rorysdoodles - Tumblr blog

[rorysdoodles]

friends oc

[rorysdoodles]

Doodle Time: Banjo Crab / Crabgrass band

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some eddie fanart

[rorysdoodles]

Finished my vest after putting it off for months and I’m really happy with how it turned out >:)

Close ups:

[rorysdoodles]

the problem with staying up until three am to finish a book about cleopatra in one sitting is that i start thinking about things and i find a sort of cosmic interest in the fact that ancient rome was super obsessed with being the most macho and manly society, and yet two of the most famous and successful men it ever produced were disabled. 

caesar apparently developed some sort of health problem later in life, though we’re not sure if it’s epilepsy, a series of strokes, or symptoms of some cardiovascular disease that ran in his family, and took great pains to hide that from the roman elite whenever possible. augustus, meanwhile, was prone to chronic illness that we don’t know much about because he also took great pains to hide it, but appears to have just been about being so delicate that he got sick if it was too hot and got sick if it was too cold and then also some other times, and this did actually have a negative effect on his reputation since it caused him to miss crucial military victories, as well as having nearly killed him at multiple points in his life. ancient rome was basic toxic masculinity distilled down to its essence in all facets, and prided military strength and as such, able bodied strength, and the people who arguably shaped rome into the powerhouse it was, the pinnacle of the world for five centuries, the very foundation of the entirety of western society, were people whose bodies did not allow them to conform to that ideal, and had to struggle with it as a result.

another thing to look at is augustus’s tendency towards what appears to be some kind of depression or depressive disorder. it’s hard to categorize what might be mental health stuff in ancient rome, because committing suicide wasn’t just an extreme symptom of a much larger issue the way it is now, but something you did if your honor was impugned or literally if someone more powerful than you told you to do it (for example, after octavian was betrayed by a close friend, he was convicted of treason but we don’t know if he was traditionally executed or just forced to kill himself, because killing yourself was literally an execution method), but there are other things one can look at.

augustus had a recorded tendency to get into heavy depressive episodes, such as when he went into a stupor with the whole “give me back my legions” thing, and when he shut himself up for a whole month to mourn agrippa, his closest friend in the world. he also, oddly for someone living in a society as rife with toxic masculinity as ancient rome, is known to have publicly cried at least twice. one was when he heard that antony had killed himself, which is likely just as much a performance as it was any genuine emotion, but the second was when he learned that the romans had been so enraged at caesar’s murder that they’d started such a huge riot that the fires it started had cremated caesar’s body. considering that this was an eighteen year old boy who’s blood father had died when he was four, who did not have a close relationship with his stepfather, who was clearly dedicated to caesar, was well enough loved by him to have been given not just the political boon of being his heir but also the personal gift of being his son, who had only just found out that caesar had been murdered, it’s entirely fair to assume that augustus’s reaction at the time was a genuine expression of what was most likely very real grief that he was trying really hard to avoid processing due to rome’s toxic masculinity oriented view on society. 

anyway this is just a very long winded ramble about how, for the kind of society it was, and the way people view it, the most powerful men in rome, perhaps arguably the most powerful men to have ever existed in the west, were at the very least physically disabled men at a time when physical disability was seen as even more of an affront and something to be ashamed of than it is now, who did not have the resources to deal with those disabilities and had to deal with negative reputational effects of them as well as the health costs, and still are the most recognizable names, faces, and stories for anyone even discussing the roman republic or the roman empire.

[rorysdoodles]

dueling banjos! but one sided because i have no one to play it with :(

ive only been playing for a month or so, please don’t be mean

[rorysdoodles]

The thing that makes Dream SMP so horrific isn't the sheer scale of it's angst. There have been children's shows with a bigger death toll by thousands and even millions, like Steven Universe with it's themes of breaking free from an exploitative system through war that showcased suffering spanning galaxies wide, or Adventure time where it's entire basis of history is that their world is the remnants of an apocalypse, or as with Gravity Falls, where the whole fabric of reality would have been transformed to a nightmare if it hadn't been for the bonds between one rag tag family, etc. No, the pain in Dream SMP isn't grand, and that makes it all the more difficult to stomach.

Because instead of the main villain being some chaos entity from space that slaughtered numerous lives, it's that friend that acted like an older brother and laughed over the most stupid of jokes and fought with you over the most useless, mundane of things, before he turned around and started slipping further and further into his god complex until the only thing he lived for anymore was the enjoyment and fascination he took in your suffering.

And that authority figure you need to take down for their unethical management of the system is not some lackey or world leader who you only know by their title and evil deeds, no, it's that man that gave everyone pumpkin pie and promised you he could give you a home when everyone else had left you in the dirt and who told you how sad he was to see you frown and giggled over your valentines confession and created a whole sentient machine to help you combat your mental health struggles and build you a place where you could actually feel safe, only for him to fall to repeating the same torturous abuse on others that he swore he would protect them from.

Oh, and that otherworldly entity, beyond the veil of your mortal world, that wishes you to join them in their eternal game outside your reality, that knows the secrets of the universe, including it's end? What if that was once just your brother that played guitar, and your father that smothered you in affection, and your leader that tried to lead your close knit group to freedom and prosperity with diplomatic words, and stood as bait in the range of fire, unprotected, when it came to battle, and cried under closed doors when the speeches were done and all that was left was to lie face first into a pillow. Slowly, painfully, drifting away from his goal, from hope, as he let go of that vision and self destructed in his paranoia and pain, taking you all down with him. Dying with the conviction that the only thing he ever brought, and could bring, was suffering.

So it doesn't matter that the wars that they went through only featured a dozen people at most, because while there was no big, inconceivable number of the lives lost, the despair and utter loss of hope, and anger, grief, that the few people we follow displayed at the end of it, was enough to tell the story. And it doesn't matter that the exile arc only lasted about a week in our time, because while it didn't last years for the character like it could have in any other story, the plain and so unapologetically explicit depiction of abuse we sat through watching all 11 of those days was enough to leave us shaken to our core. And it doesn't matter that the possession esque plot in Ranboo's story is never actually fully displayed, never actually results in anything too grotesque or alien, just some property damage, because the horror in Ranboo's voice and his detailed monologues as realizations keep piling up about the following pain that has resulted from it, the fear and uncertainty of himself, his own mind, and all the implications, are enough to make us cry.

Because, in the end, there doesn't need to be some big, cinematic, world wide tragedy to make us believe this is serious, to make us scream at the unfairness of it all. There just needs to be the intimate, and horrifying realization, that in this story, the ones closest to us are the ones who can actually hurt us the most.

[rorysdoodles]

today vs a year ago

ranboo art!!

[rorysdoodles]

some art of lilith clawthorne