilo and resolves to do better and learn from her mistakes. Jumbaa, who through most of the movie protests to be evil and uncaring, nonetheless comes to not only care for Pleakley, but more importantly for Stitch too, and ends up assuming the role he never wanted but nonetheless forced himself into from the start: he is Stitch's family. Hell, the moment that reveals this is really clever - Stitch goes out into the wilderness to try and re-enact a scene from a storybook of The Ugly Duckling, hoping, in a very childish way, that his family will show up and love him. Jumbaa arrives and, coldly but not particularly cruelly, tells Stitch that he has no family - that Stitch wasn't born, but created in a lab by Jumbaa himself. But in that moment Jumbaa is proving himself wrong - because Stitch's creator, his parent, DID show up, and did exactly what happens in the story by telling Stitch the truth of what he is. It can't be a surprise, then, that later in the movie Jumbaa ends up deciding to side with Stitch, to help him save Lilo, and to stay on Earth with his child.

David and Pleakley go from being pushed away by Nani and Jumbaa respectively to essentially becoming their partners in the family. The Grand Councilwoman and Cobra Bubbles finally see how cruel their initial solution of isolating Stitch and Lilo from their family would be, and bend the rules they are supposed to enforce to protect and support this weird found family instead of breaking it apart. Gantu and Myrtle are recognized for the assholes they are and face comeuppance in the form of comedic slapstick pratfalls. And most importantly, Stitch and Lilo both get the emotional support and understanding they need to thrive and live happy lives as children should be allowed to do. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

It's a very precise, smartly written movie. It's a delicate balancing act of tone and emotions, with a very strong theme about the need for family and understanding that hits children in their hearts and imaginations. It's extremely well structured.

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So it'd be kind of colossally fucking stupid to remake it and start fucking around with the core structure of it, chopping out pieces and completely altering others, with no real purpose beyond "Well, the executives thought it might be better if we did this."