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I'm not normal about him

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Let's Begin, Doc!

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Rose Espinosa, Little Silver, 2018, oil on board

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the best trope in media is: “characters turn on the lights, see the monster, and immediately turn the lights back off”

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Oh damn the Catholics have joined in on the war against AI "art".

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Mama cat gargoyle

Cat with a kitten statue on the roof of the castle of Château de Pierrefonds, France. It was built between 1393-1407.

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Jack and Jill

((Jack is the most gullible motherfucker. I can’t believe he fell for this a second time. TRUST NO BITCH))

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Ink Artwork by Endre Penovác

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i come to you today with another samurai jack AU. quick recap of where this AU diverges from canon:

("hey i haven't seen the show and idk what's going on" okay, watch this from 9:56)

Every once in a while somebody goes "do we really KNOW Aku (as a separate entity from the space blob) is inherently evil? or did he just immediately turn evil due to the fact that his very first interaction was his creator telling him he meant to kill him? how would things have gone differently if that hadn't happened?" and I went okay, sure, let's roll with that.

AU where the emperor DIDN'T immediately give Aku a motive to hate humanity and just sort of claims him. that's his son now.

and that's Jack's brother now.

listen, I've made jokes in two different posts about Jack & Aku having the same birthday and y'all should have interpreted that as a threat.

Aku is NOT allowed to name himself Literally The Word "Evil." He gets named Kage. And being called Literally The Word "Shadow" is edgy enough to satisfy him so he goes with it.

Since Jack never gets named "Jack," he's going by his real name. which in this au is Hikari, because adoptive twins named Light and Shadow feels like the kind of corny symbolism this show would jump all over.

it's also an actual phrase: 光と影 (hikari to kage, "light and shadow") meaning "rise and fall; ups and downs; shame and glory; bright side and dark side; light and shadow"

I wonder a lot about the fact that Aku's just, like, created as an adult. We know he's capable of developing and changing—he does during the course of the show—so like, he hasn't been static since he was born. What was he pre-loaded with, then, and what came later?

what if he looks adult to human eyes, but mentally he's just a young child that can already talk & fight. "Guy tells baby he was trying to kill him; baby throws a tantrum and decides to take over the world"—that feels like a perfectly proportionate emotional reaction for an actual newborn less than five minutes old for whom this is not only the worst thing to ever happen to him, but the ONLY thing to ever happen to him.

This isn't how I interpret Aku by default; but it IS how I'm interpreting him in this AU so that he can mentally keep pace with Jack and so that he has to "grow up" even though he already looks grown. Sure, this means that at a week old he's saying stuff like "if that odious daimyo visits Father again today, I will rip his body asunder and send his charred skull back to his grieving children" but he's also saying stuff like "why does my brother get a blanket but I don't? 🥺"

"oh," you say, "so this is like a nice soft AU where nothing bad happens?"

NO. It's an AU about a demon tree child under constant pressure to make himself smaller & less threatening so everyone stops fearing him, and he's never quite small enough or unthreatening enough unless he's literally disguised as something other than himself—and sometimes not even then.

It's about the less favored son who can never seem to do anything right enough to gain his father's approval. Sometimes he almost thinks his father hates him. But that can't be true, right? After all, his father went out into the wilderness with a potion and some hocus-pocus to make him on purpose, and why would he have done that if he didn't want him? Surely there isn't some other secret reason his father made him that he doesn't know about. Is he just not living up to his father's expectations? Is he too much trouble?

At least his brother loves him unconditionally.

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she designed that too

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Small contribution to Babes Week 2025 organised by @ireallyshouldbeholdingyou. Day 2: 14th century/black plague.

Text editing: @quintus79-blog.

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I saw a lady today holding a kitten really high up so artistic rendition of it because it made my day. The lil guy was just okay with it

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socially awkward jack is one of my favorite things ever

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Miki Montlló

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Happy early Valentines! Sincerely… Fruitjuice

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Corn